Daydream Nation Retrospective (Fact Magazine, 2007)
In thirteen months time, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation will be twenty years old, but the band have already celebrated its existence by putting out a remastered double CD/quadruple LP complete with covers and live performances, and touring the entire album courtesy of ATP’s Don’t Look Back series (they play Camden’s Roundhouse on the 30th and 31st of this month, and the 1st of September). There’s never been a better time to get into the album, so if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?
Daydream Nation is famous for a lot of things. It was the album that earned Sonic Youth their major label deal with Geffen; it was declared 1988’s album of the year in both the NME and Melody Maker (back when they were good and alive, respectively), and it featured ‘Teen Age Riot’. It’s often referred to as the ultimate combination of experimental techniques and traditional songwriting: a late-eighties bridge that connects Swans and Big Black to Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
And rightfully so: the music is incredible. But what always astounds me about Daydream Nation is the way it unfolds, the meticulousness with which these songs have been collected, ordered and presented, and the themes that run through the record, creating not just a musical, but also a cinematic masterpiece.
The four elements of the band (Thurston’s voice, Kim’s punk rock sneer, Lee’s poetry and Shelley’s energy [What about them guitars?!? - Ed]) compliment each other as well as they ever have, but what separates Daydream Nation from the likes of Goo and Rather Ripped is what these elements achieve on their own. As the album unfolds, they all play out their own stories, express their own thoughts, and die their own deaths.
‘Teen Age Riot’ is not only Nation’s most recognisable song, but its opening credit sequence; a soft-focus introduction to the disillusioned protagonist Thurston Moore, for whom ‘it takes a teen age riot to get out of bed right now’. ‘Silver Rocket’ takes the audience from his disenchanted foreword straight into the action, an aural bank heist of a track, before the next track introduces Kim Gordon, the record’s femme fatale. ‘Cross the Breeze’ gives us more of an insight into her character; she’s as disillusioned as Thurston is with New York, but rather than sleeping the days away she fills her time with confrontation, with both big-wig executives (‘Kissability’) and herself (‘The Sprawl’).
The album’s fifth track (how many albums – Surfer Rosa and Every Night aside – can boast a run of five tracks that good?), ‘Eric’s Trip’, introduces the third member of the band’s vocal trio, Lee Ranaldo. He’s the abstract fantasist of the three; sugar-coating his granite depression with hallucinogens and music (later track ‘Hey Joni’ is a duel tribute to Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell) and ignoring the unalterable big picture in favour of inward experience (‘I’m over the city, fucking the future, it looks pretty good to me’).
Lee is Daydream Nation’s wild card; his escapist personality is somewhere between Thurston’s and Kim’s, but without their respective senses of apathy or focus. Inevitably, he spirals out of control, and the torrential, acid-torn ‘Rain King’ is his on-screen – or, er, on-record – death. His poetry has reached all-out abstraction at this point (’steel drum, wedding ring, Pontiac door knob ten’) and the song acts as both the deconstruction of, and a tribute to, his character: ‘his lips a fountain, his daylight sparks, he’s a shotgun, schoolyard, street-wise, white-hot kid’. ‘Kissability’ provides a similarly intense conclusion to Kim’s role in the story, or so we think…
‘Hyperstation’ is the point where everything comes together for our primary protagonist; the reasons for Thurston’s jaded gaze and the reason for the album’s title (‘daydreaming days in a daydream nation’) are revealed. There’s no great climax to his tale; like many of the best films, the situation at its conclusion being exactly the same as it was at the start is precisely what makes it so affecting. But just when we think the credits are going to roll, we get our epilogue, the proverbial icing on the cake: Kim driving off into the sunset blasting ‘Eliminator Jr’. And who is the album’s everpresent secret weapon? Steve Shelley, laying the foundations to every scene, binding them to one aesthetic and linking them through the most pure, kinetic drumming of the era.
