ADP #10: Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth

[slurpdurp]

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Background Information"
New York City is undeniably one of the most famous cities in the world. The sheer scale of it has attracted millions of people to simply witness the magnitude of the city that once welcomed the world. As glamorous as the city may seem to those infatuated with urban lifestyle, NYC is a city filled with people undergoing their own unique experience.

In the late 1970s, the city hit one of its lowest points. A recession nearly caused the city to hit bankruptcy. Crime was on the rise and citizens were disgruntled. They wanted a change. This desire for change affected all areas of New York life, including the culture. Artists in the city began shifting away from the traditional rock and punk formula and into a movement known as 'No-Wave'. No-Wave culture became a staple of New York City in the late 1970s.

Sonic Youth was formed in 1981 by Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. By this point, the no-wave movement had run its course. By 1982, Sonic Youth was rehearsing in the same space as fellow noise-rock band Swans. The bands toured together and developed their own unique styles while leading the way in the noise-rock genre. Between 1983 and 1986, Sonic Youth released no-wave albums. With 1987's Sister, they shifted towards more traditional structures. A year later, the band spent $30,000 on their most expensive album to date. This album would also become their most iconic. It is 1988's Daydream Nation.

The Music:
Daydream Nation could be considered the bridge between no-wave and alternative rock. Sonic Youth allowed their creativity to explode on this album. Their live concerts typically features prolonged jam sessions, but these sessions had never properly been captured in the studio before Daydream nation. During the songwriting process, Thurston Moore would come up with a simple riff and then the band would spend weeks or even months jamming over the riff until they had come up with a complete track. This is reflected in almost every track on Daydream Nation. There are times when the band seems to shift in a completely different direction during the song, only to finally reach a climactic resolution. One of my favourite examples of this is on the second track, "Silver Rocket", where everything seems to be going off the rails until the band slowly but surely builds back in and finishes the track grandly. Moments like these caused Daydream nation to become one of the foundation albums of indie rock, alternative rock, and experimental rock. This album would certainly be in the canon for any of those 3 genres, oftentimes as one of the landmark releases.

The Lyrics:
Lyrically, the band wasted no time in releasing their aggression and angst. Their words were powerful. On "'Cross the Breeze", Kim Moore cries out, "Let's go walking on water / Now you think I'm Satan's daughter". While she only says this lyric once, it resonates in the audience's head long after the finale of the album because of the passion that it is cried out with by the typically apathetic Moore.

Thurston Moore sets the stage for the album's lyrical tone right from the get-go on "Teenage Riot". He expresses his distaste for the state of his city and the lifestyle he feels forced into with, "It’s getting kinda quiet in my city’s head”, and then sums up the feelings of his target audience with, "It takes a teenage riot to get out of bed". This is a band who was fed up with the system and felt driven to do something completely new. The band also draws heavy influence from New York experimental rock predecessors The Velvet Underground. Lou Reed's loud and authentic lyrics about the sex and drugs of urban life had a clear influence on the rawness of Sonic Youth. The band is on full-gear throughout the album.

After 7 fast-paced and relentless tracks, culminating with the brutal, "Hey Joni", the band takes a brief pause to slow down on "Providence". The track is reminiscent of a rainy day with a dreary piano motif crawling beneath. The tracks true identity comes from a voicemail recording from Mike Watt to Thurston Moore. After a dramatic minute and a half, the piano cuts off, leaving the listener with one of Daydream Nation's few moments of near-silence. Providence is the perfect interlude. It allows the intensity to swell and then build up before bursting into "Candle". Within the context of the album, it is flawless. I don't understand the decision to release it as a single, but it is a beautiful track nestled in between pure aggression.

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The Legacy:
The legacy of Daydream Nation can't be understated. It paved the way for alternative rock to become mainstream. It was followed up by Nirvana's Nevermind 3 years later. Nevermind is one of the best-selling albums of all-time, but it was released such as Daydream Nation that determined the future of alternative rock. Daydream Nation set the formula for alternative rock by destroying any concept of a formula. It threw away traditional song structures and was written for those who craved anything different.

