Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation

Matthew Stearns

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781441188717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Daydream Nation is the kind of gorgeous monstrosity (born of extremes, rife with difficulties, and mythic in proportion) that can crush the will of the most resilient, well-intentioned listener if the necessary preparations haven't been made. Matthew Stearns explores the album from a range of angles, including a track-by-track analysis and a look at the historical and cultural context within which the album was made. Featuring a foreword by Lee Ranaldo and exclusive interviews with the band, this truly is the definitive guide to Daydream Nation.

Chapter 1.
This Record Eats Ears

Bullet to the face. Sonic Youth meets Calvin Coolidge. Flushes of energy through the lobes and sternum. Some concerns about dangerous records. “Let me out of here! These hornets are slammed on acid!” Blessed be our cousins in juvie. Off with your pants!

Stop being such a Goddamned sissy! Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?

—Charles Ives, 1931

Certain records arrive like howling bullets at crux moments and split the face of music wide open, exposing long-concealed sonic musculature, ripping tonal tissue from previously unexplored sockets, and melding it all back together into a form at once oddly familiar but, at the same time, unrecognizable. These records often have a peculiar relationship to time. On the one hand, they manage to appear as precisely what was needed at their current point of entry, necessary and unique to the environment from which they sprung. On the other hand, these albums can feel slightly removed from limited, local continuums, appearing in the present but with a sense of having brought back news about music from the future. Many of these become the records that constantly appear on all manner of admiring critical lists, get reissued with embarrassing regularity, and retain their place in our collections, from one purge to the next, with steady resilience. Despite the legitimacy of these consequences—and, by all means, please; compile your all-time lists, reissue until your brains squirt out, and cultivate those permanent collections—they have an unfortunate tendency to obfuscate the reality of the initial impact and residual force of some of these albums. Rock historicizing can be a diluting, cheapening business. There are some records in this category, however, that are totally impervious to the dulling-down that results from excessive and protracted critical handling. Put them on the player today and they’ll blow holes through the moldy, sagging boundaries of music with as much force and violence as they did the first week they were fired out of the distributor’s warehouse. Daydream Nation is a dead-to-nuts example of just such a record.

Resoundingly canonized as a breakthrough landmark in the chronicles of avant-rock expression, Daydream Nation has garnered copious accolades, critical acclaim, and honors since its relatively modest release back in the early fall of 1988. Recorded for a distinctly affordable thirty-five thousand dollars (give or take), Daydream Nation’s release in October of ’88 was marked by immediate and universal critical adulation. The record finished a more than respectable second to Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in that year’s (always nail-bitingly anticipated) Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. CMJ shot it into the top slot of its year-end chart, while it landed second on that year’s Rolling Stone critic’s poll. In Britain, NME and Melody Maker both listed Daydream Nation as first in its category. And, if you’re into this kind of thing, in the Fluffy Cloud Land of All-Time Best Album Lists: Rolling Stone places Daydream Nation in the number 45 slot, Spin says it’s 14th, and, more recently, the trusty and considered, if brand-spanking-new in the grand scheme of things, Pitchfork gave Daydream Nation the number 1 nod on their Best Albums of the Eighties chart. Based on the consensus, and in my experience, I think it’s safe now to go ahead and assume that all of this excitement has been entirely, rightly deserved. (Notwithstanding the fact that the type of thinking that results in assigning superlatives to records is, let’s be honest, kind of suspect to begin with, like declaring someone King or Queen of the rock prom.)

In its way, admittedly, this book is an extension of the applauding critical discourse that has swirled, and continues to swirl, tornado-like, around Daydream Nation since its release nearly twenty years ago at the time of this writing. The record’s excellence and vitality are presupposed here, while, at the same time, the book argues implicitly for Daydream Nation’s decisive historical relevance. That relevance is instantiated both in terms of Sonic Youth’s trajectory as a band and in light of Daydream Nation’s permanent impact on the development of contemporary independent, avant-garde, and noise rock. As if more evidence was needed to corroborate the record’s epochal significance, in 2006 the US Library of Congress added Daydream Nation to the permanent archives of the National Recording Registry—a collection of audio recordings, according to the Library, deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically important,” and which “inform or reflect life in the United States.” One can’t help but celebrate this as a legitimate accolade for Sonic Youth while at the same time seeing it as a triumphant victory for all things marginal, daring, and edgy. Daydream Nation shares this archival honor with such co-inductees as Calvin Coolidge’s inaugural address and a recording of the first official transatlantic telephone conversation. From Calvin “Keep Cool With” Coolidge to a cross-oceanic phone call to Daydream Nation—a historic are indeed.

