Sonic Youth
Play "Daydream Nation", Live @ Piazza Castello, Ferrara 06.07.07

THE REVIEW

Teenage Riot: because the soul of punk is not dead yet, and that's a good thing.

The Crawl: Kim Gordon sings awkwardly with that subtly nostalgic filter and dances like a fairy on acid whenever she's not playing the bass.

'Cross the breeze: because every trope exists only as an expression; iconoclastic hardcore fury immersed in dark, paranoid acid. This piece exists to be played live.

Kissability: because rarely has a female interpretation been more beautiful.

Trilogy: because this frantic and sharp magma is the essence of this group.

That's why "Daydream Nation" was performed in a breathtakingly exciting manner. We're not talking about those mummies, the Rolling Stones, with their pathetic little songs that only make sense as cellphone ringtones. We're talking about a group that, while obviously changing and aging, is still the same as 19 years ago. First, the entomologist's eye with which they reveal the fetishistic bourgeois neuroses of the 80s, the elite class praised in its Reagan era banality, the era of daydreaming, a dream as insidious and slimy and full of dark sides as ever... that's the meaning of every melodic hint (therefore intrinsically middle class) of Daydream Nation, melodic hint devastated and shattered by inevitable psychosis... then the tracks of Rather Ripped: reaffirming melody and reaffirming being intellectuals of a certain extraction, but also with a style that still emphasizes a critical distinction, that's what continues to make them astonishing; the difference between the first and the second part of the concert is therefore strong and evident, and more than anything else, it's Steve Shelley's drums that distinguish it, which never revealed its immense importance more than at this concert: throughout Daydream Nation, its sound was primarily the tribal sound of the toms and the timpani, strong and deep, Dionysian, the stirring sound of a frustrated need for a generational redemption now impossible, the paroxysmal drive of a will for freedom never more impossible. In the second part, however, the drums become calm, characterized more by the cymbals, accompanying serenely, almost sweetly, not a solution and not even resignation, but a distal awareness, perhaps even an aging, but the aging of a true musician. One who reads and tells reality, or at least HIS reality, even when performing a stylistic exercise. The difference is indeed sharp and strong, but each part of the concert is essential to understand the other, and thus to understand this group: in this lies the continuity, not in style, but more than anything else in the need for two realms that have lived different moments and for this reason could only be so different: it is in visceral honesty that the continuity of their story lies.