Gone
Native
Long-lasting farewell from New York underground was the result of this record. Not because of betrayed ideals but in consequence of the penetrating power of Sonic Youth's 1988 work. In a period of pop cultural rebuilding they hit a nerve and set down the yardstick on a melange of noise, pop, experiment and avant-garde. With a transgressive approach of both conservation and subversion one breathtaking peak of electric guitar music was formed around the couple of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. 25 years after it is time to re-listen.
by Kilian
going nowhere? – a brief prologue on late 80s tenor
Different
from usual let's frankly begin this excursion into pop culture
materialistically, that is with the social realities: In the last
post-war decade world politics deal with unsettled relations of power
and ideology, violence is flaming up in many parts of the world,
certainties become unsure. And the United States are, of course, in
the thick of it. After eight years the First
Persian Gulf War in which the U.S. massively supported Saddam
Hussein's Iraq against the Islamic Republic of Iran ends with a UN
ceasefire involving heavy losses on both sides. At the same time U.S.
intelligence and military interfere in Latin American political
struggles to put down leftist governments and anti-American movements
in countries such as Grenada, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and
Panama.
Domestically, Republican Ronald Reagan, president-in-office
since 1981, asserts a neoliberal agenda which deregulates financial
and other markets, lowers taxes, cuts social welfare benefits and
pushes back labor unions. Under his administration the income gap
between the nation's wealthiest 10% and the rest becomes wider than
with any president in the previous decades while the lower 50%'s
income flatlines – a tendency still distinct today. Poverty once
more gains ground, especially in the big cities. In some areas the
number of the jobless, homeless and those living under the breadline
increases alarmingly. The slums teem with criminality, drug traffic
and littering and whole districts become messy cesspools – with the
proud and brawny New York City leading the way. In November 1988
George Bush senior is elected president. Although his administration
deradicalises Reagan's measures his attempts remain the same at
root.
Outside
the Cold War continues. Warsaw Pact and NATO are highly armed
opposing each other, a vast number of nuclear warheads and
intercontinental missiles are still ready for World War III. But
after more than forty years of world wide confrontation between the
two super powers the tide is turning. For quite some time the Soviet
communist block is on a trajectory towards an economic breakdown and
thus a disaster is looming for the second most powerful world empire.
As we know this finally results in the end of the West's long-time
arch enemy that leaves behind a scene of devastation which has to
face a new and confusing clash of interests in the former Soviet
realm.
In
the midst of these conditions the 80s mainly yield a depressing mood
that is pop-culturally either compensated with the petering out of
70s glam kitsch or endured with help of new forms of expression. And
of course pop culture thereby reflects to the point – whether
intentionally or not – what's going on. Punk more and more becomes
useless since the overall apocalypse for which its ethos should
prepare doesn't happen and the personal apocalypses inspired by it
are not half of the rebellion against the parental bourgeois milieu
they started as. Contemporary life seems to be more confusing than
nihilistic, so punk finally breaks. What is left? There is no wave to
tackle new wave. Whereas new wave appears to be much too arty and
optimistic to many artists no wave regains the sombre and fatalistic
tone of post-punk. In parts this leads to experimental drafts that
connect with germinal alternative rock. Albeit the latter is
musically conservative in instrumentation and structure its lyrics
often grasp the latest and most relevant topics of modern life.
Besides the grunge wave begins with a bit of punk's desperation and a
bit of alternative rock's ambitions, but altogether and in long terms
it is not overly fruitful. Much more important may be the first
stirrings of 90s and 2000s indie rock for which Sonic Youth should be
eminently important. With Daydream
Nation
we are in the year of 1988 and finally get to the gist of the matter.
However this needs another prologue.
Sonic
starts
Since
Thurston Moore had moved from his New England home town of Bethel in
Connecticut to New York City at the age of 19 he played in various
bands. In the late 1970s he had jam sessions with musician and
actress Stanton Miranda. It was her who put him in touch with Kim
Gordon, a mid-twenties yet uncommitted artist who had finished art school in Los
Angeles and brought some of her band experience to New York where she
was attracted by the city's dawning no wave scene. Moore and Gordon
became a couple and officially formed their band in 1981 under the
name Sonic Youth. They met guitarist Lee Ranaldo playing at
Manhattan's alternative art White
Columns Gallery
and found their steady drummer Steve Shelley a couple of years later.
Their first and self-titled EP was released in 1982 followed by the
destructive, noisy and yet eagerly ambitious full-length album
Confusion
is Sex
in 1983. In response to the 80s' disillusioning inner and outer State
of the Union Bad
Moon Rising
(1985) then explored America's viscid mental hinterlands. Clustering
sounds emulsify and form a persistent texture of ghostly and frigid
atmosphere. At that point Sonic Youth definitely manage to arouse
their new sound through well-elaborated guitar tunings, a more
complex song writing and better recording techniques. But it still
took the band a further two albums to be keyed to Daydream
Nation.
