Why do so many people seem to like the album ‘Daydream Nation’ by Sonic Youth? I actually own it (I bought it at a substantial discount at a local music store.) and the only song on it I can listen to is Teenage Riot. After that, the utter sameness of everything makes me turn it off and listen to something different. It’s almost like they had one good song and a lot of bad copies of that good song.
It isn’t like I’m hooked on the traditional guitar-rock sound. I love ‘Amnesiac’ and ‘OK Computer’ by Radiohead and I enjoy The Polyphonic Spree and the Flaming Lips and even Aphex Twin. I will admit to not getting Tool, however.
However, it has been mentioned as an ‘essential’ Modern Rock album in this very forum. Can anyone explain to me why?
Usually, however, there is more to it than that. I, for example, can go on and on about why I love Bob Dylan or the Beatles or Devo: There’s musical style, vocal talent, lyrical content, social context, and sheer style to take into consideration, and fans (especially the well-spoken, well-red, well-rounded ones here) can usually do something better than ‘I just like it’.
There is a difference between reviews and criticism, but even reviewing is more in-depth than that.
I speak as a long time Sonic Youth fan, and my opinion is that there were a couple of things that it had going for it…
It was a double LP. With rare exception, the critics and the music community equate double LPs with being a band’s magnum opus regardless of their general quality, and double LPs often get far more respect than is their due. The White Album, Ummagumma, Use Your Illusion, Melon Collie, there are endless examples.
IMO, it was the first SY album that was more or less consistently listenable for the general music public. I have to agree also, most of their early stuff that I once like because it was new and exciting ambient dissonance, I now dislike because it is old and boring ambient dissonance. Their “pop” albums like Goo, Daydream Nation, and Dirty are the only ones I bother with listening to anymore.
When it came out however, many hardcore SY fans considered it to be a watered-down sellout, prefering the more ambient and experimental SY style.
So Daydream wasn’t anything really new or distinct for SY in itself, but critics and the general public love it because it is one of the few SY albums that doesn’t shred your speaker cones.
I was a big SY fan around the time daydream nation came out and reckon its a superb album, probably one of the best rock albums from that time. I’m afraid I am one of those ‘I just like it’ people when it comes to music; to try and say why its good:
SY always had a noisy discordant sound, GargoyleWB hits the nail on the head with “ambient dissonance”. This usually sounds lightweight to my ears, the way punk rock can sometimes sound light compared to heavy rock. Daydream nation though is a big, dense orchestral album, Thurston Moore managed to get the atonal, screechy feedback sound that they pioneered and get it to hold up on a big canvas. The album has directionality IIRC, many of the songs fuse into one another in a skillful way. I wish I had it to hand so that I could give you specific examples, “Hyperstation” is the song I’m thinking of that seems to coalesce from the remnants of the song before and slowly take shape, this was one of my favourite tracks on the album.
White noisescapes are all well and good, but does it actually sound any good? Definitely, IMO. SY pioneered a truly distinctive sound that is in full effect on Daydream Nation. The atonality is key to getting in to SY. You mentioned the Flaming Lips, they’re a million miles away from SY to my ears, they’re a very melodious band, fragile harmonies. SY do harmonies as well, but you have to search for them on daydream nation. I disagree with GargoyleWB on the album being just one more for SY fans, or even watered down, I think its their apotheosis, they couldn’t take their sound any further. Afterwards there was nowhere else to go, so they tried their hand at being a more commercial rock proposition for a few years with Goo and Dirty. Good albums, but not really distinguishable from a range of other bands’ stuff IMHO.
One other cast iron reason for it being a great album is that its stood the test of time. The UK music press went crazy over American rock for a while in the late 80s, early 90s, to the exclusion of all else in some cases. As a result, I’ve got all sorts of over-hyped shite from fifteen years ago. Not this album though, it sounds as original and big as it did the first time I heard it. A classic.
Not to chime in with mere “what those guys said,” but I concur with Myler and Gargoyle. The main appeal of Daydream is that it struck that perfect balance of the weird, atonal fucking around of Confusion is Sex and Evol and combined it with the great, accessible songwriting of Sister, with a very conscious sense of being an epic, soaring statement (via being a double album, the theme, and so on).
I think a major component of the record’s appeal is that there’s some great flat-out pop songwriting on the record - Total Trash, Teenage Riot, Candle, The Sprawl, Hey Joni - really singable, hummable, head-nodding bop-along songs. The fact that they’re sheathed in squealing, wailing distortion and clanging dissonance only makes them cooler and more exciting.
Another thing that I think gives the album a very lasting appeal is that it acts as a very vivid, evocative snapshot of its era and scene - the latter-Reagan era American Underground. Though it was an intentional attempt, I do think that the album gives me a very, very similar vibe to William Gibson’s Neuromancer and even Blade Runner - just that sort of frantic, dystopian, grimy “eighties future” vibe, the vibe that the cover art to the Mekons’ “Fear and Whiskey” might be the greatest aesthetic example of.
