The rock opera that saved my life! (Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation)

What makes a great rock and roll album? Sing alongs, lyrical chants, twenty minute guitar solos? If it makes you feel...anything, then you’re there. The world of rock and roll. Being one with Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation” is on par with the mountain level psychotropic acid flux, the Dali Lama feels all the time. That oneness is about a connection, a connection to something higher and more powerful than a love song. To know, somebody is feeling what you’re feeling is an under-looked effect. And who more art affected than musicians? Thurston Moore, Lee Renaldo, Kim Gordon, and Steve Shelley comprise the thirty year young- Sonic Youth. Praised by the elite music world, such as greats: Neil Young, R.E.M., and Radiohead, they have outsold their contemporaries, over-inpsired youths of America, and now raise children in the suburbs of New Hampshire, while maintaining their original strategy: to reinvent rock and roll. The Sonic’s music puts a bug in the mainframe of controlled media society. They present the flipside to fame, and the beauty of anonymity. Claimed to have made art out of the ugly, or make us dance to polyrhythmic grooves outside the norm, Sonic’s full throttle force of intrigue is what the future wants. We’re constantly, subliminally brainwashed by lip synching boy bands, flash card cinema- MTV, the me-me-me generation... there is hope coming out from the sidelines. A “Daydream Nation” is born.

What makes a concept album? Well, we all went through that curious scatterbrain- “I’m living inside Pink Floyd’s- The Wall” phase in high school. So, what makes a GREAT concept album? The look: four immutable record whores, junked out on life during my twenty somethings. The sound: one continuous song, that never ends, and you don’t want it to end, much like your youth and innocence. A wall of distortion beneath the waves of the up most sincere poetry to ever hit the Reagan era. The words: Why the world sucks, and why you shouldn't care. And that’s what it’s all about- Insignificance. The daydreaming nation is about hope in the middle of an unknown town we’ve all lived in. From the past to the past through your second marriage and so on- “who gives a shit?” - when it’s all said and done. But the music rings a solution, a message of clarity, not suicide. Art’s become more indifferent to the public than brands of toilet paper these days. Why not write about it? Toilet paper, that is. The lyrics go like lines out of a Hitchcock movie, all scrambled up, and scribbled on shit toilet paper. There is little cohesiveness, even for the stream of consciousness poet to decipher, so non-linear, it just makes sense. Moore and Gordon’s lyrics are like a late 1970’s Jean Luc Godard film, where in the viewer decides for himself what’s really going on. They leave the audience to draw our own conclusions about the words, the way they’re sung, and the meaning. Jazz is a form of music that’s based its foundations on that theory: that music shouldn’t tell you how or what to feel. It points in the right direction, or alludes to the obvious, but the listener is primarily, a part of the creation. There’s a famous quote on the back of a Sonic Youth LP that says: “Music is never finished, long after the composer dies.” You collect the ideas, build a reservoir of feelings you react to, then pick and choose what you like or dislike. The imaginary world colliding with the reality of nine-to-five living is the message inside “Daydream Nation”. Everyone today can relate to that, as we quickly drift away from a unifying musical self, a culture we can call our own. Classical music encapsulated that feeling, much like this record aims to do.

Architecture for the ear erupts out of New York City, circa 1988, with the greatest conceptual rock and roll album, made by classical composers. This record is here to save a crippled old town, full of life, sex and drugs... and the American Dream, once again to unify us as musical partners forever. What The Who’s- “Tommy” did for its generation (kill the hippie, bore the punk rocker), “Daydream Nation” does today, bringing hope and clarity to a world of indifference and apathy so genuine, it makes you want to cry.