About the Band
They have been called “the essential New York rock band of the post-punk era” AZ and “arguably the most important band of the era.” JSH Sonic Youth was formed in 1981 in New York City, taking their name from MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith and reggae artist Big Youth. The original members were singer/guitarist Thurston Moore, singer/bassist Kim Gordon, guitarist Lee Ranaldo, and drummer Richard Edson. Edson and two successors didn’t last long, though, succumbing to Steve Shelley in 1985 as the man behind the drumkit until the band’s demise in 2011.
They were “four contrarians fed up with the posing and the hype that ruled rock in the ‘80s” TM and were “suspicious of scenesters and fads.” TM “Looking to The Velvet Underground for inspiration as much as Black Flag and Minor Threat, Sonic Youth were in the punk world, yet could dwell on finding beauty in noise rather than just in rebellion.” CQ “It’s not easy to use these established musical platforms to create something that can make you uncomfortable, enthralled, excited, and heartbroken within the same improvised jam. And while no one will ever tell you that Sonic Youth is for everyone, no one will deny that maybe their goals for their art were a little loftier than their contemporaries.” CQ
The Early Recordings
“Sonic Youth’s guitar experiments on their first few albums provided a link between New York’s no-wave movement and the college rock that would follow.” CS They signed with indie-label Neutral Records and released a self-titled EP in 1981. Their debut album, Confusion Is Sex, followed in 1983 before they changed labels to release Bad Moon Rising in 1985. They moved to SST for 1986’s Evol and 1987’s Sister. “Sonic Youth finally earned critical kudos,” CS “both albums marking an evolution of their sonic experiments toward a more mainstream sound.” CS
Then came their fifth album, Daydream Nation, in 1988 on the Enigma label. “The group were naturally heading toward this most definitive statement, the work for which they will be surely remembered.” RD
Daydream Nation, a Mix of Grit and Tunefulness
“This was Sonic Youth’s “last outing in indie-land but it was an almost Magellan-like voyage in its infinite scope n’ scape,” JSH a “masterful balance of gritty, crunchy textures and melodic tunefulness.” PM “Daydream Nation demonstrates the extent to which noise and self-conscious avant art can be incorporated into rock.” AM “Sonic Youth care as much about the quasi-symphonic, microtonal art-guitar music of composers like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca as they do about the rock-song form, and with Daydream Nation, they struck their greatest balance between the two.” AZ “Sonic Youth created a sprawling album of furious noise and hypnotic beauty.” RV These songs “played equally well in the moshpit and on headphones.” CM
Daydream Nation, the Band’s Magnum Opus
The album was “a pretty big breakthrough for the fledgling ‘underground’ as it existed in the abyss of the late eighties.” JSH “This is one of those albums where one can really feel the momentum of history itself turning a page.” It “brought the band to the forefront of alternative rock with a roller-coaster ride of soundscapes that earned them immediate acclaim from all corners as a revolutionary album.” CS Sonic Youth went “from obscure New York avant-garde rockers to become one of the most important American bands of the ‘80s.” RV R.E.M., Husker Du, and Sonic Youth were “major influences on the formation of alternative music.” CS
Sonic Youth “rock, college radio, avant-garde, No Wave, hardcore, and other hip compound nouns – and distilled them into one powerful, blissfully noisy whole.” EW’12 Sonic Youth “sounded like their fellow ‘80s inspirations for ‘90s alternative rock, the Pixies.” CM Indeed, “after grunge erupted in the early ‘90s, many of its key practitioners, including Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, identified Sonic Youth as a primary inspiration.” TM He’d said the same about the Pixies.
Daydream Nation is now “widely considered to be the band’s magnum opus and a seminal influence to the alternative rock genre.” WK This is “a masterpiece of post-punk art rock.” AM
Their Approach to Songwriting
“Sonic Youth’s standard songwriting method involved [singer Thurston] Moore bringing in melody ideas and chord changes, which the band would spend several months fashioning into full-length songs. However, instead of paring the songs down as the group usually did, the months-long writing process for Daydream Nation resulted in long jams, some a half hour long. Several friends of the band, including Henry Rollins, had long praised the band’s long live improvisations and told the group that its records never captured that aspect.” WK
“The songs hover gorgeously for extended lengths, letting guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo intertwine fragile tonalities as carefully as it’s possible to do at wall-shaking volume, while Moore and bassist Kim Gordon’s untutored voices disaffectedly intone words that flirt with pop stupidity, high-art eloquence, and urban cool. When they bear down and rock, they do it with a blurry intensity that finds gorgeousness at the heart of discord.” AZ
“Though the self-conscious sprawl of the album might appear self-indulgent on the surface, Daydream Nation is powered by a sustained vision, one that encapsulates all of the group’s quirks and strengths.” AM “The music demonstrates a range of emotions and textures,” AM “alternating between tense, hypnotic instrumental passages and furious noise explosions” AM that harness the “dueling guitars and quirky lyrics of its earlier works.” RV
The Recording
Sonic Youth “recorded what has come to be known as their defining work in July and August 1988 at Green Street Recording, New York.” TB “The studio’s engineer, Nick Sansano, was accustomed to working with hip hop artists. Sansano did not know much about Sonic Youth, but he was aware the band had an aggressive sound, so when the band checked out the studio, he showed the band members his work on Public Enemy’s ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’ and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s ‘It Takes Two’.” WK
The Title and Album Art
“The album’s title comes from a lyric in Hyperstation,” WK but “was nearly titled Tonight’s the Day, from a lyric in Candle. This was also meant as a reference to Neil Young’s LP Tonight’s the Night.” WK
“The album cover features the 1983 Gerhard Richter photorealist painting Kerze (‘Candle’). The back cover art is a similar Richter painting from 1982.” WK “The LP’s 4 sides and the CD itself featured four symbols on the disc representing the four members of the band, similar to the symbols of Led Zeppelin IV. The symbols featured are infinity, female, upper case omega, and a drawing of a demon/angel holding drumsticks.” WK
The Songs
Here are thoughts on individual songs.
