Kim Gordon - GIRL IN A BAND

not a single kim gordon thread is suitable for bump. i'm just getting into this. depressed by how i've heard many otherwise smart men say things like "shut up" and "quit whining" re: this book, as if this is the only memoir in history with dish. i wish it was longer!

haha, men are really saying that? yeesh.
book is good! obviously some bummer elements if you're a sonic youth fan, but hey...

I'm seeing her talk next week (getting book at same time). Very excited.

Fuck "otherwise smart men".

Went to two bookstores yesterday and neither of them had this!

looking forward to reading this

same (digitally).

Fuck "otherwise smart men".

tell me about it! i thought i'd pruned my feed, but nope

Smart men said the same thing about John French's Beefheart book... I count myself as one of them.

Smart Men Run (In My Family)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/books/review/kim-gordon-by-the-book.html?rref=books&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Books&pgtype=article

one of my bestest friends here cleans her house so it was weird to read in the nyt that she is selling the house. good steady gig for my friend. but i can definitely understand the selling part.

most of the negative reactions from friends re this book (and they are all guys so far), I think has more to do with it being about people and relationships rather than music. I think geeta is writing about it for Slate, and am looking forward to reading her take.

I liked it a lot! Quick read, a little bit of dirt on Thurston for sure but it's her fucking life story and having your husband/bandmate cheat on you seems like a pretty significant part of that story.

yeah i agree -- just a little bit too bad that aspect of the narrative kind of shades everything else (inevitably). she's had an interesting enough life as it is. but i guess the break-up is the frame around the whole thing.

why is that too bad? It's too bad that it happened, because it's a shitty thing to have happen to you, but ... ?

i'm not sure! maybe just that someone who is a great, interesting artist/musician is kind of being defined by this stuff. i'm not saying it's not interesting or not worth writing about.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/kim-gordon-memoir-sonic-youth.html

"maybe just that someone who is a great, interesting artist/musician is kind of being defined by this stuff. i'm not saying it's not interesting or not worth writing about."

Since she and Thurston and the band were at least partly defined by their marriage, it doesn't surprise me that the book would address that and its dissolution.

yeah, no i'm not surprised either. i don't know what my point is.

i think i know what you mean, tyler. it is a bummer, and it is kind of sad that we have to see Sonic Youth through that lens - but I think she actually does deal with it head-on and she seems honest and unapologetically pissed off - but it's really not the subject of the entire book.

i was kind of sad to see what minimal presences Steve Shelly and Lee Renaldo are in the book - it would have been interesting to get more of the full band dynamic story. That part made me wonder if she'd just written around them rather than drag them into the marriage breakup part of the book.

maybe just that someone who is a great, interesting artist/musician is kind of being defined by this stuff.

You would rather read about guitar tunings and the songwriting process?

Yes, in this band's case, absolutely. Well, not "rather", I'd like to read both.

As there is a finite amount of books you can read in a lifetime I will swerve this shite. Can only imagine it will be self absorbed tedious cack with the word "artist" featured about seven million fucking times.

Don't underestimate how much Tyler likes to talk about guitar tunings

it probably would have been easy enough to swerve on the internet thread about the book you don't want to read while you were at it!

as a muso nerd I would really appreciate a breakdown for bands like Sonic Youth (and Stereolab, and Pavement, and a bunch of other non-90s indie bands) of their tunings and guitar nerdery. unlike w Joni Mitchell or various 60s dinosaurs, reliable info about this kind of stuff is hard to come by.

xp

Well, unfortunately for you, she felt like writing about her life rather than guitar tunings. It's just interesting that it seems like that's a standard "dude" complaint.

i love reading about guitar tunings but i feel like it makes more sense for a book about a human being to focus on the life of the human being (xp!)

haven't read this book yet. i don't normally do rock bios but i might get around to this eventually

i haven't seen any chatter about this in my fb feed. guess that's a generational thing.

lol Stevie D posted about it a few weeks ago when an excerpt ran on some website!

for what it's worth it probably does have the word artist about seven million times and there's a lot of stuff about visual and conceptual artists - that's kind of her equivalent of "guitar tunings" type talk

teenage riot tab for open dude tuning:

D ---2------------chopstick between bridge ----
U -----3-- trem------------------------------
D ---1--------------------------------------
E ---------pick scrape ------------------------
        miss me, don't dismiss me

Philip otm

Well, unfortunately for you, she felt like writing about her life rather than guitar tunings. It's just interesting that it seems like that's a standard "dude" complaint.

oh don't get me wrong a whole book about this would be totally boring, it's just something that bugs me from time to time when I'm trying to figure out how things were done.

I have no complaints about her memoir, I haven't even read it yet but am v much looking forward to it. excerpts I've read have been great,

the sonic youth tuning tutorial is pretty thorough anyway, there's a lot of info here: http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/tab/tuning.html

has anyone read the viv albertine memoir? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/books/a-memoir-by-viv-albertine-punk-rocker.html?_r=0

I'd be up for a whole book about their guitar tunings and techniques but probably not one that was written by the (primarily) bassist of the band.

haha, i didn't really mean to complain about the personal parts of the book -- as i said i liked the book, and pretty much all of it was interesting. don't want to be a "standard dude".

wait, what is the standard dude thing? to complain about a memoir including personal stuff and to instead wish it had more stuff about guitar tuning?

i just wish the book had been in standard duding

I never remotely defined the band by their relationship. If I'm bummed by the arrival of this book it's because sonic youth has always been an interesting, somewhat mysterious, original band, but this narrative seems if not totally hinged then hung on the ultra cliche of the post divorce tell all.

Perhaps it is in drop-D duding?

xps

yes, the Viv Albertine book is very very recommended by me at least, I loved it

It's weird that people perceive Sonic Youth as mysterious because they have been very open and publicity-friendly throughout their career. My introduction to them was an article about being a girl in a band on tour that Kim wrote for Sassy Magazine.

By mysterious I mean I have no idea how they write songs.

it's bookended by the breakup - but it's really too bad if it gets painted as a divorce memoir

it's also about her growing up in California with a schizophrenic brother, a bunch of art school stuff, a ton of NYC early eighties art/rock stuff, then the sonic youth story, some choice courtney disses, 1 pretty harsh billy corgan dis, a bunch of kurt cobain stuff, some rock n roll parent stuff, and also some stuff about how they write songs and guitar tunings.

(sorry, i literally finished reading it last night)

sounds great

yeah the california section is really nicely done - in memoirs like this i'm usually eager to get that "growing up" part of the book out of the way, but i didn't feel that way here.

the last viv albtertine album is great!

woah kim being from cali is crazy 2 me

It's weird that people perceive Sonic Youth as mysterious because they have been very open and publicity-friendly throughout their career.

I think most critics mean their music.

Will read if only for corgan harshing.

great fucking title

Will read if only for corgan harshing.

unfortunately the crybaby blurb is the only time billco is mentioned in the book

What? Snubbed again by the powers-that-be.

haha corgy has a blurb for this?

oh n/m misread that.

It's weird that people perceive Sonic Youth as mysterious because they have been very open and publicity-friendly throughout their career. My introduction to them was an article about being a girl in a band on tour that Kim wrote for Sassy Magazine.

― Mistah FAAB (sarahell), Thursday, February 26, 2015 3:24 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

love this.

(Possibly laughable post ahead, thoughts possibly not coherent, etc.)

It's more complicated, I think, than a dude perspective or what have you. For me, maybe for some others, reading a memoir by Keith Richards or someone from Van Halen feels like ancient history - stories from a distant heyday about rock stars I never had much emotional attachment to. Advance excerpts of a memoir are NOT that memoir, obviously, but they're capable of shaping perception in various ways (thanks, media). Maybe the problem is that for some of this book's potential audience is that we're too attached to some of the subjects treated here to absorb some of this on a rational level - kinda like when "Bleeding Edge" came out and it rubbed me the wrong way because relative to other Pynchon it was TOO DAMN NOW.

The Thurston stuff doesn't bother me a whit. The other early excerpted disses from Girl In A Band rankled somewhat, but we're entirely WRONG, mind. The Lana Del Rey one went beyond the pale, though given what I know of KG her perspective was probably more academic/semantic than cuttingly personal. It felt icky, to me, in the same way that some of the excerpts from xgau's memoir made me blink and say "really? do I seriously want to subsidize this?"

BUT. This is probably me being oversensitive, and these are books by people I grew up and respect and still follow, and ultimately, these are books I will read.

this band has felt far from mysterious to me. i never once got the impression that they didn't loooooooooooove attention and being in the center of it all

"but this narrative seems if not totally hinged then hung on the ultra cliche of the post divorce tell all."

she kinda says in the nyt thing that that's one of the reasons someone asked her to write a book? the newsworthy thing? and that she wanted to think about what she could do next and the book was a way toward whatever is next. or at least i think that's how it went.

Well I actually read the whole book and it's great but I have to admit, I did want to hear more about the music. Since Sonic Youth is one of the best bands I've ever seen, I would have loved to learn how they got to be so good and so unique. Gordon even says at one point that she's never considered herself a musician, which though it may be true is disappointing and unhelpful for a fan to read.

is that really a surprise? i feel like she's long not bothered to claim the role of a musician - not that she wasn't often essential, and making music, it's just… she was there, doing that thing.

I'm fine w musicians saying they don't consider themselves a musician. Why is that 'unhelpful'?

The thing is, I've stood four feet away from her when her band was playing and I know that she and her bandmates were playing their asses off and constructing a moment like no other in my experience.. a head trip I'd call it.. so I'd be kind of curious about what went into that. Thoughts, emotions, whatever. She played in that band for 30 years, she must have some perspective on what it was all about. She wasn't just standing around that whole time. The book is great in that she does talk about other artists a lot, which goes against the grain of your typical solipsistic celebrity memoir, so it's definitely recommended A+++

Unhelpful in the sense that one would like some kind of insight into what they do, how they do it, why they do it.. NOT an explanation of the music, but a glimpse of the thinking behind it

you should definitely read her 1987 tour diary reprinted in the Rock She Wrote anthology, there's a bit about that. I can't transcribe it all, but a relevant sentence is "I like being in a weak position and making it strong"

claiming one is not a musician after having played music professionally for a living for decades is not that great of a look

it's that old art-world ambivalence innit

yup and it hasn't aged well

I mean she doesn't pat bros on the back in rock solidarity but she plays a hell of a songtune.

claiming one is not a musician after having played music professionally for a living for decades is not that great of a look

humblebrag?

