Composition
"The Sprawl" was inspired by the works of science fiction writer William Gibson, who used the term to refer to a future mega-city stretching from Boston to Atlanta. The lyrics for the first verse were lifted from the novel The Stars at Noon by Denis Johnson. "Cross the Breeze" features some of Kim Gordon's most intense singing, with such lyrics as, "Let's go walking on the water/Now you think I'm Satan's daughter/I wanna know, should I stay or go?/I took a look into your hate/It made me feel very up to date". "Eric's Trip" has lyrics pertaining to Eric Emerson's LSD-fueled monologue in the Andy Warhol movie Chelsea Girls.
"Hey Joni" is titled as a tribute to rock standard "Hey Joe" and to Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. It is sung by Lee Ranaldo, and has surrealist lyrics such as "Shots ring out from the center of an empty field/Joni's in the tall grass/She's a beautiful mental jukebox, a sailboat explosion/A snap of electric whipcrack". This song also alludes to the works of William Gibson with the line "In this broken town, can you still jack in/And know what to do?" These feature similarly on Lee's two other songs on the album, the rarely-played "Rain King" — a homage to Pere Ubu and perhaps Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King — and the aforementioned "Eric's Trip".
The album's title comes from a lyric in "Hyperstation", and the closing track "Eliminator Jr." (inspired by the "Preppie Killer" Robert Chambers) was thus titled because the band felt it sounded like a cross between Dinosaur Jr. and Eliminator-era ZZ Top. It was given part "z" in the "Trilogy" both as a reference to ZZ Top and because it is the closing piece on the disc.
Read more about this topic: Daydream Nation
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The proposed Constitution ... is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)