Thanks to all of you who gave me substantial answers. That is why I still come here after all these years.
I suppose I’m not into ‘noise rock’ or the whole discordant ambient scene. I suspect the reason I don’t like Sonic Youth is similar to why I don’t like Tool and I do like Flaming Lips. I have no doubt that many people find a lot of value in both SY and Tool, but I’m not one of them. My loss.
And I do enjoy the 80s dystopic/cyberpunk subgenre of SF, even though cyberpunk was always more of a style than a genre per se. I have read and reread my paperback copy of Neuromancer, watched my DVD of Blade Runner (widescreen director’s cut only, thank you very much ;)) many times, and I plan on buying Brazil (widescreen director’s cut only, once again ;)) the next time I get near a good movie shop.
I simply don’t much like Daydream Nation; I suspect I wouldn’t like very much of the music made by people inspired by it. Oh, well.
I have to mention this - are you referring only to post-The Soft Bulletin, synth-heavy Flaming Lips? The Lips are one of those bands that were so directly influenced by Sonic Youth that it’s almost comical when you listen to their earlier records. They kind of wrote the book on being a noise rock band.
Sonic Youth are a noise/art rock band who were majorly influenced by the likes of The Velvet Underground and Glenn Branca (who Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore both played for and learned a great deal from). Much of their work is oriented towards orchestrations of noise and feedback, not to mention their use of alternate tunings for guitar.
Tool on the other hand are a metal band, influenced by Black Sabbath and early Jane’s Addiction. While they do play music that’s more interesting than the rest of what passes as metal these days, they really don’t hold a candle to what Sonic Youth are doing/have done, and share almost no similarities.
Yeah, some of it is a little crunchy for me. But, man, Candle.
While we’re at it, though, a short poll-- rate these three canonical gospels in order of excellence:
Evol
Sister
Daydream Nation
And B: put together your dream best-of LP:
Schizophrenia
Star Power
Cotton Crown
Shadow of a Doubt
Silver Rocket
Teenage Riot
Expressway to yr skull
Total Trash
Catholic Block
Candle
I guess I’m poppy.
Oh, I miss the old top 10 polls.
Sister is actually my favorite out of those three - I just love that album so much. I do think that that three-album run is the greatest succession of three albums in rock history.
“Silver Rocket” is one of my very favorite Sonic Youth songs. Steve Shelley’s drumming is so crisp. And although in many cases, I can’t stand it when the band inserts one of those “let’s forget about melody and just mess around with feedback for a spell” sections into their songs, this is one case where it really enhances the song.
It’s funny your complaints about the “sameness” of Daydream Nation are my complaints about Sister. Sister is the one SY album that bores me to tears, the one I never listen to, the one I just ended up selling when I needed money, because it’s just “so what?” to me. It has such an amazing atonal flatness to it, but not in a good atonal flatness way, like some kinds of ambient music or say some modern classical composers.
The difficult thing though is really explaining what is so great about Daydream Nation. It might be said that that album represents the point at which SY hit a zenith, when all of their ideas and methods just absolutely come together and made a finely polished jewel of an album, one that teeters on the finest edge between music and dissonance. It might also be considered the point at which everything they were saying before and after was crystalized. Some of their later albums seem to still derive so much from Daydream, as if they are just rehashing. It took years before they were able to break into new directions which seemed to free them from the essence of Daydream.
Another thing that helps to sometimes explain why certain albums become heralded, is to look at what else was happening musically at the time. That was 1988. What was popular then? INXS, lots of hair metal, Michael Jackson, lots of soft rock AOR garbage. The alternative music at the time that was big was a lot of other guitar-oriented music like the Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, REM, Dinosaur Jr., Ministry “discovered” metal. There was a transition going on with alternative rock at the time, moving from punk, venturing into metal, coming up with the “grunge” style. And SY was continuing to do their own thing, without concern for song structure half the time, standing on top of their guitars while playing, and so on.
It’s difficult to explain, sometimes it’s a combination of factors that elevate a band and an album. I was already into SY before Daydream, but I remember distinctly that I had a friend who was really really into Depeche Mode. And somewhere along the line he came into a copy of Daydream and he just completely freaked out. He just dropped the Depeche Mode and moved on, realizing the world was suddenly much bigger. It just took that one SY album to do it.
Soapbox Monkey, VCO3: My musical knowledge when it comes to modern rock is slim to none. I don’t own a single Tool album and the only way I know their work is by listening (not for very long, and not very closely) to albums a friend of mine owns. The only two Flaming Lips albums I own are Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which I love, and The Soft Bulletin, which I think is mostly uninteresting and bland.
mrunlucky: Thank you a lot for your further information. The insight into the historical context of Daydream Nation was very enlightening.
