Daydream Nation

Daydream Nation
Studio album by Sonic Youth
Released	October 18, 1988
Recorded	July–August 1988
Studio	Greene St. Recording, New York
Genre	Experimental rock, indie rock, art punk
Length	70:47
Label	Enigma
Producer	Nick Sansano, Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth chronology
Master=Dik (1987) Daydream Nation (1988) Goo (1990)
Singles from Daydream Nation
"Teen Age Riot" Released: 1988 "Silver Rocket" Released: 1988 "Candle" Released: 1989 "Providence" Released: 1989

Daydream Nation is the fifth studio album by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. The band recorded the album between July and August 1988 at Greene St. Recording in New York City, and it was released in October by Enigma Records as a double album. Daydream Nation was the group's last record before signing to a major label.^[1]

After Daydream Nation was released in October 1988, it received widespread acclaim from critics and earned Sonic Youth a major label deal. The album was ranked high in critics' year-end lists of 1988's best records, being voted second in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll. Daydream Nation has since been widely considered to be Sonic Youth's greatest work,^[2][3] and an influence on the alternative and indie rock genres. It was chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the National Recording Registry in 2005.^[4]

Writing and recording

Sonic Youth's standard songwriting method involved Moore bringing in melody ideas and chord changes, which the band would spend several months fashioning into full-length songs. Instead of paring the songs down as the group usually did, the months-long writing process for Daydream Nation resulted in long jams, some of them lasting well over a half an hour. Several friends of the band, including Henry Rollins, had long praised the band's long live improvisations and told the group that its records never captured them. With Moore on a writing spree, the album ultimately had to be expanded to a double album.^[5]

Sonic Youth recorded Daydream Nation at New York's Greene Street basement studio. The studio's engineer, Nick Sansano, was accustomed to working with hip hop artists. Sansano did not know much about Sonic Youth, but he was aware the band had an aggressive sound, so he showed the band members his work on Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two". The group embraced the sound of the records.^[6] Sonic Youth booked three weeks of recording time at Greene Street's Studio A, starting in mid-July 1988. At $1,000 a day, it was the most the band had paid to record an album up to that point, but it was close to where members Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo lived.^[7]

Due to the amount of preparation the band put into composing its music, the recording process was largely efficient.^[8] The session became rushed near the end, as Paul Smith, head of the band's British label Blast First, had set a mastering date of August 18. As a result of the time pressure, Gordon was not happy with some of her resulting vocal takes. The band spent a whole night creating a final mix for the three-song "Trilogy" so it could be mastered the following morning. The record ultimately cost $30,000, which led Moore to refer to the album as "our first non-econo record".^[9]

Music and lyrics

"The Sprawl" was inspired by the works of science fiction writer William Gibson, who used the term to refer to a future mega-city stretching from Boston to Atlanta (specifically from the Sprawl Trilogy). The lyrics for the first verse were lifted from the novel The Stars at Noon by Denis Johnson.^[10] "'Cross the Breeze" features some of Gordon's most intense singing, with such lyrics as "Let's go walking on the water/Now you think I'm Satan's daughter/I wanna know, should I stay or go?/I took a look into your hate/It made me feel very up to date". "Eric's Trip" has lyrics pertaining to Eric Emerson's LSD-fueled monologue in the Andy Warhol movie Chelsea Girls.^[11]

"Hey Joni" is titled as a tribute to rock standard "Hey Joe" and to Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell.^[12] It is sung by Ranaldo, and has surrealist lyrics such as "Shots ring out from the center of an empty field/Joni's in the tall grass/She's a beautiful mental jukebox, a sailboat explosion/A snap of electric whipcrack". This song also alludes to the works of William Gibson's Neuromancer with the line "In this broken town, can you still jack in/And know what to do?" These feature similarly on Lee's two other songs on the album, the rarely played "Rain King" — a homage to Pere Ubu and perhaps Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King — and the aforementioned "Eric's Trip".

"Providence" consisted of a piano solo by Moore recorded at his mother's house using a Walkman, the sound of an amp overheating and a pair of telephone messages left by Mike Watt, calling for Moore from a Providence, Rhode Island payphone, dubbed over one another.^[13]

The closing track "Eliminator Jr." was inspired by the "Preppie Killer", Robert Chambers. It was thus titled because the band felt it sounded like a cross between Dinosaur Jr. and Eliminator-era ZZ Top. It was given part "z" in the "Trilogy" both as a reference to ZZ Top and because it is the closing piece on the disc.^[14]

Title and packaging

Daydream Nation's title came from a lyric in the song "Hyperstation".^[15] Sonic Youth had also considered the title "Tonight's the Day", from a lyric in "Candle", which made reference to Neil Young's 1975 album Tonight's the Night.^[16] The cover for Daydream Nation features the 1983 Gerhard Richter painting Kerze ("Candle").^[17] The back cover art is a similar Richter painting from 1982.^[18] The vinyl version's four sides and the compact disc inner tray contain four symbols representing the four members of the band, presumably in a homage to - and a parody of - the symbols used for the band on the fourth Led Zeppelin album.^[17] The symbols are infinity, female, upper case omega and a drawing of a demon/angel holding drumsticks.

