Kim Gordon In Focus: Inside the Mind of the Art-Rock Enigma

Kim Gordon’s 2015 Girl in a Band  chronicles her artful life in vivid vignettes. 

Coolness, mystery, and artfulness create curiosity; Kim Gordon’s allure and opaque persona unravel as she documents her life. Known for her taciturn nature in Sonic Youth band interviews where her now ex-husband Thurston Moore would domineer the conversation, there is now only one voice across these pages. Her west-coast upbringing and New York evolution are told with precise, visceral recollection. Kim Gordon’s writing is mostly straightforward, so the poetic flourishes she describes performing with are bright and enchanting:

“I wondered if they were like me and craved the feeling of electricity and sound mixed together, swirling around my head and thru my legs. I always fantasized what it would be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys who have crossed their guitars together, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat, that powerful form of intimacy only achieved onstage in front of other people, known as male bonding.”

Throughout her memoir, she mentions the feeling of performance and pure expression, threading the serendipitous moments and frayed relationships into one form. In the first chapter, she documents the last Sonic Youth show. The shared history is over within an hour; Kim disenchants the reader, pulling them closely inwards. This is her life, the strangeness and betrayal of failed marriage, young-girl idealism shattered, a triumphant leap into another phase of life.

Kim launches us deeply into her childhood, writing in a hyper-sensory, poetic way, transporting us to 1960’s Los Angeles: “Eucalyptus bathed in the haze of ambition.” She parses apart the darkness beneath LA’s allure, the specific dichotomy of academic and showbiz families. Along with the ever-changing, turbulent 1960s culture of beatniks and political bedlam, Gordon gives an intimate recounting of her relationship with her brother who eventually was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Keller Gordon, described as a “hyper-verbal troublemaker,” created Kim’s icy demeanor that the media is so tantalized by – a woman with quietude is inherently shocking, especially in a musical scene with loud rockstars such as Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna. Now the press can go home, the mystery has been unlocked.

Kim details her teenage escapades and bullheaded desire for a life in art. Her tiny wonders are sprinkled throughout the book, details like jewels. The serendipity of encountering bandmates at small, crowded city clubs where groups would perform and disappear shortly after, similar to her initial bands that formed and dissolved quickly, leaving room for Sonic Youth.

She often brings up her past relationships and attraction to intellectual renegades, the minds with nuance who supported her artwork. Kim credits them with shaping her fearlessness in art. Her affinity for men devoted to art led her to one of the most innovative guitarists  in rock history, Thurston Moore.

Since Girl in a Band was written in 2015, Moore is slyly mentioned most of the time, as she admits that her heart is still broken following their divorce. Some of this commentary comes off as truly snide; digs against cultural figures such as Billy Corgan, Jeff Koons, and Courtney Love almost feel too personal and unnecessary in paragraphs. However, this is Kim’s life, and her unadulterated opinions. Moments of brashness are juxtaposed with her day-to-day self-consciousness.

Sometimes it is difficult to discern whether her judgments are drawn from the media or her own mind. Phrases littered with “maybe that’s why,” “probably because of,” and “I think,” skew the reality of the book. One could suppose that her life is as she sees and experiences it, however, the voice of judgment appears often, never quite clear if it is just her thoughts or something that has been said to her. Her heartache is palpable especially towards the end of the memoir when describing the cataclysmic discovery of texts and emails from the “other woman.” The reader gets vicious insight into a shattering marriage and how Kim’s daughter, Coco Gordon Moore, was hope incarnate. Maternal love and instinct is a natural concoction of determination. Even before her divorce, she undertook the balancing act of rock stardom and motherhood. Kim sweeps the disillusionment that the public has of musicians in her own words. Sonic Youth’s 1988 album Daydream Nation may be in the Library of Congress for its imprint on American culture, yet her stories of divorce and insecurity all ring with the same melancholy of the human experience.