Tempted to read that "Bros" sentence oddly.

you only live once

wait, what is the standard dude thing? to complain about a memoir including personal stuff and to instead wish it had more stuff about guitar tuning?

mommie dearest is some fucking bullshit

https://scontent-lga.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/11001829_10203987117141366_9017450964001771372_n.jpg?oh=37bd6b046c18cb68765f6a6f6b803074&oe=55494943

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/kim-gordon-girl-band-memoir-interview-sally-timms-cuddy/Content?oid=16661865

Ah, she addresses that musician question with Sally Timms

thanks for that link, Josh, good interview

would love to read sally autobio...

Bros comment was basically hinting at the rock world being a man's world that she has had to put up w it for 30+ years. And now for the past 2 years the rock world has endlessly picked apart her divorce in public, since before it was even official. Consider this when you question why she would want to distance herself from that world.

Scott, what is Mark Ibold reading?

I don't know what the "rock world" was doing, but the media was likely picking apart the divorce because both parties were giving interviews about it.

From 2011 to 2013 there were no interviews from either about it, and then Kim did that one with Elle in 2013, and then Thurston spoke up in 2014

Do you mean this?
http://www.spin.com/articles/thurston-moore-solo-album-best-day-interview-sonic-youth/

Cos it doesn't talk about the divorce at all.

didn't Thurston give an interview to The Fly back in 2011?

Yeah I think I'm probably just blowing things out of proportion, he seems to be trying to keep quiet about it, she wrote this book.

But I still think she can say whatever she wants about being a musician and shouldn't have her legitimacy questioned because of that.

haha well you have to admit 'i've never considered myself a musician' is pretty good reason to question her legitimacy as a musician, if you're gonna do it at all

I think he's made a couple of comments in interviews mostly trying to stick up for his new girlfriend but I think in general he's just not talking about it - which is also fine. Kim really slams that Beck-produced solo record of his as being about the affair and a series of "sophomoric suicide notes" if I recall correctly.

i do remember listening to that record when it came out and thinking "man thurston has written some really intense love songs for kim" :/

That account of the final SY show mentions songs not played supposedly because they were about the new girl, too.

I liked that record - but then I like sophomoric suicide note rock

I love that record.

x-post--

didn't Thurston give an interview to The Fly back in 2011?

― ancient texts, things that can't be pre-dated (President Keyes), Friday, February 27, 2015 3:31 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not till 2014

its gonna get added to the divorce-rock canon with "here my dear" and "shoot out the lights" now

claiming one is not a musician after having played music professionally for a living for decades is not that great of a look

idk this totally makes sense to me. it's like falling into a good office job and showing up for a few decades, using your creative skills to do good work, but still not feeling like it's who you are at the core. you could have done something else.

or maybe it's just imposter syndrome. i still don't feel like a musician even though i make music, compared to my friends who understand theory at a really deep level and can quickly compose at the piano, instead of laboriously plunking something out.

xxxp

yeah i think the first scenario might be where she's coming from - i get the sense she thinks of herself more as a conceptual artist who approached music as an experiment and stumbled into a real band continuing to see herself as a non-musician allowed her to do interesting things inside music

it feels like a pretty common punk & postpunk perspective and not really as controversial as others seem to see it

otm. and obviously there's a lot more potential for making a living doing music vs visual art, or at least there used to be.

But I can see how it comes off as kind of humblebraggy too

not sure i agree w/ a lot of this, but it's an interesting take on the book: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/wave-feminism

I’m reading this now.

She doesn’t say “I don’t consider myself a musician.” She says that she didn’t consider herself a musician when she was performing with her first band.

Page 11: After thirty years of playing in a band, it sounds sort of stupid to say, "I'm not a musician." But for most of my life I've never seen myself as one..

And she says it again in that Sally Timms interview

I did find it interesting a few years back when she switched from bass to guitar - I'm not making that up, am I? - as if she were actively owning her musicianship rather than being permanently relegated to "girl bassist" role. Anyway, it's weird anyone here is even having this conversation. I certainly never thought of Thurston and Lee as some sort of "musicians." I always heard SY as inventing its own language to circumvent any technical limitations, real or implied.

how does that not convey musicianship?

i mean, come on, they're not the Shaggs. You can tell from their albums that they know how to play instruments

their drummer was a real rock drummer. he's on tour with thurston right now! he always seemed like a nice fella.

can someone tell me when being a musician became something to distance oneself from when one has played music professionally for ___ years?
i get it, i just find the whole idea o_O tbh

xpost
and he played in the crucifucks!

I did find it interesting a few years back when she switched from bass to guitar - I'm not making that up, am I?

Nope, they replaced Kim on bass with Jim O'Rourke (who was replaced by Mark Ibold when JO'R quit the band after Thurston became involved with Jim's GF Eva who at the time herself was married).

I was in Sweden years ago when there was a SY show at a gallery in Malmo. Basically they had taken over the entire place, it was covered with poster art, guitars, tvs playing videos, etc. There was an interactive part to all of this, which was a tent you could go in and play on instruments alongside Kim Gordon's voice coming out of the speakers. The resulting CD had SONIC YOUTH : SENSATIONAL FIX on it, even though the only member of the band on it was KG.

can someone tell me when being a musician became something to distance oneself from when one has played music professionally for ___ years?

Ever hear of punk rock?

It's sort of about destroying barriers between musician and audience, producer and consumer. It doesn't mean suddenly the past 30 years of her playing music have been a sham.

And another part of that is not wanting to step into a role defined by an industry that is pretty exploitative of women.

Those are just my takes tho, I haven't read this book.

"I never thought of myself as a musician" is different than "I am not a musician" and it seems like a totally common sentiment to me.

Maybe it's baggage that accompanies the word "musician." A friend of mine, the best guitarist I've ever known personally, got his hackles way way up when I referred to him and band cohorts as musicians. He calmed down when I said "ok, ok, 'players...band members'," but the word musician rubbed him the wrong way for whatever reason.

a quick google of "never thought of myself as a musician" turns up quotes from Mo Tucker, Joni Mitchell and Pete Doherty just in the first couple of pages, i'm sure dozens of others have said it

art project bands aren't that uncommon. uncommon to make money at it. devo did it. i don't know how many CDs SY were selling when they were at their most MTV-friendly.

Ever hear of punk rock?
Yes

I just think it's really weird that in 2015 in a book about how it feels to be a member of a marginalized group in an industry unfriendly to that group would still insist that she is not a musician. I guess I think she should be proud to be a musician. Everyone who has accomplished what she has accomplished should be proud.

I suppose it would be no different had she called SY an art project. Does not mean it is not also a band.

Yeah LL I can definitely where you are coming from there. That is how it is 'unhelpful'. Still, that seems like putting pressure on her to define herself a certain way cos of who she represents.

but she didn't insist she's not a musician, say she's not proud to make music, or say she's not proud of her musical accomplishments! She talks a lot about the thrill of making music and performing and the stuff she's most proud of at length in the book.

she said "I don't think of myself as a musician" not all that other stuff.

i just take her "not a musician" idea to mean that technical expertise was never her goal.

fwiw, the la review posted above focused in on that as well, as apparently elsewhere in the book she doesn't think of herself as a singer either.

Neither did John Lennon

i can't say i think of her as a singer either. though i love me some brother james...

now marnie of live skull. THERE was a downtown nyc noise rock bass player you didn't want to mess with.

how dare someone not accept labels

dylan is a poet, page is a rock god, jay-z is a rapper etc

i miss coco's band. they were cool. they used to play in my basement. teen spirit! still think body/head is the coolest post-SY thing though. it really does seem like the band breakup did them all some good. that can really traumatize people after doing that kinda day job for years and years. it becomes such a huge part of your identity.

I like what Eno says to Lester Bangs here:

This brings up the famous ''I'm not a musician" quote from early in his career, which confounds fans and critics alike to this day. It seems like a conceit turned inside out, inasmuch as I've got almost a dozen albums of his music sitting here. "Again," he almost sighs, "it was a case of taking a position deliberately in opposition to another one. I don't say it much anymore, but I said it when I said it because there was such an implicit and tacit belief that virtuosity was the sine qua non of music and there was no other way of approaching it. And that seemed to be so transparently false in terms of rock music in particular. I thought that it was well worth saying, 'Whatever I'm doing, it's not that,' and I thought the best way to say that was to say, Look, I'm a nonmusician. If you like what I do, it stands in defiance to that.'

"When I say 'musician,' I wouldn't apply it to myself as a synthesizer player, or 'player' of tape recorders, because I usually mean someone with a digital skill that they then apply to an instrument. I don't really have that, so strictly speaking I'm a non-musician. None of my skills are manual, they're not to do with manipulation in that sense, they're more to do with ingenuity, I suppose."

And yet one wonders still how disingenuous all this might be. So I asked him point blank: "Have you ever had any formal music or theory training at all?"

"No."

"Have you ever felt the pressure that you should get some?"

'No, I haven't, really. I can't think of a time that I ever thought that, though I must have at one time. The only thing I wanted to find out, which I did find out, was what 'modal' meant; that was I thought, a very interesting concept."

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/musn79.html

bothered by the close of that m.j. dinius article:

Her closing sentence: “I know: it sounds like I’m someone else entirely now, and I guess I am.” Not really, Kim; if you’re no longer a girl in a band, you’re still defining yourself in relation to a man. And it’s both brave and humiliating of you to admit that out loud.

so smug & condescending. yes, people often define themselves by their romantic/sexual situations, the kind & amount of attention they receive, etc. men do this, women do this, and it's often suspect, sure. but it seems really shitty to impugn kim's feminist credentials for it. idk.

holy modal eno

completely agree contenderizer.

yeah, that's so shitty - and a spoiler too

i'm not a musician

She just noticed a Guitar Center next door: "I'm actually looking for a tremolo pedal. . ."

