It was The Raincoats I related to most. They seemed like ordinary people playing extraordinary music. Music that was natural that made room for cohesion of personalities. They had enough confidence to be vulnerable and to be themselves without having to take on the mantle of male rock/punk rock aggression…or the typical female as sex symbol avec irony or sensationalism.
— (Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth, 1993)
Where most kids’ shows took place within some snug refuge, a Treasure House or a Nice Man’s Living Room, “Sesame Street” is set in out on the sidewalk, and therefore in a community, in what was clearly the city of New York — and not the Starbucked and Disneyfied Manhattan of contemporary commerce, but a funky working-class neighborhood where laundry dries on clotheslines and trash cans sit by the stoop.