FEATURE:
Kissability
Sonic Youth's Glorious Daydream Nation at Thirty-Five
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I want to spend some time with…
IN THIS PHOTO: Sonic Youth in 1988/PHOTO CREDIT: Frans Schellekens/Redferns
the iconic Daydream Nation. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to call it that. The fifth studio album from Sonic Youth came out on 18th October, 1988. This phenomenal and highly acclaimed double album earned Sonic Youth a major label deal. One of the most celebrated albums ever, the band adopted a new creative process here. Longer sessions and jams were favoured in search of finding that perfect sound. Led by Thurston Moore’s melody ideas and chord changes, the band spent ages fashioning these into songs. Far from sounding like a laboured and complex album, there is an accessible, nimbleness and urgency to the tracks. Strangely for a double album, there is no baggage or wasted moments. Even the very best double albums have some filler on them. The Beatles’ 1968 eponymous album for example. After signing with DGC, Sonic Youth released the mesmeric Goo in 1990; 1992’s Dirty was the completion of a sensational trio. An album that I would recommend everyone grabs on vinyl, this is one of those classics where you do not need to know much about the band to appreciate it. I don’t think it is possible to do justice to Daydream Nation in a single feature! I will try my best. Nearly thirty-five years since it came out, it has this huge and vital legacy. One of the most important albums of its era I think. I am not sure whether Sonic Youth’s members are marking the thirty-fifth anniversary. Maybe Kim Gordon will say something? Whether Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley have an announcement coming? It will be interesting to see.
I am going to come to a couple (of the many) incredibly positive reviews for Daydream Nation. It is clear that the band ascended to a new level after the stunning Sister (1987). I said that Daydream Nation was the start of a trilogy of genius albums. In fact, ever since their third studio album, 1986’s EVOL, they had hit this rich vein of form! Established this unbreakable connection and set a golden standard for all Alternative Rock/Post-Punk sounds. Albumism spotlighted Daydream Nation on its thirtieth anniversary in October 2018:
“Sonic Youth has always been a band with a lot to say and their fifth full-length studio album Daydream Nation is no exception. It’s an incredible album, both angry and funny, thoughtful and flippant—a perfect equation for “cool.” Recorded in the summer of 1988 at Greene Street Studio in New York City, Daydream Nation featured a photo in the liner notes of the band standing in a dark city alleyway. They look young and aloof, Thurston Moore wearing his sunglasses in the streetlight. There isn’t anything in the photo that would look out of place 30 years later, a testament to the enduring coolness of Sonic Youth.
When released on October 18, 1988, Daydream Nation was met with widespread critical acclaim. It was produced by Nick Sansano, who up to this point had mainly worked on Public Enemy albums. The Wharton Tiers-bred jazz and noise elements of earlier albums are used on top of a pop structure, instead of as the foundation. A studio engineer whose experience had been with hip-hop, not art rock, his rhythm-driven influence played beautifully with the more obscure sound the band had cultivated to that point.
Sister (1987), the album preceding Daydream Nation, shares a similar conceptual background, based on the science fiction writing of Philip K. Dick. While not a true concept album, Daydream Nation incorporates the same futuristic paranoia, this time finding inspiration in Neuromancer and James Ellroy. The mindset of a dystopian near-future feels prescient in the late ‘80s ultra-consumerist society and adds an edge of desperation to the general punk angst.
Widely considered Sonic Youth’s greatest album, it served as a manifesto for alternative music. College radio was thriving, bringing a very specific brand of New York cool to campuses across the country. “Teen Age Riot” kicks off the album with a Kim Gordon incantation. Originally referred to as “J. Mascis for President,” the threat of a second coming of punk is an enthusiastic rallying cry for indie music.
Charges against capitalism and the American Dream are leveled again on “The Sprawl.” Gordon drawls, “Does fuck you sound simple enough?” and kicks off an ode to suburban horrors. “Come on down to the store / You can buy some more and more and more and more,” serves as the chorus, a menacing pastiche of the late ‘80s culture.
