Kim Gordon is a founding member of Sonic Youth, visual artist, feminist icon, mother and fashion trendsetter. Now she can now add “memoirist” to her list of accomplishments. Her new “Girl in a Band,” not only offers insight into music, art, the shifting tides of underground culture and the dynamics that made Sonic Youth tick, it’s also more transparent about her personal life than she has ever been.
Gordon and her husband of 29 years, Thurston Moore, finalized their divorce in 2013, effectively ending Sonic Youth, the band they co-founded in New York City in the early ’80s, when the couple separated in 2011. Since the breakup, Gordon has formed a new avant-rock band, Body/Head, and been the subject of numerous exhibitions of her visual art around the country.
In a phone interview from her home in Massachusetts, Gordon said the dissolution of her marriage prompted her to try to “make something constructive out of it.”
“Life steps in front of you, you have to take it on,” she says. “When something traumatic happens in your life, like a breakup, it sets you off thinking about your life. How did I get here? Who am I? I started thinking a lot about my childhood, and it was helpful in making sense of where I am now.”
Here’s an edited transcript our conversation.
Q: Your first rock band, Below the Belt, you describe as “pure mayhem and caterwauling.” You were stepping into music for the first time after being in the art world. How did it feel?
A: It was super exciting, because I’d never done anything like that before. We started a band for a college art class project, so it was within that context. I don’t think it mattered how it sounded. The art context can be very forgiving (laughs). When I was at Otis (College of Art and Design in Los Angeles), people were doing experimental music, and that piqued my interest. When I moved to New York, I was super influenced by Warhol, the Factory, and art that had music attached, like the Velvet Underground. Music was a new thing, but I didn’t really think about pursuing it further. I moved to New York to pursue visual art.
Q: Are the challenges to developing a career in visual arts and music similar?
A: When I look back on Sonic Youth’s journey, I wonder how did that happen? There was no money for a long time, and we were not thinking what will come out of it. It was always about let’s make a record, get a gig at CB’s (New York punk club CBGB), get a tour. When you’re not thinking about anything else you just move one day at a time. The art world is the same and yet quite different. The art world now is a lot more commercial than when I started out. It’s harder. I’m still establishing myself as an artist in that world. I guess I’m a late bloomer. I was in a band for 30 years and did what I could in art. In 2003, I started more seriously getting back to this thing that is so much a part of who I see myself as in the world. In the art world, careers slowly progress or they don’t progress at all. It’s not like having a hit and selling a bunch of records. In the art world, there is always going to be the hot trendy new artist thing, but it’s hard to sustain that.
Q: You write that the need to be a woman out front never entered your mind until Sonic Youth signed with Geffen a decade into the band’s career. Why is that?
A: I guess I didn’t feel like my style was together. Things changed after we made “Daydream” (Sonic Youth’s breakthrough album “Daydream Nation” in 1988). The songwriting became more structured. Even though I was there and contributed, I felt like I had less creative input in songs that were more conventional. For me, it became about thinking about image and playing around with that. The record company was not really behind that. For me, some of the ideas were more playful, inspired by Blondie. I liked the way (Blondie’s Deborah Harry) used clothes ironically. The goofy glam shots (on the inner sleeve of the 1990 “Goo” album), that was my idea. I was conscious of getting more into fashion, and what I could wear on stage, because I could afford to buy nicer clothes. My friend at (Gordon’s ’90s fashion line) X-Girl, we would have conversations about cool white jeans, Françoise Hardy, Marianne Faithfull, and the way these (female) artists (from past generations) would dress, and have a dialogue with that in a way.
Q: You write about the way Madonna used her sexuality to sell her art and that evolved into a cultural landscape where porn is everywhere. You argue that it was about a woman using a male’s idea of marketing sex. How does someone like Beyonce fit in with that wave of sex-as-marketing?
A: I’m all for sexy images. I don’t see that many Beyonce videos, but I think there are so many different ways to involve sexuality in the way women present themselves, but just presenting it in one way gets kind of boring. I don’t see a lot of sexy images lately (in the mainstream) aside from conventional ones. It’s more about gender fluidity now, that’s where the conversation is. People like Lady Gaga have brought humor back to these (sexual) images, where no one had been doing it since Debbie Harry.
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