In 1986 EVOL
was released with experimental material that came closer and closer
to a presciently innovative pop sound until the vigorous Sister
followed one year later. By now the band's songs had gained a catchy
pop structure which changed their no-wave-face to a more convoluted
but clear-sighted avant-pop and experimental tone.
Sonic
Youth were kept an underground experience for a long time. It was not
until the mid 80s as the band got media attention. The New York press
remained indifferent towards the city's no wave scene in years.
However the late 80s brought them their first New
York Times
article and music journalists were keen-eared from now on. Before
Sonic Youth had changed their label several times. After contracts
with various indie houses they signed with record company Universal's
rock branch Geffen. The major deal was offered after Daydream
Nation
proved to be a considerable commercial success. Vocals were portioned
out among frontman Thurston Moore, bassist Kim Gordon and guitarist
Lee Ranaldo. All members learned to handle more than one instrument
so that everyone would contribute a widespread arsenal of sounds and
textures both live and in the studio.
Song
writing benefited from long and much-praised jams and a routine of
Moore offering a harmonic structure with which the band then could
experiment. Nonetheless most of the songs had already been strongly
outlined when their fifth studio album was recorded in the summer of
1988 within thirty days at Greene St. Recording in SoHo, Manhattan.
The location was chosen because of its short distance from the band's
apartments and of the fact that many influential hip hop
albums of the 80s (and then in the 90s as well) had been recorded there, e.g. by Run D.M.C.,
Public Enemy, Ice Cube and Beastie Boys. With a full length of 70
minutes it became the band's longest album. The twelve songs were
released on four vinyl sides as a double album with tracks ranging
from 2:41 to 14 minutes.
topography
of the animated mind
A detuned
guitar prefaces the opening Teen Age Riot,
analogously phase shifted and equipped with patching drum
bites. Wooden sticks click subdued eighth notes on a drum's rim until
a soft beat emerges. Kim Gordon disperses the segments of an
introductory phrase that concentrates in an echo: spirit
desire / we will fall.
The intro silently fades as it had begun to make way for a new,
pushing riff that sets free the stated rebellion. A cascade of
guitars and drums crescendos, then verse and chorus start. The uproar
is fun, a juvenile adventure as it takes
a teen age riot to get me out of bed.
Jocular and boozy nights never seem to end, lights are turned on:
we're off the
streets now / and back on the road / on the riot trail.
Riding
the Silver Rocket a distorted guitar exalts in a thrilling
punk manner. This naturally ends up in crying noise until the main
riff is resurrected. Thereafter the song is finished, straightforward
and hard-edged, with not more than three and a half minutes one of
the shortest in the repertoire. Widely unrelated with that but not
less impelling, even agitated and a lot more uneasy The Sprawl
weaves a net of claustrophobic timbre. While Kim Gordon's first line
(to the extent that I wear
skirts and cheap nylon slips I've gone native)
yet boils down to ironic wit the rest must be misleading. The fallacy
lies in its discomfort. Her voice is both aggressive and anxious
shouting I wanted
to know the exact dimension of hell / does this sound simple?
And we aren't left in the dark much longer where all this originates
as the chorus
ambushes: come on
down to the store / you can buy some more and more and more and more.
Along these lines the last stanza makes the chased and urged soul
comprehensible: I
grew up in a shotgun row / sliding down the hill / out front were the
big machines / steel and rusty now I guess / outback was the river /
and that big sign down the road / that's where it all started.
Musically,
this puts a subsequent seesawing instrumental part of more than
four minutes in motion.
In
the original release of the vinyl LP Cross the Breeze
introduces side two of four. Here again it is Kim Gordon's
vocals wrapped in disturbing, restless and turbulent sound,
concurrently uncertain and concrete. Unlike the female bassist in
this song guitarist Lee Ranaldo's voice is an often underappreciated
part of the band's appeal. With solid and warm certitude he manages
to bring forward the vital impetus of Sonic Youth's energizing
character: I can't see anything
at all / all I see is me / that's clear enough / that's what's
important / to see me // my eyes can focus / my brain is talking / it
looks pretty good to me / my head's all straight / my girlfriend's
beautiful / it looks pretty good to me.
On that note the modern pop-epos of Eric's
Trip,
fifth song of the record, proves to be one of the album's highlights.