“Eric’s Trip,” “Hey Joni,” and “Rain King” are Lee Ranaldo tracks, adding surrealist drama to the album. Based on the monologue by Eric Emerson in the Andy Warhol movie Chelsea Girls, “Eric’s Trip” is a dry parody full of manic noise, Moore using a drumstick on his fretboard while Ranaldo roars ahead on his guitar. Ranaldo’s significant contributions to Daydream Nation would position him as a vital member of the band and help to further define their sound into their second decade.
“Silver Rocket” and “‘Cross the Breeze” are full throttle rock music, everyone having fun and showing off a little bit. They fit nicely into the ‘80s college rock zeitgeist, with hints of Hüsker Dü. “Total Trash” sounds like Sonic Youth’s version of pop. Musically, the group runs the gamut on Daydream Nation in a more comprehensive fashion than previous albums, perhaps due to the extended double album length giving them some room to try things out.
Despite the length of Daydream Nation, every song is good. There is a frantic intensity that never seems to die down, normally only captured by a newborn band hungry to prove their collective rage. Even when a track begins to wind down, there’s rarely a moment of ambient noise, normally a Sonic Youth signature. A two-minute song turns into seven minutes, yet even after all of the original tracks, it’s still not enough. Daydream Nation is essential to the punk rock canon, an exceptional point in a band’s already prolific career”.
Let’s move onto another thirtieth anniversary feature. The Quietus published their piece by announcing that there were events and special things happening. 2018 was a big year for Daydream Nation. Amazing and quite right that this phenomenal album was being properly celebrated and given this special recognition:
“The album’s 30th anniversary is being marked with a series of events presenting Daydream Nation-related films with filmmaker Lance Bangs, Sonic Youth archivist Aaron Mullan, Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley from the band, and others. By wielding carefully-curated – and, importantly, generation-spanning – source material, an immutable truth emerges: no matter the bandwidth or doting column inches that have been dedicated to it over the years, the legacy of Daydream Nation feels like it resides in the unrepeatable backdrop of its creation (namely New York City of 1988) and the epiphanies that it later spawned live. Only film could vividly translate those realities and it’s something that 30 Years of Daydream Nation comfortably pulls off.
The gist and schedule is straightforward: a “SY edit” of Put Blood in the Music is shown in a brand-new, restored transfer, followed by excerpts from Lance Bangs’ new concert film of the band performing Daydream Nation in its entirety in Glasgow in 2007. Rounding out the bill are unseen gems from the band’s archives with an emphasis on “localising” the presentation for each city. As ever with Sonic Youth, the fans play a sizeable role. “I’ve been in contact with tape traders and the people who originally filmed or taped the shows,” Mullan tells us. “Often times there are superior audio sources that we can re-sync with video, and with modern tools we can fix old issues like misaligned azimuth, DC offset, and just plain old noise to present old recordings better than they've been seen or heard before. Audiences often get emotional about the archival stuff.”
Centring on the heady creative energy of New York at the tail-end of the 1980s, Atlas’ Put Blood in the Music feels inextricable from the Daydream Nation story. Featuring a towering cast of scene protagonists including Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch and John Cale, it’s a busy and beatific eulogy to, as one voice puts it early on, “the white noise of the city sounds” that finds Sonic Youth – still fresh from laying down their defining statement – thriving centre-stage. Nothing hones in on the essential topographical heart of Daydream Nation quite like this particular edit of Atlas’ film.
Fast-forwarding twenty years, long-time Sonic Youth collaborator Lance Bangs’ new concert film bounds forth today as an equally vital document from the recent past. Capturing the band, four years shy of disbanding, revisiting Daydream Nation at Glasgow’s ABC in 2007, it’s a slow-burning, multi-camera throwback that, crucially, frames the occasion with the fans (shots of the giddy yet static onlooking mass conveys something more potent than Charles Atlas or anyone else could ever hope.) Just as the woman who introduces Put Blood in the Music refers to downtown Manhattan on the cusp of the 1990s, the band’s “loud, violent, non-stop energy” is laid bare, a transmission coursing forth as sheer meditative resolve.
