[Moshe]

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Article published Sunday, August 12, 2007
Sonic Youth broke new ground with ‘Daydream Nation’

By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER



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In the tiny book of liner notes inserted with the new reissue of Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation” (Geffen, $29.99) is a story so unlikely it has the perverse ring of truth. It’s told by Ray Farrell, the band’s A&R man at the time (1988), now vice president of the eMusic online service. He writes that their tour of the Soviet Union — itself, in 1988, an unlikely story — was cut short by the government. The official reason was a lack of available flights to shepherd the band around the country. But the band suspected that the audiences who had turned out for its first shows, in support of “Daydream Nation,” had freaked the powers that be.

The mix was too odd.

At some shows, bikers would stalk about and pick fights; and at others, the band would play the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” and audiences of Western-music-starved college students would react by swaying.

Not in irony.

In genuine, sincere unison.

I believe his story, but only because I remember first hearing “Daydream Nation” in 1988 and remember what it felt like — it felt like a band, at last, had found a way to tie every strand of far-flung creative energy floating around the underground rock movement back to popular rock music. My stoner friends dug it. The guys I played baseball with listened to it on their Walkmans. It was a unifier. It felt like this weird rock group (at the time, way outside of the mainstream) had found the places where the Carpenters coexist with Motorhead — without seeming snarky.

Today, every spaced-out note and muscular riff on that two-album set has been absorbed, homogenized, and tossed back.

The culture caught up to it.

 

READ: Bands are playing entire discs, in sequence, at their concertsBut then it didn’t have far to go. “Daydream Nation” arrived as the best indie rock of the ’80s (the Replacements, Husker Du, the Pixies) was headed for major labels. Sonic Youth themselves jumped to a major soon after. (The Nirvana breakthrough was still a few years away.) But in 1988, they sounded like the only band without a reference point, without a past. “Daydream Nation” called to mind a dizzying array of influences without sounding like anything you could put your finger on. One song, “Hey Joni,” was a nod to Joni Mitchell (a favorite of guitarist Lee Ranaldo); and the cover art was festooned with Led Zeppelin-like cryptic symbols.

But check out YouTube.

Search for “Teenage Riot.”

You’ll get a music video of the first song on “Daydream Nation,” a video that seamlessly pairs concert shots of Sonic Youth with archival footage of Patti Smith, the Stooges, the Beach Boys, Neil Young, the Ramones, Minor Threat, Sun Ra — each a piece of the Sonic Youth puzzle, buried deep in their sound. As Matthew Sterns explains in his book-long appreciation of the album, released earlier this year as part of the 33 1/3 series, “Daydream Nation” was recorded for $35,000 in less than two weeks, in a literal swirl of discordant influences. Greene Street studios in Greenwich Village had played host only a few months before to Public Enemy and the recording of another pop milestone, “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.” Intrigued, Sonic Youth requested that very same wall of sound — dense and epic.

For a more tangible lesson in influences, pop in the second disc of the reissue and you’ll find four cover tunes recorded during the same period. Their drifting head-in-the-clouds feedback loops make an appearance on the Beatles’ “Within You Without You”; those chaotic herky-jerky time-signatures on “Electricity” are courtesy of Captain Beefheart; a traditional punk thrash drives their take on Mudhoney’s “Touch Me, I’m Sick,” and an anthemic riff becomes the foundation for Neil Young’s “Computer Age” — ironically, a song far less accessible in its original version.

The star of this reissue, however, remains the original 14 songs on “Daydream Nation.” Until recently, I had not heard it in one sitting since high school. Back then I listened to it every day for three months, and what I heard were snippets of the indie rock scene, all in one place for the first time: “Total Trash” is a cheerfully sloppy low-fi jam, “The Sprawl” drags every shoe-gazing British mope rocker into the mix, “Eric’s Trip” has the driving exuberance of the Replacements, and the first part of “Cross the Breeze” finds the room for hyper hardcore drums.