The most bemusing stretch of her autobiography is the tale of her own art history. Her vivid descriptions of New York City in the seventies and eighties elucidate its non-stop energy. A life in pursuit of art is seldom talked about in detail. Usually interviews deal with the content of albums, but Kim walks us through the cheap foods and menial jobs, and most importantly the steadfast desire to stay in New York. These pre-Sonic Youth are redolent of Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids. Pure artists live in squalor in the pursuit of self-expression. Gordon remarks “everyone says they knew at age five that they wanted to be an artist.” New York is the quintessential art city, an eternal buzz of restlessness beckoning for more ideas in the air. She leaves LA knowing that she “had to in order to become who she always wanted to be.”

After becoming a member in Sonic Youth, her story takes off. Chapters rush by like their seven-minute noise-rock jams. Kim captures the flashing punk rock touring scene with old diary entries from a collection called Boys are Smelly. Typical diary entries are prosaic and confessional; this collection teems with rock-and-roll history and gender study. She writes that “For many purposes, being obsessed with boys playing guitars, being as ordinary as possible, being a girl bass player is ideal, because the swirl of Sonic Youth music makes me forget about being a girl. I like being in a weak position and making it strong.” Male bonding is a curious thing for her; touring, performing on stage, and creating music allows her to enter the male dimension, or in her ideal case, the genderless art realm.

The halcyon days of Sonic Youth are laced with her current heartbreak as Kim recalls her past with Thurston. She intersperses the golden past with ultimate betrayal, winding in and out of positive so he never comes off as lovely as he once did. I found that these moments of mentioning the present broke the transported nature of Kim’s writing; her sensory details and city context are lush but turn sour when the present is threaded into the story. She begins with a self-quote from therapy:

“The codependent woman, the narcissistic man…It’s a dynamic I have with men.”

A relationship centered around art is a recurring theme for Kim, as most relationships in her life in this memoir are linked to or are purely art-based. They are also numerous in the beginning, giving insight into her development as an artist through supportive relationships. As she moved around the country from LA to Chicago and ultimately New York, she encounters brilliant minds along the way. It’s a joy to see who she gravitates towards; they’re all unique creators such as Mike Kelley who later designed Sonic Youth album artwork. The budding romance between her and Thurston shines with their old passions to create something new in the music world; this part holds some of Kim’s best passages in the book – when she’s not including the future mess. I found myself smiling when turning the page. Vignettes of holding hands and waltzing into a movie theater or conversations about “reclaming the term ‘noise rock’” warmed my heart. Their initial union with Thurston’s confidence and Kim’s quieter ambitions shine with potential that eventually materializes in the album-by-album rundowns.

Throughout the memoir, Kurt Cobain’s story waltzes through. She describes him as having an otherworldly kindness and sensitivity. Soft details of Cobain are seldom shown in media. Usually one sees his punk rock stage-self and tragic stories. Gordon humanizes him, transports the reader into a moment with him. He wasn’t tall, he was a rather meek, sensitive figure off-stage. She noticed his self-destructive tendencies and even leans into the writing to tell us that making a home with Courtney Love was a quicker path to darkness. Gordon describes the immediate kinship she felt with Cobain, the intuitive sense of meeting another emotional and sensitive person. She never fluffs up the narrative, admitting that they weren’t best friends, but that the connection was strong. Gordon’s stories of the enigmas of the nineties rock world give insight to a place no journalist could ever go.

Distilling the unique feeling of creating and performing music is no easy task. Kim Gordon reminds the reader throughout her memoir why she loved the heart-racing lightning strikes of on-stage moments. She even makes a jovial comment that if she couldn’t express herself through music that she’d probably just be a sociopath. The act of creating art fuels her, never demurring. Her first and only solo record thus far, No Home Record, was released in the fall of 2019. It recalls the noisy, art-rock of Sonic Youth, but melded with new futuristic-sounding percussion and electronic embellishments. She admits in Girl in a Band that she always had a cloud of insecurity even in the more confident moments; No Home Record is the few-years-later coalescence of growth. Kim Gordon never stops creating, whether it is visual art or music or poetry – her mind has always been a tender yet forceful one in the art-rock scene.