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Book Review
Aug. 5th, 2013 02:41 pmDaydream Nation
by Matthew Stearns
Daydream Nation is one of my favorite rock albums of all time - it sounds like a certain kind of summertime, it's got raging intensity and delicate beauty, it's just so full.
Unfortunately, this book is pretty much the opposite. It's crap, to put it bluntly. Stearns' writing is terrible - an unappetizing stew of purple prose and pretentiousness. He focuses so much on his own very personal experiences and perceptions of Sonic Youth's music that he crowds out any real analysis or insight. At least there's some unintentional humor in the first couple of chapters, when Stearns complains about how critics usually discuss Sonic Youth and then follows that up with several paragraphs of pretentious twaddle about how mind-blowing, edgy, beautiful, or whatever their music is in his experience. There are a few good nuggets of material here, especially when Stearns quotes band members at length, but they are buried under an avalanche of tripe.
(On a more personal and subjective note, Stearns' experience of Daydream Nation is so different from mine now or 25 years ago that I sometimes wondered if we had heard the same music. He found it terrifying? Really? All I can remember is how entranced I was on first hearing it, how it was so different from everything else, and how it seemed to beckon me into a whole other musical space. It's not that I think there's a right and wrong here, it's that Stearns seems so adamant about how definitive his experience of the album is, as if he has the truth of it. Well, it's just his truth, not mine, and not necessarily anyone else's. The capacity to evoke such different yet vivid and forceful responses is what makes Daydream Nation so great, not how much it blew Stearns' own mind.)
by Matthew Stearns
Daydream Nation is one of my favorite rock albums of all time - it sounds like a certain kind of summertime, it's got raging intensity and delicate beauty, it's just so full.
Unfortunately, this book is pretty much the opposite. It's crap, to put it bluntly. Stearns' writing is terrible - an unappetizing stew of purple prose and pretentiousness. He focuses so much on his own very personal experiences and perceptions of Sonic Youth's music that he crowds out any real analysis or insight. At least there's some unintentional humor in the first couple of chapters, when Stearns complains about how critics usually discuss Sonic Youth and then follows that up with several paragraphs of pretentious twaddle about how mind-blowing, edgy, beautiful, or whatever their music is in his experience. There are a few good nuggets of material here, especially when Stearns quotes band members at length, but they are buried under an avalanche of tripe.
(On a more personal and subjective note, Stearns' experience of Daydream Nation is so different from mine now or 25 years ago that I sometimes wondered if we had heard the same music. He found it terrifying? Really? All I can remember is how entranced I was on first hearing it, how it was so different from everything else, and how it seemed to beckon me into a whole other musical space. It's not that I think there's a right and wrong here, it's that Stearns seems so adamant about how definitive his experience of the album is, as if he has the truth of it. Well, it's just his truth, not mine, and not necessarily anyone else's. The capacity to evoke such different yet vivid and forceful responses is what makes Daydream Nation so great, not how much it blew Stearns' own mind.)
