REM, Jane’s Addiction, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements… The vast majority of North American groups that throughout the eighties contributed to introducing alternative rock to mainstream tastes were made up of men. There were exceptions like Kim Deal, who was first in the Pixies and then founded The Breeders, one of the bands that led the noise revolution’s assault on the charts. Sonic Youth did not sell as many records as them, but they acted as a Trojan horse for a new generation of artists to invade mainstream music channels.
As part of a revered group that functioned as a focus of renewal, Kim Gordon – co-founder, bassist, guitarist and vocalist of the quartet – contributed much more than a feminine image in a traditionally masculine field. Her voice questioned the role and space of women in rock in a few years in which these types of issues were secondary.
In his memoirs (The girl in the group, 2015), Gordon reflected on Sonic Youth’s debut on the London stage in 1986: “In general, women are not allowed to be the host. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: art and debauchery and pushing things to the limit is masculine; craftsmanship, control and refinement is for women. Culturally, we do not allow women to be as free as they would like, because it is something that is scary.”
His conquest of that creative freedom defines a journey whose last episode is titled The Collective. It’s the second album he signs under his own name, and on it, Gordon once again expands his scope, exploring sounds that don’t necessarily come from guitars. His previous album, No Home Record (2019), included the song Hungry Baby, permeated by the impact of #MeToo. “She has provided a platform for women to demonstrate and talk about issues such as sexual harassment, which are assumed and normalized by society. It is a complicated issue to resolve because we live in a very reactionary world, dominated by social networks where everything is either black or white, there is no gray area that allows debate,” she stated in an interview for El País.
In one of the themes of The Collective, The artist puts herself in the shoes of an ultra-conservative politician who complains about how feminism is annihilating traditional masculinity: “Don’t call me toxic just because I like your ass,” says the lyrics of I’m A Man.
Gordon’s does not approach her songs from the usual perspective of the composer, because her view is that of a visual artist who makes music, and not the other way around. While studying at university she began to realize that there were things her brother could do that she couldn’t just because she was a girl. So she left her native California and settled in New York just as the 1970s expired. There she discovered the liberating context that conceptual art and experimental music provided. She saw the DNA trio perform, which like many groups of the so-called no wave He had female instrumentalists contributing to luxating the language of rock, and he felt that music could also be an ideal vehicle to express himself.
At that time, downtown Manhattan was full of visual artists like Barbara Kruger and Barbara Ess – both members of the feminist musical collective Disband – or Miranda Stanton – then in Thick Pigeon – who introduced him to Thurston Moore. . With him, Gordon would create Sonic Youth in 1981, the band that changed the patterns of rock during the eighties and nineties. They were active until the romantic relationship between the two ended abruptly in 2011.
Sonic Youth’s popularity took root in Europe starting in 1985, and grew exponentially with albums like sister (1987) and Daydream Nation (1988). In 1990 they inaugurated a new era by becoming the first independent and heterodox group to sign a contract with a multinational. A part of the community of groups that they had promoted followed in their footsteps in a process that overflowed after the success of Nirvana, another of their protected bands. Parallel to that, a new generation of punk women took action under the collective name of riot grrrls. Their goal was to build networks – labels, clubs, festivals, fanzines – in which women could express themselves outside of the machismo inherent to rock. For them, Gordon was a role model. Because she is a veteran and because she is lucid.
In the subject Kool Thing He had equated the fear of a black planet that Public Enemy spoke of, with the fear of a female planet. In several photos from then, Gordon wore a T-shirt with the inscription Girls invented punk, not England (girls invented punk, not England). “They threw it at me during a performance,” she said in an interview for GQ magazine in 2015. “Women are always anarchist elements that rebel against male social conventions, so, logically, punk is something of ours. She made more women visible thanks to people like Patti Smith and Siouxsie, who encouraged others to break the mold, but for me they were not an inspiration. In my case, the no wave “It was much more influential than punk.”
While a part of Sonic Youth, Gordon was in groups with other women. With Lydia Lunch she formed Harry Crews, a short-lived female band whose repertoire was based on the prose of the American novelist of the same name. Free Kitten, her longest-running side musical activity, was an adventure she carried out with former Pussy Galore Julie Cafritz, one of the women she considers iconic “despite the fact that she has never been widely accepted.” Others would be Jennifer Herrema (Royal Trux) or Kathleen Hanna, from the decisive Bikini Kill, ringleaders of the riot grrrl.
Gordon also co-produced Hole’s first album but, above all, he empathized with the sensitivity of Kurt Cobain, one of the first male voices who, from the side of that alternative rock, spoke out in favor of feminism and against homophobia. Gordon was possibly one of the first musicians to visualize sexual harassment. “Don’t touch my chest, I’m working at my table,” she sang in Swimsuit Issue, included in the album dirty (1992), which was inspired by an incident that took place in the offices of Geffen, the record company to which Sonic Youth were linked.
But Gordon’s interests extend beyond that alternative scene he helped create. Madonna, for example, is another artist for whom she has always expressed great respect: “I think she changed the way rock people wrote about women,” she told Rolling Stone in 1997. In 1986, Sonic Youth He started a project called Ciccone Youth in which they investigated the possibilities of drum machines while subjecting some Madonna songs to shock treatment. In The White(y) Albumwhich is how their only album was titled, there was a song titled Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening To Neu (Two Cool Rock Girls Listening to Neu), which consisted of Gordon and Cafritz’s comments while they listened to one of those bands that only guys seemed to be able to appreciate. On this album, Gordon also appropriated Addicted to love, Robert Palmer song popularized by a video in which a group of beautiful and inane instrumentalists accompanied the singer. She covered it using the original song as karaoke music.
At 70 years old, Kim Gordon moves outside the norms and clichés of pop music. She recently told The Guardian that “women still don’t fully explore experimental music.” “I don’t need my songs to be playing on all the radio stations,” she added. One of her references, the Japanese drummer Yoshimi, who also collaborated in Free Kitten, told her something similar. In the book Master music. Essays on music and women written by women, co-edited by Gordon herself, Yoshimi stated that “it takes a lot of courage and courage to play free and experimental music.” Kim Gordon did that same thing in the context of rock. Those dissonant and unconventional bands of the no wave New York City in 1977 gave him the pattern that he continues to develop today.
