Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, released in 1988, had been a big venture for the music industry. This was the year of a new Bon Jovi record, a chart smashing My Bloody Valentine and also the Pixies new works. Among all the great things happening in the alternate rock music circuit that year, Sonic Youth released their album through the member line up of Starbucks, Thruston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley. With Moore and Gordon being longtime in the avant garde music scene, Sonic Youth seriously looked to make a creative wave in their sixth album. Their works came out to be effortlessly cool as usual and produced many classics in this double-decker service.

The album bears iconographic symbols important to Sonic Youth that included classic figures like that of each band member being shown on popular labels of classical anthems. It is the same concept used in Zeppelin’s album, Led Zeppelin IV. The work taken up by Youth has been both challenging and one played at the high end of things. All the tracks have been thrilling and have kept up to the challenge that they have intended to present on themselves. They have brought up topics ranging from personal crisis to political, national as well as general humanitarian facades, all in one large collage. They celebrate both the controversial off-beat as well as the popular with streaks of high art as well. For instance, we have the ever popular “Total Trash” that really took the scene of chart busters by storm. There are over 15 tracks in all, packed in this busy and ambitious album. It could have ended up to much an indulgence from the band but actually it deserves every right of celebration for it established its higher credentials through this. Not a single song can be said to have flopped!

The track “Teenage Riot” was written as a result of the strange call for arms and violence by young people, causing massacre and terror. It is also influenced a lot by the concept of the cyber punk as found in William Gibson’s work “The Sprawl”. The song satirizes the intense growth of consumerism and hence the result by which youth get influenced to ask and demand for more. It is also a pun to the Hendrix song “Hey Joe”. The reference to “Eric’s Trip” in this track is also an influence from Andy Warhol’s character Chelsea Girls. If you happen to get the vinyl album edition you are blessed with four discs of work that have stretched across this album. It is both revolutionary plus a cutting-edge to the history of alternate rock music making all the right marks with its importance.