Sonic Youth
Daydream Nation

THE REVIEW

I remember coming home from school, while waiting for my mother and thus my lunch, I started to fantasize whether this time, just this time, she would be the girl who would complete me. Physically and spiritually. The lunch. A quick pasta with tomato sauce, my mother had an hour before going back to the office and anyway before the school bar closed, Alfonso, a repeatedly failed former student probably ill-suited for study who, however, was lucky enough to have grandparents running the bar at the classical high school “Dante Alighieri,” had sold me a ham and cheese sandwich for a thousand lire instead of two, so I wasn't really hungry. Obviously, it would be easy to think it was her face or body or voice that was tying my stomach in knots. It wasn't. It was the thought of the mixtape I would give her the next day that did it.

Now clearly, as many of you know, creating a mixtape (in cassette, audio cassette, magnetic tape) for a girl was an incredibly complicated task and one, naturally, which had to aim for perfection. It wasn’t like making one for your Walkman or a friend, where you’d just put the latest tunes that had reached your ears. By perfection, I meant putting tracks she would like but didn’t know, sophisticated yet somewhat catchy, romantic but not sappy; at least, not in the first mixtape, heart never rhymed with love. Or at least that’s how it was for me. And then. And then the scene I was already imagining was her in her room with the empty case in hand and the tape in the stereo with the music loud (to be played at maximum volume) as, piece by piece, side B after side A, she began to be filled with passion for me.

For that, I had 60 damn minutes. But I also had around 600 CDs.

The doubts were numerous, for instance, on how I should make the cover, even though I usually cut out some absurd image from one of the Focus magazines I found in the big bathroom’s magazine holder and stuck it with stick glue to the outer borders of the cassette paper where the song titles, artist names, and album titles would usually be written. On the inner side, I wrote the song name, the artist’s name, and as a title, some phrase in English like “During the shiny electrical funeral” or “My sister My Bitch My master and servant,” which gave a vaguely poetic and decadent tone; most of the time this was the atmosphere I wanted to give to my compilations. Once the doubts regarding the title and packaging were overcome, even though back then I barely knew the term, the doubts regarding the playlist began, and here, however, there were absolute certainties: there would definitely be “No Love Lost” by Joy Division and “Song to the Siren” in the This Mortal Coil version (who knows maybe if I had known Tim Buckley’s version already, I would have hooked up sooner and more). But the first track, what the hell would be the first damn track, I almost melted onto the floor with doubt. I could end up ripping out all my nails or trying to eat my head from the inside. Then a light always turned on but this light had the semblance of a candle, a slightly blurred candle and the foggy tone of the wall behind it went on to smudge into itself. Always. Always the first track came from that CD with that lit candle on the cover. Track number 1, 6 minutes and 58 seconds, 1 minute and 22 seconds of intro, a lopsided and limping intro. Then. Then the explosion, sweat and blue sound, and with the explosion everyone started talking about the storm. “Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth. I always entrusted her with my presentations; for me, it was simply a calling card, a CV and I hoped it was a pass partout. After a few years, I understand why to win her (I should say win them, but I have only one face in mind) I chose and would have chosen that song as the first for every compilation. “Teenage Riot” for me was a way of being, a warning, I wasn’t and wouldn’t accept staying quiet or having a normal relationship, I wanted love, wounds, hookups, I wanted everything and immediately, I wanted the riot. I knew that thanks to this song, I would have had some extra chance, my revolt wanted to be made of flesh, sweat, noise, and bruised blood (Stirner and the circled A’s at most were just an iconographic frame). My revolt was her. I wanted that to be felt right away. Thanks to “Teenage Riot” I knew she would understand and that she would like it. But it is the whole “Daydream Nation” album that reminds me of those two or three years when high school was ending and I tried any way to stand out.

The album with the candle for me like a red bandana for a Los Angeles gang. After the opening “Teenage Riot” that everyone would understand, the tracks that composed for me like an ideal diary followed “Silver Rocket,” “The Sprawl” with Kim Gordon’s chryselephantine voice, Kim Gordon clad in aluminum. That melodic repetitive bass, the rhythm that so much resembles a robot in short circuit phase.

“Daydream Nation” is the first true encounter of noise (let’s remember that Sonic Youth are children of No-Wave and Glenn Branca) with melody just as I, in that period, had the first real encounter between spiritual love and physical love. “Total Trash,” “Hey Joni,” and “Kissability” are there to show it. And then the end, you must imagine that in that period I also started to heavily use drugs, from acids to pills up to psychotropics, and I don’t know how many times after getting home totally overwhelmed I would put on headphones and at full volume listen to the 14 minutes of “Trilogy” which for me was honey, ambrosia that someone poured directly into my ears because then the next morning someone would come to talk to me about the storm.

But now Pause. Pause. I need to put in the second track.