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Kim Gordon: It's good to have options.Tell me about the title, Girl in a Band. I mean it's not shocking—that's probably the number-one question you've gotten asked in your career. There weren't many women in bands in the 80s and 90s.
Yeah, it's sort of this ironic, horrible question pretty much every girl hates to be asked. What's it like to be a girl in a band? It was sort of thrown out as a working title and I thought, God, I got to find something better than that. But it stuck around because it had multiple ironic meanings. It seemed like you can hang a lot of stuff on that.
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Well, I think being a girl in a band's job is to add an element of chaos, mystery, an unknown energy. Like, What she's going to do next? It makes it slightly unpredictable.You have this great line about how " the girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and throws it back at the audience." I was wondering, how does that fuel your performance?
Well, it could be that. I don't know. That's a good line. I mean, I was sort of aware of being projected upon, but every performer is. But I have used that maybe as such a panic for lyrics in terms of imagining an actress as a typical passive object in a film. What happens when you break through that expectation. What happens if you turn it around? I think that was what was so amazing about Riot Grrrl. That's what they really did. They took that and completely ran with that.Let's talk about why you wrote this memoir. You aren't starving and…
Well, I needed another source of income. I didn't want a nine-to-five job. It's up there with my nightmare, which is teaching French class. Then showing up to a final when I'm sleeping.Did you write to set the record straight? Or because you thought, let's see—you paint, you make music, you design clothes, you direct—I have a lot of extra time on my hands?
No. I mean, I never really thought about writing a memoir. My initial reaction was to make an art project out of it. You know like a noir novel. That was seriously one of the ideas. Then I got approached by a few editors, and then my first instinct was to like write a memoir like Bob Dylan. Just make shit up. Memoirs are a weird thing. You aren't remembering, you're recreating.
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Yeah, I think when something really dramatic happens in your life there's this process of creation that splits your life up in pieces. There's a point where you want to see how you got to where you are. What part did I play?It kind of sets you off on this course of wanting to discover who you are and owning up to it in some way. I think writing is this kind of way for me to figure stuff out.It's like that great Joan Didion quote, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means…"
Right.Marriage isn't that much different then being in a band. Everybody plays their role and if they don't, it's chaos. Everything breaks loose. Is it possible for two artists, male and female—same age, equally ambitious, successful—to really live together? Can you both be artists at the same time, especially if you have a kid running around?
I don't know. I think artists need a lot of space in their life. If you're lucky, you have a partner who understands that. Then you need to find someone who can be your wife. I mean in terms of just dealing with things like scheduling and all those other things you have to do. I think it's really hard. I know a lot of female artists who don't have kids and I think there's a reason for that. But people stay married because they love each other and they want to work things out.
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I don't miss playing with Sonic Youth now. I did it for so long, and I feel like now I have a situation with Bill Nace, [Head/Body], which feels closer to me and closer to my interests. I'm also focusing more on visual art, which is more of who I am.How has this rupture—the divorce, the breakup of Sonic Youth affected your art?
I feel like it made me unstuck. Sometimes everything just converges at once and it's a shit storm, but it put me back on track in terms of what I should be doing. I can only say good things have happened to me.I really liked reading about you growing up in California in the 60s and 70s—scraping goatskins in school, choreographing dances to Frank Zappa, making pottery. Did you ever imagine this would be your life? Was the music a surprise?
Yeah, the music is a surprise. I think in a way punk rock opened up people in ways they didn't expect. It was just the most interesting thing since the 60s—and I'm old enough to know about what the 60s were like. It meant different things here than it did in England. It was exciting, and it drew people into music who never thought they'd be musicians.But when you came to New York in the early 80s you weren't into punk as much as no wave. Which is less conventional and not as cheeky as punk. What music set your brain on fire?
Music that was very confrontational for the audience. Bands like Mars and D.N.A. Then there's bands like the Static, which was Glenn Branca's band at the time. A lot of artists and people came to New York to play music.
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Dan Graham introduced me to this girl Miranda Stanton, who played bass and Christine Hahn, who played drums. We formed this all-girl group called Introjection. Dan wanted do this famous performance piece of his, an audience mirror piece, with an all-girl group, and he asked us. So I learned guitar. Someone taught me how to do like a sort of jazz half-chording on the guitar. That was it, man.Was there a moment when you thought, Yeah, this is what I should be doing?