When I first learned about the induction of Daydream Nation into the Registry, something struck me that hadn’t struck me previously—Daydream Nation actually is an American rock record that, in its own singular way, “reflects life in the United States.” The discomfiting aspect of this follows from the fact that, while there are many of us out here in the world who have tacitly known full well that Daydream Nation “reflects life in the United States,” this fact was not something we would have ever expected to be explicitly articulated by a federally sanctioned body of these very United States. It’s like being told by your parents that your clothes are cool. “I know! You don’t have to tell me!” The teenage resistance to all manifestations of grown-up authority is slow to dissolve, I suppose. Still, the Library has a point in singling out Daydream Nation for its archives: the record does represent a uniquely American aesthetic point of view—a point of view rooted in both the New York noise-rock underground and in the wider emergence of a fertile vanguard of independent American rock music.

All of that business being said, however, this book’s primary concern is of a more urgent, pressing nature. The real plan here, apart from pursuing all of that important, perfectly reasonable, historico-administrative stuff laid out above, is to get right down into the burning star-core engine that sends Daydream Nation careening down its incandescent, combustible path and figure out what the hell kind of fuel allows it to race at such velocities without spinning out into the ether.

There are moments on Daydream Nation when the record’s aggregate narratives, boggling sound composites, and distributed energies reach a level of intensity so pitched that the whole thing seems to hover on the brink of self-implosion. These moments, when the record is played at appropriately upsetting volumes, have physical corollaries that often involve shooting waves of alarm up the spine, flushes of energy through the lobes and sternum, lockjaw, palpitations, and visual disorientation. If the act of listening to music requires some degree of participatory commitment from the listener, and if that commitment itself takes place as a kind of merging and identifying with the action and drama of the record, then Daydream Nation asks for one hell of a commitment. Based on the sheer scope of its attack, Daydream Nation poses a direct, imminent threat to the safety and well being of its listeners. At the very least, it threatens the security and structural viability of its listener’s ears. This record eats ears—chews them up with its gnarled sonic teeth (something covered later) and swallows them whole.

In this sense, it’s perfectly appropriate, and not shameful at all, to be slightly frightened by Daydream Nation. By reputation and in size, it stands as a kind of outsized rock ’n’ roll behemoth—an overwhelming monstrosity (in the sense that monsters typically tend to be born of extremes, rife with power, difficult to contain, and mythic in proportion—Daydream Nation certainly meets all of these qualifications) capable of crushing the will of the most resilient, well-intentioned listener if the necessary preparations haven’t been made.

Yet, for all its intensity, seriousness, and voltage, Daydream Nation is not beyond lighthearted, reflexive self-critique. Employing various playful gestures and ironic strokes that verge on self-satirization, Sonic Youth laudably resist the temptation to take themselves, and by extension, Daydream Nation (and, I suppose, rock ’n’ roll itself) too seriously. Some of those strokes include: Assigning themselves “symbolic rock identities” (♀, Ω, ∞,

) within the album art à la Led Zeppelin at the height of their grand mytho-mystical rock god ridiculousness, circa 1971; using a Heavy Metal-ish Bavarian/Germanic/Slavic typeface on the track listing and liner notes; and incorporating a prog-style song trilogy. These elements of Daydream Nation at once reveal Sonic Youth’s genuine, collective affection for the gestures and accoutrements of rock ’n’ roll-ism while at the same time evidence a healthy, slightly smirking acknowledgment of the form’s more ludicrous tendencies. (I mean, pictogrammatic identities!?) This levity bumps up against the potent gravity permeating much of Daydream Nation’s musical landscape. A counterbalancing happens in the process, which, in effect, helps allocate different types of energy across the record’s canvas. As Steve Shelley corroborates: “You know, Thurston’s writing ‘Teen Age Riot’—which is a great song¹—[emphasis added, see footnote] and his working title was ‘Rock ’n’ Roll for President,’ and it’s sort of about J Mascis. I mean, that’s not a very serious subject if you know J. Maybe humor’s best in small doses on albums. We had a lot of fun with Daydream: there’s the Gerhard Richter painting on the cover and then there are the four symbols on the labels—which is us poking fun at ourselves: ‘This is a pompous double LP! We’re just another rock band with a double LP! And there’s even a trilogy!’ We were having fun with the typical rock album ingredients, but knowing they were typical.”