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/kim-gordon-on-divorce-art-and-life-after-sonic-youth-20150226

jamming out at the guitar center...

oh whoa, i didnt know Jim O'Rourke = "Tom" in the book. jesus

I didn't put that together either. What a mess.

w/r/t "Tom", could you elaborate for those of us who haven't read the book?

yeah idgi why is he not refferred to as Jim

Mild fictionalisation?

Gordon chooses to leave out a few details in the book, some for the sake of other people’s privacy, and others presumably because they are too painful to acknowledge. For one, she never mentions Prinz by name, instead referring to her by pronouns, or simply as “the woman.” She also mentions how Prinz was romantically linked to a close associate of the group years earlier, referring to this person by the alias, “Tom.” Tom is probably Jim O’Rourke, who had been rumored to have been sleeping with Prinz while she was married to her first husband, Andrew Prinz, circa 2003. On Prinz and O’Rourke’s relationship, Gordon writes: “All of us had seen this very shy, anti-technology, anti-domesticity guy transform into a man clutching a cell phone.” She describes that affair ending “badly, theatrically, crazily, like some tabloid story,” and that, “Tom had moved across the country to escape her.” This move may or may not have been the catalyst for O’Rourke’s departure from Sonic Youth in 2005; O’Rourke set his sights for Japan around that time. One year later, Prinz and Moore started a publishing company together, Ecstatic Peace Library.

from here: http://www.stereogum.com/1733304/what-kim-gordons-girl-in-a-band-reveals-about-the-end-of-her-marriage-and-the-last-days-of-sonic-youth/franchises/essay/

weird

yeah weird. i didn't put that together at all... guess thurston burned that bridge too, huh?

i always forget that the guy from mahogany got fucked over in this too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wygQmJ59E4Q

she's an odd one: http://gpdhome.typepad.com/royalblognl_news_summary/2009/09/dutch-royal-wedding-for-new-york.html

the guy from mahogany

ha i was wondering if it was the same guy

so this lady managed two engagements and marriages all while she dated two members of sonic youth in succession? that's very industrious.

oh it's even worse than that, you have no idea

The Woman sounds like a keeper.

Girl power!

i do remember listening to that record when it came out and thinking "man thurston has written some really intense love songs for kim" :/

― tylerw, Friday, 27 February 2015 15:45 (8 hours ago)

the lyrics for 'benediction' sound like they were written for kim in mind. xpost yeah prinz doesnt sound like a good person unforch

I dont understand the Lana Del Rey diss at all.

You know, I've always wondered if the members of SY were friends with one another. Like, did Kim get along with Steve and Lee? Did Lee like Thurston? Or was the whole band something of a marriage of convenience?

did they live in a house and eat rice

Teenage Riot House.

^^I think a real opportunity was missed for a Monkees-style Sonic Youth sitcom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDcmPg-eehc

That was kind of awesome, thanks.

Yes that made my morning!

Kim will be on NPR's Fresh Air with Terri Gross tomorrow

You know, I've always wondered if the members of SY were friends with one another. Like, did Kim get along with Steve and Lee? Did Lee like Thurston? Or was the whole band something of a marriage of convenience?

Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life emphasizes how well Sonic Youth got along, in sharp contrast to some of the other groups in the book (Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr.)

There's a part where Thurston is trying to think of any big fights within the band, and all he can remember is a time that Lee got ice cream at a tour stop, and Thurston was bitter that he couldn't afford to get one too.

Obviously take with huge grain of salt given the last few years

We know that Ranaldo was close to leaving the band around the time of Dirty because his songs weren't being picked for the rec. Never got the feeling that Lee and Thurston hung out together that much when they weren't touring/recording.

I don't think Thurston is the most reliable narrator there, I mean Lee did almost leave the band b/c "Genetic" got cut from Dirty.

that being said, it does seem like conflict was the exception, not the rule

lol xps

go geeta go!

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/03/kim_gordon_s_memoir_girl_in_a_band_reviewed.html

From the review it sounds like Gordon needed more time to process all that has happened to her. Sure that this is her way of doing it but it doesn't sound like there is a lot there for the person reading it..

From the quotes its inevitable that we'll get Thurston's side of the story now...watching the Joy Division doc screened over here on TV last week it seems we always expect the relationships of people in realy great bands (or people involved around these groups) to be somehow better/richer than ours. You see the disappointment people express when hey, it all broke when text messages were found. We don't expect it to be so ordinary despite a lot of SY/punk setting out with from the whole 'we're like you/you can be like us'..

not sure how to read the almost complete lack of appearances of lee and steve in the book

I know KG was on Fresh Air yesterday, and given Terry Gross is such a crap interviewer, I asked a friend (who heard it), if she started the interview more or less by asking: "So, like, your memoir is called Girl in a Band. I wanted to ask you ... what's it like being a girl in a band?"

He said yes.

Yeah I just listened to that, it was a really terrible interview, and I'm often a defender of TG.

I felt embarrassed for Kim Gordon at how much Terry Gross asked her about her clothing. I mean I hope at least that came from something in the memoir and wasn't just Terry Gross's random dumb idea of something to talk about, because it's really not what comes to mind when I think about Kim Gordon. She's not Lady Gaga!

FWIW I thought she was a bit of a lame interview too for someone 61 who has been in the media for so long, maybe it was just because the questions were so bad and she was trying to be nice.

Gross is often especially embarrassing when interviewing musicians, putting out this sense of "I'm above talking about what you do, but there's this one specific thing I find interesting about you and I will confine 90% of my questions to that one thing."

it's really not what comes to mind when I think about Kim Gordon.

TBF:

http://www.surfacetoair.com/blog/2012/03/shop-kim-gordon-x-s2a-collection-is-now-online/

Gross is often especially embarrassing

Full stop. She's the worst. 90% of her questions are statements with a question mark at the end. She gets interesting guests, most of whom do the heavy lifting for her by being, ipso facto, interesting. It never ceases to amaze me how lazy her line of questioning often is, given her subjects. "So, like, you were in a movie with Robert DeNiro - what was that like?" "I wanted to ask you about your book. Did you always want to write a book?" That kind of BS.

yeah, but she's very fawning to some people, and kind of "let me ask you the same question ten different ways because I don't care about anything else about you" to people like Jay-Z

She's totally fawning by default, because she does not ask real questions or really push the subject. But when she gets some on who needs to be drawn out, she fails, which is the sure sign of a weak interviewer. Then you're just, well, a host, a moderator. Not an interlocutor.

She gets people to talk and lets them talk. Sometimes it works well.

i've heard worse interviewers than terry gross
i think the role of the interviewer has been lost a little with the current fever for "conversations"

that's interesting LL, can you expand on that?

i hate charlie rose as much as i hate terry gross. as far as fawning doofuses go. hell is charlie rose and terry gross and james lipton interviewing each other....for eternity!

I think that's what I mean with moderator vs. interview. The goal is not to glean info or challenge but simply encourage/comfort the subject into speaking at length and filling up the allotted time. Like, does TG ever actually break news? No, right? She's just there to get them talking about stuff, not report, or investigate, or dig deep.

But yeah, Charlie Rose is the same sort of deal. Gets great subjects, which is most of the battle. And when it goes bad ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLPStHVi0SI

The current popular model for interviewers is Mark Maron, who runs his interviews in a more rambling, conversational way

but I don't know what the ideal model of "interviewer" is. Oriana Fallaci or something?

that's interesting LL, can you expand on that?

yeah maybe via podcasts and the ability to do them/have them heard and maybe because the line between us and them has been blurred substantially, there seems to be a tendency to broadcast one's conversations, where the role of the person talking is as peer and not a person who talks to all kinds of people. so what you're hearing is their "conversation" rather than an interview or moderated panel or w/e. i have all sorts of examples, but i've seen annie clark talking with matt sweeney on youtube, listened to new drumming podcast about "drummers and their lives" and there are tons of others.

personally, i sometimes find this frustrating because 1) i am not part of the conversation and that passive feeling bugs me unless i am learning something, which frequently i am not 2) it makes me cringe to think that i am merely being allowed to listen to it, and may be required to pay to do so 2) i think it leads to boring conversations a lot of or at least some of the time 3) people don't like to poke and prod their peers like professional interviewers used to do, or at least used to? i have no idea. it's just an observation. it's something that's been bugging me but i haven't been able to put my finger on it until recently.

whooey that was too long but you asked!

that's interesting LL, can you expand on that?

Wait, was this a meta joke?

but I don't know what the ideal model of "interviewer" is.

probably some documentary filmmaker I'm not thinking of at the moment. Errol Morris?

i took that question at face value but if you're making fun of me, i take back my completely honest answer

Bill Moyers? 60 Minutes?

i took that question at face value but if you're making fun of me, i take back my completely honest answer

Interesting. Why is that?

har har

i agree w/ LL, i feel like in some ways the more conversational model of podcasts or youtube-y things satisfies a kinda voyeuristic impulse (hey this is what it would be like to hang out w/ this famous person!) rather than really getting to more interesting/revealing topics? that's not always the case, of course, but a lot of podcast interviews feel this way to me.

Errol Morris is the man.

The Interrotron is the man.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663105/errol-morriss-secret-weapon-for-unsettling-interviews-the-interrotron

yeah he gets the job done

people aren't very good at asking questions anymore. also everyone is giving it away for free anyway so maybe there's nothing all that probing left to ask about, nothing mysterious.

anyway i still haven't read this book but for some reason i'm not sure i want to

ha - no it wasn't intentionally a meta joke but that's pretty funny!

I think you're making a great point about post-internet media in general, the "conversational" thing isn't just in interviews but also in how people write and address the reader - and sometimes it's great and natural and yields interesting stuff but sometimes it feels really fake and log-rolling and formulaic.

Also I feel uncomfortable about super chummy conversations becoming the norm - formal and/or challenging, adversarial interviews can be great, especially with artists. Sometimes the new school old pal/shrink's office hybrid seems to actively avoid talking about people's actual work and the ideas behind it - it's like there's a rush to universalize everyone at the expense of what's actually exceptional and interesting about what they did.

Like, does TG ever actually break news? No, right? She's just there to get them talking about stuff, not report, or investigate, or dig deep.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, March 6, 2015 11:22 AM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well yeah, but that's the whole point/format of her show! I don't really get that as a criticism at all, she's not a news reporter.