This album to me has been hugely influential. Prior to listening to it, I thought that rock music had a set of rules. I tried to stay true to the way I perceived rock music to be while playing it. I'm a drummer, and when I'd play in bands or in jam sessions, I'd stick to a 4/4 rock groove with traditional fills and stick to what had been done before. After listening to Daydream Nation, I threw all of that out the window. I said goodbye to the rules that I thought existed and decided to give myself total freedom to experiment and try new things every single time I picked up a pair of drumsticks. To this day, I never play the song the same way twice. I explore new fills, rhythms, and techniques. After I discovered Daydream Nation, I played in on repeat for a week. At the end of the week, a buddy of mine came over for a jam session with my dad and I. We went on to have the greatest jam session I've ever been a part of. For half an hour we built up the energy and tension of the song. I don't even remember playing anything I'd ever tried before during those 30 minutes. Since then, I've become so much more confident in my abilities to play music and come up with creative ways to serve whatever song I'm playing. I have Sonic Youth to thank for that. To say this album blew my mind is an understatement.

Questions:
1. Music is one of the most prominent elements of culture in most societies. Culture also has a huge effect on the music of the society. Oftentimes, we can use music to understand the history of a society or culture. In what ways do you see the culture of today affecting the music being released, and vice-versa?
2. Interludes such as "Providence" have been the points of discussion on many albums, just look at "Fitter, Happier" for the prime example. What do you think that interludes should be used for? In what ways could they be used perfectly, and oppositely, how have they be used poorly?
3. Do you believe that music should have guidelines or traditions, or do you believe that music should be purely creative rather than follow rules?
4. On Daydream Nation, the lyrics and music compliment each other perfectly. How do you feel that lyrics affect the experience of an album? In what ways do lyrics that compliment the music improve the experience of an album for you, or do they at all?
5. Some albums are believed to be "Ahead of their time". As they age, they improve in the perception of the audience. A famous example of this is The Velvet Underground and Nico, which had a huge influence on Daydream Nation. What would an album need to be in 2017 in order to be "Ahead of its time"? How is this different from the way that it was in the 1960s?
6. Lastly, if you're into rating albums, what would you rate Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation? I personally would give it 5 stars out of 5 because not only has it impacted the way I perceive and play music, it's also an album that I can enjoy from start to finish on any given day.

[Hayden]

[albumceleste]

1. Just a few days ago we were talking with a friend about how a lot of higly praised albums from the last decade and current one are sad/quiet/melancholy/needy in tone, often with whispered vocals and a kinda passive-agressive attitude. We wondered if this may have something to do with the way youth grows up in the internet era, a kinda sedentary life often with a massive amount of time isolated in front of a screen.
The youth that gave life to 80s and 90s rock lived in a completely different landscape.

2. The first time I listend to DN I tought Providence was beautiful. It still is my favourite moment on the album.
Interludes are fine as far as they make sense I guess.

3. Tricky question. I don't think DN is that "free" from guidelines or traditions. Sure it has less boundaries than -say- a U2 album, but compared to some jazz albums recorded 30 years before, or academic music composed a hundred years before, it has a lot of cliches and boundaries. I think anyone wich listens to the album can see it's rock, find rock structures -you are a musician so you know what I'm talking about- and box it in a determined style pointed to a determined listeners population.

4. I tend not to judge music by their lyrics. Sometimes it's impossible with terrible ones, and sometimes great lyrics can uplift an album comprised of three chords strummed up and down.
I can only understand two languages so putting lyrics on a pedestal would deny me a lot of music.

5. As a famous writter said "everyone is fatally contemporary", so I don't think there are works ahead of their time. Most likely there are lots of works behind of their time, adhering to strict formulas that have been proved to work in the past. It's normal.

6. I loved this album as a 20yoer and really influenced me for some time about noise-dissonance applied to electric guitar. But I left it behind ever since. It's a music that isn't meaningful to me anymore.
At the time I would probably rated it 8/10 but today for me is a 5/10. A good and influential rock album, well played and an acceptable listen but in the end not something I would save in a vault of XXc music.

[Daydreamer]

Excellent write up. Another album I found on this site and as I usually need more time with longer albums I still haven't digested this album. Teenage Riot and Candle have solidified as great songs, but that's as far as I can go in rating this album. You can definitely hear Lou Reed had a gigantic influence on this album, both in the chaotic guitar playing which is similar to VU and atonal vocal delivery in some of the songs. Still haven't studied the lyrics but as you wrote it is logical they cover the same arease as Reed's.

[babyBlueSedan]

This has been my favorite Sonic Youth album since the first time I heard it (it being the first album I'd heard by the band). There are definitely days when I prefer Sister or Rather Ripped, and recently I've really been digging Washing Machine, but this one still sounds like a breath of fresh air every time I hear it. I think it does a great job at taking the noise and anxiety of No Wave and applying it to more traditional rock song structures. As for my opinions on some of the questions you posed:

2. Interludes are fine whenever, as long as they don't come between every couple tracks *cough* Stankonia *cough*. Honestly Providence is my favorite sounding track on this album, I love the way it builds to the spoken bits. I remember listening to this album driving some friends to work and saying how great it was. They said it wasn't music which made me sad

3. I'd say that music doesn't need to follow rules but all of my favorite music is pretty traditional so... I think it's best when music tries to do it's own thing while still adhering to more traditional song structures. That said I know there are a lot of people who prefer more experimentation than I do.

