This Thursday, October 18th, is the 30th anniversary of Daydream Nation, and I don't like to throw around superlatives often, but I'll go ahead and call it the greatest album by my favorite band of all time. Sonic Youth are not what one might consider a singles act -- they only had a handful of minor rock radio hits in the '90s, and the closest thing they had to a career-spanning best-of compilation was called Hits Are For Squares. But interestingly I've found that because they were around for so long, and had so many entry points for different audiences and different generations, that they kind of do have a good canonical set of singles -- their top 10 songs on Spotify feature 9 singles (or the most famous track off a given album) from 7 different albums running from the mid-'80s to the mid-2000s. So even though they're a band that I think rewards obsessive consumption of their whole catalog, I think there are a lot of casual fans who really like one particular album or era of the band, and I always try to provide good gateways to appreciating more of their stuff.

Sonic Youth deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. The World Looks Red
2. Brave Men Run (In My Family)
3. Death To Our Friends
4. Catholic Block
5. 'Cross The Breeze
6. Hey Joni
7. Cinderella's Big Score
8. Purr
9. JC
10. Tokyo Eye
11. Skip Tracer
12. French Tickler
13. Renegade Princess
14. Rain On Tin
15. Paper Cup Exit
16. Reena
17. No Way

Track 1 from Confusion Is Sex (1983)
Track 2 from Bad Moon Rising (1985)
Track 3 from Evol (1986)
Track 4 from Sister (1987)
Tracks 5 and 6 from Daydream Nation (1988)
Track 7 from Goo (1990)
Tracks 8 and 9 from Dirty (1992)
Track 10 from Experimental Jet Set, Trash, And No Star (1994)
Track 11 from Washing Machine (1995)
Track 12 from A Thousand Leaves (1998)
Track 13 from NYC Ghosts & Flowers (2000)
Track 14 from Murray Street (2002)
Track 15 from Sonic Nurse (2004)
Track 16 from Rather Ripped (2006)
Track 17 from The Eternal (2009)

There's a nice symmetry to how their career wound up -- 5 proper full-length albums in the '80s, 5 in the '90s, 5 in the 2000s. And I would totally say they were one of the best rock bands of each of those decades (probably the best of the '80s). It's hard to say I could ask for more of a band that did so much for so long, but it does make a little sad that they broke up when they still had momentum and were making great music, that if not for personal differences they might have made 5 more excellent albums in this decade (incidentally, I thought it was gonna feel fun to end the playlist with a song as fast as "No Way," but actually listening to it I realized what a grimly appropriate breakup song from the band's final album it is). Each member of the band has done good stuff since then, but that would've happened anyway, there were tons of great Sonic Youth side projects and solo albums while the band was still going.

Given that some of their best songs are pretty long and I wanted to include something from every album in my 80-minute limit, it was pretty hard to pick and choose. So I'd kind of strategize and include my favorite 7-minute epics "'Cross The Breeze" and "Rain On Tin" and use multiple songs from just two albums where it seemed to make sense: the double album masterpiece Daydream Nation, and Dirty, which I don't think is one of their very best but is their top selling album and at 15 tracks there's a lot of really great stuff to choose from. "JC" was, like Dirty's big single "100%," dedicated to the band's murdered friend Joe Cole, but it's a much gentler and more beautiful flipside to the single.

For a band who only had a few true 'hits,' a lot of their best loved songs are album tracks, but I tried to mostly avoid the most popular tracks from albums and things that stayed in the band's setlists beyond the initial album cycle, with some exceptions ("Rain On Tin" stayed in the band's shows for many years and I think is kind of the essential deep cut of their last decade). While there are albums like Sister or Murray Street where I could've used practically any track, I really had the most fun cherry-picking from the albums that probably could stand to have better reputations. Experimental Jet Set was my odd introduction to the band and I still think it has so many cool interesting arrangements like "Tokyo Eye" that aren't quite like anything else in the band's catalog. I was horribly disappointed with NYC Ghosts & Flowers when it came out, even before I saw famous pans like the Pitchfork review, but songs like "Renegade Princess" can sound pretty awesome when taken out of the context of the album's unsatisfying whole.

I'd like to note that there's an annoying little issue with the Spotify version of "Skip Tracer" -- the first 23 seconds or so of the track actually belong on the previous track on Washing Machine (unlisted on the original album sleeve but known officially as "Becuz Coda"). I don't even know how the streaming version of an album would end up with tracks starting and stopping in different spots than they did on the CD, but that's pretty irritating. I love "Skip Tracer," though. I thought for 20 years about covering that song in 2015 and then I didn't and regret it. Several of my many Sonic Youth mixtapes and mix CDs over the years have been collections of Lee Ranaldo's relatively few vocal turns, so I tried to pick 3 good ones from different decades for this playlist.

As someone who plays drums in guitar bands but doesn't play guitar I always kind of look at Sonic Youth in awe for the way they took an instrument I already kind of found mystifying and did such different things with tunings and effects and textures that they kind of brought into the rock realm from the avant garde. The way they kind of started out just kind of making weird noise and writing these simple 'dark nursery rhyme' kind of songs and then gradually found their footing as a full-on rock band that wrote incredible songs is really inspiring to me, it's something like how the Rolling Stones were a covers band until Mick and Keith tapped into their songwriting abilities. In fact, I really see the Stones and Sonic Youth similarly in a lot of ways, the way they were able to take this relatively simple sound and get so much creative mileage out of it for decades, there probably have not been any other bands that were that good for that long.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17, 2018 at 7:05 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.