I seem to remember Greil Marcus saying that he wasn't a very good interviewer because he really just wanted to hang out with/be friends with the musicians. So he stopped doing interviews.

it's like there's a rush to universalize everyone at the expense of what's actually exceptional and interesting about what they did.
agree -- it's done, i think, in the name of or at least with the idea of bringing us ("us") together but it makes me feel totally alienated. and then irl no one ever asks me anything and i think a part of the interviewer's job is to get reticent ppl to talk, so kudos for that, haha!

maybe kim gordon should reinvent herself as the stone cold interviewer we've been waiting for

All things being equal, I prefer hearing the subject talk more and the interviewer talk less. I think Terry Gross is very good at that, I think it's an underrated interviewing quality. Too many interviewers trying to ask "sharp" questions or show how smart and with-it they are. You get more interesting results from just giving someone space to talk, assuming they're an interesting person. She's at her worst when she gets too hung up on a point (like Kim Gordon's clothing), but I also have to wonder if that wasn't just the result of whatever was cut from the interview being worse. I mean I assume they record more than they put into the final product, and sometimes an interview maybe just doesn't go that well, and the best thing you have is the part where they talk about clothing.

i like the conversational model, seems like it often results in interviewees feeling more comfortable, and compelled to share (like if the interviewer is doing the same it can help draw the interviewee out).

i think i just love eavesdropping and good conversations in general, whether i'm a part of them or not.

xp

i don't think it's a one size fits all thing - there's room for many different approaches, but I think LL is onto something and the conversational approach is trendy now (and also just really hit or miss - sometimes it's amazing and illuminating, sometimes it's just super dull)

the good ones are good, but the bad ones are so many and so bad
i also like eavesdropping but if it's public it's not eavesdropping

i guess i consider conversational skills as discrete from interviewing skills
and the full spectrum is out there in between too, so who knows

actually, it's not that i consider them different -- they are different
it's not a matter of opinion

Sometimes the new school old pal/shrink's office hybrid seems to actively avoid talking about people's actual work and the ideas behind it - it's like there's a rush to universalize everyone at the expense of what's actually exceptional and interesting about what they did.

I get this, but if people really want to know "how did you think of X/how did you get to be so talented" (with the subtext of "how can I be like you"), often there's just not much to say about it.

xpost TG interviews are cut, edited and reconfigured like crazy.

To the best of my knowledge.

xp to Jordan's point
i know what you mean - but that's not the only way of talking about what people do... a bigger problem I think is that a lot of artists/comics/musicians/writers/film-makers are understandably resistant to interpreting or explaining what their work is supposed to mean so interviewers end up getting snippy answers when they go down that route too directly

I'm not interested in meaning so much as why people make the aesthetic choices they do

xpost TG interviews are cut, edited and reconfigured like crazy.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, March 6, 2015 12:33 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

To the best of my knowledge.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, March 6, 2015 12:33 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, assumed as much. I mean in my very limited journalistic experience, there are some people that are just hard to get to say anything interesting -- they stick to a script, they're reticent, they have confused ideas about what would be interesting to other people, etc. I can see how in that scenario you might be stuck with some bad "best" tape. 5 mins on clothing in a 2-hour interview, asked on a lark (you never know what might wind up being interesting) would be less egregious than in a 25-minute final product.

this is how you do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4_cZWGGnQM

there are some people that are just hard to get to say anything interesting -- they stick to a script, they're reticent, they have confused ideas about what would be interesting to other people, etc

Like Terry Gross!

charlie rose is the fucking worst; he's a tiny bit better when he talks to political figures than cultural figures, but he's basically laughable either way.

http://videosift.com/video/Paul-McCartney-on-the-Chris-Farley-Show

i still remember one of his shows w/ stanley kubrick's widow and martin scorsese (this is not too long after kubrick's death) where he demonstrated that he knew less than nothing about film. scorsese pointed out some really obvious thing about "the shining" and rose looked utterly lost and said something like, "wow, marty, that's why you're so great to talk to, you point out this stuff that nobody else would ever notice" and scorsese looked visibly embarrassed for him.

xpost

charlie rose's shows, not chris farley's

https://screen.yahoo.com/chris-farley-show-martin-scorsese-000000739.html

oh man and those looooooooooooong-ass build-ups that charlie rose does. where he stretches a question out to like 10 minutes and you think man this is really gonna be good and then the person gives like a three word answer. because the question sucks so bad.

there's a pretty funny charlie rose parody on the royal tenenbaums DVD as i recall, where the "charlie rose" figure has these incredibly long and pretentious pauses in which they cut back and forth between him and his increasingly bewildered guests.

the weird thing about that SNL farley-scorsese but is that they basically reward the audience for having the philistine attitude as the host.

farley-scorsese BIT

Holy shit how did you find out about Frank Hurricane? Man is my boy!

he used to live in town here. he just played at my store with the completely insane little howling wolf.

Yeah they are hitting the road. Playing my city tonight but I'm going out of town. Frank's amazing, he seems like he would be the most hippy dippy guy but he is a really hard worker. Called me one day wanting to record, came over, and did backing tracks and vocals for 9 songs all in a few hours.

i feel bad for him having to drive with wolf for so long. hope his sanity remains intact.

hey, c'mon guys, this thread is getting off the central topic of charlie rose and his bad interviews

Girl in Band, Dudes in Thread

Terry Gross: "So, what's it like being a dude in a thread?"

you know, terry, it's funny that you ask that...

the two strands of this thread will come together when Marc Maron's Kim Gordon interview goes up

Back to the Kim half of the interview, it caused me a certain mental dissonance to think "this is a 61-year-old person speaking"

https://instagram.com/p/zGb_f1Fbsg/

Like, this person one year older than my mother-in-law is talking about what's punk rock.

seriously? all the old punks are in their late 50's and up now

punk is wasted on the young

yeah I know, but she actually stayed relevant compared to most of them, so it was just odder for me to think she's 61 now. I had actually never realized she was so much older than me, although it wouldn't make much sense if she wasn't given their discography timeline.

well she was a bit older than the other folks in the band--she was close to 40 when sonic youth had their biggest success

She's 20 years younger than Leonard Cohen.

xp yeah I don't think I had realized that

I assume Steve Shelley is, like Mark Ibold, 25 or so.

makes perfect sense, why would young people care about what is or isn't punk.

xpost -- steve was the baby of the band, for sure

adorable li'l crucifuck

tried to watch a youtube interview with kim from the strand and stopped cuz it was kinda awkward. she's really not used to being interviewed at length about herself. apparently. though you would think she has done a million interviews by now. lots of bafflement and not knowing how to answer questions. the interviewer is fine though!

byron c. is writing the authorized SY book, i think. would read that.

is that still happening? i remember reading about it a while back, but wondered if the breakup had complicated things.

She's 20 years younger than Leonard Cohen.

She's a few months older than Geddy Lee, 5 years younger than Robert Plant and Ozzy Osbourne.

I smell supergroup.

i think it's still happening. he told me about it a long time ago. and kim mentions it in a body/head interview on youtube from 2014.

x-post

ah ok, then it is probably still happening! yeah, would totally read a coley sonic youth book.

I honestly think the best person to write the best book on Sonic Youth from an internal view would be Ranaldo.

god, byron coley's writing is so tedious. he can't seem to tell the difference between criticism, history, and an annotated discography.

ha, i don't know, i think he's a fun writer.

he's not someone i'd trust to make any insightful observations about sonic youth's music or place in popular culture; he's more of the trainspotting type.

maybe not, i'd just be in it for the stories... and the annotated discography.

coley would deliver on the guitar tuning talk people were hoping for

he's close to everyone in the band. still. and you can definitely get stuff that way that nobody else is gonna get.

yeah, like rare 7"s

j/k

sort of

hey Scott what's that Ecstatic Yod record store like? is it still going?

Yod isn't really open. but Feeding Tube is on the weekends. they moved from their space in Northampton to a spot in Florence. filled with crazy Byron stuff. same building as the Yod Space. which is also filled with crazy Byron stuff.

their rent was crazy in northampton. they do lots of mail-order. i need to stop by there soon. i need some good avant skronk. the feeding tube label is putting out amazing stuff. i had a hand in an upcoming release that i'm really excited about.

florence is right next to northampton.

one of the guys who was in the punk band The Pist opened up a cool store in Florence. Wild Mutation Records. cool punk and metal selection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zsWyMpFuDw

and there is a bar across the street from that store that has been having good shows. if you are in the area:

Mar 19 2015
13th Floor
Florence, MA

Lower Dens

Bill Nace

Ruth Garbus

Sunatirene

9pm

uh, body/head played there recently...to be a little more on-topic.

i need to get back to western mass

btw does kim or thurston still live there?

i don't think so. at least at the end of the book, she had moved to LA, Thurston was in London and their daughter was off to art school.

How fucking incredibly surprising [yawn emoticom]

Another enlightening xelab post

Don't fucking read it then tayto fan.

If self absorbed NYC bores expanding upon themselves for a couple of hundred pages lights your candle, then good for you.

*reading

kill those idols xelab

I went to Byron's store a couple of times in the late 90s, once when it was still at the Book Mill in Montague. Prices could be a little on the steep side, but grading was always detailed and spot-on. And you'd see stuff that you'd never seen before and would never see again.

somebody should live-blog kim's book page by page. or maybe do a burroughs style cut-up w/christgau's memoir

xp
I wish I had the big dick to kill them with, but it aint happening right now!

love the book mill, that place is amazing

She's 20 years younger than Leonard Cohen.

She's a few months older than Geddy Lee, 5 years younger than Robert Plant and Ozzy Osbourne.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Friday, March 6, 2015 3:29 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I smell supergroup.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, March 6, 2015 3:32 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My huge LOL of the day, thank you

I wish I had the big dick to kill them with, but it aint happening right now!

TMI

No one should ever liveblog the reading of any book, that's insanity

FWIW I thought she was a bit of a lame interview too for someone 61 who has been in the media for so long, maybe it was just because the questions were so bad and she was trying to be nice.

she is, by her own admission, a terrible interviewee. like, not unpleasant in any way, just incredibly hard work, won't even open up on "easy" questions. was glad to read her admit this in the book, because oh my god, it can be so dispiriting to interview her.

