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.

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.