The Sprawl: Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation Turns 35
Honoring the album that unlocked the band’s fully realized vision
Daydream Nation, released 35 years ago today, was an emergence from the underground, one that had its roots even before Sonic Youth existed.
New York City’s No Wave scene of the late ’70s wasn’t exactly seen as a stepping stone, but the opposite.
James Chance and the Contortions weren’t going to be seen on the Midnight Special. Casey Kasem wasn’t going to be announcing Teenage Jesus and the Jerks making American Top 40 after Springsteen gave them a song. Alan Vega wasn’t getting offers to use his songs in commercials (that was decades away, after his 2016 death).
In contrast to the punks, No Wavers weren’t keen on identifying what they were a part of or if they were indeed part of it at all. They were too busy scraping by in pre-gentrification lower Manhattan. It could be a bit of a hidden playground, before it became overrun with landlords drooling over dollar signs and their wealthy NIMBY tenants. The only rules seemed to be no rules. It was outsider music that pushed its fringes for its own sake — noisier, often combined with art or film. Musical proficiency was extremely optional for a genre far away from accessibility.
Sonic Youth came not long after, forming in 1981, inspired by what they were seeing.
“When I came to New York, I’d go and see bands downtown playing no-wave music,” Kim Gordon told Elle in 2013. “It was expressionistic and it was also nihilistic. Punk rock was tongue-in-cheek, saying, ‘Yeah, we’re destroying rock.’ No-wave music is more like, ‘NO, we’re really destroying rock.’ It was very dissonant. I just felt like, Wow, this is really free. I could do that.”
The band was very much operating in the spirit of those who came before, seemingly destined to live on in the minds of those who saw them in small clubs in NYC and along the East Coast not long ago. The clubs long gone, replaced by environs far less hospitable, such as the vacant Mudd Club space now sitting in a building with multi-million dollar condos above.
VIDEO: Sonic Youth performs The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on David Sanborn’s Night Music 1988
Sonic Youth’s earliest work fit right in with their predecessors, full of exploration, but very avant garde and atonal.
The bizarre tunings weren’t just an artistic choice, although that certainly was a benefit. The fact of their early days was that they weren’t flush with cash, so the guitars they could afford weren’t top of the line. If you try to play standard tunings, whether you want to sound like Zeppelin in a studio or yourself in an arts space in the Village on a cheap, shitty guitar, it’s likely going to sound like a cheap, shitty guitar. But if you do weird tunings and bring in drumsticks and tools from a hardware store to start coaxing unusual sounds out of it, it’s a lot easier to avoid noticing the lack of power chords.
Sonic Youth wasn’t fully content to just keep making its own brand of obscure no wave. Destroying rock for the sake of doing it is its own dead end. If you deconstruct enough, there’s nothing left to tear down and you just have random parts lying around.
They began to write songs more than pieces. It was material that could provide launching points for exploratory passages.
However optional musical proficiency might have been in the scene, Sonic Youth wasn’t going to consign itself to willful amateurism. The idea of incorporating more traditional ideas in with the avant garde was an intriguing prospect.
The addition of Steve Shelley as drummer was the addition that made the puzzle fit. He was on board for 1986’s EVOL, but it was on the following year’s Sister where he really made his presence known as a propulsive anchor for the flights of guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. Here was a band beginning to fire on all cylinders with thrilling results.
After finishing the Sister tour, they began working on new material. While that album was fairly compact (11 songs in just over 42 minutes), they were coming up with not just greater quantity, but length. They’d been encouraged to stretch out more, as they would do live. Some songs stretched to more than 20 minutes.
They accumulated material in two ways — either through interactive jamming (with an eye towards approaching their live sound) or in expanding upon riffs that Moore had come up with. Moore had been especially prolific in this period. It came together in basement rehearsal spaces in quarters so tight the songs had to played quietly for the moment.
They narrowed down the list of tracks and whittled down some of the longer improvisations. Not long before recording, they engaged in a rare bit of road testing. They previewed the album’s songs over a couple of weeks at clubs in the region — CBGB, Knitting Factory, Maxwell’s and T.T. The Bear’s Place.
Making Daydream Nation was a fairly quick process. Having a little bit more money being on Enigma Records, they went to Greene Street Recording, a facility known more in history for its place in classic hip-hop. Even without the ’90s history to come, it was where Run-DMC had recorded their first two albums, Kurtis Blow had written and recorded “The Breaks” and where Public Enemy had just done the bulk of recording for It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
Its history was a plus to the band, as were the possibilities that 24-track recording offered them.