^ certainly borne out by the fresh air interview. almost insultingly dull. i'm not making any great claims for terry gross, but the vast majority of the people she interviews manage to say at least one halfway interesting thing.

Honestly the only members of Sonic Youth who ever struck me as particularly interesting as individuals were the pre-Shelly drummers. Wish they'd get together and do a book about the band.

Richard Edson stars as Richard Edson in Edson: The Movie

Did Anton Fier ever drum for them?

Anton Fig did. But he was lured away by Frehley's Comet.

lol. Crossed paths with that guy last night, believe it or not. Should have asked him about that.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n06/kristin-dombek/woman-manly

She couldn’t have been more conscious, the first time she picked up a bass guitar, that she was crossing a threshold – between listening to and making rock and roll – and it was different for a woman on the other side. In 1980, before they started the band, she’d written an essay about No Wave testosterone for Real Life magazine, called ‘Trash Drugs and Male Bonding’, deciphering a Rhys Chatham performance as a ritual of male intimacy through musical heroics. How serious was she when she wrote the following much quoted reverie, in a tour journal a couple of years later? ‘I always fantasised what it would be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys who have crossed their guitars together, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat, that powerful form of intimacy only achieved onstage in front of other people, known as male bonding.’

after 25 years of seeing SY shows, i stopped in 2008 cuz both KG & TM had become bad onstage jokes to me. Last straw was TM boilerplate stage patter about Obama.

so call me indifferent.

carrie does her best but god this is painful

http://pitchfork.com/news/58830-kim-gordon-and-carrie-brownstein-chat-about-instagram-selling-out-in-hour-long-interview/

Carrie's AMEX ad should interrupt the section where they discuss selling out.

...and then go deeper with those priceline or whatever dotcom it was whose ads she appeared in with THE SHATNER in the early 2000s.

the soundcloud part is really weird to me
not everyone has a label to release their records -- what could be more DIY than to throw your music out into the world without anyone's support at all. i'd have thought she would find that cool?

I didn't get a chance to watch more than a few minutes, but it started off incredibly awkward.

what do they say about it LL?

Her daughter said someone was "a soundcloud artist" and then she and Carrie were both like "yeah not rly into that sound"/blabla "dabbling" and it seemed pretty rich coming from two well/established musical figures from the DIY school

It's around the 28-30 min mark

gross

don't punch down ladies

Who me? I'm not punching anyone. I'm disappointed they didn't embrace this very democratic medium. If nothing else sc is a way to distribute sounds even when no one is likely to notice. I thought they'd be into that.

think he meant kim and carrie are punching down. but yeah, sort of an odd stance -- DIY is only cool if it's pressed up on vinyl?

pretty sure he means the ladies in the interview.

yeah, that part is embarassing for both of them.

xp

I suppose a comma would have been helpful

and then later in the interview Kim talks about signing to a major 'because we were frustrated with indie distribution'

TBF, SY was getting robbed blind re:distro at that time.

^^^

yeah I don't really hold that against them

So how is the book?

Soundcloud thingy starts at 32:40. Kim says, "There's a certain sound that Soundcloud artists have." Which is like saying there's a certain sound that musicians have.

Carrie's remark about it being an "interface of dabbling" sounded more to me like it was aimed at listeners; all you have to do is click around, and you don't have to "commit" (her word) to an artist by buying their stuff. And that sitting at a computer listening to music isn't as ideal as listening in your car or on a stereo or whatever.

That said, she and Kim did share a weirdly incredulous and tone-deaf laugh about "artists who aren't on a label," like, "There are artists who aren't on a label?! Who don't have the means to put out a record?!"

Kim allows that she hasn't had much experience with Soundcloud, and then proceeds to denigrate artists on it much like someone would complain about jukeboxes in the 1940s.

i mean, i get that there is a lot of corny EDM that thrives on Soundcloud (artists that have built their popularity almost solely through it, where they can put out remixes & bootlegs that can't go through legal distribution channels). but she should realize that, like anywhere else, there are underground communities based around all kinds of music.

and Carrie feels like she doesn't connect with (or replay) a record unless she listens to a physical copy, cool, but these days there is no point to making physical copies unless you have a dedicated fan base, so.

it seems like a weird blind spot for people who came out of post-punk values - but I know a lot of people who would probably argue that their $100 rare hardcore 7-inches that stay wrapped in plastic are somehow "punker" than free online music accessible to everyone, it's pretty fucked up actually and a way of looking at music that's about to literally die off

well they're more "punk" in the sense that they're from an era when the punk ethos was actually practiced in opposition to something but that's about it

nothing ever changes

That said, she and Kim did share a weirdly incredulous and tone-deaf laugh about "artists who aren't on a label," like, "There are artists who aren't on a label?! Who don't have the means to put out a record?!"

I should add that this also distinctly came across as, "What kind of LOSER isn't on a LABEL?!" Instead of offering encouraging words/advice for artists who aren't able to put records out, they laughed at them.

Another score for the staged conversation :-/

Explains why I didn't find much a couple months ago when I went to go check out who Sleater-Kinney follows on soundcloud.

is there a harder interview than kim gordon? at least j mascis' schtick is funny

so many old sst weirdos.

From an idea by Mr. SST--Can we be shown weirdos+Kim Gordon?

so the Lana Del Rey bit was taken out.. http://pitchfork.com/news/58606-kim-gordons-lana-del-rey-off-herself-line-removed-from-memoir/

Kim says, "There's a certain sound that Soundcloud artists have." Which is like saying there's a certain sound that musicians have.

to be honest in the whole sustained press "event" around her book kim gordon has been saying stupid thing after stupid thing and i think there's perhaps a bit of political correctness involved in the relative lack of punishment she's taking for it in the blogosphere, etc.

what's striking to me is how /sharp/ gordon's writing was—how incisive and smart and thoughtful—once upon a time, versus how complacent and whiny she seems to be now.

I wish she'd let us see that side of her. That's the honest truth.

she kind of reminds me of Alex in NYC (he doesn't post around her anymore, I don't think) in that the "punk" attitudes that were bracing and oppositional and by-necessity somewhat reflective once upon a time have ossified into something that's fundamentally conservative, that's largely about policing boundaries and casting aspersions.

(i'm a little skeptical about the "revolutionary" aspect of punk to begin with, but for discussion's sake i'll concede that point)

Alex in NYC is here:

http://vassifer.blogs.com

His blog has been good reading. Holy shit, I can't believe how long I've interacted with him.

I was so looking forward to the book but I keep getting more and more turned off.

I dont get why she has to come for everybody! It bums me out so hard, I never saw her that way. I seriously do not gaf abt Kim Gordon in opposition to whoever...and I am not down with this dirt-dishing quotable whatever the fuck this is. I mean, yay marketing & staying in the media if that's what she's going for cool but talk about putting a bad taste in yr mouth

The book was disappointing on many levels...maybe because I expected more or expected better or maybe just because I didn't expect her voice to sound like that. She didn't need this book at all.

The more I think about SY the more I think thank christ for Lee Ranaldo

There is a certain sound to any SY song which is alt/indie rock if u wanna be reductive. Yeah the Soundcloud part of this was insanely out of touch 2nd to the selling out part.

The more I think about SY the more I think thank christ for Lee Ranaldo

His solo career has been fantastic. Especially his first album, which was loaded with catchy, super-melodic songs. Almost classic rock, which is surprising because catchy melodies weren't always his primary concern in SY.

I haven't read the book yet. Does he come across OK?

Saw a girl my age reading this in the subway and had to laugh

I haven't read the book yet. Does he come across OK?

― kornrulez6969, Thursday, March 12, 2015 11:02 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i skimmed a dece amount of the book, she says they butted heads a lot during mixing but she came to respect his way of working and felt like they could usually reach a compromise. contrasted with thurston who apparently used moodiness to cast a cloud over everyone if he didn't like something.

to me the book came across exactly how she seems to in interviews--either she's not a very reflective person or she finds it impossible to verbalize her interior life. either way it doesn't make for great memoir.

I think it's that Kim had a misunderstanding of what soundcloud was. I think she thought it was something much gimmicky-er than simply a place where people can post DIY music. I have to go back and listen to find where I picked up on that.

And I agree with the interpretation upthread that Carrie was just kind of talking about dabbling with music on a laptop not being a proper way to experience, which was what she told Kim may have been the reason "soundcloud artists" weren't resonating for Kim.

I mean that part was pretty clear. She was like "well maybe it's because you happen to be listening on the computer. You need better computer speakers" or something.

She was interview by Gary the Squirrel last night in New York.

Kim? LOL

Can't really see Kim taking questions from a puppet...

"she kind of reminds me of Alex in NYC (he doesn't post around her anymore, I don't think) in that the "punk" attitudes that were bracing and oppositional and by-necessity somewhat reflective once upon a time have ossified into something that's fundamentally conservative, that's largely about policing boundaries and casting aspersions."

R. K., I presume.

You used to post around her?

i was adopting a southerin' accent for that line, i guess

i don't know what R.K. means.

Racoon Kabuki

Richard Kern

Just realized he thinks you are another poster, one who uses a do not google, NSFW screenname.

Rhino Kunt?

Never mind -- mistaken identity.

The more I think about SY the more I think thank christ for Lee Ranaldo

OTMFM

OK I finally got far enough into this (been watching in parts) and I'm having trouble figuring out when exactly they were acting like they were superior to selling out? They talked about it for sure, but neither of them did anything to deny whether or not they personally took part. Maybe I missed it though.

That interview (well the first 16 minutes) is one of the least interesting things I've come across in some time. The audience clearly wants to like both women, since they seem to laugh nervously at every awkward moment, but the whole thing feels like a bummer. Two people who can't communicate. I don't read rock memoirs generally, and certainly wouldn't read this one.

Selling out thing was just a non-issue, like they talk more about Sid Vicious pouting his lip irt punk rock.

