Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation – Box Set

If you want a musical explanation of how to be indie, buy this box set. it is what defines indie and alternative, when it was actually a meaningful term.

God these guys can rock. And Kim Gordon is the girl in the band so she rocks harder than anyone!

This deluxe, remastered version of the indie rock classic is a reaction to Reaganism on the 90s, hardcore punk, college rock, arty avante garde, all becoming an alternative tribe.

From Pitchfork:

“The band spends this double album managing to inhabit just about every major strain of the underground, collecting and referencing each facet of what this “new youth culture” might look like:

• avant-garde Downtown NYC new music, complete with odd harmonic collisions and screwdrivers wedged in guitars
• hardcore punk sneering and double-time drumbeats
• good old off-kilter, accessible collegiate pop music
• gorgeous, oceanic “head-in-the-clouds outer limits” guitar stuff, which– along with the previous year’s releases from My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr., and the Pixies– would define indie rock’s guitar vocabulary as much as anything this side of Joy Division/New Order
• high-art, film, and literary references, ranging from the album cover (a Gerhard Richter painting) to the lyrics (which borrow from an Andy Warhol film and books by Harry Crews and Denis Johnson– and this is before Denis Johnson published Jesus