Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation: The Album Review

On the '90s band of the '80s, and "cool."

Thurston Moore: guitar, vocals

Kim Gordon: bass, vocals

Lee Ranaldo, guitar, lead vocals on “Eric’s Trip,” “Hey Joni,” and “Rain King”

Steve Shelley: drums

Produced by Nick Sansano with Sonic Youth

Album art by Gerhard Richter, Kerze (1983)

Author’s Note: This post corresponds to the Daydream Nation episode of Vinyl Monday’s Double Album December miniseries, originally posted 12/6/2024. Save for audio/editing jokes that cannot be included in a text format, this is a faithful adaptation of the review chapter. To watch the full episode, scroll to the bottom of this post or visit my YouTube channel here.

I had several false starts with Sonic Youth. Given my early predilection for guitars – and making them loud – considering the flock I flew with in art school and my enduring fascination with New York, you’d think I’d have loved the Youth from the jump. For fuck’s sake, I spent a good chunk of my formative years in rural Connecticut! The pieces was always there, but they just didn’t click for me.

Spotify tried and tried for five years to get me into this band. I enjoyed “Schizophrenia” and “Incinerate,” maybe “Little Trouble Girl” for its Shangri-Las reference, but that was it.

My best friend finally pushed me over the ledge. He chipped away at me slowly and methodically until my power went out, I had nothing else to listen to, and I saw Sonic Youth’s performance of Silver Rocket on Night Music from November of 1989.

My thoughts were as follows. Firstly:

"...where has this 6'6" whiny-voiced beauty been all my life?"

Listen. Everybody's allowed to have bad taste in something; whether that be clothes, cars, liquor, TV shows, or food. Hell, you can even have bad taste in music! I have weird taste in men. And when it's not weird, it's bad.

Then, "What the hell was THAT?"

Seeing the Youth doing their thing was like finding a missing link of my music taste that went all the way back to my very first favorite albums. A year down the line, my favorite Sonic Youth era is Bad Moon Rising (sorry, Steve Shelley.) “Death Valley 69” is my favorite Sonic Youth track. I listen to Walls Have Ears maybe once a week, and have been slowly and methodically chipping away at my best friend from high school to give it a chance. For a year now, I’ve been itching to cover Daydream Nation. It couldn’t have come at a better time. I literally just covered the birth of noise rock, White Light/White Heat!

What makes Daydream Nation special? For one, it's only the second '80s album I've ever covered. But in all seriousness, it’s what made Sonic Youth special. I don’t typically do track-by-track breakdowns for double albums, I go wherever the music takes me. Today, our journey happens to be fairly linear.

Great albums have a three or four-track run of great songs to start. The White Album has “Back In The USSR”/“Dear Prudence”/“Glass Onion,” American Beauty has “Box of Rain”/“Friend of the Devil”/“Sugar Magnolia”/“Operator.” Ladies and gentlemen, Daydream Nation has a four-track run! Am I a little miffed that it’s broken up across two sides of a disc? Yes. Such are the limits of the physical format. Great albums are also helped by great album openers; Abbey Road has “Come Together,” Blue has “All I Want,” Let It Bleed has “Gimme Shelter,” and In the Court of the Crimson King has “21st Century Schizoid Man." Not only is side one of Daydream Nation pretty much indisputable, it’s got one of the all-time great album openers.

Picture this: you’ve just brought your copy of the brand-spanking-new Sonic Youth album home. You rush up to your room, and break it out of the shrink wrap, excited to put disc 1 on the platter. And you drop the needle on this.

Teenage Riot is THE Sonic Youth song for a reason. It’s a crime the intro got axed to make it a single. It’s one of the few moments on the record that doesn’t freewheel ahead of itself. It takes its time. It’s exactly what Daydream Nation needs; gentle, rocking, atmospheric fog of guitar, accented by Kim’s sleepy murmuring of “no you’re it...spirit desire...we will fall” ping-ponging between the left and right channels. I don’t want to be too on-the-nose, but this feels like falling asleep in the back of the car while your friends chat in the front. It fills itself; an extra sheet of guitar hung in the window as Steve subtly enters with his sticks. Either the world comes into focus or fades away, depending on if you’re waking up or falling asleep. The groove’s on its legs, stands up, and then that riff drops in. It is go time. Welcome to Daydream Nation. This is a riff song on a riffs album; the loftiest of riffs.