4. I'm a huge lyrics guy but honestly I don't really care about the lyrics on this album. The one exception is Kissibility, which paints a pretty creative picture of borderline sexual harassment. Other than that I think the lyrics work best as individual sentences or lines. Like "I wanted to know the exact dimensions of hell...Does fuck you sound simple enough". I think that's the most "punk" thing about this album - the scattershot not-giving-a-shit lyrics.

5. Albums are only called "ahead of their time" with years of hindsight. I don't think anyone called VU&N ahead of its time in 1967. And in my opinion this one is pretty of-its-time. It fits in pretty well with the alternative rock of the 80s and by the time the 90s hit alternative rock was more influenced by Pearl Jam and Nirvana than noise rock.

6. I've rated this album 10/10 for years and because of nostalgia I feel bad rating it any lower. I can't think of any bad moments that would cause me to rate it lower though.
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And it's hard to be a human being. And it's harder as anything else.

[Tha1ChiefRocka]

1. "Globalization" would be the key term to think about in modern music. The fact that anyone can listen to essentially anything for free has made music less culturally significant in my mind.

2. If it's good it's good, simple as that. If you can tell that effort was put into making the track.

3. As an art form, music has no rules.

4. Even though I am an English Major, I don't really care about lyrics. Poorly written lyrics are fairly obvious like clunky dialogue in a film. Bad lyrics will sound unnatural. As long as they propel the song forward and add something of value to the track, that's all that matters.

5. It would have to incorporate disparate elements of music together in a way that had not been done before. The 1960's were still a Promethean time for rock music. Everything new was innovative to an extent.

6. I like Daydream Nation, but I like other Sonic Youth albums like Murray Street and Sister just as much. Still about a 4.5 out of 5 though.

[Space-Dementia]

1. Like other people have said, culture doesn't seem to influence music as much anymore, mostly because of how connected we all are via the Internet. Yeah, there's still tons of political influence in music, but there doesn't seem to be like a "New York music scene" or a "Seattle music scene" as much as there was in the 70s 80s and 90s.
2. Interludes are awesome when I'm fully immersed in the music. If I'm laying on my bed with my eyes closed only focusing on the music, then interludes are often the most touching part of an album. However, most of the time I'm not listening to music like that, so in those cases interludes don't really mean anything to me. If I'm driving somewhere long-distance and listening to OK Computer, then Fitter Happier puts me in a trance and I'm on the verge of tears, but otherwise I'll probably skip it.
3. There's two types of great albums, in my opinion: the purely creative album that's different than anything else, and the rule-following album that doesn't really innovate but just does what it does really well. Daydream Nation, OK Computer, Sgt. Pepper, Emergency & I, and Spiderland are all albums that would fit in the first category. Is This It, Weezer, If You're Feeling Sinister, The Bends, and Teen Dream would all fit in the second category. So there's great albums that are purely creative and great albums that follow rules. I'd say, though, that the best albums that stand the test of time are the purely creative ones.
4. I usually don't pay attention much to lyrics, but noteworthy lyrics can either add to or subtract from an album. Weezer's Make Believe was a bad album, but once I read some of the lyrics, it decreased to "one of the worst of all time" level. The Unicorns' Who Will Cut Our Hair is an album I really like musically, but some of the lyrics are really cheesy which pisses me off. Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked At Me is rather uneventful musically, so the lyrics are really all there is, and they're magnificent. The Dark Side Of The Moon is perfect musically, and the lyrics go together so well with the music, which makes it one of the greatest albums of all time.
5. There's been a handful of albums released recently or not so recently that seem to me like they're predicting what the future of that genre will look like: St. Vincent, Bitte Orca, The Money Store, and Emergency & I all come to mind. They sound weird at first. I had to listen to each of those at least five or six times before I even understood them, let alone liked them. I think that's because they're so different than anything else that my ears aren't used to them. However, I keep waiting until more Death Grips-influenced hip hop starts becoming more popular, or until the staccato, eclectic, electronic-rock of St. Vincent and Dirty Projectors becomes more mainstream in the world of indie rock. Sometimes it doesn't work out, like The Dismemberment Plan still sound really weird, even after 18 years, but I think often it does and when it does that's really exciting.
6. I'd give it a B+. No one else has done the "take an alternative rock track, then halfway through just break into two minutes of noise, and then transition smoothly back into the alt rock track" thing that they do as well, and I love when it works, but some of the songs just experiment a little too much for my liking. It's definitely Top 50 material, though.

