Sonic truth
Alt-rock pioneer Kim Gordon’s memoir pulses with passion and pain. Books,
Hipster goddess credentials don’t get any better than Kim Gordon’s. She was the bassist and lead singer of apparently defunct “noise rock” band Sonic Youth, said to have spawned the indie and grunge movements.
Her friends, deceased or still with us, include rocker Kurt Cobain and filmmaker Sophia Coppola.
She’s a conceptual artist whose work has been displayed at London’s influential Gagosian Gallery. At the age of 61, she remains an icon of cool.
And like her female bohemian-rocker forebear Nico, of Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol entourage fame, she is blond, blessed with high cheekbones and killer legs (which look particularly good in the silvery shorts she has sometimes worn), and cursed with a lousy singing voice.
Gordon admits her vocal powers are limited in Girl in a Band, her much-anticipated — in alt-rock circles, at least — new memoir. It details how she and longtime Sonic Youth collaborator/husband Thurston Moore came to a parting of ways in 2011.
It was a sundering that broke indie-leaning hearts. “They were cool and hardcore, with a profound seriousness about their art, and they hadn’t sold out or gotten soft,” Elissa Schappell wrote in Salon. “In an age of irony, where I’d feign indifference and cover up my insecurity with mockery, they weren’t too cool to care.”
Gordon and Moore’s is such a clichéd story: after 27 years of marriage and artistic collaboration, not to mention a 20year-old daughter, Coco, he fell for a much younger woman, and Gordon discovered his years-long betrayal in his email. Guys, how hard is it to cover your cyber tracks?
Gordon’s memoir vibrates with the pain of that dissolution. But it’s also a smart — for Gordon is clearly intelligent — and insightful to a point — for she is also, by nature, an emotionally guarded individual — reflection on what it’s like to be the “girl in the band.”
And to be a mom going out on stage every night creating a din of ecstasy (to borrow an album title from the late guitarist Chris Whitley).
Gordon was born in Rochester, N.Y., and raised in California, the daughter of a sociologist and his artistically inclined wife. She came to revere her older brother, Keller, who bullied her as a child — she attributes her outward reserve to his incessant teasing — and later became a paranoid schizophrenic.
She writes that she was an artist from the age of 5 and still considers herself more a visual/conceptual creator than a musician. Those impulses led her to study briefly at York University in Toronto before she attended the Otis College of Art and Design in California.
A passion for art also propelled Gordon to New York City in 1980, but it was easy in the art/music meld that then characterized the Big Apple for her to drift into rock, especially after she and Moore became a couple.
Some expected that Gordon’s book would have the evocative power of Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of her start in New York. But Gordon’s writing has none of Smith’s passion and poetic sensibility.
Still, Gordon offers some great aperçus. On being the only woman in Sonic Youth: “The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze . . . Since our music can be weird and dissonant, having me centre stage also makes it that much easier to sell the band.”
On Courtney Love: “I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behaviour, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill.”
And while Gordon hasn’t written the definitive book about balancing motherhood with rockdom, she does offer a few edifying snippets: “Touring with a child was nerve-wracking . . . In airports, Beanie Babies call out every 50 feet. Disciplining a child in public is no picnic, especially when a few eyes are on you.”
Ultimately, many of us who wish we’d had more rock-’n’-roll lives might envy Kim Gordon her insistence on pursuing her creativity, but then we sigh with relief that we never had to say no to a Beanie Baby with the international rock media watching.