Thurston Moore has said “Teenage Riot” is about making J Mascis president. I don’t buy it. I’ve always interpreted this song as the ballad of the small-town kid itching for city life and live, in-the-flesh rock-and-roll music. “You come running in on platform shoes with Marshall stacks to at least just give us a clue.” Or the ballad of those who want to be a part of it themselves: “Got a foghorn and a drum and a hammer that’s rockin and a cord and a pedal and a lock, that’ll do me for now.” I see visions of guys with Ramones haircuts stumbling onto a battered stage! And no matter what music comes into or falls out of fashion, it’s never gonna end: “You’re never gonna stop all the teenage leather and (cooze?)” It’s the ballad of Thurston Moore and his travels from Connecticut into the city, “Looking for a ride to your secret location where the kids are setting up a free-speed nation for you.”

It’s the ballad of all who want something more, but don’t know what more is yet.

Over the past year or so, I’ve really latched onto the line, “I hope it works out my way.” Whatever it is, I’m cautiously optimistic.

Much as the ex-spouses may posture themselves as rock icons, Steve was truly the engine of Sonic Youth. He’s got this song in the palm of his hand; pulling back with big classic-rock crashes and pushing forward with cymbal rushes. Kim plays in an elastic manner after the break, giving the song an extra rush. Awonderful heart-pounding valence to rush the blood to our heads. Is there a better coming-of-age anthem than “Teenage Riot?” I’m really not sure. Now imagine writing the coming-of-age anthem at fucking 30. That was one of the Youth’s most important tools in their box. Somehow, in their thirties and forties, they had their finger on the pulse of...well...the youth. More on this later.

The other side of the “Teenage” coin is Candle. Although much less lyrically potent and performed weaker than its brother, it excels in its musicality. Smooshing 10/4, 9/4, and 4/4 time together is objectively insane. It creates a lurching feel, and a really great showcase for Steve.

“Teenage” is a damn tough act to follow. But Sonic Youth raise us “Silver Rocket.” While the former feels like a stab at an arms-raised stadium rocker – whether intentional or not – the latter feels like Sonic Youth. It feels like a natural evolution one can evaluate from “Expressway to Yr Skull” (preferably the Walls Have Ears recording,) through “Catholic Block” and “Schizophrenia,” to now. Both the Youth’s pop sensibility and sharpness of their craft sure are something to look back on. Listening to bootlegs recordings like the ones made at their June ’88 CBGB’s gig, it’s remarkable how fully-formed the Daydream numbers were from the jump. “Silver Rocket” is a perfect union of pop Youth and noise Youth. We’ve come a long way from song-NOISE. It’s song-NOISE-song.

An off-kilter guitar line racing off into a riff with constant forwards and upward motion. That’s something all the best Youth tracks share: a memorable, off-center arpeggio, followed by constant ascension.

Another common Sonic trope is – for lack of a better term – saying words.

It’s a “punk” “thing” that goes as far back as Lou Reed. Words are more placeholders and image-creators than anything. The “Rocket” verses changed a few times, including something about a date with a girl named Cher. I was none the wiser. They’re just kinda hurdled out. The words that matter stay consistent: “You got it, yeah-yeah, ride the silver rocket!/I can’t stop it, burning holes in your pocket...” (Does anyone know why Thurston annunciated “pocket” like that when this was played live? It’s very funny.)

Thurston talked about it in his recent interview with Polyphonic; there’s just something about these guys shoving their instruments in front of their amps that makes you go YEEEAH! They’ve cut the main cable and letting the thing go into screeching, howling, fuzzed-out freefall.

Bear with me, dear reader: I’m about to do something I’ve never done before. To get the full picture and best evaluate “Silver Rocket,” I’m defecting to the Night Music performance below.