If there’s one thing 30 Years of Daydream Nation exhumes it’s that Sonic Youth’s defining statement didn’t just mirror the rapture and anxiety that was New York, America and the world at the tail-end of the decade. From the vantage point of the future it fiercely confronted – by having this chance to view it via the broad prism of Bangs’, Atlas’ and Mullan’s presentations – it feels like a self-contained revelation forever insisting upon the beginning of another new path. As Ranaldo incants on Daydream peak ‘Hey Joni’: “Forgot the past, and just say yes.” Thank God they took their own advice”.
Since Daydream Nation arrived on 18th October, 1988, it has received nothing but plaudits and applause! It is an album impossible to ignore or dislike. So many powerful and fascinating tracks fit together wonderfully. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it would have been for the band and producer Nick Sansano to sequence the songs and ensure there was this consistency. As it stands, Daydream Nation is an album that will be loved and honoured forever. So many bands formed after hearing Sonic Youth’s masterpiece. This is what AllMusic say about the New York City’s band’s magnum opus:
“Sonic Youth made a major step forward with 1987's Sister, their first album where the songs were as strong as the group's visionary approach and they rocked with the force and authority they'd clearly sought since the beginning. If 1988's Daydream Nation didn't make as decisive a leap in terms of theory or style, as far as execution was concerned, it was Sonic Youth's first unqualified masterpiece, a triumph that made them one of the most respected bands in indie rock. Initially released as a two-LP set, the sheer scope of Daydream Nation was ambitious, but the longer tracks worked to Sonic Youth's advantage, allowing them the space to lay down solid melodic structures and then use them as a framework for extended jams (thankfully, the band made splendid use of their wanderlust without wearing out their welcome).
Sonic Youth were playing at the top of their game on the Daydream Nation sessions; the guitar interplay between Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo was stronger and more intuitive than before, and bassist Kim Gordon and drummer Steve Shelley had grown into a powerful rhythm section that cut an impressive groove, giving the band a greater freedom to explore the space around them without getting lost. Sonic Youth were not simply tighter on Daydream Nation, they were making better and more satisfying use of their arsenal of alternate tunings and bent but elemental song structures, and the final product fused their love of creatively applied noise and the sound of the electric guitar with song structures that merged elements of punk, prog, boogie, and psychedelia. The journey from the trippy joy of "Teenage Riot" to the hot-rodded choogle of "Eliminator Jr." was a bracing, glorious experience, and Daydream Nation confirmed their status as one of America's best and most original alternative rock bands, and one that had a shot at a future outside the underground -- a pleasant surprise given the alienating air of their earliest work”.
I shall wrap things up with a review from Pitchfork. They assessed the Deluxe Edition in 2007. It seems that, regardless of what your musical tastes are, there is something on Daydream Nation for everyone. I first heard the album in the 1990s. You hear songs from the album played today. They still have this incredible power to move and get under the skin:
“I don’t expect to hear too many complaints about the rating above. Daydream Nation is a great uniter: You’d be hard pressed to find many fans of indie rock who don’t have some love for this record. That’s partly because this record is great, sure—that’s one boring reason—but it’s also because this record is one of a handful that helped shape the notion of what American indie rock can potentially mean. It’s almost a tautology: Indie fans love Daydream Nation because loving stuff like Daydream Nation is part of how we define what indie fans are.
Not that there wasn’t plenty of underground music in the U.S. before this album’s 1988 release—hardcore punk, high-art avant garde, quirky college rock, DIY, weirdo regional scenes. But the notion that all those Reagan-era discontents might be in the same boat—a new Alternative Nation just beginning to converge—hadn’t yet been fully articulated. Sonic Youth sensed that convergence in the making, and they were pretty sure it had something to do with Dinosaur Jr.: “A new aesthetic of youth culture,” Thurston Moore called it in Matthew Stearns’ 33 1/3 book about the album, “wherein anger and distaste, attributes associated with punk energy, were coolly replaced by head-in-the-clouds outer limits brilliance.” Right. So the band writes the most glorious, accessible pop song of its career, calling it “J Mascis for President”—i.e., an underground-rock campaign song—and it kicks off this record under the title “Teen Age Riot.” What does that sound like if not the grand calling-together of a nascent underground audience?
