Song: "Teen Age Riot"
Artist: Sonic Youth
Album: Daydream Nation
Year: 1988
Length: 6:57
Label: Enigma/DGC (reissue)
Rating: 10 out of 10 (for the album via Pitchfork)
I don't know if I can do justice to the history of this song and this album any better than Pitchfork did on its recent review for the deluxe reissue that came out in 2007, so here's their version:
You'd be hard pressed to find many fans of indie rock who don't have some love for this record. That's partly because this record is great, sure-- that's one boring reason-- but it's also because this record is one of a handful that helped shape the notion of what American indie rock can potentially mean. It's almost a tautology: Indie fans love Daydream Nation because loving stuff like Daydream Nation is part of how we define what indie fans are.
Not that there wasn't plenty of underground music in the U.S. before this album's 1988 release-- hardcore punk, high-art avant garde, quirky college rock, DIY, weirdo regional scenes. But the notion that all those Reagan-era discontents might be in the same boat-- a new Alternative Nation just beginning to converge-- hadn't yet been fully articulated. Sonic Youth sensed that convergence in the making, and they were pretty sure it had something to do with Dinosaur Jr.: "A new aesthetic of youth culture", Thurston Moore called it in Matthew Stearns' 33 1/3 book about the album, "wherein anger and distaste, attributes associated with punk energy, were coolly replaced by head-in-the-clouds outer limits brilliance." Right. So the band writes the most glorious, accessible pop song of its career, calling it "J Mascis for President"-- i.e., an underground-rock campaign song-- and it kicks off this record under the title "Teen Age Riot". What does that sound like if not the grand calling-together of a nascent underground audience?
Sonic Youth don't set the song up as a call to arms. Instead, Thurston, singing, is in bed, just like you might be while listening to it-- or to Bug (Dinosaur Jr.), or Surfer Rosa (the Pixies), or Isn’t Anything (My Bloody Valentine), all of which came within the same year. Just two motes of potential energy, both waiting for Mascis to "Come running in on platform shoes/ With [his] Marshall stack/ To at least just give us a clue." The video for this song contains more images of musicians who aren't in Sonic Youth than musicians who are: Ian MacKaye, Patti Smith, Mark E. Smith, Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Sun Ra, Daniel Johnston, Neil Young, the Beach Boys-- a crash course in what still, almost 20 years later, looks like an indie canon.
In the years following its release, Daydream Nation has risen in stature to become one of the most highly-regarded albums of the 1980s, receiving much critical acclaim and appearing on many "Best-of" lists. It was ranked #1 in Pitchfork's top 100 albums of the 1980s,[3] 14 in Spin's "100 Greatest Albums, 1985–2005".[2] In 1989, it was ranked #45 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the The 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980's.
"Teen Age Riot" was the first single from Sonic Youth's 1988 album Daydream Nation. The album version of the song is long, clocking in at 6:57, and has two distinct parts. The first might be perceived as hypnotically dreamlike, with Kim Gordon reciting childlike, stream-of-consciousness prose, such as "You're it, no you're it/ Say it, don't spray it/ Miss me, don't dismiss me/ Spirit desire/ We will fall." ("We will fall" is a reference to The Stooges' song of the same name.), this section is played at a moderate to slow tempo on non-distorted guitars with a general dynamic build toward the second section, starting at 1 minute and 21 seconds at which point Thurston Moore plays, with-distortion, the recurring guitar riff that characterizes the second section of the song. The second section of the song is up-tempo and dynamically, is louder than the first section. The vocal line for this portion of the song is sung by Moore.
#5 Song of All Time
Everybody's talking 'bout the stormy weather
And what's a man do to but work out whether this is true?
Looking for a man with a focus and a temper
Who can open up a map and see between one and two
Time to get it
Before you let it
Get to you
Here he comes now
Stick to your guns
And let him through
Everybody's coming from the winter vacation
Taking in the sun in a exaltation to you
You come running in on platform shoes
With Marshall stacks
To at least just give us a clue
Ah, here it comes
I know it's someone I knew
Teenage riot in a public station
Gonna fight and tear it up in a hybrid nation for you
Now I see it
I think I'll leave it out of the way
Now I come near you
And it's not clear why you fade away
Looking for a ride to your secret location
Where the kids are setting up a free-speed nation, for you
Got a foghorn and a drum and a hammer thats rockin'
And a cord and a pedal and a lock, that'll do me for now
It better work out
I hope it works out my way
cause it's getting kind of quiet in my city's head
Takes a teen age riot to get me out of bed right now
You better look it
Were gonna shake it
Up to him
He acts the hero
We paint a zero
On his hand
We know it's down
We know it's bound too loose
Everybody's sound is round it
Everybody wants to be proud to choose
So who's to take the blame for the stormy weather
You're never gonna stop all the teenage leather and booze
Its time to go round
A one man showdown
Teach us how to fail
We're off the streets now
And back on the road
On the riot trail
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