As a double album, Daydream Nation keeps company with two other notable indie rock records of the eighties—both tremendous in their own right, and which you’d be well-advised to spend some time with by way of proper contextualization— Hüsker Dü’s warped hardcore and psych-carnival Zen Arcade and Minutemen’s forty-four-track skull-diddler Double Nickels on the Dime (both released in 1984 on one of Sonic Youth’s former labels—the era-defining, if questionably administered, SST). These three records represent a commanding Holy Trinity of early indie rock doubles and together mark a period of unprecedented creative expansion in terms of the possibilities of underground (or otherwise) American rock music. However, Daydream Nation wasn’t originally planned as a double. Perhaps this is an indication of the degree to which Sonic Youth’s creative energy was expanding in ways that even they weren’t quite prepared to handle. When they started pounding out song ideas for Daydream Nation, the band quickly discovered that the music, flush and brimming as it was, demanded more breathing room. The standard two-sided long-player format didn’t have enough girth to accommodate the unwieldy amount of material they were generating. Thurston remembers: “We decided to let the songs stretch in ways that were prohibitive for a single LP, knowing that a double would take care of biz. We were also inspired by the SST releases of Hüsker Dü and Minutemen to do so. The idea of a double was still somewhat radical in its scope for bands like us—they harkened to a previous era of Yes and Deep Purple.”

The rich, fertile groundwork laid by music generated stateside in the eighties from indie, post-punk bands like Dinosaur Jr, Black Flag, Butthole Surfers, Royal Trux, Laughing Hyenas, Green River/Mudhoney, Minor Threat/Fugazi, and on and on has only recently begun to be excavated. Like a Doppler sound warp, the impact of the remarkable, forward-thrusting racket made by outfits like these is just now, and in very limited capacity, starting to register and receive its long-overdue critical assessment.²

Sonic Youth was tuned into the transformations that were happening in indie rock in the eighties with a heightened sensitivity. They watched closely as hardcore punk reached maximum energy expenditure earlier in the decade, and saw the reorientation of punk’s impulse taken in fresh directions by a new breed of young, loud, smart, eager, and curious bands coming out of suburban garages across America. As Thurston writes: “There was certainly a new aesthetic of youth culture at this time—exemplified by the emergence of J Mascis/Dinosaur Jr, wherein anger and distaste, attributes associated with punk energy, were coolly replaced by head-in-the-clouds outer limits brilliance (Mascis, Cobain, My Bloody Valentine—MBV as somewhat clones of this sensual/appealing stance)—therefore, a new politic, mistakenly manifest and tagged ‘shoegazing’ which was really what could only be UK’sters—the teenage riot was a head-case, where the outsider musician came forth from the underpinnings of above ground rock ’n’ roll and ripped shit on the poof core of Hollyweird.”

Well, yes, exactly. . .

“I think Daydream Nation came at a significant yet transitional time in American underground rock mitosis,” continues Thurston. “Form and content were aching to break all parameters and run into the new decade. It was a liberation from the heady collectiveness of hardcore-infused scene dynamics and an embracing of what we wanted to do beyond that world, one which we predated artistically and one we knew we had to blast forth from.”