Apart from Ranaldo's voice it is a pop-cultural reference which
generates its crucial distinction. Some of the song's
lines are inspired by musician and actor Eric Emerson, a 1960s and
70s member of Andy Warhol's art collective The Factory. He and
his monologue – held under the influence of space drug LSD –
appeared in Warhol's 1966 experimental film Chelsea
Girls.
With lyrics and sound (we
tore down the world and put up four walls / I breathe in the myth /
I'm over the city, fucking the future / I'm high and inside your
kiss)
the band relates to this work of three and a half hours of split
screen sequences filmed at Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.
There, Warhol staged several members of New York's contemporary art
scene and employed music by befriended band The
Velvet Underground.
22 Years later it is Sonic Youth, often considered the heir and
successor of Velvet
Underground,
whose adaptation re-narrates a hallucinatory trip: I
see with a glass eye / the pavement view / a shadow forming, across
the fields rushing / through me to you.
Not very different from the movie there is a hint of estranging
self-aggrandizement (she
thinks she's a goddess / she says she talks to the spirits / I wonder
if she can talk to herself / if she can bear to hear it)
as well as adventurous visual perception (hold
these pages up to the light / see the jackknife inside of the dream).
Be it Warhol or Sonic Youth, the maxim of New York's avant-garde is
simple: we make up
what we can't hear.
Far
from this the album's sole piano appears on Providence.
Thurston Moore recorded himself playing at his mother's house in
Connecticut. The cassette record is superimposed by an answering
machine tape from Thurston and Kim's home. Mike Watts, a befriended
musician calls from the city of Providence in Rhode Island and asks
about instrument cables Moore had bought the day before. Some
amplifier's noise swooshes through the impressionist melody as the
message's banality becomes an ornate collage of trivial action. After
that a beautiful and clean guitar picking turns into a fine
all-instruments arrangement in the album cover's eponymous and
easygoing track Candle
just to be followed by the earnest Rain
King,
a roaring stirrer of familiarly overdriven sound. Three minutes later
the record ends with a 14-minutes Trilogy,
a rousing connection of three unlike songs. In the beginning The
Wonder
roughens the ground so that Hyperstation
can fill the opened space with a shivery incantation: all
coming from female imagination / daydreaming days in a daydream
nation / […] / it's an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation /
daydreaming days in a daydream nation.
Finally
the wired and psyched up Eliminator
Jr.
does the rest to leave us with widely scattered and vibrant
sentiments about this exceptional work.
daydreams
in days of imagination
The album
earned perfect scores and rare reviews and was included in many
greatest-albums-of-...-lists. In 2005 it was admitted to the U.S.
Library of Congress' National Record Registry, a sound archive of
records considered important for life in the United States. It not
only foreshadowed the style of the beginning 90s but also influenced
indie rock of the decade to come - up
to its extensions in the 2000s and 2010s.
With
their manipulatively prepared guitars that from time to time are
plied with drum sticks or violin bows and thus are perfectly suited
for distorted noise parts Sonic Youth can doubtlessly be ranged among
the grand acts of noise rock. But the band's rock straightness and
its punk attitude towards aesthetic conventions equally originates
alternative rock. Nonetheless they defiantly abide by the rules qua
rich and upright colportages of the lo-fi standard given and at the
same time overstep bounds with powerful and drifting guitars that
sabotage the 70s new wave sound to the 80s no wave.
As if this wasn't enough the album enriches
experimental rock in a (for the most part) non-electronized manner.
Ultimately the
songs' pop structure – often employing the scheme
verse-chorus-verse-bridge-solo/experimental – unites noise parts
and largely unusual guitar tunings with pop elements to a more than
rare timbre.
Sonic
Youth's sound is a daydream of no wave, noise, alternative,
experimental and avant-garde soundscapes in which a depressed country
imploringly and unhesitatingly
likes to put itself in. But the daydream merely is what it can be
imagined as. Thus the album only provides the acoustic and lyric
bites for whatever purpose possible. In 1988 it precisely was that
nation of jaded, surfeited and disillusioned civilians who needed an
outbreak from a boring and unpleasant reality. In whatever state,
mood or condition the record might be re-listened it will be able to
gain a completely different dream figure of what has already been
known. It then would stir up the imagination in any conceivable
direction. German
artist Gerhard Richter provided Daydream
Nation's
album cover, a painting called Kerze
(candle) from 1982. It depicts a candle in a realist, as if
photographed and yet impressionist way. The gloaming light weighs
heavy as a clear shape is silhouetted against a blurry surrounding.
The candle is a dream, one version, the frontal imagination. We can
find ourselves in such a dream at any time. And each time it blends
with what we listeners carry with us in this pale and dim light. As it is a daydream, half asleep, half waking.
