[LISTENED TO: November 2021] Girl in a Band
I didn’t really have that much interest in this book when it came out. I love Sonic Youth, but I didn’t really think I cared all that much about their origin stories. Then I saw that there was an audio book read by Kim and that sounded pretty cool.
I realized that I had no idea anything about Kim Gordon’s life and it was fascinating to learn just how much of a bohemian artist she was before she joined the band.
The memoir starts with the final Sonic Youth show. Kim and Thurston’s divorce was already going to happen. They simply wanted to finish out their final shows. So Kim played while watching her disappointment of a husband absorb all the adulation.
But Kim’s book isn’t a salacious tell-all. It’s the story of her life and how she wound up where she did. In fact, there’s very little about Sonic Youth (a lot more about the earliest records and then bits and pieces about the later records). And, while she’s obviously pissed at Thurston for what he did, she’s restrained in her need to thrash the guy.
Perhaps the biggest take away from the book is that after thirty years of being in a rock band, she doesn’t consider herself a musician or a Rock Star (maybe a small letter rock star). That eye opening statement is a kind of lead in to the fact that she has been an artist for most of her life–just not necessarily in music.
She moved to New York from California in 1980. It’s crazy thinking that Kim was a California girl.
It’s even crazier thinking about her older brother Keller who was manipulative and mean and ultimate institutionalized. Kim idolized him and he abused her terribly (more than an older brother might normally do). All of this made Kim into the shy and sensitive woman who you would never think was responsible for some of the most iconoclastic and then iconic music of the 20th century. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 