Sonic Youth don’t set the song up as a call to arms. Instead, Thurston, singing, is in bed, just like you might be while listening to it—or to Bug, or Surfer Rosa, or Isn’t Anything, all of which came within the same year. Just two motes of potential energy, both waiting for Mascis to “Come running in on platform shoes/With [his] Marshall stack/To at least just give us a clue.” The video for this song contains more images of musicians who aren’t in Sonic Youth than musicians who are: Ian MacKaye, Patti Smith, Mark E. Smith, Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Sun Ra, Daniel Johnston, Neil Young, the Beach Boys—a crash course in what still, almost 20 years later, looks like an indie canon.
Following that, the band spends this double album managing to inhabit just about every major strain of the underground, collecting and referencing each facet of what this “new youth culture” might look like:
avant-garde Downtown NYC new music, complete with odd harmonic collisions and screwdrivers wedged in guitars
hardcore punk sneering and double-time drumbeats
good old off-kilter, accessible collegiate pop music
gorgeous, oceanic “head-in-the-clouds outer limits” guitar stuff, which-- along with the previous year’s releases from My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr., and the Pixies—would define indie rock’s guitar vocabulary as much as anything this side of Joy Division/New Order
high-art, film, and literary references, ranging from the album cover (a Gerhard Richter painting) to the lyrics (which borrow from an Andy Warhol film and books by Harry Crews and Denis Johnson—and this is before Denis Johnson published Jesus’ Son)
giant tongue-near-cheek rock gestures, like including a three-part “trilogy” and four Led Zeppelin-style icons representing the band members
slacker poses and goofy skater-kid trash culture
ambitious art-world braininess
this
that
the other
All melted down into one lump: “Seamless” isn’t even the word.
Of course, now that a whole genre's grown out from Daydream Nation’s roots, all its “difficult” sounds, modified guitars, and strange collisions have become de riguer, invisible, and normalized, more clearly revealing the shimmering pop epics that always lay beneath. What’s really shocking is the energy of it. This record’s default setting is the place most rock bands try to work up to around the third chorus—guitar players veering off into neck-strangling improvisations, singers dropping off the melody and into impassioned shouts. These songs start there and just stay. Usually the guitars spend a few bars wandering off and into sideways tangles, choking out their harmonies, and then come back together and spend a few bars pinning down the riff: On “’Cross the Breeze,” that means Kim Gordon keeps returning to the same refrain, each time grunting it more insistently than the last. Sometimes they don’t even stay there: Lee Ranaldo’s “Hey Joni” starts off already on some next level of energy, and then Lee shouts “kick it!” and the band ratchets up to some next next level, and then he coasts up to one exhilarating shouted “HEY!” and the band bursts through a ceiling higher than you could have imagined at the start of the track. It’s the kind of transcendent glory that crosses genres and even arts: that same in-the-zone feeling you get from a be-bop combo in top gear, a rapper at the absolute clear-eyed peak of his game—hell, even an athlete in perfect function.
Lyrically, it’s Thurston who turns in the rock slacker trash: When he’s not just lying in bed, heÆs wandering around downtown Manhattan, getting mugged, blowing up amplifiers, and talking in a stoned skater-kid argot (“you got to fake out the robot!”). Lee, being Lee, exists on some more mystical future/past plane, located in dreams and open fields instead of on the Bowery. Kim’s lyrics are the brutal, terrifying ones, each song outlining a flirtation with some demonic jerk. In “Kissability,” it’s a rotten entertainment mogul, pledging “you could be a star” and probably playing with himself under his desk. In “Eliminator Jr,” it’s Robert Chambers, the teenage rich-kid “Preppy Murderer,” and a horrible little shit even before he raped and strangled Jennifer Levin behind the Met in Central Park. In “’Cross the Breeze,” it may be the devil himself”.
A real classic that is heading up to its thirty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to spend some time with the amazing Daydream Nation. The mighty fifth studio album from Sonic Youth, everyone needs to spend some time with it. Still absolutely essential and wondrous, I don’t think any band has matched it in terms of its importance and endurance. Daydream Nation is still mind-blowing…
AFTER all of these years.