Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation (33 1/3)

I've been listening to this album for about 14 years. It's one of the most influential albums of my young life and for certain helped me expand out of the tight circle of music I had back in my teenage high school years. I regularly wax poetic about it to anyone who will bother to listen.But this book... whoa.Stearns is a music journalist. Every single section begins with a quote or an excerpt from somewhere. Then an exceptionally hyperbolic thesis statement on how each aspect explored is the most masterful thing to have ever been committed to tape.The music. The themes. The settings.I swear to god if I have to read, see or hear any other piece of media that claims New York City is just as much a character / part of the band I will shoot myself.I cringed half the time I was reading this book. The masturbatory purple prose seems to SEEK to make you feel uncomfortable.However...What I find most fascinating about the book is the depictions actually shown from the interviews and quotes from Sonic Youth and the sound engineer that worked on Daydream Nation.While Stearns is stumbling over himself to gush maximally over anything and everything Sonic Youth, the most refreshing part of the book is that the members of Sonic Youth seem humble and modest in comparison. It further grounds an already down-to-Earth band which lends more power to the material.Stearns does shed excellent light on context and insight into the band and the thoughts and feelings poured into the creation of the album along the way which makes the price of admission worth it, if you can just push through the cringe worthy prose. A lovely irony I weaved into the narrative happens most often during the track by track analysis. While walking the reader step by step through each song, Stearns reaches *REAL* hard into his high school English AP skills and digs hard into the symbolism and imagery of the songs. There's a section where Lee Ranaldo describes how he was floored by reading Raymond Carver's "What We Do When We Talk About Love" for the first time and how he fell in love with American Minimalist writers and the power they packed into such sparse stories. There's more density in what you didn't say than what you did is the lesson to be gleamed there... but Stearns seems to bruise, batter and contort EVERY SINGLE LYRIC to tease out any and all literal possible meanings of what's happening in each song. And if you get a feel for what Ranaldo says about Carver and the types of stream-of-consciousness that's employed in it... the analysis feels like he's reaching HARD or more often just plain wrong. Yet... I find myself empathizing because he does truly love the album and he seeks to apply and project his own lens and vocabulary onto it in the ways he knows how. So I can't fault him. Even if it is so brazenly self-indulgent.Being a sort of counter-culturalist at heart, I haven't decided if it's a stroke of genius for Stearns to gush so exceptionally over the album that it's forced me to confront my own feelings and ideas about how I perceive the album and I find myself really analyzing it for what *I* like about the music and album as a whole rather than fall prey to the 160 page circle jerk session this lends.I really think it's worth reading, but please, take it for a heaping grain of salt. Remember what YOU like and why you like it and compare it against what you read.

I have to say that this is actually on of my favorites in the series so far. Stearns was able to go to the source, and spent a lot of time interviewing members of SY, which adds a lot of great information and depth to his book. I was also incredibly hooked by the introduction, where Stearns has some incredibly insightful things to say about music, recorded sound and the album format in general. I appear to be in the minority here, but I rank this one highly.

Love this album. I didn't see the horror and anger that this author did, but I appreciate the opinions.

the writing is just too much. i will now open to a random page..."And the final ring of "Teen Age Riot's" struck chords recede into silence. There's a moment, a microbeat, similar to that instant in the breathing cycle when the dynamic switches from the used-air release of exhalation to the oxygen-rejuvenation rush in inhalation, when the current track is over but the next hasn't quite begun. In this small window, we're given a short break to savor the exhaustion of "Teen Age Riot's" charged, fluid advance and this it's back to business. Before we've caught our breath, the howl of "Sliver Rocket" comes screeching over the horizon (starting from the left channel, it sweeps steadily across the stereo image, and settles into the right), unleashing sortie after sortie of chemical-rash inducing guitar assaults."it's all like this. a gap between two songs can't be simply a gap between two songs; no, it has to be THE MOST PORTENTOUS MOMENT EVER !too much.

A+

I got this book after a friend recommended it, unfortunately I've had little previous experience with Sonic Youth. I bought it along with the album and used it as a guide (for which the author's layout was perfect) as I immersed myself in a new experience. I believe that to fully appreciate a work of art one must understand the context in which it was created and Stearns did a wonderful job painting a picture of how both the New York music scene and the band member's personal lives helped shape the music. I also enjoyed the lyrical analysis, and although I don't agree with all of the author's conclusions, I found his analysis interesting and provocative. Stearns invites us to wonder with him what these lyrics could mean and opening it up for debate is far more important than coming to the "right" conclusion.I can understand the die-hard fans who may complain that the author spends too much time raving about an album they already love. For someone new to the music though, this enthusiasm is infectious, and I found myself listening to the same track over and over again letting Stearns point out some of the moments he so obviously adores.Daydream Nation has been off my radar for the last twenty years (yes, I've been under a rather large rock), I thoroughly enjoyed the new experience and I highly recommend Matthew Stearns' book as a companion to the album.

Definitely not one for the anti-vocabulary people of the world. There's a whole lotta words flying around in this little book, but ultimately that's a good thing. Sonic Youth's music can be unwieldy and unapologetic, and this point is not lost on Stearns. A nice homage to SY's classic sound. 4.5 stars.

Far too excited. To the point of unreadable. It's a pity, because it's one of my favourite albums.

The books in this series on Marquee Moon and You're Living All Over Me helped me put aside any initial scepticism about the idea behind these small publications and about "serious" writing about music. This one reinforced it. Whereas the other two (and the one on Doolittle, from a quick flip-through) actually go into some detail on the creation of the album itself and its context, such as the history of the band and the wider musical environment from which the album emerged, this one is just an extended review. And an utterly tedious and pretentious one at that. Just to open a page and pull a quote at random: "one massive, thrilling, midnight-run that sounds like undiscovered planets (umber, turquoise, and tangerine in color)". It's a good example of how hard and even pointless it often is to write about music itself. Rather than read this author's pseudy analysis of the music and the lyrics, I'd just go and listen to the album.

I wrote a detailed review of this book some weeks ago with quotes illustrating exactly why I thought it was awful. That review has not appeared here which leads me to suspect that the reviews we see are cherry picked while giving an illusion of being free expression.Anyhow I did not enjoy this book which reads like an extended review/description of the album. There is some evidence of an interview with Lee Renaldo but for a book length work there is very little insight here.

This book serves as both a song-to-song guide of Daydream Nation and an insight into the circumstances under which it was created.Stearns writes in a personal, frank and humorous way, giving a true feeling for the songs' effects on the listener, rather than being overbearing with notations about the musicological structure. However, it does contain some new facts, as it is well-researched genuinely informative.The only negative is the sometimes unnecessary over-analysis of decisions which were probably made by Sonic Youth with less thought than Stearns puts into analysing it. (I guess this does have a certain charm in keeping with his excitable writing style.)Overall, this is a great guide to Daydream; I would recommend it to anyone interested in SY or the album.

good read

Oh my, I worked hard to go through this book. There are some insights and interesting background stuff ... from time to time but most the time, the author needs to show how well educated he his or what a brilliant intellectual he his. This ends up in a narcissistic navel-gazing. And when the author don't understand the songs, he shows that he can use a stop watch to time exactly when there's a shift in the song.If you are a hard core SY fan, it might be of interest ... but then again, I guess you know already everything which is written in this book.