Carrie always seems VERY uncomfortable on stage in any situation that isn't playing rock music. Out of the three Sleater Kinney members she always comes across as the most stiff when they're all being interviewed in front of a crowd.

tough crowd.
if you think kim gordon's boring and pretentious and awful and/or hate rock memoirs, this book is definitely and unsurprisingly not for you.
if you're curious, it's a fast read and imo different than a lot of rock memoirs.
I agree she's a terrible interview and always has been. I found the book more revealing than the interviews I've seen and read. She is still a pretty opaque character, but that's just the kind of person she is.

I do agree that many current indie & Soundcloud acts do have a certain sound, and that sound is "when we were babies we had a white noise machine in the nursery"

great sound imo

It is funny that someone who doesn't consider herself a musician, never practiced her instrument, and says she got into music after watching a performance artist look at himself in the mirror writes off internet musicians as "dabblers".

Yeah you can see these interviewers, like Brownstein and Elissa Scharpell, artfully trying to get KG to fill in the gaps of what she avoided talking about in the book, but in the end what is in the book is interesting and worthwhile. I did notice that the book seems to have two voices - some sections are well-thought out and carefully written while others have a casually vague tone as if they were dictated from a conversation. I think the "controversial" parts of the book come mostly from the casually vague sections.

x-post But she was on a LABEL

I still think I remember her implying she thought soundcloud had some kind of gimmick-y concept or something, rather than just a place to post music. Still haven't had time to go back and look yet.

BREAKING: 61-year-old has incorrect assumptions about website

The most inflammatory part of that section was Gordon repping for Radio Shack computer speakers -- I have em they are the worst!
Those are truly the dabbler of speakers !

kim gordon doesn't like soundcloud and madonna makes records with diplo, both very much in character i suppose.

I listened to some of that interview with CB. The Soundcloud thing goes on for so long. It begins all "lol old people" with Gordon's daughter telling her that someone is a Soundcloud artist. But then she keeps generalizing about SC, almost as though trying to grasp what it is as she speaks-- "It's all about production" "Some producer makes a track and gets some other artist to sing on it and that's how they make a name for themselves" Though she seems to have only heard one SC artist.

Yeah that's bizarre. I think u guys are right it sounded like maybe she was on a different website or something.

Yeah thats the quote I was thinking of.

xp

old lady yells at soundcloud

A+

https://instagram.com/p/0Jg-dHhmDu/

she's not just any 61 year old/"old lady"

she also tossed a diss at Animal Collective right before the Soundcloud stuff

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/Cloudy_Cloud_Calculator_alternate_cover.jpg

she's not just any 61 year old/"old lady"

so does this mean we should angrier at her about dissing soundcloud?

i don't know who's angry -- it's not that big of a deal
i'm just disappointed

i just don't see the point of sweating it, as far as unexamined biases held by sixtysomethings go "these kids on the internet don't know what the punk is all about" isn't that toxic

maybe it means something different to me than it does to you

hey you called out a joke i made, i asked why, and reaffirmed my intent, feel free to offer a different perspective rather than imply it

Oh thanks for posting that Takako Minekawa cover I must listen to that ASAP!

I would def buy a Kim Gordon / Takako Minekawa collab.

feel free to offer a different perspective rather than imply it
was not trying to be cryptic -- i'm kinda reticent to talk about my interior life (like KG)
but

i am a woman
i do practice my instrument
i felt bummed by KG's blithe dismissal of things i value (practicing every day, trying to improve my playing, sending music into the ether on soundcloud even when no one asked for it) because i thought at least one of those things would be something she (or Carrie) supported and turns out i'm just an uncool dork who cares too much

But see our comments above, I don't think she even took the time to understand that soundcloud is a much simpler concept than she seemed to imply.

And maybe if she did, she'd be all "oh, nevermind"

LL, i totally get it - "lol hey old punk doesn't get what the kids are doing" and "wish my hero had more respect for what we're doing" can co-exist. i was just defensively fishing out just what the ish with what i said was.

for all i knew you thought i was being condescendingly ageist or something

nah
just plain old garden-variety disappointment that i didn't learn anything from listening to this convo

What's yr SC page La Lechera, might as well pimp it.

since you asked
https://soundcloud.com/marshmallowy
midwestern basement drumming recorded on my phone

just goes to show you there is no difference between the eagles and sonic youth

Well, yeah.

Thurston Frey

Henley is Free

It Takes A Heartache Tonight To Get Me Out Of Bed

Sonic Youth's "Dirty ... Laundry."

100% of The Best of My Love

both bands enjoyed a love/hate relationship with david geffen

both bands opened for neil young

Well, yeah.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, March 13, 2015 3:10 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

Sonic Youth added a ringer from Pavement. Eagles added a ringer from Poco.

Both bands wouldn't turn down a bathtub full of Budweiser.

https://soundcloud.com/marshmallowy is so good!!!

"Thurston Frey"

Lee Ranaldo has a kid named Frey! for your information...

xp - i appreciate every kind word, ty!

frey! with the exclamation point? hope so.

What is Sonic Youth's Hotel California?

nice music, la lachera!

What is Sonic Youth's Hotel California?

Teenage Riot

i dunno, isn't it "death valley 69"? you know, the dark side of the california 60s counterculture? WE MUST ANSWER THIS IMPORTANT QUESTION

Tyler's right. Also would have accepted "Expressway to yr Skull."

I just figured teenage riot is their signature/most famous song

isn't that something off dirty? i think I remember reading that sold like 3 x as much as anything before or after

SFJ gives sales figures here, which he says are from Nielsen: http://www.sashafrerejones.com/2005/07/you_thought_i_was_backing_out.html

Dirty sold the most but the gaps w/ the albums before and after it are not quite that high. I thought the O'Rourke-era albums might have sold a little better than they did. I guess they were completely off the radar of the youth market by then?

(That post is 10 years old though.)

O'Rourke era also when they simultaneously went less punk and more overtly experimental, or at least less punk, and also when the Dead noodling started creeping in.

And whatever radio/120 Minutes support they had was nil.

when the Dead noodling started creeping in.

you say that like it's a bad thing

:)

SFJ's numbers:

SONIC YOUTH:
Sonic Youth / 4,100
Bad Moon Rising / 33,000
Confusion Is Sex / 41,100
Starpower / 1,000
Evol / 48,400
Sister / 72,000
Sonic Death / 5,500
Made In The USA soundtrack / 21,000
Daydream Nation / 162,000
Goo / 169,000
Dirty / 329,000
Experimental Jet Set Trash & No Star / 246,000
Washing Machine / 159,000
A Thousand Leaves / 66,000
Nyc Ghosts & Flowers 46,000
Murray Street / 63,000
Sonic Nurse / 65,000

i eventually contributed to the number for dirty (at least i think i didn't buy the cassette used) but when i was one of three kids who wore a Dirty t-shirt to the first day of 8th-grade, none of us had actually bought it yet. we just knew it was the hippest shirt at the Disc Jockey at the mall.

Seems so weird that The Eternal was a Top 20 album.

I'm not totally informed about SY lore, but I do know that Lee Ranaldo has always been a big fan of the Grateful Dead

would never have pegged Experimental Jet Set Trash & No Star as their 2nd biggest record.
big drop off after Washing Machine (1995) and 1,000 Leaves (1998).

ha was gonna say that experimental jetset was the biggest used bin perennial for awhile -- lots of people who bought it after hearing bull in the heather and then lots of people who did not like any other songs.
[i was one of the people who bought it after hearing bull in the heather, but ended up loving the band]

big drop off after Washing Machine (1995) and 1,000 Leaves (1998).

well there was a big drop-off for alternative rock after 1995 and 1998

some other interesting numbers on that SFJ post - Hole and Breeders were huge, Pavement not so much.

i was there

i still listen to pavement!

Exp Jet Set is my favorite, it had the coolest art too.

i still listen to Pavement and Come.

Come were way better than Sonic Youth in the 90's.

http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/lp/lp10h.jpg

i still listen to Pavement and Come.

― scott seward, Friday, March 13, 2015 4:35 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hope you clean up afterwards! #dadjoke

would never have pegged Experimental Jet Set Trash & No Star as their 2nd biggest record.

it's the post-Dirty bump. I think the fact that this sold so much also explains the subsequent drop in sales. Kids spent their allowance money, felt like they got burned, moved on to other things

Yeah, I remember I always used to feel a little embarrassed when I told people I was into Sonic Youth and they'd reply something like "oh ... yeah, I used to have Experimental Jet Set ..."

Experimental Jet Set was their "New Jersey" album?

After reading about what their album sales were like in Goodbye 20th Century, I basically concluded that they were money management geniuses in order for them to have the lifestyles that were discussed earlier on this board. (The book tended to support this view.)

bull in the heather was a genuine radio hit in my part of the world, i heard it all the time for a little while there. and i think it's the only video of theirs i've seen in regular rotation on mtv.

Only ones I saw regularly were "Kool Thing" and "Shadow of a Doubt" (the latter only on 120mins, though).

Yeah, heard "Bull in the Heather" regularly on "alternative" stations. They played it on Letterman, too.

Didn't they play Letterman every time they released an album from at least Dirty onwards? I'm pretty sure I watched all of them one day.

i remember watching them do the "single" version of diamond sea on letterman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEXpKDu0Mf8

There's a clip of them doing 100% with additional instrumentation from The World's Most Dangerous Band!

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KjGj-rFwsHw

haha, so weird. why did they do that? was it a union thing? did they really have to have the bass player double kim's lines?

For the first few weeks of 9th grade, 100% seemed like it was always on every time I turned on the tv after school.

For a few years in the late 80s/early 90s, bands on Letterman were frequently just a few key members playing with the house band. So instead of the Kinks, it was Ray Davies with the band; instead of Pere Ubu, it was David Thomas and Jim Jones with the band.

xp

(but no idea why they'd double SY)

Some discussion here: Back when Paul Schafer played along with the musical guest on Letterman

How did Paul do on Allen Ravenstine's parts

Didn't Paul et al play with the Pixies too?

Yeah, that Pixies clip (with Anton Fig drumming and Dave Lovering reduced to slapping two Barbie dolls together) went viral in the early days of YouTube and got people thinking about that era of Letterman performances again.

How did Paul do on Allen Ravenstine's parts

Ha, he didn't. Ubu were promoting Worlds In Collision, but Fontana refused to pay $2500 to fly the members and their gear to NY for the show. Word got out, and a bunch of bands (R.E.M. and Jane's Addiction are two I remember) contributed to their travel fund.