There are two things I want you to make note of. Number 1: once again, Steve’s got this thing in the palm of his hand. He controls the tone and plays pockets left and right. This movement of “Rocket” would be amorphous if not for him. He’s the skeleton and the center of gravity.

And number 2: that. Thurston playfully tackling Lee Ranaldo. That right there is Thurston and Lee’s dynamic. One was the instigator, the other the willing participant. (Here, it just so happened to be blondie instigating.) These two were made for each other as guitarists. Two spectacular, unpredictable powder kegs unwilling to confine to the boundaries of sound and completely willing to tear. Shit. Up. Equal reception and transmission; plucking one frequency out and following it to the end. They challenged each other to think inside and outside of the box, and on their feet. And that just prompts me to keep giving Steve his flowers, because it’s no walk in the park to hold your own against Thing One and Thing Two!

“Teenage Riot” and “Silver Rocket,” I listen to these twin orbs of musical plasma and think “wow. Maybe things can be good after all.”

To explain the rest of Daydream Nation’s four-song run, I’m defecting to a passage from Thurston’s book Sonic Life, about a Sister-era gig that Iggy Pop crashed.

“(Kim’s) hair was dyed blond, and she wore a white T-shirt and glittery painted dungarees, dressed down but with foxy glamour, a look she artfully evoked as she left behind no-wave blankness...Iggy could see it. I could see he could see it…”

quoted from: Thurston Moore, Sonic Life, 2023

A lot of critics are hesitant to reference Kim’s sex appeal because, quite frankly, most critics are dudes and it’s a little hard to pinpoint for them. But I feel I can do it.

Daydream Nation is so special because around this time, Kim Gordon became Kim Gordon. We saw it with Fleetwood Mac. Stevie’s stage presence became the spirit of the band; full moons, black capes, incense, and love songs. When she honed her craft, she put Fleetwood Mac on the map. Sonic Youth always had thepotent and essential presence of Kim, but Daydream Nation was around when she came into her own as a performer. Sonic Youth came into their own because she did. It’s the look, the attitude. It’s the aloof, the unflappable, the quiet fierceness. She didn’t even consider herself a musician really; she’s an artist first. She had the air of being completely comfortable in her skin and to this day, it’s still magnetic. Guys who went into Sonic Youth gigs not particularly attracted to Kim came out with huge crushes on her. Why was that? Because there’s nothing more alluring than confidence – or even just the mantle of confidence. It’s the very spirit of Sonic Youth, and it was incendiary.

I love that that happened, by the way. When are women in their thirties and forties afforded…well…anything in rock and roll? Let alone being the face of a whole movement of rock and roll? And in the ’80s and ’90s no less; when the music press was more misogynistic and gross than it is now! Kim got something so few women in the rock canon get: the reverence they deserve, in their time. She paved the way for so many to follow. The Sprawl, Cross The Breeze, and Kissability were among her stones.

“Cross The Breeze” and “The Sprawl” beg for Kim to sing them. That voice is instantly recognizable; the detached talk-sing that has us begging to sit at the artsy kids' table and be part of that conversation.

If only we could all be bored in LA under harsh Sunset Strip lights and barraged with advertisements, hip to Joni Mitchell since freakin' birth.

Of course, the music is special too. I clocked the Velvet Underground-esque tambourine on “Sprawl,” and how tenuous and harrowing “Cross The Breeze” feels behind cries of “I wanna know!” And who else to sing “Kissability?” It’d feel ridiculous and insincere without her – what kind of topsy-turvy world are we in where I’m using the world “sincere” in a Sonic Youth album review??

I’m shocked that “Kissability” has flown under the radar for so long, especially after the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s and Lana Del Rey deep cut “Put Me In A Movie” blowing up on Tiktok. “Look into my eyes, don’t you trust me? You’re so good, you could go far/I’ll put you in a movie, don’t you wanna?” It’s in the same, off-center key as “Silver Rocket” was. Where “Rocket” was raucous and exciting, “Kissability” is creepy and slimy; just like the film producer creeping on the aspiring actress.