Release and reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[19]
Blender	[20]
Chicago Tribune	[21]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[22]
The Guardian	[23]
Rolling Stone	[24]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[25]
Select	4/5[26]
Pitchfork	10/10[27]
Spin Alternative Record Guide	10/10[28]
The Village Voice	A[29]

Daydream Nation was released on October 18, 1988,^[30] in compact disc, cassette and double vinyl formats.^[31] It did not chart in the United States, but reached No. 99 on the British albums chart.^[32] Three singles with accompanying music videos were also released: "Teen Age Riot" (in 1988 on 12" vinyl and CD),^[33] "Providence" (in the United Kingdom in 1989),^[34] "Candle" (October 1989 on 12" vinyl),^[35] and a live version of "Silver Rocket" for subscribers to Forced Exposure.^[17][36] "Teen Age Riot" reached No. 20 on Billboard's newly created Modern Rock Tracks chart.^[37] Sonic Youth also promoted the album with a North American tour from October to December 1988, concentrating almost exclusively on material from the album. In 1989, they took the tour to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the USSR and Europe, finishing the year with their first network television appearance—on the syndicated Night Music—playing "Silver Rocket".^[17] In 2007 they played the album live as part of the Don't Look Back concert series, and then toured with it through Europe and Australia into 2008.^[17][38]

Daydream Nation received overwhelmingly positive reviews from contemporary critics.^[39] Billboard called it "the supreme fulfillment" of the band's "fullbore technique".^[40] Rolling Stone magazine's Robert Palmer said it demonstrated "the broad harmonic palette, sharply honed songwriting skills and sheer exhilarating drive" of the "influential quartet", while presenting "the definitive American guitar band of the Eighties at the height of its powers and prescience".^[24] In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau believe while Sonic Youth were embracing a "happy-go-lucky careerism and four-on-the-floor maturity", their relentlessly discordant music was "a philosophical triumph".^[29] The British music press also embraced the album: Record Mirror enthusing that Sonic Youth were "the best band in the universe"; the NME calling Daydream Nation the "most radical and political album of the year"; and Q magazine saying it made an "enthralling noise".^[40] At the end of 1988, Daydream Nation appeared in several lists of the year's best albums, being ranked at No. 2 by Rolling Stone, No. 1 by CMJ,^[41] and No. 9 by NME.^[42] It was also voted the year's second best record in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll,^[43] which made the band realize that the album had made an impact.^[38] Christgau, the poll's creator and supervisor, named it the fourth best album of 1988 in his own list.^[44]

Daydream Nation has received extensive critical acclaim and numerous accolades since its release in 1988. According to Matthew Stearns, writer of the 33⅓ book dedicated to the album, it has been "resoundingly canonized as a breakthrough landmark in the chronicles of avant-rock expression".^[41] Stearns wrote that Daydream Nation comprised the "Holy Trinity" of early indie rock double albums with Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade and Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, writing that the three works "together mark a period of unprecedented creative expansion in terms of the possibilities of underground (or otherwise) American rock music".^[45] In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine deemed it "a masterpiece of post-punk art rock" that demonstrated the degree of which "noise and self-conscious avant art can be incorporated into rock, and the results are nothing short of stunning".^[3] Jon Matsumoto of the Los Angeles Times called it the band's masterpiece and said they had developed first-rate songwriting skills to complement their penchant for dissonant instrumentation.^[46] Greg Kot, writing in the Chicago Tribune, called it one of the most recognizable albums of the 1980s with its combination of "hypnotic guitar jams and some of the band's best, straight-ahead tunes".^[21] Reviewing the 2007 deluxe edition, Christgau credited Daydream Nation for making alternative rock "a life force" and remarked that, along with the "vital" bonus disc, the album remained an honest and thrilling listen because of its musical tunings and anthemic songs about post-irony and "confusion-as-sex".^[47] In Spin, Will Hermes said it was perhaps "the greatest art-punk statement ever",^[48] while John Mulvey from Uncut called it a still radical "avant-rock masterpiece".^[49] In a retrospective review, Pitchfork lauded the album, giving it a rare perfect score, saying that "Indie fans love Daydream Nation because loving stuff like Daydream Nation is part of how we define what indie fans are."^[50]

In 2002, Pitchfork ranked Daydream Nation as No. 1 on their list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s.^[2] It also placed at No. 13 on Spin magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums from 1985 to 2010,^[51] No. 30 on Slant Magazine's "Best Albums of the 1980s"^[52] and No. 45 on the Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s.^[53] The Spin Alternative Record Guide (1995) named it the ninth best alternative album,^[54] and it was ranked 11th on Guitarist's 2000 list of the 101 essential guitar records.^[55] In 2003, the album was placed at No. 328 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums ever.^[56] Daydream Nation was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry in 2006.^[4] Kurt Cobain listed it in his top 50 albums of all time.^[57][58]

Track listing

All tracks written by Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley). 

Deluxe Edition

A deluxe edition of Daydream Nation was released in 2007, containing live versions of every track on the album, plus studio recordings of some cover songs. A 4-LP vinyl version was released on July 17, 2007.^[59]

The four-LP vinyl release of the deluxe edition has a slightly different track listing than the CD release. The first two LPs have the same track listing as the original double-LP release. However, the home demo of "Eric's Trip" is at the end of the fourth LP, rather than falling immediately after the original album.

Personnel

Sonic Youth

• Thurston Moore – guitar, vocals, piano, production
• Kim Gordon – bass, guitar, vocals, production
• Lee Ranaldo – guitar, vocals, production
• Steve Shelley – drums, production

Production

• Nick Sansano – production, engineering
• Howie Weinberg – mastering
• Dave Swanson – engineering assistance
• Michael Lavine – photography
• Matt Tritto – engineering assistance

Charts

References

Bibliography

• Azerrad, Michael (2001). Our Band Could Be Your Life. Little, Brown. ISBN 0316787531. 
• Browne, David (2008). Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth. Da Capo. ISBN 978-0-306-81515-7. 
• Stearns, Matthew (2007). Daydream Nation. 33⅓. Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-1740-X. 

External links

• Official website
• Daydream Nation (Adobe Flash) at Radio3Net (streamed copy where licensed)
• Daydream Nation at Discogs (list of releases)