New Solo Kim Gordon

👏🏼 to Kim for becoming a rapper at 70. I would’ve expected it during her Free Kitten / X Girl era when she was wearing Starter jackets and John Starks Knicks jerseys. It’s both embarrassing and not that bad.

Saying this is “rap” is insane

Kinda my point. It’s a “rap” beat and she kinda stays on it. I shouldn’t mock it. She’s been a part of music life for 35 years.

I feel like she's occasionally been doing this kind of vocal delivery since at least the 90s

Yeah I don't think her vocal delivery is that different here, tbh, it's the context.

I listened to a little and agree that the instrumental portion is quite good, interesting. However — has her vocal delivery ever been anything but cool and detached? I feel like if anything is weak here (compared to previous recordings that I’ve enjoyed of hers) it’s the lyrics. I feel like she has a hard time putting her heart into it, like she’s too “cool”. Which I get. But if the music isn’t esp dynamic and neither are the vocals or lyrics what does that give the listener to pay attention to? Idk.

Kool Thing sittin' with a kitty
Now you know you're sure lookin' pretty
Like a lover not a dancer
Superboy take a little chance here
I don't want to, I don't think so
I don't want to, I don't think so

Kool Thing let me play it with your radio
Move me, turn me on, baby-o
I'll be your slave
Give you a shave
I don't want to, I don't think so
I don't want to, I don't think so

I mean lyrics have always been the weakest point of Sonic Youth without a doubt and Kim has definitely provided some of the biggest cringes over the years…I just always feel like if you don’t have anything to say just make a better instrumental…what’s the point of having your vocals on there just to be front and center…but that’s just me and my distorted view of music at this stage

I just try and to listen to the sound of the voice without paying any particular attention to the lyrics. I like the sound of her voice.

at least those lyrics are a little goofy? esp when delivered in such a deadpan way? I remember when Swimsuit issue came out and I enjoyed hearing her coo VenDEla, ASHley, and all the other supermodel names. I mean it's not ~heartfelt~ but it means *something*, there's a significance. Also "don't touch my breast, I'm just workin at my desk" is all time imo.

imo Kim is a GREAT lyricist, always has been, and is doing fine on this new track. Stoopidity has always been her aspiration, writing a femme version of Iggy Pop. Nonchalance and tossed-off half-assed non-sequitur is part of the recipe.

Like Gordon pretty-much invented a lyrical style and mode of presentation that I’d describe as Girl Macho, taking macho punk modes from Ramones and Suicide and femme-ing them, I don’t think her genius in this regard can be impugned, nobody does it better than her. Who else could blithely say “iBook” in a song as a complete stanza and have it be divorced from any “modern social commentary”, just an object sitting there like a shot from Jeanne Dielman

Agree with all that. Well put! There’s something about her particular application/variety of femme that is (for me) at least partially defined by its lack of traditionally feminine singing techniques, for lack of a better word — the deadpan delivery is part of the appeal. I could never in a million gazillion years be that cool.

pitchfork covered the song in their column about new rap songs lol
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/kim-gordon-bye-bye-new-song-listen/

Well, I chuckled at “Opium Kim G” despite myself

I was tickled

Another new track out today, "I'm a Man". Slightly more guitar, but still very much in the vein of the lead single.

The new song is much better than the first one, to my ear. And the video's pretty good, too...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioKP3ORu0QY

Her current ultra-detached vocal style works sometimes, doesn't work other times, but it's very interesting (for me) to contrast it with her mid '80s style as heard on Walls Have Ears, the Sonic Youth "bootleg" culled from several 1985 UK shows and reissued earlier this month. She does some unhinged howling on there that's incredible, and the complete opposite of the "detached Kim Gordon thing" she's best known (and most often lauded) for.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/arts/music/kim-gordon-the-collective.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ZU0.28RS.8lCHqmnJxpN4&smid=url-share

NY Times interview

excerpts --

re working with 41 year old producer Jason Raisen

“I probably wouldn’t have made a solo album if Justin hadn’t bugged me to do it,” Gordon said, referring to “No Home Record,” their first collaboration from 2019. Raisen told her he was excited to play “The Collective” for some of the rappers he knows, telling her, “It’s going to blow their minds.” Gordon wanted “The Collective” to be “more beat-oriented” than her previous album. “I don’t have a great singing voice, or I’m not a natural singer," she said, “so rhythm is one of the things that gets me inspired.” ...Gordon and Raisen met after his brother, Jeremiah, a music producer who makes beats under the name Sadpony, had a chance encounter with Gordon at an L.A. restaurant in 2015. He mentioned that his brother had recently worked on the alt-pop star Sky Ferreira’s acclaimed album “Night Time, My Time.”

“I liked that record, but I’m not normally impressed when I hear the word ‘producer,’” Gordon said. “My ears kind of close up.”

When Raisen began sending her some tracks, Gordon was taken aback: “Oh, he really gets my sensibility.’” She described that work with words she frequently uses as her highest artistic compliments: “Minimalist” and “trashy.”

A process developed: Raisen sent Gordon tracks he thought would inspire, and she laid down vocals in his studio, later adding layers of distorted guitar and other effects. Gordon has a complicated relationship to the word “musician,” so Raisen has taken to calling her a “noise designer.” “She’s really good at noise designing,” he said.

i liked that article. and the pictures are great. she looks awesome. nu-joan didion.

