I have to confess I have never been a particular fan of Sonic Youth. I would read about them in Sassy, but I didn’t really hear much of their music other than when the Kool Thing video played on Much Music, and I just didn’t really love it. The band had an aura of cool (New York, friends with Chloe Sevigny, etc) that felt really beyond me because I just did not get it. However, I was in a used record store this spring and saw this book in a pile; the proprietor offered to just give it to me because we were already leaving with an armful of vinyl. I share this both because I love to reminisce on how I end up with certain books but also to be upfront about how I don’t have feelings one way or another about Kim Gordon and/or Sonic Youth.
Kim Gordon, one of two the two leads of the band, published this memoir in 2015, about four years after Sonic Youth broke up and her marriage to bandmate Thurston Moore dissolved. She opens her book with several chapters about her upbringing in California, the influence of her schizophrenic brother on her youth, and her quite privileged upbringing (international travel, experimental primary schools attached to universities, etc). She reviews her interest and education in avant garde art, experimental music and her decades spanning career with Sonic Youth. Towards the end of the book, she discusses the compromises she made in her marriage and parenthood, and pretty lightly chronicles Moore’s affair and the subsequent dissolution of both her marriage and the band. It’s well written, it’s moderately interesting, and to me there wasn’t anything in there that was particularly revealing or revelatory. That being said, there were some elements that I found pretty interesting:
- I read online that some readers thought Gordon was dragging some people through the mud, but I thought her comments about musician Lydia Lunch were not particularly salacious. She was a little more pointed about Courtney Love (and very clear about her fondness for Kurt Cobain), but everything she said seemed to align with the public’s knowledge of Love. She didn’t even use the name of the woman Moore was involved in, despite them still being together all these years later. I thought she was pretty polite and restrained, but had the sense she could probably tell some really interesting stories.
- Some folks seem to think she was a name dropper, but I would argue that part of what makes a celebrity memoir compelling is the name dropping (Streisand, Fisher, Skye, etc) and most of her names were for artists that probably resonate best with a relatively small group of people.
- While some of the book is framed through her envy of men and their bonds in musical groups, I found that Gordon didn’t explore that as thoroughly as she might have. The parts of the book I enjoyed most were the parts where she talked about the effort and labor that go into creating and maintaining a career, whether that be in music or art. The older I get, the more perspective I have on how women struggle in the workplace, and I can only imagine what that must be like in both the music industry (where men dominate rock and roll as well as seemingly much of the labels/management), and I would assume something similar occurs in the art world. Gordon discusses how journalists were very focused on her gender and how she felt about being in a rock band, about how she deliberately played around with how she dressed and presented herself as a way to confront sexism, and the choices she had to make to balance motherhood and family with her pretty public facing careers. I wish Gordon had taken a bit more time to frame this exploration a little more formally and outwardly looking – I think she might have some interesting perspectives.
Bingo Category: Work