Kim Gordon: How to lose the cause and love of all life and not break
RECENTLY POST The first full-fledged memoirs of the legendary Kim Gordon "Girl in a Band", where a member of the group Sonic Youth bluntly told about her life. The media first of all paid attention to its comments about industry associates and former members of the native group, however, the accustomed role of an angry woman is much more hidden for the public than empty dissatisfaction.
"Noooo!" - something like the headlines in October 2011. “Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon are divorcing. The couple asked to respect their personal space and did not want to give further comments on this issue,” was stated in a laconic official statement. “I no longer believe in true love,” “This is the end of an era,” “How could they do that?” - the Internet exploded. In the world of music, they have been something of a gold standard that generations of fans and colleagues have been looking at since their inception. At a time when not many people can boast of a happy long-term marriage, they were the embodiment of an attainable ideal - look, if we, the rock stars, succeed, then everything will be fine with you. For a cry about the deceived expectations of investors for some reason lost the voice of the heroes of the sad news. Nobody wondered what a woman now has, whose heart was broken more seriously than her fans' illusions, and that her life and work are much more than a marriage that did not survive the midlife crisis.
Kim Gordon was silent for two years until she told me why they separated. It seems that Gordon does not particularly like to talk at all - neither on the old recordings of 1988, nor now she feels confident enough when she needs to be at the microphone not to sing. Gordon slowly picks up words, does not try to smile artificially. What has so far been considered the embodiment of "cool", in fact, was the result of a banal self-doubt. It is strange to hear from the mouth of the coolest woman in music about how shy she is, that she does not like to be in the company of other people for a long time and has never considered herself to be quite cool.
The complexes that captured her at first in the fashionable art party of New York in the 80s, then held her back in the world of musicians - but Gordon talks about it directly. The story about the group is not for nothing that seems to be secondary in "Girl in a Band". The focus here is the personal story of a woman who has found an outlet locked inside the energy on the stage, never having learned to cope with overwhelming emotions in ordinary life. The “group” here is not so much Sonic Youth itself, but the metaphor of the male world, in which she always tried to preserve her individuality.
It is strange to hear from the mouth of the coolest woman in music that she never considered herself cool enough
"Hey, Kool Thing, come here, I’m going to ask you. I’m wanna know what you’re gonna do.” ? ". Kim Gordon grew up in an academic family that lived in California, Hawaii, and Hong Kong - but she knew about the pressure test firsthand. Her relationship with men seems to have played a key and at the same time negative role in the development of Kim Gordon. As a girl, she realized a simple thought: if you don’t want to incur the further wrath of your aggressive sadistic brother Keller, it’s easier just not to show how painful and ill you are with his mockery. So, somewhere in a very deep childhood, when no one ever suspected his schizophrenia and did not try to protect his younger sister from him, the story of the artist and musician began - silent, restrained, ready to throw out their emotions only in art, where she could scream and be heard.
Home riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill was beside herself with happiness when Kim Gordon became her fan. Until now, Gordon speaks of Hannah in a most flattering way, and both of them, although not musically in the case of Gordon, remain exemplary riot grrrl in essence. Gordon is deservedly called a feminist icon, her texts, her position, her art have always been extremely clear. Nevertheless, feminism is not the center of its work, but simply an inseparable leitmotif of all life. When Gordon was in London, from all sides she only heard: "What is it like being a girl in a group?" Really.
With her help, everything else, the first big label for Sonic Youth, Geffen tried to "sell" the band. The blonde in the dress was placed in the center of the stage in order to attract attention - should I say how she was touched. For the artist Gordon, music has always been primarily an instrument of art, and not an end in itself, and the fact that its most important performance, from time to time, was tried to equate to a marketing approach, was incomprehensible. Even when she tried to turn this concept upside down, adjusting to the game of sex, all her images were a bit comical. But first and foremost, both externally and musically, she wanted to be "kick-ass", because just then women on the stage were not allowed to be.
About Gordon know how bassist and the second (or first - how to see) the voice of Sonic Youth. Nevertheless, she was never anyone except her own - she was a full-fledged member of the team, she played, she sang on equal terms. For herself, she will forever be primarily an artist. For a girl from California, everything starts and ends at the metaphorical easel she used to brush over, just because it’s so right. She is not trying to somehow justify her craving for art, she simply says: "This is the only thing I wanted to do since I was five."
Paintings, sculptures, performances, friendship with inspired artists, study, wandering around the art-party of the capital of the world - Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth could well not be. But once she performed on stage as part of Dan Graham’s performance “Performer / Audience / Mirror”, everything fell into place. The scene was the place where she could create the same way as on the canvas, and throw out all the frustration that accumulated in her, and it does not matter that no one knew what to call their music, even if the know-wave had already died. Finding pictures of that period Gordon on the Internet is difficult, much easier to read the collection of artistic fragments of her life, which she published under the simple name "Kim Gordon Chronicles" in two volumes. At some point, her friend and mentor artist Dan Graham told her to write - the result was a collection of her articles and essay "Is It My Body?", From which much about Kim Gordon became clear long before her memoirs.