I thought it was thrilling when we did the performance. I was incredibly nervous. But it was like going on this huge rollercoaster ride, and then it was over. Then the next day I felt like a rock-and-roller or something. I'm wondering, Should I continue doing music or do art? It was very confusing.But you've never not made art. Even when you were making music you were still making art.
To some extent. I mean, for a number of years, it was pretty much on the backburner. I pretty much always did think of myself as a visual artist. Rather then identifying myself as a musician.When you started writing music with Sonic Youth, how did it work?
Mostly we sat around playing. Jamming. Someone would start playing something interesting. Sometimes Thurston would start with a riff that he sort of related to and worked around it. Then I would do big extra music. Then we would meet in the middle.
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I was aware that we had more of a platform and audience, and then I was more aware of women in the corporate world, as we'd go into the offices.Talk about that—this is why I threatened to bring pliers—talk about the song "Swimsuit Issue".
Well, I guess shortly after we signed there was a scandal at Geffen where some executive was accused of sexual harassment by his secretary. So, I decided to write a song about it and used the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit sort of as a metaphor.The song ends with you listing the names of all the swimsuit models. But wasn't there more to it than just thinking, This is interesting.
I think there's a lot of material to write songs about if you're a woman. Maybe more than if you're a man. I mean, emo-core showed guys could write songs whining about how they're misunderstood by their girlfriends and shit… They became liberated, [ laughs] but if you're not just writing about a broken heart—there are a lot of other things to write about. In our band we took advantage of that. I mean "Tunic" was about Karen Carpenter.When I was writing my last book I put together a playlist of songs that would help get me through the rough parts. And when I started thinking, no one cares about women and control, I'd listen to "Tunic" and think, Fuck yes they do.
Yeah, eating disorders are kind of a metaphor for how far women will go please other people. The feeling that our body is basically the one thing we have to work with. It's a powerful thing. Women's bodies. It's a challenge to talk about things like that in a way that isn't overtly political. Some people thought the song was just kitschy.
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Which was an amazing movie. Much better then the TV version.But then you listen to it, and it's a dark, deep intense song and it doesn't just speak to women. You go to a show and both men and women are singing along.
At the time the Carpenters were regarded as incredibly conservative and a part of the establishment. People didn't take them seriously. But Karen's voice is incredibly sexy and soulful so she made those lyrics her own. They're incredibly dark. The Carpenters are weirdly radical.What about "Kool Thing"?
That was a weird song about a bunch of different things partly inspired by a film Raymond Pettibon did called Weather Underground. Where it's kind of like being sexually drawn to the Black Panthers. Then throwing Jane Fonda and Barbarella into the mix.You see those influences in the video, but what is the song coming out of?
We were very inspired by LL Cool J and his first record Radio. Rick Rubin produced it, and I interviewed him for Spin. I had to go his rehearsal, and I was really curious. Like, how much did he know about rock? I was sort of disappointed when he said Bon Jovi was his favorite rock band. It made me think about your expectations for performers and what you project on them.Chuck D has a cameo.
We were recording at the same studio and we thought we'd ask him. He kind of did the most cliché thing when he said, "Yeah, word up. Tell it like it is." It was kind of cliché in a way that we deserved.Do you think as an artist gets older their work becomes more political?
I don't know. You just feel like less of a loser. You've been through more so it doesn't really matter. When I started playing with Bill I thought, Thank god, I am just playing music that I don't have to promote . I could just enjoy it. It ended up being very freeing. I could set the bar low and I could just play music. It turned out to be a very radical record.I don't want to talk about all this Lana Del Rey Twitter bullshit, but I'm a feminist, and you're a feminist. However, not all women are feminists and some of the very best feminists are men. So, how do you define feminism?
It's changed gradually over the years. But the bottom line is, it's really about people's rights around the world. Women shouldn't be abused. They should be fucking free. All the other subtitles and everything else doesn't really matter. Whether you're a man or a woman you have to morally answer to yourself.Despite how Lana Del Rey may feel…
Feminism doesn't mean women are free to do whatever they want. You can't go and stab someone.