After all this build-up and publicity, they played "Oh Catherine," one of the least-distinctive songs in their oeuvre (and not even one of the better ones on WIC).

https://youtu.be/X7dhvuq0cEY

(looks like Eric Drew Feldman was there, too)

why did they do that?

Wouldn't you jump at the chance to do a noise-rock jam with Sonic Youth if you played in a talk show house band?

OK getting a bit off topic, but I still remember my jaw dropping when Paul ripped into his solo at 2:22 during Nick Cave's "I Had a Dream, Joe" performance in '92.

https://youtu.be/eO17Vdi94CA

(YouTube doesn't allow embedding of this one.)

yes!!! that moment stuck in my memory forever too. The look of utter loathing on Paul's face as he savaged the keys.

Wouldn't you jump at the chance to do a noise-rock jam with Sonic Youth if you played in a talk show house band?

I must admit I greatly admire how game the WMDB guys were in committing to the moment, what with the guitar guy throwing his strat around, and Schafer doing the same with his mini synth.

Sid's got weird music bona fides (Fripp, Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, etc.)

So does Paul

She was interview by Gary the Squirrel last night in New York.

― Three Word Username, Friday, March 13, 2015 5:01 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Were there any Squirrel in a Band jokes?

that Kim interview with Carrie was actually pretty entertaining! Would be surprised if they were sober during it. It's weird to me that people (not saying everyone here is) are taking it at face value, since it was pretty obvious a performance of an interview, and there was so much tongue-in-cheek play acting and sarcasm.

It was interesting to see at what points Kim got comfortable and seemed sincere. Her description of the themes of her upcoming art show sounded fun.

it was pretty obvious a performance of an interview, and there was so much tongue-in-cheek play acting and sarcasm.
i did consider this, and if that's the case it makes me feel like even more of an idiot for bothering to watch it
what's what point of playacting an interview? honestly, aside from getting paid for the event, what's the point for them or the audience?

I think you'd be giving them too much credit.

wait, they were trolling you guys and you fell for it? that's kinda funny. i didn't watch the video.

like, are they in character? sleaterkinney loves her characters.

i think i expect too much from them in general

what's the point for them or the audience?

well, I am sure Kim is contractually obligated to do a certain number of interviews. She says throughout the interview that she doesn't like doing interviews. Of note are the times when she flips the script and starts asking Carrie questions as if she was the interviewer.

She talks, as she does in the book, about Dan Graham and her participation in his Audience/Mirror piece. She also talks about a show Sonic Youth did at a festival in Seattle where they did a 40 minute set that was one long improv jam and then they played one song. She was inspired by the No Wave scene and was buddies with Mike Kelley. What all these things have in common is having a somewhat oppositional attitude to the audience, to not giving the audience what they want, or what they are used to getting.

I'm not saying that her performance of the interview was totally calculated and scripted with a high art rationale, but as someone who's 3/4 of the way through the book and familiar with her friends and influences, it would not be a stretch for her to have thought about it like that.

Ok that makes sense. Thanks for the thorough answer. I guess I should've known.

theres a difference between doing a 40 minute improv set and giving the audience absolutely nothing except the privilege to hear your voice and watch you on stage. i understand she hates interviews & is contractually obligated to doing them, but this doesn't screw anyone but the people in the audience, and as performance piece, there's just nothing there. people could still be won over and blown away and opened up by a 40 minute jam, i don't think this has any redeeming value if it was consciously done in opposition to 'the candid interview.'

she could just have been high and tipsy and not giving a fuck because she hates doing interviews because they remind her of youthful trauma involving her brother

the privilege to hear your voice and watch you on stage.

but isn't that what the audience wanted? Isn't that what they were paying for?

I watched it last night for free and I was entertained, so saying "there's just nothing there," is kinda arrogant on your part

i get that, and she could've just been genuinely having a bad day, but they could've had a conversation about anything... but you're right, in my opinion there was nothing there, i was just expecting more. idk i find this specific type of non-interview incredibly annoying, inconsiderate, and not 'cool'/'punk' at all. it just puts distance between them and the audience, like they're in on an inside joke and going into laughing fits. there's nothing to gain from it. do a crispin glover or talk about no wave or something, anything for an hour. interview as oppositional performance piece - sweet, make it interesting.

the privilege to hear your voice and watch you on stage.

but isn't that what the audience wanted? Isn't that what they were paying for?

i think they probably paid expecting a conversation, but clearly she put a lot of time and thought into the book, and i bet she never wants to talk about it again, so w/e, i was just a bit bummed

there's a reason that most talk show interviews are relentlessly planned out and most podcasts are aimless torture -- it's kind of hard to make an A-B conversation into an entertaining or fulfilling experience of the audience, even when the people involved are interesting and accustomed to the spotlight it's a total crapshoot. this one doesn't seem especially good or especially bad by any reasonable standard.

experience FOR the audience, meant to say

I'll skip the above mentioned interview and read the book, I think.

The idea of this interview as Sarahell describes it sounds fascinating conceptually, but...

when they were coming up with albums for the audience member to buy her 12 year old niece, it was really sweet. Also, the part where they talk about the difference between alternative and college rock and remember bands like Buffalo Tom

That was a highlight? The weird feeling I get from Kim Gordon interviews is that she wasn't even really *there*. She will remember Buffalo Tim but have nothing to say about Chuck D. She will have a lot to say about soundcloud but nothing about what playing bass or music meant to her - I got the impression that, to her, music feels like an afterthought to a not very successful visual arts career. In the past I would've thought this was blankness or intentional contrary-ness that had its roots in something meaningful. Now, I'm really not sure there's anything there.

We are kind of living the golden age of the anti-interview. If I want to see a conceptual bad interview I can watch Adult Swim.

Carrie should have asked what the hell was up with that Letterman 100% performance?

xxp - she writes about why she plays music and what it means to her in her book. Honestly, most musicians' answers about playing their instrument and what music means to them aren't all that interesting, they tend to be pretty similar. I am more interested in what she thinks about soundcloud.

xps great points, I've only ever listened to Marc Maron's podcast, and Bret Easton Ellis' when it was active. imo the only problem with talk show interviews is how short they are. I love long interviews with lots of tangents. Maron and post-9/11 Howard Stern are really good at getting guests to open up. Maron's interview with Rivers Cuomo was fantastic, even with only a cursory knowledge of Weezer (thought Rivers was a virgin in 1994), it was never stilted and Rivers never went into his play-acting "i would rather be boiled alive rn" schtick. can't wait for his KG episode.

wait she did have something to say about chuck d! i was always embarrassed by the chuck d parts of kool thing and this was the first time i heard anything kind of vindicating that embarrassment.

what's the point for them or the audience?

well, I am sure Kim is contractually obligated to do a certain number of interviews. She says throughout the interview that she doesn't like doing interviews. Of note are the times when she flips the script and starts asking Carrie questions as if she was the interviewer.

She talks, as she does in the book, about Dan Graham and her participation in his Audience/Mirror piece. She also talks about a show Sonic Youth did at a festival in Seattle where they did a 40 minute set that was one long improv jam and then they played one song. She was inspired by the No Wave scene and was buddies with Mike Kelley. What all these things have in common is having a somewhat oppositional attitude to the audience, to not giving the audience what they want, or what they are used to getting.

I'm not saying that her performance of the interview was totally calculated and scripted with a high art rationale, but as someone who's 3/4 of the way through the book and familiar with her friends and influences, it would not be a stretch for her to have thought about it like that.

― Mistah FAAB (sarahell), Sunday, March 15, 2015 7:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not totally sure whether you are suggesting she is doing this subconsciously or not, but wouldn't it be more likely that both of them are just awkward in this setting?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

sy headlined penn state's annual end-of-spring-semester outdoor concert in 1998, and only played songs from A Thousand Leaves a month before it came out - basically treating the show as a warm-up for the tour. there was definitely an air of "huh, are we blowing your mind?" but ironically the frat guys were fine with it cuz it was loud, and the hackeysackers dug the trippiness. it was SY's fans that experienced some degree of challenge, but really disappointment ("jesus could you at least play the diamond sea?"). it's really easy to rationalize public indulgence as a creative challenge.

hell, even if you don't, someone in your audience will be nice enough to make the assumption

I'm kind of surprised people have such defined expectations for Kim Gordon. Maybe because she came off as so remote and cold/"cool" so long, people could project their own ideas on her a bit? Now a bit frustrating to find she's just an awkward arty bass player in her 60's? Maybe others have seen it as all boring schtick for a long time now.

I'm not knocking people on this thread at all - I get it. Sonic Youth always fucked with artifice and "authenticity" - artiness and pop - high and low - virtuosity and primitivism - jaded cool and spazz-out heat. And there was always a tension between their air of bemused detachment even while championing free-jazz/abstract expressionist improvisational purity, an unmediated straight-from-the-heart ideal wrapped up in a guarded smirkiness... add to that the fact that she's an older woman (often-time frontperson) in this eternally teenage rock n roll world...

I don't know - it just seems like she's in a position that whatever she says or does to reflect on her experience is bound to disappoint everybody.

I remain undisappointed

yeah to be clear, i'm not disappointed in kim gordon giving an uninspiring public performance - par for course for decades, though i'd probably think less of her if she was patting herself on the back for being challenging after one. if anything she's succeeded for me through her pr campaign in giving a more sympathetic context to her half-assed engagement with her audience.

there's something almost delightfully quaint in the idea of that "hey, you're an experimental artist" rationalization of responding to stage fright by getting weird

"if anything she's succeeded for me through her pr campaign in giving a more sympathetic context to her half-assed engagement with her audience"

ha - yeah that's kind of where I land with all this too

I was thinking about this and also that one guy who crashed his mom's car for a video because it is "A joke" and he is "A performance artist" and just read this thing about the Ferguson poetry guy and is 2015 the Year Performance Art broke? Is this the new sincerity?

no

k thx

np

ha ha how can 2015 be the Year Performace Art broke when that Shia LeBeuf stuff was a year or two ago?

plus, that stupid river phoenix brother.

plus Kim Gordon did an awkward interview not performance art

Yeah I wasn't saying that it was intentionally performance art ... I said it was possible that some of the stilted quality of parts of the interview were intentionally that way. I watched it like a performance, because that's the way I tend to watch things.