In her first journalistic experience, "Trash Drugs and Male Bonding," she talked about the mechanism of male friendship. She was fascinated by their intimacy and the need for a point of contact, which music often turned out to be; it seemed surprising that the shelves were necessarily books with names like "Men and their work." At that moment, Gordon decided that she was tired of watching from the side - she wants to be a part of this club, because she loves music and considers it an ideal tool in its accuracy to transfer the artist's idea. Her favorite name for notes about the everyday lives of the future members of the group nevertheless remains "Boys Are Smelly".
Marriage is like a conversation - too many variables to reduce the reason for its ending to something one
Friends told Kim that he and Thurston were so close to each other because of their independence. The problem, it seems, lay in the fact that the sources of such behavior differed dramatically. For Moore, she was and remains something natural, growing out of his egoism. For Gordon, it was the only way to get rid of emotional dependence on men. “Marriage is like a long conversation,” she writes, too many variables to reduce the reason for his ending to something one.
The story of who Kim Gordon is is nevertheless strongly connected with men: from a sadistic brother and a changeer husband to mentors and ex who were much older, and even journalists, who released mizoginicheskie comments. Divorce became a point in the formation of its independence, when it finally became clear that trust and mutual understanding lasted exactly as long as they occurred under the conditions invented by Thurston. The singer and musician compares herself with a stapler, which he somehow threw out of the window at the moment of irritation - maybe she, too, was bored, like this stapler.
It is important that in the end she called her memoirs not “Boys are stinkers”, but “Girl in a group”. This is not a story about how men hurt her, although it immediately becomes clear that this has not been done without. This is a very self-centered story, putting the woman in the center of the narrative. Gordon is trying to remember how it all began, to tell the way of his becoming as a person and artist: in an interview she explains that this is the only convenient way for her to think - putting the reasoning on words on paper. Obviously, the book helped her close the gestalt and move on, even if at first she sat down to write it, by her own admission, for money.
The main revelation, about which she writes so openly, is not cheating on her husband, and not even how they and Sonic Youth first invented texts - pulling the lines out of a hat. The most important is her way from weakness to strength. Behind the succession of names of celebrities, closed concerts, bohemian art parties and legendary status do not feel the slightest self-glorification. Gordon just recounts the events, while not forgetting to show the narrator the way she was - unsure and confused: "Stunned by my hypersensitivity, I could not make any other choice but to become fearless."
During her life, Kim Gordon made many famous friends, from artists like Mike Kelly to actress Chloe Sevigny or even Marc Jacobs, and in the closed Kurt Cobain or radical Henry Rollins, she first saw soul mates. Another question is that their fame or stellar potential meant absolutely nothing to her. Her main hater Courtney Love is not in vain so angry - for psychopathic Love it is completely incomprehensible how you can be so uncalculated. In the past couple of weeks, the media has been vigorously discussing how much hate there is in Gordon.
In his memoirs, Gordon got not only Courtney Love, but also Lane Del Rey who came to the word (“doesn't understand what feminism is”) or, for example, Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins (“nobody liked him because he was a terrible whiner” ). Behind all this noise it is not difficult to discern the main victory of a famous woman over herself and show business. Instead of politically correct statements, she calls things by her own name and does not try to replace her thoughts with strangers. About her inability to forgive her husband, she told everyone who wanted to read her book. In the first frank gesture of her career, she flaunted her whole soul, leaving herself as unprotected as possible in front of criticism - despite the fact that, on 300 pages, she regularly refers to how her sensitivity and embarrassment played a cruel joke on her.
30 years of joint music and 27 years of marriage later, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore went their own ways. “Miss me. Don't dismiss me,” Sonic Youth ended their last gig in history. Shortly before the tour in South America, they started talking about how they were leaving, but they promised to play everything planned. Gordon never felt as lonely as at that moment, but perhaps it was then that she finally found true freedom — not just in music, as it was before, but also in life.
With the end of the group, life did not end, it did not end with the completion of the story of "Kim + Thurston." Visual artist Gordon has always been more than a symbolic marriage or any man who influenced her, although, of course, she could not believe that something as trivial as a divorce would happen to her after so many years of giving up on conformism. She is the protagonist of her history and her art, whatever form it takes. Gordon asked herself: "Is it really power? Push your emotions away?" - of course not. But this is exactly what she refuses to do next, and therefore she has already won, not being afraid to talk about her weakness.
Photo: Getty Images, Saint Laurent, Uniqlo