If there’s any edit to Daydream Nation I’d make it’d be putting Eric’s Trip and Hey Joni together. We’ve had two great Thurston songs and two great Kim songs (exciting as the switch-up is, Total Trash is the weakest cut on the album; a bit too long for what it is.) And I’d keep it to these two Lee songs. “Rain King” is a cool nod to Pere Ubu and fits in nicely with the sequencing. But it doesn’t really serve the album, just the sequencing. The loose crunch wash on “Eric’s Trip” is one of my favorite sounds a guitar makes. It’s heavily affected and mightily mutable. Shoegaze took this sound and RAN with it. It creates a dizzying feeling; I’m being spun around on a merry-go-round. “My head’s on straight, my girlfriend’s beautiful…” Sure Lee, but is my head on straight? Apparently the lyrics reference Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, starring Nico and her son Ari. I’m more interested in “Hey Joni:” a gender-swapped “Hey Joe.” The classic “man shoots two-timing partner and flees town” song. What makes “Hey Joni” so cool is how Sonic Youth’s looseness with words and images-over-narrative storytelling obscure the story; making it a completely new thing.

If I had a nickel for every time I covered an instrumental track called “Providence” on Vinyl Monday, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?

I’d never dream of leaving Providence in the dust. I’m a sucker for an interlude! This might be my zoomershowing, but the distant piano obscured by noise reminds me of something Ethel Cain would do. It’s a niceease between “Hey Joni” and “Candle.” Not where I’d have put it in the track listing, but it works!

There’s nothing more double album than a full-side epic. Sonic Youth give us the full bombastic double-album treatment with just that. Trilogy parts AB&Z; named for the three forms of DNA. “The Wonder” is a proto-”Titanium Expose” romp, sounding more dire than its younger brother. Thurston’s clinging onto themelody for dear life amidst dissonant guitars and tumbling bass. This has to be an all-time great moment for Steve, he’s slightly ahead of the loose-axeled brakes-failed drive. He’s the propulsion of this hectic thing that can’t slow. It does slow, however, mellowing into “Hyperstation;” an overstimulated sensory shutdown.“Smashed up against a car at 3 AM/The kids dressed up for basketball beat me in my head/There’s bum trash in my hall and my place is ripped/I totaled another amp, I’m calling in sick/It’s an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation, daydreaming days in a daydream nation.”

...much better than the “talking baby wizard” line.

Rounding out the album is “Eliminator;” a fun punkish turn for Kim, and a surprisingly punctual end for this sprawling thing.

Now you may have noticed that not once in this review did I describe Sonic Youth with the word “cool.” That’s because I think people use it as a crutch when they talk about Sonic Youth. I wanted to describe exactly what makes them and Daydream Nation “cool.” It’s the music, sure. But you can’t ignore the human component.

Thurston Moore, generally described as a cool person. Debunked as soon as you read Sonic Life – and no, not just for the uncool things he’s done. For as long as he’s been listening to music, he’s been a huge nerd about it. A music history nerd. This man had filing cabinets full of STUFF about music, stuff he made and stuff the artists he admired made. He really should’ve been an archivist. Kim Gordon, queen of cool. Making trap bangers at 70, and touring said bangers. But she herself does not think of herself as cool!

I think that’s why I, a known uncool person, love Sonic Youth. Let me explain.

It’s no secret that I have not once in my life been cool. I’ve been geeking out over things I love for as long as I have loved things. Not only do I love things, I love them openly. There are going to be people put off by that energy because it’s opposite to what Sonic Youth was. Cool. The millennials, the age group listening to Sonic Youth in middle and high school as opposed to the Gen X-ers who listened in their college years, did a lot to make space for loving things on the internet. Myspace. Wordpress. Tumblr. With my generation, the zoomers, I see the pendulum swinging back to where it was in the ’90s; when it wasn’t cool to like things. You had to be ironic about it to be hip. It’s no longer en vogue to just love things. But the truth is: people get bitter and mean when they don’t love things openly! Being bitter, about someone else’s love or feeling you have to conceal your own, is no way to live. It eats away at your soul.

I feel sorry for people inhibited by their fear of being earnest.

