Girl in a band

First of all, I must admit, I'm not a fan of Sonic Youth. I had heard maybe one or two songs in my life; they just weren't that popular. And I just wasn't that impressed. But of course I knew about them so I figured anyone who has been in the music business for so many years would have some great stories and real insights about life and love and raising a family in that world, but I was wrong.

Not that this book is terrible... But it is bland and superficial. I'm not sure why it was written because Kim Gordon doesn't share much of anything. It was just dry, passionless recitations of past events, much name dropping (of people I never heard of, artists) "we made this album, went on that tour with these people", and bitterness (which I get, of course) because her long time musical partner and husband was unfaithful and left the marriage. So yeah, girlfriend, I get it, but if you're going to write a book about your life you need to open your heart and tell some interesting, lively, funny stories.

The weird thing is, I understand Kim Gordon ultimately. I am very much like her in fact. I also had an emotionally and physically abusive older sibling who my parents (well, father, my mom was dead) did little to protect me from. So I learned early on, as did Kim, to play my cards close to my chest, to become very protective of ME and very watchful and suspicious. So I get it, it's hard to open up and make yourself emotionally available. It's easier to be standoffish and a loner because it's safer that way. I also get that you need to protect your daughter and don't want to share too much about your relationship with Thurston Moore and the ultimate betrayal because you don't want her to be hurt in any way. But if you are writing a book, that you want to be interesting to the reader who doesn't know the background history, you gotta give us a little bit more of yourself. You've got to show a little passion, tell some stories that get to the real Kim Gordon deep down. The Kim you mostly keep protected. Otherwise, don't bother.

It's also ironic that the story when you feel you get a glimpse of the real Kim Gordon is the story of her abusive older brother and how that shaped the person she became, the icy, standoffish rock chick. The one who doesn't give much of herself away.

As a music nerd, I read a lot of music-related biographies and other non-fiction, but I'm not sure I'm the right audience for this book. I feel like it would be of interest if you're a serious Sonic Youth fan or interested in New York City in the 80s, but I am neither of those things. As a feminist, I was interested in Kim Gordon's experience as a woman in rock, and as a voyeur, I wanted some insight into the disintegration of her marriage. I feel like there wasn't enough of those things, and there was way too much factual detail about people and things I didn't much care about. The barrage of facts actually drowned out the emotional content in a way that left me skimming large portions of the book. I also got the impression that Ms. Gordon was trying too hard to prove she is a "real" artist by focusing on her involvement in the visual arts and fashion scenes -- as if being "just" a musician wasn't enough. I think that ultimately, Ms. Gordon is very reserved in interviews and elsewhere, and I expected her to open up more in the book, and I don't think that really happened.

While this book is similar to that which Gordon previously has published, by means of mentioning art, dropping names and quickly going over events and people, this book has something special in that she goes through her marriage breaking apart due to her former husband's infidelity; she writes about it in a very going through the motions way, even when describing her own feelings.

One morning I got up to go to yoga. Thurston was still asleep, and I looked down at his cell. It was then that I saw her texts about their wonderful weekend together, about how much she loved him, and his writing the same things back. It was like a nightmare you don’t ever wake up from. At yoga class I was trembling, and when I came home I confronted him. At first he denied it but I told him I had seen the texts—just like in the movies, only this was painfully real. Thurston claimed that he wanted to break it off. He claimed he wanted to come back to our family. In time I found the e-mails and videos from her on Thurston’s laptop, and the hundreds of text messages between the two of them proudly displayed on our monthly cell phone bill. When I confronted Thurston again, he denied it, then admitted it, then promised things were all over between them. It was a pattern that would happen over and over again. I wanted to believe him. I understood that the cigarettes were a mark of some secrecy between them, a ritual and a taboo that could only happen outside the home when no one else was around.

She writes about Sonic Youth's last gig ever at the very start of the book, which is very heartfelt and a quite horrid read, but really only when framed by the last part of the book, where she pores through the motions of what happened; how Thurston Moore lied to Kim Gordon and everything they had stopped, but started living again (according to him), yet turned out as a hoax.

She tells of her growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic brother who nobody seemed to get was just that, during the psychedelia-lovin' American 1960s.

But she quickly got into art, both the visual side and the musical.

For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless. I wrote an article for Artforum in the mideighties that had a line in it that the rock critic Greil Marcus quoted a lot: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.” Meaning, the higher the chance you can fall down in public, the more value the culture places on what you do. Unlike, say, a writer or a painter, when you’re onstage you can’t hide from other people, or from yourself either. I’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin, and the Germans have all these great words with multiple meanings inside them. A few visits ago, I came across one of those words, Maskenfreiheit. It means “the freedom conferred by masks.”