Listening to “Daydream Nation” again, what really struck me was how it has not aged — more accessible in 2007, their guitars collide in long hurricanes of feedback any Jimi Hendrix fan would appreciate. But now I hear Metallica as well — on the final number, “Eliminator Jr.” (although the title is a nod to ZZ Top). What startled me was how overwhelmingly perfect it still sounded, how the band plays at that peak of energy most other bands take concerts to build to.

Apparently, I’m not alone: There are other double-album indie classics from the ’80s that stretched the idea of what underground rock was capable of (Husker Du’s “Zen Arcade,” the Minutemen’s “Double Nickels on a Dime”). But when magazines draw up Best-of-All-Time lists, it’s only “Daydream Nation” that takes a spot alongside “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Exile on Main Street,” and “London Calling.” It’s been added to the Library of Congress’ archive of seminal American recordings and referenced on The Simpsons. And you know what? Almost 20 years later, it’s still sounds cool.

But that’s another list.

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.comor 419-724-6117

[Moshe]

 

[Moshe]

http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/...deluxe_edition

 

Sonic Youth
Daydream Nation (Deluxe Edition) [Geffen]
Writer: Austin L. Ray
Reviews, Issue 34, Published online on 15 Aug 2007

It’s one of the greatest albums of the ’80s, one of top 50 guitar albums of all time and one of the finest 100 albums ever, but the numbers don’t do Daydream Nation justice. Even beyond such trivial lists, in 2006 the Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry. So not only is Daydream Nation “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” but it’s also in the company of similarly monumental recordings such as an 1895 Booker T. Washington Speech and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out.
Despite the acclaim, though, the best summation of Sonic Youth’s overall greatness came during a conversation I had with Kill Rock Stars founder Slim Moon while researching an SY story shortly after the band’s 2006 album, Rather Ripped. “We will follow a favorite author for 20 years and 20 books, and forgive them for a bad book or two, but we rarely have these kinds of ongoing relationships with rock bands,” the intense Pacific Northwest expat began. “Sonic Youth has given us the richest, most consistent body of work of any rock band in the history of rock music. There ought to be hundreds of bands who have a multi-decade ‘conversation’ with their fans that has some real substance, but the truth is, there just isn’t. Sonic Youth is one of the only ones.”
Daydream Nation—now given the full-on reissue treatment nearly 20 years after its original release— reaffirms guitar as the backbone of rock ’n’ roll and frightens the hell out of anyone who thinks rock music is “too noisy.” And that’s the thing: This record is too noisy. It’s rock music in a nutshell—fuzzy, unpredictable and ready to hurtle off the rails at any moment, crashing down the mountain in a ball of flames. But, somehow, something holds it together. Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, in making their most agreed-upon masterpiece (there are a handful in SY’s catalog), also set the standard for organized chaos in the form of a rock record. The year was 1988, and the first Bush was about to take the presidency without so much as a whimper from his competitor, so what were a group of hip, young New York musicians supposed to do aside from make the most punishingly beautiful album they could?
From one of the best track-one/side-ones of all time (“Teenage Riot”) about appointing J Mascis the leader of a nation that seemed in a perpetual daydream (Sonic Youth was collectively obsessed with Dinosaur Jr. at the time), to the ending trilogy (a full 70 minutes later), this was clearly one of those Grand Statement works destined for either utter failure or complete success. The latter proved true; between those bookends is everything from mountain-tall guitar lines that would make Television proud to the stripped-back, surreal “Providence,” consisting of ghostly piano and an answering-machine message from The Minutemen’s Mike Watt.
It makes sense, then, that the band and Geffen chose to augment this remastered version with a mirror image: The second disc comprises a solid live version of every song from the original record, plus four hard-to-find studio-recorded covers of The Beatles, Neil Young, Mudhoney and Captain Beefheart. If you’ve never heard Sonic Youth do “Touch Me I’m Sick” or “Electricity” (from the pricey, out-of-print Beefheart tribute Fast ’n’ Bulbous), then you’re missing some of this iconic group’s finest moments.
For open-minded listeners seeking the true possibilities of what can be accomplished through rock ’n’ roll, Daydream Nation was—and is—a wakeup call. “Yes, you can do whatever you want,” it seems to say. Over the years the album has earned Sonic Youth many a fan, perhaps the biggest being aforementioned bass-playing Minuteman Watt. After his friend and bandleader D. Boon died in a car accident, Sonic Youth lit a fire under Watt, getting him playing again. When I phoned Watt (for the same SY article I interviewed Moon for), he got to the heart of why, after over 25 years, this band still matters.
“It’s easy to see through Sonic Youth that there are always possibilities,” he said. “Anything can happen. They redefine rock ’n’ roll for themselves and make it their own. It’s very empowering. It’s a revolution every few years where new people come into the fold and listen to their records and go to their shows. It’s hard to think of a world without Sonic Youth.”
Daydream Nation hammers home these exact sentiments—with feedback-drenched authority.