They worked with engineer Nick Sansaro, who was just getting his career started, having just engineered Public Enemy, as well as DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two.” He might not have been familiar with mixing guitar rock, but his ability to mix aggressive sounds was a selling point.
Having a little more cash to pay for studio time is one thing, but Sonic Youth didn’t have “Screw you, we’ll take all the time we want” cash. Thus, they operated on a deadline.
VIDEO: Kim Gordon talks Daydream Nation on the Top 500 podcast
Making the songs went smoothly, with disagreements confined to post-recording. “Mixing as a democracy is not fun,” Gordon told Josh Adam Meyers on the Top 500 podcast. Moore and Ranaldo had quibbles with guitar levels. Shelley wasn’t always comfortable with input on his drum sound. Gordon wanted her bass more audible.
Still, they didn’t argue much as they had a double album to finish, something that most acts of their generation weren’t doing. Their one-time SST labelmates Hüsker Dü and The Minutemen were notable exceptions.
Although focused on making a good album, it wasn’t as if the band had a particularly grand vision. “We weren’t trying to do anything except get a record out and then, you know, go on tour and try to break break even. We all had day jobs. Sonic Youth wasn’t supporting our lifestyles. We all had to pay rent and buy peanut butter,” Moore told Classic Album Sundays in 2019.
The album opened with clever misdirection — a delicate minor-key melody as Gordon’s speaking voice overlaps, giving a not fully awake stream-of-consciousness feel to her words (“You’re it, no you’re it / Say it, don’t spray it / Miss me, don’t dismiss me / Spirit desire / We will fall.”)
But less than 90 seconds in, “Teen Age Riot” pauses and Moore’s riff sounds the alarm. It’s an addictively propulsive exercise in guitar interplay between he and Ranaldo, showing that weird tunes and melody could mesh. It may have had its origins in a whimsically niche flight of fantasy (“What if our pal J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. ran for president and won?” and turned it into an anthem of disaffection and earned distrust.
If not always overtly political, the band was clearly absorbing life in New York as the Reagan era was ending, with the realization that wide swaths of people were never welcome in that “shining city on the top of the hill.”
That said, they were conscious of not being too specific, lest references become dated. But the POV is scattered throughout. As with the nods to speculative modern science fiction of the time, it’s there to be found.
For all of their status as a quintessential New York band, none of the band grew up in the city. Moore came from Connecticut and Ranaldo on Long Island. Like Gordon, Michigander Shelley didn’t grow up close enough to be able to take a train into the city.
“The Sprawl” came together the quickest of any of the album’s songs and remained one of Gordon’s favorites to play live. Its touchstone wasn’t the gritty edges of lower Manhattan, but the 1960s Los Angeles Gordon knew as a teenager. It was a point where there were ever more freeways and strip malls, turning so many suburbs into theme park versions of themselves.
Desires for escape as well as those more carnal intertwine, wrapped up in a critique of rampant consumerism. All of which is set to an engagingly guitar driven in which the riffs duel more than any solos — the Velvet Underground with more improv before the drums disappear entirely for an extended outro.
Gordon told Meyers that “‘Cross the Breeze” was sort of the band’s take on metal (and years later, Moore was contacted by a black metal musician who told him that the song had a following among players in that community).
The song is not metal by any means, but you can see why members of certain musical communities latched on to it. The lyrical vagueness is offset by how furiously the four attack the music to the point where it feels like an instrumental.
It’s the music that time and time again delivers to keep even the moments that could have threatened to be oh, so art school pretentious go down with a kick.
Ranaldo had more of a presence, getting three songs where he sang and supplied the lyrics, two more than usual. As the band’s resident Deadhead, there was an irony that none of the longer songs were his. There’s an abrasively dissonant salute to Pere Ubu (“Rain King”) and the more straightforward but intentionally disorienting Sonic Youth on Nuggets homage to an acid-drenched monologue in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (“Eric’s Trip”).
His highlight, though, is “Hey Joni” which is not, contrary to what some thought, about Joni Mitchell.
Rather, it’s a musically furious reversal of songs like “Hey Joe.” There may be an unreliable narrator at play, but it certainly plays as if it’s a musical variation of Tarantino’s attempted historical correctives without the foot fetish. In any case, the ferocity is what sells it.
