Daydream Nation

The producer Sonic Youth hired for this album was primarily known for his work in hip-hop. Nick Sansano had recorded Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two." He did not know much about Sonic Youth before they approached him, but when he played them his records to show his approach, the band was immediately drawn to the density and attack of the sound. They booked three weeks at Greene Street Recording in SoHo in July 1988, paying a thousand dollars a day, which Thurston Moore later described as their first non-economy record.

The band had been developing the songs through sprawling live performances, and other musicians had been telling them their studio albums never quite captured the wild, roaming quality of their shows. Daydream Nation was the attempt to fix that. It runs seventy minutes across fourteen tracks, the longest of which, the three-part closing suite, takes up an entire side of vinyl. The guitars are tuned to custom alternate tunings that Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo developed over years, giving the album a harmonic palette that does not correspond to any standard rock vocabulary. Kim Gordon's bass and voice hold the whole dissonant architecture in place while everything else detonates around it.

The album gave Sonic Youth a major label deal and became the standard by which ambitious guitar music measured itself for the next decade. Kurt Cobain listed it as one of his fifty favorite albums. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2006. If you want to understand why independent rock music in the late 1980s and 1990s sounded the way it did, this is the record that set the coordinates.