She writes plainly lovely sometimes, in amidst all of the namedropping and hurt:

WRITING ABOUT NEW YORK is hard. Not because memories intersect and overlap, because of course they do. Not because incidents and times mix with others, because that happens too. Not because I didn’t fall in love with New York, because even though I was lonely and poor, no place had ever made me feel more at home. It is because knowing what I know now, it’s hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.

On thinking back when she met Moore, before 27 years of marriage ended:

Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston’s and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are. It’s made me question my whole life and all my other relationships. Why did I trust him, or assume I knew anything at all about him? Maybe I imposed on Thurston a dream, a fantasy. When I look back at old photos of us, I have to believe we were happy, at least as happy as any two creative people who are stressed out with commitments and fears about the future and what’s next, and about their own ideas and inner demons, ever can be.

And quoting a friend on what being in a band is not:

As J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. liked to say when asked about being in a band, “It’s not fun. It’s not about having fun.”

What is fun, however, is mainly when Gordon writes about the band creating stuff:

Gary Gersh, our A&R guy at Geffen, was disappointed when we chose a black-and-white Raymond Pettibon drawing for the cover of Goo. I’m sure he was hoping for a glamorous picture of the band, something very of the moment, with me front and center. Raymond’s drawings had been slapped on record covers for many bands on the SST label, especially Black Flag’s. We loved Ray’s zines and drawings and in the mideighties I had written about his work in Artforum; the black-and-white cover was based on the couple in Terrence Malick’s film Badlands, while the inside was colorful, a riot of faux-glam goofiness.

..and:

In the video for “100%” I wore a bootleg Rolling Stones shirt that said “Eat Me.” As a result, MTV, which showed any number of videos of naked women grinding away, was reluctant to run ours. They felt my shirt sent a bad message to viewers. After the band signed with Geffen, a story came out about an executive there who had sexually harassed his secretary. That was the inspiration for “Swimsuit Issue.” I found it strange that Geffen, like a lot of companies, had a “Secretary’s Day,” but secretaries never seemed to get promoted to anything above that level. The song was meant to spotlight that hypocrisy.

And Moore. Over and over:

Later someone showed me a comment posted on the Sonic Youth website. “She looks like a hot little number,” a fan wrote in. He must have seen a photo of the two of them on some website, or picked up on the gossip going around. He added, “Kim beware, men are pigs after all and more affairs happen at work than any other arena.” Finally, the fan wrote, in a catchphrase he took from The Dark Knight, the second of director Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” A few months later, around Coco’s seventeenth birthday, I found out Thurston had seen her again, at a concert he played in Europe, though he had promised his therapist that if she showed up again or contacted him, he would call his doctor and tell me, too. He did neither. I went back to checking his e-mail, where I found several short, porno-like videos that she had sent him. Thurston denied ever responding to them, but sometime after that I found an e-mail he’d drafted to her with a photo of him attached. Maybe he didn’t send it because his vanity got the better of him, or maybe he wanted me to find it. I asked him to move out of the house. The official announcement of our breakup was timed so we could sit down and tell Coco before the news hit the Internet and strangers started discussing our lives. The web is trouble enough, especially when you’re in your senior year of high school and stressed out about college. Even though Thurston and I had separated in August, so far we hadn’t made any public statements, but people were starting to speculate. It didn’t stop Coco from being angry with me for not telling her sooner. Kids believe everything is a family matter and that they should have an equal vote or some control over everything that goes on in their family’s lives. And being a teenager makes everyone doubly self-conscious. We had already more than ruined her senior year of high school. As she had told us, we couldn’t possibly know what it was like to have us for parents. I did feel some compassion for Thurston, and I still do. I was sorry for the way he had lost his marriage, his band, his daughter, his family, our life together—and himself. But that is a lot different from forgiveness.

All in all: a trip through music and love and disaster and building yourself back together; it's an honest trip, but should have been a little more constrained and without all of that name-dropping, but then again, it wouldn't have been Moore's story without that.

While this book is similar to that which Gordon previously has published, by means of mentioning art, dropping names and quickly going over events and people, this book has something special in that she goes through her marriage breaking apart due to her former husband's infidelity; she writes about it in a very going through the motions way, even when describing her own feelings.

One morning I got up to go to yoga. Thurston was still asleep, and I looked down at his cell. It was then that I saw her texts about their wonderful weekend together, about how much she loved him, and his writing the same things back. It was like a nightmare you don’t ever wake up from. At yoga class I was trembling, and when I came home I confronted him. At first he denied it but I told him I had seen the texts—just like in the movies, only this was painfully real. Thurston claimed that he wanted to break it off. He claimed he wanted to come back to our family. In time I found the e-mails and videos from her on Thurston’s laptop, and the hundreds of text messages between the two of them proudly displayed on our monthly cell phone bill. When I confronted Thurston again, he denied it, then admitted it, then promised things were all over between them. It was a pattern that would happen over and over again. I wanted to believe him. I understood that the cigarettes were a mark of some secrecy between them, a ritual and a taboo that could only happen outside the home when no one else was around.

