[ed. note: As we start to pick up steam here at 4GBs.com, we will have more and more pieces written by talented journalists, music enthusiasts, musicians, producers, musicologists, editors, artists, and brilliant, nutty people of all sorts. Today, we PROUDLY present the first of these.... [drumroll] …. written by awesome journalist Steve Baragona. ENJOY.]
Twenty-one years old. I was younger than that when Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot” came out in 1988. “Classic rock” was a new genre. Radio stations had just adopted the format a few years earlier, while I was in high school.
In 1988 I was an angry, frustrated, miserable college freshman at a cultural wasteland of a university in upstate New York. (Mike and his cohort wouldn’t show up for another two years.) It wasn’t that my classmates didn’t like new music. They just weren’t interested. Dislike is one thing. The apathy was what really got me.
I got my copy of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation off the floor of my college radio station, where I DJ’d and hung out with the few other people who cared about new music. Obviously, there weren’t many of us. Sonic Youth was already a well-established name in the indie rock scene in 1988, but a spare copy of Daydream Nation had been sitting neglected on the floor for weeks before I decided to give it a home.
Needless to say, I loved it. I could try to explain why I loved it as an angry, depressed teen and how loving this album was such a huge part of who I was then. I could try to explain why I still love it 21 years later as a fairly content adult. It would all be bullshit. Honestly, who knows?
The important thing is, when Daydream Nation was released in 1988, “classic” rock was a new idea. But it was clear that some songs that had resonated with people 20 years earlier still resonated with people in all kinds of different situations and times of life and continued to do so long after anyone expected them to. The Who hoped, and failed, to die before they got old.
So now I’m wondering how “Teen Age Riot” got to be 21, how I got to be almost 40, and if “Teen Age Riot” isn’t classic rock (and no “classic rock” station says it is), then what the hell is it?
Steve Baragona is a journalist living in Washington D.C.
