Artist: Sonic Youth
Venue: McCarren Park Pool, Brooklyn, NY
Date: July 28, 2007
I imagine every generation has their musical heroes, standard-bearers, the ones who everyone in the next generation emulates, until one of those become the new heroes. Usually by this point, the original band is fading from the scene (or sometimes, is dead/disbanded), and so the new generation of listeners often never hear the role models of their favorite bands. For me, Sonic Youth is almost one such band — although they have directly influence many of my favorite bands, such as Blonde Redhead and Radiohead, I say “almost” because Sonic Youth is still here, coming out with new albums regularly. And so once again, I find myself in the curious position of having heard a band’s works in reverse order. In this case, I had not heard their classic “Daydream Nation” until after I heard most of their newer material. But the crazy thing is that that album still sounds edgy and fresh today, 20 years after its release. It’s a wonder to me that it would have appealed to listeners back then (since music exists in a continuum, works of art often resonate most only when experienced in their context, and not as much after or before its era).
And so when the unprecedented opportunity to hear that album in its entirety presented itself, I jumped at it. With a much older crowd than almost any other show I’d been to, I found the concert experience a little bit different — since I hadn’t heard it and breathed it and lived whet it first came out, I was definitely one of the few people who didn’t know all the lyrics and hooks and time changes in the music. But no one cared when my arrhythmic jerking didn’t quite match the beat, because everyone was solidly focused on the band. Much older than most rockers, Sonic Youth still played with the fury of the album, living up to their name. With a giant candle as the backdrop and a small one in the foreground, the unchanging visual motif went well with the recurring guitar themes from the album. Sonic Youth tore through the long album with a grim determination with only a few breaks (usually under cover of a blisteringly harsh “radio tuner” flipping through channels of garbage and high frequency audio assaults).
The wasteland of 80s suburbia that was the motivation behind the album has only grown worse, as the restlessness of disenchanted and spoiled youth of the suburbs has mixed in with the futility of our efforts to end the horrific violence being perpetrated by our rulers. Bush is the new Reagan, and what he lacks in verbal ability, he more than makes up for in brazen corruption and a total disregard for human life. Perhaps this was part of the reason the album still resonates so strongly today. Or perhaps it’s just a fucking awesome record.
When the album was done, there was a massive explosion of applause from the audience, and the band was immediately back on for an encore that was almost as long as many other bands’ sets. At one point, Thurston Moore even said “hey, we’d play all fucking night if it wasn’t for New York’s noise ordinance.” I have no doubt that they could — or that anyone would leave before the morning if they did.
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