[diamondsea]

Sorry, it's not specifically referred to the Deluxe edition. That's a review I read 20 months ago. Hope that it could fit anyway.

Dave Everley

Q Classic
Volume 1 Issue 10

Daydream Nation

Boundary-obliterating career high from art-punk brainboxes

If the history of American alternative music has its own collective Zelig figure, then Sonic Youth is it. From the messy birth of punk rock in the cradle of CBGB's (which they witnessed as impressionable fans), through the noisy, chaotic adolescence of the No Wave and hardcore punk movements (both of which they were associated with, though inaccurately in the latter case), and on to grunge (which they inadvertently nurtured via their patronage of Nirvana), they have been a perpetual presence - sometimes in the background, sometimes stepping out of the shadows to blaze a trail that others can't help follow.
Never was the latter more evident than on 1988's Daydream Nation. If their first four albums ('83's Confusion Is Sex, '85's Bad Moon Rising, '86's EVOL and '87's masterful Sister) progressed from wilfully demanding experimentalism to a significantly more approachable, though no less challenging, melding of rock'n'roll and avant garde music, Daydream Nation was their biggest step yet. Previously, Sonic Youth had vacillated between music and art; here, they erased that boundary and drew a whole new one.
Ironically, given their received status as godfathers to Seattle's great unwashed - a mantle they were never wholly comfortable with - Daydream Nation is no grunge album. Rather it's a limitless landscape of sound whose ever-shifting topography takes in discordant highs and pacific lows, often in the same musical passages.
This duality permeates Daydream Nation's sprawling 71-minute length. Opener and early college radio hit Teenage Riot - by far the album's most straightforward track - is an ironically lackadaisical call-to-arms that presaged Kurt Cobain's own knowingly disaffected slacker anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit by three years. Conversely, Providence's delicate piano, crackling static and disembodied voice is as dreamlike as the burning candle on the album's artwork (a detail from German abstract artist Gerhard Richter's 1983 painting Kerze).
For all their lofty pretensions, Sonic Youth always had the capacity to rock out. Silver Rocket is a snarling, punk-inflected workout propelled by singer/guitarist Thurston Moore's boyishly bratty snarl. Elsewhere, fitting titled three-part closer Trilogy careens wildly between relentless guitar motorik and disharmonic freakouts. The whole album is a nutshell, in other words.
Visionary as it is, thoug, Daydream Nation's musical influence on grunge is debatable - its arty tendencies and (albeit disguised) intellectualism ran counter to the latter's more primal urges. But there's no doubting the fact that its creators' unwillingness to conform helped shape the fiercely independent attitude of such first-generation grunge acts such as Soundgarden and Mudhoney.
After Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth left indie purists aghast when they signed to a major label, Geffen, home of Guns N' Roses. Typically, their contract stipulated that the band retained artistic control over their material; more pertinently, Thurston Moore took the opportunity to introduce his new paymasters to a relatively unknown band named Nirvana.
"We are influential in showing people that you can make any kind of music you want", said Kim Gordon. This unconventional masterpiece remains the ultimate confirmation of that statement.