DAYDREAM NATION
Sonic Youth
1988

I think for the first ten years I owned this album, I would listen to “Teen Age Riot,” to me the perfect rock song, and then shut it off maybe one minute into “The Sprawl.” I can’t help what I wanted, and what I wanted was The Stone Roses. There was more I would’ve liked at the time, even just finishing “The Sprawl” or listening to songs like “Total Trash,” but I didn’t have the appetite for something as burned out and adult as “Silver Rocket.” Hell, I barely had patience for long instrumental sections – so much of my enjoyment of music for so long was built on singing along, I’m not sure I would’ve stuck through anyway. I got my fill through so many bands inspired by Sonic Youth, from Yeah Yeah Yeahs to The War on Drugs.

I started Sonic Youth from the beginning when I started getting really into the less radio friendly side of Pixies, looking to recapture the distortion and feedback of being in my twenties at the Majestic in Madison and blowing my ears out. Coming back to Daydream Nation after listening to their 80s output, it’s so much clearer why this is considered their landmark album. They’d mastered noise rock with evil lyrics a few years prior, Bad Moon Rising culminating in the extremely uncomfortable “Death Valley ‘69,” making music for the end of the world. Daydream Nation instead comes out of making longer instrumental jams, and those jams resulted in much more melodic guitar parts with a lot more texture. Without that context, I was under the impression the darkness was overwhelming melodic beauty – now, I understand instead that the distortion and uptempo rage was the starting point.

I’ve been reading through William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy this past year or so, and Sonic Youth’s “The Sprawl” came out two weeks before the publication of the third novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive. Where Neuromancer cohered into pretty cogent worldbuilding and rage about our increasingly transactional reality, the second novel Count Zero is 90% fun action and vibes and 10% conspiratorial agitprop. It’s hard not to joke that “The Sprawl” also borrows that structure, with maybe two minutes of fairly enjoyable and poetic reflection on transactional sex, imposter syndrome, and a decaying, rusting home and then six more of absolutely gorgeous guitar interplay.

A lot of the lyrics on this album are window dressing on top of a massive instrumental jam. “Candle” is a pretty simple reflection on feelings of fatalism at a young age, but any sense of anger or resolution is really only told through the dark riff under the verses or the noisy instrumental break. This still isn’t a pop album, but it represented the breakthrough into popular critical acceptance and college radio airplay that Sonic Youth hadn’t found yet. Their next album, Goo, would include more radio friendly dance music and fewer songs over 7 minutes long. It also amped up the political and pop culture references, a little less vague and poetic.

The signs of that change are in that song I loved so much as a teen, “Teen Age Riot.” That song was originally titled “J Mascis For President,” and Dinosaur Jr.’s frontman is still in there with his Marshall stacks. The opening, Kim Gordon’s “spirit desire” intro, is so funny – whatever its original intent, it comes across now as a lampoon on the post-hippie new age radicals and manifestation as resistance. Then, the power pop arrives, the perfectly tuned guitar tones of Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo in conversation with one another, chunk and clean. The remainder imagines a revolution with a charismatic alt-rock hero, and it ends still on the riot trail. I think there’s enough humor to the song to understand that this may be some “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” bullshit (“He acts the hero/We paint a zero on his hand”) but it doesn’t give in to that defeat. Taken out of context, that might sound like cynicism swallowing a dream – but, again, this is the daydream of the people who’ve put out some of the darkest no-wave noise rock of the 80s, so maybe it’s the start of believing in something.

KEY TRACKS: “Teen Age Riot,” “The Sprawl,” “Total Trash”
CATALOG CHOICE: Bad Moon Rising, Goo
NEXT STOP: Bossanova, Pixies
AFTER THAT: A Deeper Understanding, The War on Drugs