Really unimpressed with this book, which felt rushed out, as if she was pressured to get it out there, while the wounds were still fresh, but only managed a 130 page draft (CA stuff is pretty solid) and then got bored/ran out of things to say and filled in the rest with a smattering of so-so song recollections. My biggest issue was how often she seemed to imply things she/they were doing were big in-jokes, which is a sneaky strategy. Oh, you didn't like our riff on Godard? Well, we were just joking. Oh, you liked that song? We wrote that in a minute, when we were just messing around. It's a win-win for KG, who comes off cooler than you either way, and not always in a good way.

Was surprised to learn about the Danny Elfman connection though. Was surprised to learn so little about Sonic Youth.

It's not great. Struggling to finish it, for the reasons you give. I also feel it's rushed.

hmm the copy I had on hold from the library is coming in next week

"Oh, you didn't like our riff on Godard? Well, we were just joking. Oh, you liked that song? We wrote that in a minute, when we were just messing around. It's a win-win for KG, who comes off cooler than you either way, and not always in a good way."

Ha! Yeah, this sounds like classic high schooler coolness-security techniques. Fully prepared for any reaction.

It's also how my sister played ping-ping. Before: "I'm tired and I don't want to play." After: "I beat you when I was tired and didn't want to play!" Or: "I lost because I was tired and didn't want to play."

Ping-pong, ha. Ping-ping sounds like a panda.

There is, or was, something offputtingly adolescent about the Thurston and Kim show, which was tempered by Ranaldo and Shelley.

i haven't read the book yet but i plan to. all those negative reactions kind of baffle me. there are all those feminists who are disappointed that apparently kim gordon wasn't the feminist forerunner they thought she was. and now you say she has written a lukewarm book where she always makes her cme over as the cool one. which she was. and it is kind of her tragedy that she isn't anymore. that the band and her relation to the leader are knit together. in a way it always seemed clear that this wouldn't last forever.

sp: come over

It lasted a hell of a long time though. Every time I get bummed that there aren't anymore SY releases forthcoming, I can go back and listen to one of the many many good records they made. They should do a live archives series though. They don't even have to be in the same room for that.

Oh don't worry, they will

Uh no way ws Kim ever the "cool one" over Lee

Judging frm fans yelling at/for him at the four shows I saw, anyway

What's the Danny elfman connection?

Yeah I was underwhelmed with the book too. And I'd really looked forward to it.

concur with the underwhelming. that almost sounds like a parody sonic youth song title "the underwhelming." thought the childhood/california chaps were by far the best and actually really interesting, not only her experience but her general take on '60s LA, suburban culture, etc. usually my least favorite part of a memoir/bio is the early years so go figure. the rest felt cursory, wanted much more from the early NY period for starters. and i would guess the career chronology was just too painful to explore deeply given the way it ended. which leads to, yeah, thurston was a heel and worse to her but hey there are two sides to every relationship story not that i'd want to read his necessarily. it was probably cathartic to put all her anger & hurt on the page but it didn't result in a good book and i'd even hazard the guess that with a few years distance she may feel differently if not regret writing this.

I might be naive about how much money you make from a book these days, but it seems like she put it out at the best possible time in terms of sales. It occurred to me the other day that Kim and Thurston were performing "Sleepin' Around" onstage together, and how weird that is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ZQ6wpxYVQ

weird, didn't know there was video of this. It was a secret show, as they'd played a much larger/established venue in the area the night before. It was a total gas to see them here.

It was a secret show, as they'd played a much larger/established venue in the area the night before

Not disputing your version of events but according to the (normally reliable) SY concert chronology they hadn't played anywhere else in a month or so prior to that show:

http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/cc/2005.html

Ah, you are correct! The Flywheel show I was thinking of was in November of 2002. They played the C4lv1n in Northampton and then Flywheel the next night; only, the C4lv1n supposedly makes artists sign something saying they won't play anywhere else nearby within x number of days, hence the secrecy of the Flywheel show.

What's the Danny elfman connection?

She and Elfman were a couple.

Gordon boingo'd oingo?????

(Sorry, I knew this trivia, but had that construction in my head and had to get it out. It was either this or saying it out loud in a coffee shop.)

They played the C4lv1n in Northampton and then Flywheel the next night

hate doing this to you but according to the same website they played in Providence, RI the night after they played in Northampton:

http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/cc/2002.html

Huh...well, it must've been the night before, then. I remember us Flywheelers being told to keep it a secret, but the day of the show, like 20 people around town asked me about this "secret" show. And I have no poker face. Fortunately, the tiny space wasn't overwhelmed.

See, I liked this book, and was okay with it being heavier on Kim pre SY than on SY - probably because I didn't know much about Kim before reading it. It may have worked better for may if it cut back on the SY.

D'oh, ok, found it...the show I'm confused about happened in 2001:

http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/cc/111701.html

"Oh, you didn't like our riff on Godard? Well, we were just joking. Oh, you liked that song? We wrote that in a minute, when we were just messing around. It's a win-win for KG, who comes off cooler than you either way, and not always in a good way."

sounds like you also have insecurity re coolness. Honestly, that is how songs sometimes come about, and just because it started out as a joke or a quick take doesn't mean someone is an idiot for liking it or investing it with meaning.

I understand that. I know how music/art is made, and Kim Gordon's bad attitude has no bearing on my emotions or appreciation of her music. But it is a book, and I am a reader, and multiple times in the book, iirc, she's describing a project someone didn't like or that got a poor reception or maybe undo criticism, whether short films or videos or fashion or Free Kitten, and rather than defend it she pulls the "oh, it was all a joke, we thought it was hilarious that anyone would take it seriously" move. Which obviously does not affect one's reaction to it, but it is kind of a dick authorial stance, especially when that sort of defensive in-joke brush off never comes tied to projects people love. "Oh, Daydream Nation, that was some piece of shit we crapped out overnight after a few beers."

i think you're reading defensiveness into it.

i read this and the marie kondo book at the same time and they sync up pretty well as bios of people who found outlets for their childhood anxieties

a little more than halfway through this (I'm up to their tour w Neil Young) and complaints about this seem a bit overstated imo. It's not hyper-detailed or deeply engrossing or anything but as a series of strung together reminiscences that constitute her life story it works fine, and there's flashes of her poetic/artistic aesthetic littered throughout that give a good sense of her art and her approach to it. I haven't come across any of the stuff JinC describes, or at least I didn't notice it (yet).

I probably overstated it myself. The book is fine, though I stand by my assessment that it feels rushed and a tad slapdash.

the funniest thing about this book to me is the constant undertone of "man, this city was so much better when it was totally dangerous and falling apart and filthy and filled with drug dealers and junkies and criminals", like, the active non-ironic pining for a city with garbage strikes, dilapidated infrastructure, and a soaring crime rate. those were the days!

i can almost respect that sentiment when the person acknowledges the privilege behind it and shows some self-awareness (which she may well do, i haven't read the book yet - my wife's on a long waiting list at the library) but it's a pretty ironic from someone who moved to a college town in mass for the kids 20+ years ago to wish that the city stayed awful for everyone who couldn't get out

though actually i might be wrong on the date - an interview implies they didn't move until coco was five, and i thought they'd left in like 1996. maybe they wouldn't have left if the place had stayed more cracky.

she definitely shows self-awareness and acknowledges the irony

I'm most of the way through the book (we're at 2005 now). I'm really enjoying it. For some reason I'm just not bothered by all the stuff people are talking about itt. Her writing is simple and effective and frequently strikes some very deep chords with me.

(Well ok if I must pick a nit, the Lana del Rey bit seems beneath her.)

which she may well do

she's self-aware and cops to the irony of it - privelege, not so much

she does say that she didn't want to raise Coco in the city because of its inconveniences and vices

xp

new york nostalgia stuff was odd, but not surprising. i also found her relationship to northampton and the pioneer valley to be odd. i couldn’t tell if she was miserable or not. the smith college radio station was pretty good tho. when i lived in amherst, i always listened to that station.

cool re: self-awareness - i didn't mean to assume. i am sympathetic to the sentiment just in terms of nostalgia. celebs just sound kind of batty when they ignore the non-bohemian elements of the time. the weirdest i ever heard was patti lupone saying she misses when broadway was scarier - like, when was the last decade she had to leave a theater without a driver?

stayed up way too late reading this book last night -- aside from the occasional zzz when she goes on about the art scene in NY and how commercial it is, it's really fun to read and the stuff about CA and her brother is interesting too. enjoying it!!

did i ever post itt? Read it last night over like 4 days (that's really fast for me) and concur totally. Her writing is very unostentatious but often (esp when she is writing about olden CA times) she just really nails a certain feeling/vibe in the least showy way.

i went to the danny elfman film music concert at lincoln center friday night and I was thinking about young him and young kim messing with each others' hearts, so weird.

four days in one night IS fast!

Lol

"last night" = "last month"

An excellent read, beautiful prose and an unusual nonlinear narrative structure, really captivating, and she bears all about Thurston and his hijinks to boot. Really enjoyed her descriptions of life in Southern California and of the complex relationship she has with her troubled brother. One of, if not the, best written rock bios I've read, and without the help of a co-author!

was hoping for more details about the mid-late 90s sonic youth albums, which she barely touched on. first half of the book is well-engrossing, though

I love Kim Gordon. I view her as a role model. she doesn't seem to get hung up on things, good or bad.
she always seems to be in the moment. she does things because they are fun to do.

I think those first seven SY albums will be my friends for life.

I feel bad that she has to answer so many stupid questions on the book tour.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/kim-gordon-leaves-town-a-road-diary/2015/09/04/1d505042-44f2-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html

told to Washington Post writer diary of her move now back to Cali with photos along the way

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/05/kim-gordon-on-bodyhead-and-the-election-i-cannot-wait-for-it-to-be-over-but-im-afraid-of-what-will-going-to-happen/

i think i'm at least a year behind in the "worst music writing ever thread" so I dunno if someone has helpfully posted it there as well.

TIL there's a new chapter in the 10th (!) year anniversary of this book, could someone summarize it?