Over the course of Sonic Youth’s staggeringly consistent 30-year run, Gordon was a kind of fairy godmother of the underground. The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.” That was always the most warriorlike thing about Kim Gordon: the gaze she throws back - check the cover of the book - is withering. In her new memoir Girl in a Band, she sums up a lesson she learned shortly after Sonic Youth signed their major-label deal with Geffen in 1990: “or high-end music labels, the music matters, but a lot comes down to how the girl looks. Do not fill in all the blanks, because the second you do, they’ll think they’ve got you figured out, they’ll think you’re simple, they’ll find a way to reduce you to what they can see. Keep secrets with yourself, Gordon says with her silence. Men feel at once enticed and threatened by this quality they have called her things like “sexy” and “mysterious” and “aloof.” Women, though, recognize the code that Gordon speaks as a survival strategy, a way to stay sane and maybe even be taken seriously in this weird world. (She’s said she picked up her “idea of space, and in-between-ness, and the importance of phrasing” early, from her parents’ jazz collection.) Her lines are cryptic but also legibly caustic - a lot of Kim Gordon lyrics feel like inside jokes with Kim Gordon, jokes that are somehow very pointedly and personally and stingingly about you. Gordon is a master of the beckoning omission, the blank space, the pregnant pause. Once I came to better understand Kim Gordon, I realized that it wasn’t there. She’s a … what, exactly? One of the first times I heard the song I rewound that part a couple times, listening for the phantom noun. Then, very suddenly, the machinery jams, the tempo slows to a crawl, and we hear the voice of the bass player, Kim Gordon, at once nervous and bracingly warriorlike: “She’s finally discovered she’s a …. There’s a great song on the first Sonic Youth album called “Shaking Hell.” The opening minute and a half - steely, ominous, unsteadily motoric - sounds like a piece of factory equipment malfunctioning in the moments before somebody loses a limb.
0 kommentar(er)