She writes about Sonic Youth's last gig ever at the very start of the book, which is very heartfelt and a quite horrid read, but really only when framed by the last part of the book, where she pores through the motions of what happened; how Thurston Moore lied to Kim Gordon and everything they had stopped, but started living again (according to him), yet turned out as a hoax.

She tells of her growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic brother who nobody seemed to get was just that, during the psychedelia-lovin' American 1960s.

But she quickly got into art, both the visual side and the musical.

For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless. I wrote an article for Artforum in the mideighties that had a line in it that the rock critic Greil Marcus quoted a lot: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.” Meaning, the higher the chance you can fall down in public, the more value the culture places on what you do. Unlike, say, a writer or a painter, when you’re onstage you can’t hide from other people, or from yourself either. I’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin, and the Germans have all these great words with multiple meanings inside them. A few visits ago, I came across one of those words, Maskenfreiheit. It means “the freedom conferred by masks.”

She writes plainly lovely sometimes, in amidst all of the namedropping and hurt:

WRITING ABOUT NEW YORK is hard. Not because memories intersect and overlap, because of course they do. Not because incidents and times mix with others, because that happens too. Not because I didn’t fall in love with New York, because even though I was lonely and poor, no place had ever made me feel more at home. It is because knowing what I know now, it’s hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.

On thinking back when she met Moore, before 27 years of marriage ended:

Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston’s and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are. It’s made me question my whole life and all my other relationships. Why did I trust him, or assume I knew anything at all about him? Maybe I imposed on Thurston a dream, a fantasy. When I look back at old photos of us, I have to believe we were happy, at least as happy as any two creative people who are stressed out with commitments and fears about the future and what’s next, and about their own ideas and inner demons, ever can be.

And quoting a friend on what being in a band is not:

As J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. liked to say when asked about being in a band, “It’s not fun. It’s not about having fun.”

What is fun, however, is mainly when Gordon writes about the band creating stuff:

Gary Gersh, our A&R guy at Geffen, was disappointed when we chose a black-and-white Raymond Pettibon drawing for the cover of Goo. I’m sure he was hoping for a glamorous picture of the band, something very of the moment, with me front and center. Raymond’s drawings had been slapped on record covers for many bands on the SST label, especially Black Flag’s. We loved Ray’s zines and drawings and in the mideighties I had written about his work in Artforum; the black-and-white cover was based on the couple in Terrence Malick’s film Badlands, while the inside was colorful, a riot of faux-glam goofiness.

..and:

In the video for “100%” I wore a bootleg Rolling Stones shirt that said “Eat Me.” As a result, MTV, which showed any number of videos of naked women grinding away, was reluctant to run ours. They felt my shirt sent a bad message to viewers. After the band signed with Geffen, a story came out about an executive there who had sexually harassed his secretary. That was the inspiration for “Swimsuit Issue.” I found it strange that Geffen, like a lot of companies, had a “Secretary’s Day,” but secretaries never seemed to get promoted to anything above that level. The song was meant to spotlight that hypocrisy.

And Moore. Over and over:

Later someone showed me a comment posted on the Sonic Youth website. “She looks like a hot little number,” a fan wrote in. He must have seen a photo of the two of them on some website, or picked up on the gossip going around. He added, “Kim beware, men are pigs after all and more affairs happen at work than any other arena.” Finally, the fan wrote, in a catchphrase he took from The Dark Knight, the second of director Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” A few months later, around Coco’s seventeenth birthday, I found out Thurston had seen her again, at a concert he played in Europe, though he had promised his therapist that if she showed up again or contacted him, he would call his doctor and tell me, too. He did neither. I went back to checking his e-mail, where I found several short, porno-like videos that she had sent him. Thurston denied ever responding to them, but sometime after that I found an e-mail he’d drafted to her with a photo of him attached. Maybe he didn’t send it because his vanity got the better of him, or maybe he wanted me to find it. I asked him to move out of the house. The official announcement of our breakup was timed so we could sit down and tell Coco before the news hit the Internet and strangers started discussing our lives. The web is trouble enough, especially when you’re in your senior year of high school and stressed out about college. Even though Thurston and I had separated in August, so far we hadn’t made any public statements, but people were starting to speculate. It didn’t stop Coco from being angry with me for not telling her sooner. Kids believe everything is a family matter and that they should have an equal vote or some control over everything that goes on in their family’s lives. And being a teenager makes everyone doubly self-conscious. We had already more than ruined her senior year of high school. As she had told us, we couldn’t possibly know what it was like to have us for parents. I did feel some compassion for Thurston, and I still do. I was sorry for the way he had lost his marriage, his band, his daughter, his family, our life together—and himself. But that is a lot different from forgiveness.

All in all: a trip through music and love and disaster and building yourself back together; it's an honest trip, but should have been a little more constrained and without all of that name-dropping, but then again, it wouldn't have been Moore's story without that.