I know for a fact Sonic Youth would have laughed me out of the function for being so openly enthused about them and their albums. I mean, hello! The Nardwuar Interview Incident! But I can’t help it. Sonic Youth,Daydream Nation, and “Teenage Riot” and “Silver Rocket” in particular just…do it for me. These guys were doing stuff no one else in the mainstream was doing in the late ’80s, while making it so easy to dig. One foot on the ground. One foot in the infinite. On top of that, they had this wild physicality and presence onstage. Kim Gordon, the dragon soul of Sonic Youth. The very spirit of it, distilled to 100 proof. Equally intuitive and reactive. Lee Ranaldo, a mad scientist of sound, conductor of a one-man guitar orchestra. Thurston Moore, not a rock god but a rock titan, wielding his guitar like a lightning bolt. And Steve Shelley, the belly of the four-headed beast. This energy wouldn’t move anywhere without him. I would have killed to have had these guys blow out my eardrums in person.

Sonic Youth immersed themselves in it, both on stage and on record. That could have only been done this way by these four people. Through Daydream Nation, I too can dip my toe in it. Though I’ll never get to sit at the cool kids’ table, though these guys would’ve laughed in my face, I still feel at home within their catalog because Sonic Youth were nerds about something too. About whatever energy surrounds a band. About great bands. About sound, and shaping it in ways that could never be replicated. This stuff never sounded the same way twice; it’s why Sonic Youth are the Grateful Dead for insufferable people. (It’s me. Hi. I’m insufferable people. You probably are too.) Sonic Youth tapped into the raucous beautiful electric unifying energy which connects all of us who love music. That’s the root of cool. Not bringing down those who express their reverence outwardly.

As for Daydream Nation. It’s paradoxical: a tight double album. Concise in form, yet expansive in format and in sound. That’s a tough balance to strike. Tough as being avant-garde and mainstream, tough as walking a tightrope in shades. But what a thrill it is to hear and watch~ I haven’t felt this excitement for a band since…well…you know. And wouldn’t you know it. Sonic Youth named themselves after Sonic Smith. Thank you to my best friend for finally breaking me down until I gave Daydream Nation a chance. College me was stupid. She just wanted to be cool, without knowing what cool was. And as a wise man playing another wise man once said:

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

– Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, Almost Famous (dir. Cameron Crowe, 2000)

Daydream Nation stands as perhaps the album that put “alt rock” under the magnifying glass. All the more remarkable, considering it’s a double album; maybe the most un-“alt” thing you could do at this time. The only other double album made by a group of similar standing is...maybe the Minutemen?

That term, “alt rock,” has carried many definitions over the years. It’s kind of a dirty word nowadays. WithDaydream Nation, Sonic Youth forced the “alt rock” door open. For better or worse, they got major label eyeballs on the genre. Things were already brewing under the surface; Thurston likened Green River splintering off into Mudhoney and Pearl Jam to the Sex Pistols releasing “Anarchy in the UK.” The warningflare before changing tides. The group to blow the door right off the hinges was Nirvana, but that’s a story for another episode.

What’s for sure better is what Sonic Youth did with Daydream Nation musically. Paul Oldfield for Melody Maker was right: this was the album that elevated the Youth to a place where the only thing you could really compare them to was themselves. It’d take some time to marinate, and the course isn’t exactly the same anymore. But with these 70 minutes, Sonic Youth steered rock-and-roll in the direction it’s been in for the past 30+ years.

To round things out, I raise you another double-album giant from 20 years before Daydream Nation: the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland. Though they’re different artists who cut the slab of marble into very different shapes with different tools, Jimi and the Youth did a remarkably similar thing. They were so influential that they were totally absorbed into the fabric of rock-and-roll. To the point where they’re not considered groundbreaking anymore.

Daydream Nation didn’t just break ground. It dug a hole to fucking China. It’s loud, tight, expansive, andinstant-classic classic-rock big. No wonder it’s is the Rosetta Stone of my music taste.

Personal favorites: “Teenage Riot,” “Silver Rocket,” “The Sprawl,” “Cross The Breeze,” “Candle,” “Kissability,” “Trilogy”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!