Six Degrees of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation

Sonic Youth's remarkable longevity is due in part to their careful balancing act between consistency and change delivering, with nearly every album, a new variation on their core aesthetic, itself a balancing act between noise and pop. Their pivotal 1998 album, Daydream Nation, is the band's definitive record precisely for the way it plays out all those tensions. The band's semi-major-label debut it was recorded for the Capitol/EMI-distributed Enigma after an acrimonious... break with SST it was easily the most accessible record in their career. Catchier and more streamlined than anything they had done before, it ran with the tight, melodic momentum they had picked up on 1987's Sister, but it hardly pandered, as became amply clear on tracks like the blistering "Silver Rocket." Making the most of the 2LP format and titled like a manifesto, Daydream Nation sprawls in the best possible way, alternating between terse, double-time punk rave-ups ("'cross the Breeze") and dissonant fugue states in the case of "Trilogy" and "Silver Rocket," within the space of a single song. Above all, it feels extraordinarily charged, as though their guitars were creating force fields in the air. Their novel tunings and strange preparations jamming a drumstick beneath the strings, for instance created enormous waves of sound, like some apocalyptic, tsunami-grade version of Phil Spector's full-spectrum assault; levitation feels not just possible but practically required. It's tempting to call Daydream Nation Sonic Youth's White Album, from the two-LP format to the pedigreed sleeve art. (Where the Beatles' sleeve was designed by pop artist Richard Hamilton, Sonic Youth used the German painter Gerhard Richter.) It even had its own "Revolution #9" in the form of "Providence," two-and-a-half minutes of turntable noise, upright piano and cryptic answering-machine message that ranks as one of the most haunting things they've ever done. More than two decades after its release, Daydream Nation still functions like a gateway drug, hooking the listener on punchy, determined rock 'n' roll before sweeping her away on gusts of feedback. It's a great moment in feeding back and crossing over, and so are the other five albums in this list of Sonic Youth's influences and peers.

Any Sonic Youth fan listening to gamelan for the first time may likely be struck by a profound sense of the uncanny, like a flash of dj vu. Indonesian gamelan music goes back centuries; composed for enormous ensembles of gongs and other percussion, using microtonal scales, in many ways it's the very antithesis of Western music. (Instrumentalists, traditionally, don't even own their own instruments; the gamelan is a shared possession of the... whole village.) But gamelan's shimmering, pealing sound is a direct antecedent of Sonic Youth's electric chime, and that's not accidental. As early as the mid '60s, the Velvet Underground's John Cale recorded a clattering piece for harpsichord and fretless guitar called "Stainless Steel Gamelan," and gamelan was also an influence composers Lou Harrison and Steve Reich as well as Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. ("Overtones danced all around the notes," writes Lee Ranaldo of seeing the latter pair perform in 1979, "getting more animated, turning into first gamelan orchestras, then later a choir of voices, and finally a complete maelstrom of crushing sonic complexity.") But this wasn't even gamelan's first incursion into Western art music. Claude Debussy famously encountered the form at the 1889 World's Fair; David Toop suggests this encounter as the pivotal moment for Western art music's turn towards the ambient, and you can hear the same wonder Debussy must have felt ringing through every one of Sonic Youth's alien, open-tuned chords.

The Monks are one of rock 'n' roll's unlikelier stories. A group of American servicemen stationed in Germany in the early '60s, they got their start playing garden-variety rock 'n' roll as the 5 Torquays before changing their name to the Monks, adopting a uniform of tonsures, black robes and rope belts, and digging into their own repertoire of twisted, amphetamine-fueled proto-punk. They even claim to have discovered feedback one fortuitous day... when guitarist Gary Burger laid his instrument next to his amp. Blown away by the squealing eruption, they quickly settled in to jam around it, with Burger learning to control the noise or, at least, shape it. As bassist Eddy Shaw has written, "It had turned into pure black sound, creating the noise of a jet airliner taking off five feet away from your ear drums. One could get dizzy." If that sounds a lot like Sonic Youth's approach, it should; you can hear ample evidence of no wave's roots running across Black Monk Time, the Monks' only official album, recorded in 1966. The Monks' muscular, no-funny-stuff drumming anticipates the tom-heavy wallop of Sonic Youth and Swans, and the GIs' embrace of noise is an even more crucial predecessor of punk. The Monks' song structures stick to rock 'n' roll convention, but buzzing Hammond organ and a strummy attack add layers of overtones that bubble up and peel away, like blisters, from the songs' harmonic core. Where Sonic Youth turned to sticking guitar sticks beneath the strings, though, the Monks got their jangle the old-fashioned way, with banjos.

