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Sonic Youth hasn't been the *only* band to change my life. Nirvana had already done so in many ways, perhaps having a greater impact on my future than anyone else. But I realize now that part of my fascination with them was due to having a father whose love of the Beatles was like a deeply engrained personality trait. I grew up listening to the Beatles, and hearing the old man (when he was kind enough to grace me with his presence) tell stories about seeing them in the '60s, and being on the front lines of the greatest pop culture phenomenon in history.
I saw something of the Beatles in Nirvana, being just old enough and just interested enough to understand that they were occupying a position of similar significance, though on a much, much smaller scale.
So, like any good son of an absent alcoholic father, I took shelter in denial and hero-worship, and I emulated him. I really did fucking love Nirvana, and still do (more so than even, actually), but looking back on it, I can see how some of my Nirvana infatuation may have been a result of environment and circumstance. A coping mechanism. And therefore not entirely "me" or my own. And while I was sincerely smitten with that music, and I certainly felt Kurt's death shake my worldview like an earthquake, there was something archetypal about the whole thing.
But my experience with Sonic Youth was different. knew that there was no universality to their sound. I didn't have friends who listened to them... I knew that to some (many?), much of their music was virtually unlistenable. But I also knew that there was a large community of people who felt that they made perfect music. I already enjoyed the first few albums I'd picked up, but I would never have played them alone in the car for a long drive. And to be fair, they were fairly challenging records. This was back when albums like Antichrist Superstar and Life is Peachy were more or less what teenage boys wanted to hear. So I think SY was special for me from the get go because I couldn't talk to my friends about them, and if I put their music on, it was in the background.
Daydream Nation was definitive and personal and my love for it was unique, something I'd never felt in response to music before. I knew that plenty of the bands I loved when I was 13 simply wouldn't wouldn't appeal to me in adulthood.
Daydream Nation was very different. The maturity of the music was palpable. I was responding to the music and the aura and the hue of the sound; I wasn't just relating to some angsty lyric about divorce or the status quo. I was appreciating art on my own, in my own way, independent of the influence of friends, siblings, MTV, radio or any other warped and market driven notion of what was or should be "cool". There was something really pure about it, and I loved the idea that I was having an authentic reaction to something, and it had nothing to do with marketing, or trends, or high school, or what anyone else thought I "should" be doing.
In this way, I associate SY and Daydream Nation in particular, with a key phase in the development of my identity and my path to independent self discovery.
Yes, that was from my memoirs, Severian's S'Very Awesome Rise & S'verely Shitty Subsequent Slip into S'nility
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