[Daydreamer]

[AfterHours]

1. Music is one of the most prominent elements of culture in most societies. Culture also has a huge effect on the music of the society. Oftentimes, we can use music to understand the history of a society or culture. In what ways do you see the culture of today affecting the music being released, and vice-versa?

Obviously the internet has dramatically changed how diverse serious music listeners have become. There are few limits to what we can listen to and most obscure albums can now easily be listened to by anyone. Many artists have turned to maximilism, crossing genres and so forth. Unfortunately the purpose behind art has degraded and thus the conviction in most of its music. Think about how much purpose and conviction artists like Beethoven and Bach and Michelangelo had in their music. There may be a much wider spectrum of talent now, but it doesn't seem like we will ever see single artists that could produce so many masterpieces in every genre or sub-genre of their medium (like those composers). Perhaps Shostakovich was the end of the line.

2. Interludes such as "Providence" have been the points of discussion on many albums, just look at "Fitter, Happier" for the prime example. What do you think that interludes should be used for? In what ways could they be used perfectly, and oppositely, how have they be used poorly?

Both are fine interludes within the context of their respective albums. In OK Computer and Daydream Nation the interludes are well-executed and emotionally/conceptually relevant to the themes and arc of the albums. Interludes that are mere novelties and don't really contribute to the emotional/conceptual purpose of the work, tend to lose their luster much faster.

3. Do you believe that music should have guidelines or traditions, or do you believe that music should be purely creative rather than follow rules?

There's no such thing as "purely creative" in music anymore, but many albums have come much closer than most (Trout Mask Replica, Rock Bottom, Faust, The Velvet Underground and Nico ... are about as singular as seems possible). You have to follow some rules. There has to be some semblance of organization and sense to the work, even if it's not evident in it's form but only emotionally/conceptually (such as with free jazz).

4. On Daydream Nation, the lyrics and music compliment each other perfectly. How do you feel that lyrics affect the experience of an album? In what ways do lyrics that compliment the music improve the experience of an album for you, or do they at all?

How the lyrics are sung/delivered is far more important to me than the words themselves. So, with that in mind I would say something like: Music/Vocal delivery: 95% / Lyrics: 5% ... Lyrics only become important to me if the vocalist is great/extraordinary, otherwise I'm not particularly interested in what they're saying no matter how close it might be to great poetry.

5. Some albums are believed to be "Ahead of their time". As they age, they improve in the perception of the audience. A famous example of this is The Velvet Underground and Nico, which had a huge influence on Daydream Nation. What would an album need to be in 2017 in order to be "Ahead of its time"? How is this different from the way that it was in the 1960s?

I think pop music could make so much more progress than it ever has (in terms of its artists expressing extraordinary emotional/conceptual depth in their music). Unfortunately, like Hip Hop, it is a major marketing tool and is only rarely applied to make historically extraordinary music. Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is perhaps the only album in Rock history to reach the emotional depths of many of the world's greatest artists without sacrificing or much complicating its fundamental nature and Pop music songs/structures -- with compositions that are generally not much more complicated than many Beatles songs (just much more personal and emotional). The album may be one of the ultimate examples of "lightning-in-a-bottle" that will never strike twice, but it is evidence that there is still much potential in the genre that has never been unleashed due to its artists' so often exhibiting a general lack of ambition and little emotional/conceptual weight in their music. I think this may be the most likely genre to serve us an album or albums that are "ahead of their time" in the near future, due to such already happening in virtually every other genre. I also think Hip Hop has a legitimate shot at finally producing a true masterpiece on the order of the greatest Rock/Jazz/Classical Works. Artists like Dalek and Clouddead had the right idea, but probably would need to increase their ambition by quite a bit to produce such a work. It seems like a Rock model such as Vampire Rodents or The Pop Group could serve Hip Hop very well if followed/closely approximated. As for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I don't know how that album could happen again because it is such a perfect balance of elements and a "spontaneous combustion" of inspiration, but hopefully someone in Pop music will figure it out.

6. Lastly, if you're into rating albums, what would you rate Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation? I personally would give it 5 stars out of 5 because not only has it impacted the way I perceive and play music, it's also an album that I can enjoy from start to finish on any given day.

On my scale, I give it an 8.5/10. Anything 7.5 or 8/10+ would probably qualify as "5 stars" by most standards.
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[RoundTheBend]