Kim Gordon - GIRL IN A BAND

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