Moore whips up a fresh batch of noise on the cranked-up tempo of “Silver Rocket”, with a breakdown full of feedback, distortion and a woozy feeling that it’s all close to falling apart at the end of the night before the rhythm section kicks back in to wrap things up in under four minutes.
“Total Trash” is the closest Daydream Nation comes to playing it straight. Sonic Youth shows it to be a feint, first with the atonal soloing and then the stomping, buzzing breakdown where it threatens to detail like a train taking a curve too fast. But as they always did on the album, the band kept the chaos controlled, the flights tethered by rope carrying a lot of slack.
If that song had ire for record company bullshit, “Candle” with its shorter length, shows there’s plenty of venom for its burned out protagonist, the “dog star” with the “wind whipping through my stupid mop.”
It followed “Providence”, which was comprised of piano recorded at Moore’s mom’s house on a Walkman, an overheated amp and two phone messages left by former Minuteman Mike Watt, who’d just played with the band on the Ciccone Youth side project, reminding Moore to use weed in moderation to avoid memory loss.
It’s filler, but short filler and Watt’s admonishment serves as the lead-in for the self-laceration of “Candle.”
Gordon’s “Kissability” either anticipates #MeToo by decades or at least doesn’t treat the casting couch a punchline as she mercilessly inhabits the character of a producer type who isn’t willing to take no for an answer. As much as it’s about objectification in general, the intentionally leering creepiness meant the song could have been easily called “Harvey Weinstein” and been even more prescient.
The album closed with Sonic Youth going prog with the closing “Trilogy”, three songs – Moore’s “The Wonder” and “Hyperstation” (the most drawn out section) and Gordon’s “Eliminator Jr.”
The three flow seamlessly musically, held together thematically by the not always glowing impressionistic portrait of the city in 1988 — the paranoia of “The Wonder”, the utter weariness of “Hyperstation” and the remorseless killer Robert Chambers (who’d pled guilty to manslaughter earlier that year) in “Eliminator Jr.”
The title of the latter was intended as a joke about the song’s extended opening (and recurring riff), which indeed carried enough boogie that Billy Gibbons himself had to stroke his beard in approval.
To top it off, the band’s embrace of visual artists resulted in Daydream Nation’s memorable front cover — Gerhard Richter’s 1983 photorealistic painting Kerze (“Candle”).
Richter liked the band, so he allowed them use of the Kerze (which sold for over $16.5 million in 2011) for the front and another painting of a candle for the back free of charge.
The album was universally praised, although that didn’t translate to huge sales. Sonic Youth’s trouble capitalizing on the buzz had partly to do with timing (“Teen Age Riot” arriving a few years too early) and partly because Enigma had distribution and marketing problems.
The experience, along with a need for more financial security (30-something indie musicians need health insurance, too), hastened the band’s decision to move to a major label and find new management. The latter had been simmering since the release of the 1986 bootleg Walls Have Ears without the band’s consent or input.
They signed with DGC, which released Goo in 1990. They’d keep exploring their various sides — more commercial (that being a relative term given that this is Sonic Youth we’re talking about) under Geffen banners and avowedly experimental and almost militantly avant-garde on releases on their own label.
2009’s The Eternal, released on Matador, was the band’s last, thanks to the end of Moore and Gordon’s marriage two years later. He’d been in an ongoing extramarital affair and refused to end it.
Band members’ private lives exist separate from fan expectations. Marriages end all the time and the heart wants what it wants. In this case, one heart wasn’t too broken up about the band ceasing to exist in the fallout.
The members have continued various musical projects. Gordon’s also free to spend more time on her visual art, something she didn’t always have when the band was active. Various archival releases, mostly official bootlegs have been released, primarily overseen by Shelley and Ranaldo.
Daydream Nation doesn’t represent Sonic Youth’s first steps towards their more song-based version of accessibility (which had been entering the picture since EVOL). It did show that the point where the alternative became mainstream was rapidly approaching. As much as anything, it showed that more were willing to meet bands like them on their terms, as they would to even greater degrees for the likes of Nirvana.
The sum of its influences — from punk to post-punk to classic rock to Beat poets, William Gibson, Phillip K. Dick and experimental artists — Daydream Nation remains an intense thrill ride of a band fully realizing its creative possibilities as it strode out of the underground to explore the street level darkness at the light’s edge.
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