GORDON STAGES COOLEST ACT YET
At 70, former Sonic Youth musician releases blistering solo LP, finds new fans on Tiktok
The day she turned 60, the artist and musician Kim Gordon felt, by her own admission, “shipwrecked.”
She had recently gone through a painfully high-profile divorce from her husband of 27 years, Thurston Moore, and in the wake of their split, their band Sonic Youth — the freewheeling and fearlessly experimental group that almost single-handedly defined the sound and ethos of American alternative rock — ended its 30-year run. Plenty of people she loved attended her 60th birthday bash in New
York, but she still felt unmoored.
Gordon’s 70th birthday party last year, though, was another story entirely.
For one thing, it was in Los Angeles, the city she’d grown up in and returned to in 2015. But also, as Gordon explained during a recent interview, it doubled as a celebration of finishing her second solo album, “The Collective.”
“It was kind of great to have done that on my 70th birthday,” she said laughing. “Because I’d actually worked that day and felt a finality to the project, it was really satisfying.”
Not many artists welcome their 70s with a new album, and virtually none with a record as blistering and gloriously strange as “The Collective,” which has more in common with postmillennial Soundcloud rap than the dulcet tones of 21st-century indie-rock. (The title is partially inspired by Jennifer Egan’s novel “The Candy House.”) But left turns are business as usual for Gordon, a restlessly curious artistic polymath who has never settled for the conventional, expected or familiar.
“She’s one of those people that was meant to be an artist,” said musician Kathleen Hanna, who has known Gordon since the early 1990s. “Painting, writing, music — she’s one of those people who was born to be around any kind of art.”
Justin Raisen, 41, the producer who worked with Gordon on “The Collective,” noted that “Lots of careers go downhill with age, but there are also lots that go upward.” He cited as examples David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave — and Gordon.
Gordon and Raisen met after his brother, Jeremiah, a music producer who makes beats under the name Sadpony, had a chance encounter with Gordon at an LA
restaurant in 2015. He mentioned that his brother had recently worked on alt-pop star Sky Ferreira’s acclaimed album “Night Time, My Time.”
“I liked that record, but I’m not normally impressed when I hear the word ‘producer,’ ” Gordon said.
When Raisen began sending her some tracks, Gordon was taken aback: “Oh, he really gets my sensibility.’ ” She described that work with words she frequently uses as her highest artistic compliments: “minimalist” and “trashy.”
A process developed: Raisen sent Gordon tracks he thought would inspire, and she laid down vocals in his studio, later adding layers of distorted guitar and other effects. Gordon has a complicated relationship to the word “musician,” so Raisen has taken to calling her a “noise designer.” “She’s really good at noise designing,” he said.
Sadpony was visiting Raisen over Christmas when they created the foundation of what would become the new album’s corrosively arresting lead single, “Bye Bye.” The pair had been making beats intended for Playboi Carti, a rapper known for his music’s rough edges and in-your-face attitude.
When they finished this beat — which begins with a loop that sounds like a car’s seat-belt alarm and eventually ignites into a conflagration of synthesized chaos — Raisen said he told his brother, “I think this might be a little too wild for Playboi. But it could be cool for Kim.”
It was. “I thought it would be good to do mundane lyrics,” Gordon said, “as opposed to making it as intense” as the instrumentation. The finished song finds her reciting a packing list in a rhythmic deadpan, giving the whole composition a hypnotic strangeness: “Milk thistle, calcium, highrise boot cut, Advil, black jeans, bluejeans, cardigan, purse, passport.”
When “Bye Bye” was released in January, it resonated beyond Gordon’s usual fan base. The song has blown up on a certain corner of Tiktok: One post that has been viewed 300,000 times shows a young, tattooed musician listening to “Bye Bye” in awe, with the caption, “Kim Gordon just cured my fear of aging.” Another popular post shows a man nodding along to the track; caption: “Kim Gordon making this absolute banger at the age of 70.”
“What Kim’s doing is totally, absolutely normal. What’s not normal is when women or people who are marginalized in other ways have stopped making art” for reasons having to do with ageism or sexism, said Hanna, a member of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. “We’re not witnessing a miracle; we’re witnessing what happens when the thing that’s supposed to happen is just allowed to happen.”
Raisen sent Gordon those Tiktoks, and she’s not sure what to make of them. “It never occurred to me that I would be seen as cool because I’m 70,” she said with a dry laugh, “considering that I’m still waiting to feel like an adult in some ways.”
But — despite being roughly as synonymous with countercultural coolness as water is with wetness — Gordon is still not quite used to being seen as “cool,” for any reason.
Gordon has long had a way of sneaking cultural and political ideas into music without coming off as didactic or overly earnest. But no one who has paid close attention to her art would mistake her signature deadpan for apathy or nihilism. On Sonic Youth’s bracing 1985 album, “Bad
Moon Rising,” when she bellowed, “Support the power of women,” she was almost daring the listener to disagree.
In the ’90s, as Sonic Youth reached its commercial peak, she made feminism seem vital to the girls who idolized her while also managing to radicalize some of the boys who liked the band, too. As Gordon asked Chuck D on “Kool Thing,” one of the band’s most popular songs, “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression?”
It has now been nearly 13 years since Gordon and Moore broke up or, to measure it in Sonic Youth terms, longer than the time between “Goo” and the band’s post-9/11 landmark “Murray Street.” “Some people have this Sonic Youth nostalgia, so they want to talk about him or the relationship,” she said. “But that’s all just so in the past to me.”
She and Moore are in touch “only if something happens,” but “hopefully it’s cordial.” Referring to his recently published “Sonic Life: A Memoir,” Gordon said, “I’m genuinely happy that he has his book out.” When asked if she’d read it, or if she planned to, she shook her head.
“I’m a slow reader,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I have a lot of other books I have to read.”
In March, art-book imprint Karma is publishing an unconventional collaboration between Gordon and her late brother, Keller, who died almost two years ago. A paranoid schizophrenic who was also a Shakespeare scholar, Keller’s notebooks are collected in a volume that also features a moving essay Gordon wrote about him.
She described her difficult but ultimately loving relationship with Keller in her 2015 memoir, “Girl in a Band.” “He really did shape me so much,” she said of her brother, “in being mean to me or just having to prove myself in a certain way. I was never the writer. He was the writer.”
But what Gordon has proved in this past decade is that her art, her life, her cool — if she’ll forgive the word — has never been contingent upon anyone else. With time, and through continued artmaking, she has righted her own ship and pointed it once again in the direction of thrillingly uncharted waters.
“Kim Gordon is kind of like a shark, in that she needs to keep swimming,” Hanna said. “She needs to keep making art. It’s just who she is.”