Oh I heard something from this on WFUV, and it was pretty good, but I appreciated it more just for being way harsher than anything they typically play on FUV.

imagine being in a restaurant in LA and having to listen to some asshole name dropping about how his brother worked on a Sky Ferreira record and then being like "this is the person who will produce my new record, also he says i should be known as a noise designer now"

no wonder it sucks so much

Hadn't seen the NYT profile yet, but saw this tidbit in the Stereogum review that mentions it:

“Bye Bye” doesn’t just sound like a Playboi Carti song. The beat was actually made for Playboi Carti. According to a recent Kim Gordon profile in the New York Times, Justin Raisen — who’s produced for indie-rock pop stars like Sky Ferreira and Yves Tumor, hip-hop weirdos like Lil Yachty and Teezo Touchdown, and even rap superstars like Kid Cudi and Drake — was with his brother Jeremiah over the holidays cooking up music to submit to Carti, Atlanta’s king of fractured, illegible, noise-bombed trap music. When they wrapped up the beat that became “Bye Bye,” the opener and lead single from Gordon’s new album The Collective, Justin recognized it as perhaps too out-there for even Playboi Carti. “But it could be cool for Kim,” he told his brother.

Imagine being Kim Gordon and just doing what you want to do. Sounds pretty great to me.

👍🏽

'bye bye' rocks

yup

another new cut, Psychedelic Orgasm. actually has a key change! more importantly, the lyrics don't seem quite so didactic/workshop exercised. No Home Record was my #1 of 2019 so I can't wait for this one.

This Stereogum interview seems like it may have been a somewhat awkward experience for the writer. I know there have been times I've talked to artists and I've been way more interested in their careers than they were, and that's the feeling I get reading this.

I think it’s just a poor interview - maybe overprepared because of anxiety - but many of the questions are both obscure and pretty closed, here’s my thesis about something you did in 1997, do you agree y/n? Doesn’t offer much space for conversation.

I think, also, that some people are compelling artists but not compelling interviewees, you know? Or: if you haven’t been interviewed much in recent times you have to get back in shape for that, so to speak.

One thing that really leapt out at me in the mid-2010s when I started listening to lots of interview podcasts is how people would go on multiple podcasts and say the exact same things - John Carpenter was good for that.

https://open.substack.com/pub/toneglow/p/tone-glow-130-writers-panel-and-recommendations?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Some folks are really critical of new Gordon album here on Joshua Minsoo Kim’s substack ( Kim sometimes writes for Pitchfork, I don’t know about the panelists he asked here)

had to tap out at this point:

Kim Gordon litmus test: Is it mumble crap when the 70-year-old white woman does it?

I've read a lot of stuff I like on Tone Glow before, but c'mon do people outside of the H0ffman forums still use the "rap = crap" thing in 2024?

some ageism and/or just lack of nuance in their critiques from reviewers who appear to be young in that Tone Glow panel

Kim is a high school teacher; I think he finds dumb, naïve but heartfelt opinions about art exciting.

i think the "mumble crap" line is meant to be ironic

Yeah, I guess maybe, after going back to read the whole blurb. But it was hard to take seriously anyway:

I don’t expect Kim to give us fleshed-out nightlife recollections when her bedtime is probably before 10 pm.

I start to question if The Collective was her way of fulfilling a bet she lost.

Performing a poor LARP of OsamaSon is only cute to older white people who are also so displaced from the source.

And the beats suck, too.

I know and like Joshua but yeah, gonna sit this one out

i apologize for my post by the way. not my best week on ilx

i once saw Kim Gordon perform with the Merce Cunningham Dance Co, it was great

I do appreciate having it pointed out to me twice that Kim Gordon is white. Helpful context!

that review is just a young writer trying to do dunks and that's pretty much never a particularly interesting type of review to read.

i'd at least wanna hear about why her attempt at making a rage album sucks (if it even does, i haven't heard the album yet and the singles have at least been interesting) not just that the entire thing is cringe

I can appreciate the industrial/noise aspect of some of the instrumental on this and the pushed to the brink production that kind of reminds me of those last couple Low albums but the vocals/lyrics/overall vibe are not ever going to do it for me here I don’t think (cue six months from now when I’m eating my words).

Going to the store
Gonna cook it up
Passing all the kids
Tik Toking around
Sipping on the smoothies
Wish I knew what
They were cookin'
They were cookin' up

I’m not really a lyrics guy and I like some really dumb shit but sorry…no. Sonic Youth’s lyrics could occasionally ruin the whole thing for me too (obscenely on the nose lyrics in a faux-Beatnik style…not a good combo as far as I’m concerned)

I feel like someone should owe Tommy Wright III some money for the beat on The Candy House (is it Meet Yo Maker it sounds like?)

gotta admit it's been the solo career noone saw coming...

xp - it's just the laziest dunks too, though. is the thing. the album might not be good and there's probably a compelling case someone could make as to why they didn't think so, but accusing Kim Gordon of all people of being an old that goes to bed before 10 just betrays a stunning lack of knowledge of Kim's connections to the downtown and art scenes.

Or is it a legend venturing into new territories as a brash late-career “fuck you!” to the critics who counted her out?

The person who wrote this does not, I think, know who Kim Gordon is

that Joshua guy's twitter vibe is annoying as hell

sub 2000's pitchfork type review--i haven't heard the Kim Gordon but the bedtime joke is pretty corny

The Collective album is available today on streaming sites