I should say here, early on, that all of these preliminary remarks come by way of a blushing confession. When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me. I had little or no idea what the hell I was listening to—all of those de/re-tuned guitars chiming and veering around, heroic banshee drumming, extended stretches of atmospheric discord, three different vocalists (representing two different genders!), thickets of feedback, preludes, intermissions, trilogies, and, for the love of god, perhaps the most unnerving, haunting element: that silent candle standing there screaming mercilessly across the cover. But there was something lurking in the shadowy, disorienting unfamiliarity of this music, something that made perfect sense, something that expressed nascent sonic realities desperate for expression. But how could this music, which seemed to have gained access to impossibly original and startlingly beautiful forms of rock ’n’ roll, even exist? Who the hell is Sonic Youth? What’s going on with this spooky, quiet candle on the cover? How did they get the guitars to yowl like that?

The whole experience was mystifying and overpowering and it absolutely terrified me. But, like any record worth a goddamn, the countless rewards of Daydream Nation revealed themselves despite the initial trauma it afforded. While those rewards came at significant hazard to the stability of longstanding equilibriums and listening habits (hence, my strong belief that successfully listening to this record requires courage, stamina, and support!), they turned out to be lasting and immense. Like learning a new language, speeding in a snowstorm, or finally discovering a long dormant perversion, listening to Daydream Nation can be nerve-racking, perplexing, and rocket-to-the-stars exhilarating in equal measure.

So, one way of putting it, and it’s probably best to establish this at the outset: Daydream Nation is not to be trifled with. There is some treacherous, gaga material contained on this record and unless you’ve got the ears for getting deep into it, you might want to put this book down and find a warm, safe place to hide out and drool over your twee pop records because, friend, we’re going inside this astonishing beast, and we’re going in the whole way. . .

Here’s the standard yarn: Sonic Youth is one of those archetypically “important” outfits, notorious for carrying a name of unquestionable validity and integrity, universally acknowledged as heavyweight champions in the break-new-ground-with-a-jackhammer-an-are-welder-and-a-guitar tournament, but whose recorded output is often met with resistance by the casual, innocent listener due to certain difficulties posed by the music’s occasional lack of aural ease-of-use.

Total bullshit.

Substandard magazine writer music journalist record guide critic’s poll—generated caked-on bullshit. More accurately, the immediate, electrifying appeal, even to the uninitiated, of Sonic Youth’s sound derives from the band’s ability to penetrate and mark out typically prohibitive musical territory that, in turn, serves as a direct and vital analogue to complexes of human emotion rarely, if ever, represented within rock’s sound palette. In my experience, those “casual, innocent” listeners (like me when I got my first Sonic blasting), who supposedly have a tough time with Sonic Youth’s exploratory leanings or their fearlessness in the face of dissonance, have more likely had their faces happily blown clear off of their casual, innocent little heads in a frenzy of near-religious ecstasy when exposed to this music. Sonic Youth records may, in part, articulate certain forms of distress or uneasiness, but those articulations themselves aren’t “difficult” so much as they’re imperative; like fresh, nutrient-rich blood being transported through untapped veins to outlying, poorly supplied aesthetic capillaries.

I mean, what the fuck is rock music for anyway? Why are we drawn to certain bands in the first place? What is it about a particular sound that can sink its teeth into us with such ferocity, yet we never want it to release its hold? Why do we want to inhabit certain records? Consider the grip that a band like Sonic Youth can have on its audience. There is a quality that inheres in the prototypical Sonic Youth passage, where the various tonal (or atonal) elements have coalesced into a concentrated, resonant hum, crystalline in its integration of disparate elements—clangor enveloped in a whisper, hammering blasts of noise wrapped in trilling lullabies, sobs contained in a scream. In these moments, we see that music is capable of eliciting undisclosed, perpendicular sensibilities and accessing internal economies that typically operate without regulation, without oversight. These passages are capable of giving shape to formless sorrows, voicing mute joys, exposing hidden emotional architectures. When you hear Sonic Youth coming through your speakers or your headphones or in some co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Thanks
• Daydreamin’ Days in a Daydream Nation by Lee Ranaldo
• Preface
• Intro
• 1. This Record Eats Ears
• 2. “Closing In,” Said the Walls to the Room
• 3. Toward a New Economics of Sound, Objects, and Genitalia
• 4. The Screaming Candle and the Curious Russian Grandmother
• 5. Nooooo(yes)ooooo!
• Outro
• Copyright Page