Sonic Youth in the National Recording Registry!

Categories: SonicYouth, music, library, government, doh

In 2000, Congress passed the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, "A bill to establish the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress to maintain and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and for other purposes" (Public Law 106-474; H.R.4846)

Every year, the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry announces a list of 50 recordings to be added to this collection. This year, Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation was added (as were “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” from Gil Scott-Heron, We’re Only in It for the Money from Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the incredible “Anthology of American Folk Music”, and the song “John the Revelator” from the Golden Gate Quartet. What a list.). I'm totally psyched. My favorite band honored as a national treasure by the national library.

Then I read through the Registry's 2005 list and saw a big whopping error in their description of the album. And not a nitpicking, indie music geek kind of thing either (though I would have written a very different description meself, but that's beside the point). They call Daydream Nation the 3rd album from the band, when by the most conservative counts (excluding EP's, bootlegs, and Ciccone Youth), it's their 6th. Isn't this the kind of hard facts that a library's metadata should be able to handle quite easily?

So the geek in me couldn't let it go, and I actually emailed the damn Registry people to tell them about their mistake. Eeek.

Sonic Youth Discography (see Daydream Nation as album #7)
AllMusic.Com > Sonic Youth > Discography (see DN as #6)