The late '80s were not an easy time for bands that wanted to broaden their audiences while maintaining their integrity or, more important, their credibility. The great post-punk/alt-rock boom of the late '80s and early '90s was a minefield for ambitious bands with even the best intentions. Zines like Maximum Rock 'n' Roll were scathing in their treatment of perceived sellouts; the scene jealously guarded its own. (The twin pleasures and terrors... of the era were most succinctly represented in Nirvana's worldwide success and Kurt Cobain's suicide just a few years later.) Nearly two decades earlier, the Velvet Underground had navigated similar waters with their fourth and final album, Loaded, caught between Warhol's Factory and the commercial ambitions of Atlantic Records. As eMusic's Matthew Fritch writes, "Loaded can be seen as the archetype for the Sellout Album or the product of a band in its twilight years taking a Last Stab at Commercial Success." But if Loaded had the songs and hooks to please radio, it also has a ragged, noisy fringe fluttering around the edges, prone to organ drones and chords breaking apart in motion. To hear Sonic Youth's debt to the Velvets, just listen to the high-necked jangle of "Rock & Roll," the way the chords and bass line spread gradually apart across the spectrum, throwing off strange, brittle harmonics while Lou Reed's sneering vocals slip between the notes. "Sweet Jane" anticipates Daydream Nation in its teasing blend of pure pop and otherworldly sonics: it may be one of the catchiest songs that the VU ever did, but its 15-second introduction, like some weird Asian fantasy, is a window to a whole different musical dimension. Sonic Youth, curiously, skirted these debates, for the most part. Maybe it's because by 1990's Goo, their major-label debut, they had already proved themselves too decadently arty for the self-flagellating punk scene. After breaking with SST, Daydream Nation actually came out on Enigma, an indie with major-label distribution; that's the kind of thing that could raise a stink in the '80s, but no one really batted an eye about it. How could they, really, given feedback fugues that had more to do with Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music than any of Loaded's bittersweet bubblegum.

Part of what makes Daydream Nation such a yearning kind of record is the way that, just out of earshot of its steadfast, punk-rock changes, there's something else, something you can't quite grasp: a quicksilver mesh of frequencies that fans out towards the horizon and beyond. The way Sonic Youth always came back to pop structures, it could almost feel like they were teasing you, barring passage to the worlds they hinted... at. To fully inhabit that feedback beyond, you had to turn to Glenn Branca. Branca got his start in the no wave scene, playing in groups like the Static and Theoretical Girls; his 1981 album The Ascention explores similar fusions of detuned skronk, ringing chords and tribal drumming as Sonic Youth's first records. (In fact, Lee Ranaldo plays on The Ascention, and it was Branca's Neutral label that released Sonic Youth's self-titled debut in 1982.) Inspired in part by his participation in Rhys Chatham's 1977 Guitar Trio, Branca began writing enormous, clanging symphonies for electric guitar and percussion, somewhere between gamelan and heavy metal but just a single frame of metal, jittery and stretched infinitely. 1983's Symphony No. 3 (Gloria) moves with painful slowness through its glimmering sound field, evoking Rothko, Morton Feldman and tinnitus, but Symphony No. 6, released the year after Daydream Nation, has adopted the pounding rock drumming and the squirrelly riffs of the latter quick and darting and muscular. The difference is that Branca never lets the music resolve. There's no accommodating step from the dominant to the tonic, no chorus, no release just clang and empty space filling up with overtones upon overtones.

For a time, Swans' career closely paralleled Sonic Youth's. The two bands shared a studio and even toured together, and in the early '80s, their jagged, atonal blasts had plenty in common even if Swans' critical nihilism was a far cry from Sonic Youth's cool detachment. Both acts jumped to major labels around the same time, but where Sonic Youth stayed with DGC, using it as a platform to help their friends... in the underground, Swans left Universal/MCA after 1989's atypical The Burning World to found their own label, Young God. If Sonic Youth are one of indie's last success stories under the traditional "studio system," Swans and their founder M. Gira are early examples of dogged, DIY survivors of the internet era. (For his part, Gira recently said of Sonic Youth, "They're the Monkees and I'm Jimi Hendrix.") The early EPs collected as Cop/Young God, Greed/Holy Money (1984-1985/6) are darker and more punishing than anything Sonic Youth ever did, but you can hear how both bands were working with similar ideas, laying out great sheets of noise over insistent warm drums, playing their guitars as though they were bells to ring in the apocalypse. Especially on songs like the dirge-like "A Hanging," Swans can sound almost like Daydream Nation slowed down to 16 RPM on a vintage record player a teenage riot drowned in codeine.