“Teen Age Riot”
“With Teen Age Riot they had themselves an honest-to-god anthem.” CQ Well, it “starts as a typical punk anthem” RV with its “barrelling, electric riff” CM but “then gets lifted by the layered guitars of Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore into a work of jubilation.” RV
“Eric’s Trip”
“The rolling waves of Eric’s Trip” AM are marked by “lyrics pertaining to Eric Emerson’s LSD-fueled monologue in the Andy Warhol movie Chelsea Girls.” WK “The song is a series of cataclysms that refuse to slow down as Ranaldo and Moore offer up counter-melodies that take in psychedelic flecks and razorish runs.” CM
“Silver Rocket”
The “punky Silver Rocket” AM features a “guitar-noise collage” PM that “comes so early in the tracklist that this harsh, jarring blast of sound is like a litmus test: If you don’t want noisy art-rock, then this album won’t be for you.” PM
“Providence”
“Some of the band’s more experimental tendencies are on display in the musique concrete piece Providence.” WK With its “hazy drug dreams” AM it “seems like a lovely, barroom-ready piano-instrumental, then the squeal of guitars intrudes and an obscenity-filled message plays from an answering machine.” RV
“The song consists of a piano solo by Thurston Moore recorded at his mother’s house using a Walkman, the sound of an amp overheating and a pair of telephone messages left by Mike Watt, calling for Moore from a Providence, Rhode Island payphone, dubbed over one another. Oddly, it was released as a single, and a single-shot music video was even filmed for it.” WK
“The Sprawl”
The Sprawl takes “the absorbed listener through their idiosyncratic aesthetic sense.” RD It “was inspired by the works of science fiction writer William Gibson, who used the term to refer to a future mega-city stretching from Boston to Atlanta. The lyrics for the first verse were lifted from the novel The Stars at Noon by Denis Johnson.” WKKim Gordon “imagines herself as a veteran of…[his] grimy sci-fi vision…who remembers where she fought with ‘the big machines.’” CM
“Cross the Breeze”
“Cross the Breeze features some of Kim Gordon’s most intense singing, with such lyrics as, ‘Let’s go walking on the water/ Now you think I’m Satan’s daughter/ I wanna know, should I stay or go?/ I took a look into your hate/ It made me feel very up to date’.” WK
“Hey Joni”
“Hey Joni is titled as a tribute to rock standard ‘Hey Joe’ and to Canadian singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell. “ WK It “achieves take-off velocity within seconds and then eases down into impressionistic verses before it revs up again.” CM
“It is sung by Lee Ranaldo, and has surrealist lyrics such as, ‘Shots ring out from the center of an empty field/ Joni’s in the tall grass/ She’s a beautiful mental jukebox, a sailboat explosion/ A snap of electric whipcrack’. This song also alludes to the works of William Gibson with the line ‘In this broken town, can you still jack in/ And know what to do?’” WK
“Rain King”
“These feature similarly on Lee’s two other songs on the album, the rarely-played Rain King – an homage to Pere Ubu and perhaps Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King – and the aforementioned ‘Eric’s Trip’.” WK “Rain King,” “which describes an eerie utopia,” TM is “headstrong and improvisational.” TM
“Kissability”
Here “the power structure being challenged is the patricarchal, acquisitive record business – ‘You could be a star,’ a leering suit tells Gordon, ‘you could go far.’” CM
“Triology (The Wonder/Hyperstation/Eliminator Jr.”
On the three-part finale “moore’s nighttime odyssey through New York goes through ecstatic release and slow-motion violence (he gets mugged at 3am) before Gordon turns the sexual fervour at the beginning of Eliminator, Jr. into a criminal prosecution.” CM That song “was thus titled because the band felt it sounded like a cross between Dinosaur Jr. and Eliminator-era ZZ Top. It was given part ‘z’ in the Trilogy both as a reference to ZZ Top and because it is the closing piece on the disc.” WK
Notes: A 2007 deluxed edition “contains live versions of every track on the album, plus studio recordings of some cover songs.” WK
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