Psychic Confusion by Steve Chick

Author:Steve Chick [Chick, Stevie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-054-0
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2007-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Daydream Nation is an album alive and enraptured with the romance of being young and making music, as poignant and earnest a tribute to this music as The Velvet Underground’s deathless ‘Rock’n’Roll’. While still unafraid to stir righteous white-light rock’n’roll from the darker corners of American culture, and exploring the shadowy side of sexual relationships, Daydream Nation captures a group drunk on the exhilaration of being in a rock’n’roll group, gathering strength from the weird new Americana made by their contemporaries, absorbing this spectrum of fresh perspective, heady from the fusion of presumed-archaic classic rock signatures and inarticulate post-punk noise perfected by their friends Dinosaur.

Of all the groups Sonic Youth had played with while criss-crossing America, they shared a special kinship with the combustive Massachusetts trio; J Mascis’ radical employment of the resolutely old-school Marshall stack guitar amp set-up, responsible for Dinosaur’s roaring onstage din, would prove influential on generations of indie rock groups. “People would go buy the exact same equipment J used, the same amps and pedals,” remembers Lou Barlow. “J embraced the Marshall stack as something that could be expressive, not some bludgeoning heavy metal crap. Rolling Stone published some crappy ‘100 Greatest Guitarists Ever’ list a while back; Kurt Cobain was in there, Kevin Shields, even Frank fuckin’ Black, but not J. And he was so fucking influential. He was the progenitor of that style.”9

Dinosaur’s somnambulant frontman would cast his lazy shadow over much of Daydream Nation, most notably inspiring the lyrics to the album’s opening track. As befits an album so optimistic in its general tenor, ‘Teenage Riot’ opens with gentle lilts of sunshine guitar, Kim conducting a playful, childlike dialogue with herself, before the endearingly ramshackle guitar lick rises from the glow, a scruffy but spritely strum. ‘Teenage Riot’ is the sound of rock’n’roll pumping from college dorms and suburban basement entertainment rooms, the touring life of a punk-rock musician beckoning, with a chance to see the world from this unique perspective if the hero can just tie a tangle of notes tight enough to write a hit.

‘Teenage Riot’ evokes the purgatorial haze of the “slacker” existence: so much potential they’re left only dazed and confused, asking, like Mick Jagger in ‘Street Fighting Man’, “What’s a man to do?” It’s a song dizzy with opportunities to squander, a lazy call to arms, Thurston singing, “It’s getting kinda quiet in my city head/takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed.” Underneath lies a charmingly naive belief in the power of rock’n’roll, of this underground music, of pop culture as a whole, as some kind of positive, rejuvenating force. Mascis stalks the song, a mysterious outsider figure “running in on platform shoes, with Marshall stacks to at least just give us a clue”, the hero with a zero painted on his hand. 1988 was election year, the end of punk figure of hate Ronald Reagan’s reign in the White House; accordingly, Sonic Youth almost called their new album Rock’n’Roll For President, with Mascis their preferred candidate for Head of State.

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