Title:Daydream Nation By: Sonic Youth Released by: DGC Released on: 1988 Rating (out of 10): 10 Date: 06/06/2001
Middle-Age Riot
I bought this sucker new, on cassette, before I'd even started buying CDs at all. Before ever hearing anything by the band, I read a review of Daydream Nation in an issue of RIP magazine, the metal mag (!) I checked regularly for news of Axl Rose's mood swings. I decided that within this puny little review from some hack cock-rock publication, within these words, lay the future of rock 'n' roll (gag me with a sweaty bandana)—rebellion via Iggy and Lou and Richard Hell and all those New York people who used to be the future too.
So I bought Daydream Nation, along with Metallica's Master of Puppets, cuz I was big into metal, and they were still metal, and I now realize that there was a whole lot of the heavy in Sonic Youth too around this time. I opened it up, Daydream Nation; I stared deep into that mysterious single candle on the cover, and I popped the tape into my tiny cassette recorder—all silver and '70s with a little grille covering the speaker.
I pressed play, and heard a sound that was distant and tinny. Distortion. Like not even deliberate Velvet Underground distortion, but more like the voice of some sonic youth trapped at the bottom of a well a million miles deep.
I cannot believe how corny this all sounds as I relate it to you now, but it's true; the tape sounded this way, I thought it was supposed to, and I liked it. I'm not sure why the machine and the tape didn't agree, but when I popped Daydream Nation into my cassette Walkman, something entirely new started to click into place.
But now I could hear what these alien hipster children of "the future" were trying to tell me. More or less. I could only understand a third of the lyrics on Daydream Nation; that's about as much as I can understand many years and many listenings later.
And I knew that my life as a bratty-but-misguided teenybopper was over. Kim Gordon was my new hero, my new anti-Debbie Gibson—fierce, slutty, messed-up, manipulative, and oversexed—egging me on.
Come on down to the store. . .
I'm all yours, Kimmy. I'll "buy some more more more more" of whatever it is you're selling.
I lie. Somewhat. It's not as if I'd never had my world rocked by this stuff before. I had already sort of discovered punk. And my dad had The Velvet Underground and Nico; I played that constantly. He also had some other Lou Reed, and I got into that.
Started reading up on the New York I missed in the '60s and '70s—the stars, the drugs. So when I got my hands on that RIP review praising Thurston's devotion to the church of Lou, I got the references.
But I knew that there was nothing going on in my world approaching what the writer was talking about in terms of the artistry of this noise—the intendedness of this feedback (and this is still a few years before Yo La Tengo got good), the studied primitivism of the lyrics:
It's gettin' kinda quiet in my city head
It takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed right now
Daydream Nation, aside from Quadrophenia, was the first all-out punk-rock-opera-cum-conceptual masterpiece (as far as I know). It basically wasQuadrophenia, but done by thirtysomething art-snobs posing as disaffected teens in some dismal outer-borough nightmare (pre-Giuliani).
Characters kinda like the teens in Donna Gaines' book Teenage Wasteland, but with more of an urban sensibility. I grew up in Brooklyn, and there were tons of teens like this, feeling fucked-up and pointless, lots of burnout potential, just sparking wildly all over the place for the hell of it: holy troublemakers, starting fights, having sex, harboring riot fantasies, plotting a great escape in their cranked-up teenage heads. Daydream Nation captures this.
(But how do you run away from New York? Where do you go?)
It makes your head spin once things really get going, around "Eric's Trip":
My head's on straight
My girlfriend's beautiful
Looks pretty good to me. . .
It's a rush, but not a bad one; it's kinda like never going over the edge, still keeping your cool and aloof pose while the "Ray of Light" video goes on around you. But instead of a dance club, your ass is brushing against the tops of trees somewhere in central Jersey, and if you reach out, you'll grab a pigeon and tear its head off with your velocity. It's night, sorta cobalt-duskish, and there are barbecues and keg parties all over the Garden State, and the shore air and all of this blows up into your nose, and it's all good: The ocean, the sand, the air, they're all right there with you.
But what I wanna know is how?
How—what—what the hell prompted this piece of velvet elegance that not even the mighty Feelies (God rest their polyrhythmic souls) were able to reach, even when they were still considered New Wave, before they were just some struggling Jersey band (and all that that implies)?
Was Daydream Nation created by humans or was it dropped from the sky in a precious little noise-rock bundle? Do I even want to know? Would I be jealous and discouraged from my own pathetic musical pipe dreams if I knew how much (or how little) work went into it?
