I can only do what I know how to do… and that’s make f*****-up music, says Kim Gordon
“I FEEL like I am waiting to become an adult,” ponders Kim Gordon, who turns 71 next month.
“I think everyone sees themselves as their interior age, not their biological age,” says the musician, visual artist, style icon and former queen of cool of Sonic Youth, the US art rock band she co-founded with ex-husband Thurston Moore.
It takes a few minutes for Kim to connect to our video call from her home in LA where she moved in 2015 and when she is on screen she is happy to chat about her second solo album, The Collective, an experimental and avant-garde project that is released today.
“I can only do what I know how to do, which is make f***ed-up music, I guess,” she laughs.
“But, yeah, I can enjoy a good pop song but I am mostly drawn to unconventional things.”
Representing her view of today’s chaotic and toxic world, The Collective is experimental and reflective.
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“Things seem to regress very quickly today — it’s two steps forward, one step back, which is kind of weird and scary.
“It’s just like watching something fall over in slow motion.
“I feel like there’s nothing you can do about it.
“It’s a weird feeling.”
I think everyone sees themselves as their interior age, not their biological age.
The Collective was also inspired by the novel The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan, and there’s also a dark track of the same name on the record.
Kim says: “It’s about this tech invention, Mandala, which is like an app and through it you can experience anybody’s memories and actually be in their body and know what they’re experiencing if they have uploaded their stuff.
“But the catch is you have to upload your own memories and experiences and join the collective.”
I don’t trust iPhones
Last June in New York Kim held a 13-painting exhibition which included a large painting of nearly 30 cut-out iPhone-case stencil holes which was also titled The Collective.
Is the art show connected to the album, with the album cover also being of an iPhone representing the vacuum of living online?
She says: “I started doing the paintings before I chose the record cover photo.
“But after I had the title for the record, I gave the big painting in the exhibition the same title.
“There’s no escaping technology, I guess.
“It’s so embedded in our psyche.
“You get lost in your iPhone — people go on there, and I do it too, to get lost.
“But I don’t trust the iPhone.
“It’s useful and obviously things are never going back.
“But it’s just happening so fast.
“People see it as a marker of progress.
“But I feel as human beings, we’re not really evolved in the same way.
“I’m just sceptical of technology.”
The Collective started with the song that opens the album, Bye Bye — a hypnotic chant of a list of items to pack for a trip, over a menacing bassline and perilous beats.
“That was the first song that I did vocals for.
“I always have a certain amount of anxiety about packing.
“I have to get it together and think, ‘What am I forgetting?’
“I wanted some really mundane lyrics to go with a propulsive beat and I thought it was a good foil.
“If I’d tried to make the vocals as intense as the beat, it wouldn’t have been as interesting to me.
“And I wanted to do more beats on this record than the last record.
“Justin Raisen, my collaborator and producer, makes beats for people [he has worked with Charli XCX, Drake and Lil Yachty], so it was a no-brainer to ask him.
“There are some beats on the last record and years ago I made this record SYR5 with Ikue Mori and DJ Olive and there were some beats on that.
“I’ve always been interested in beats for my vocals because I’m limited in my way of singing, it’s not really melody-driven.
“Rhythm is what gets my brain going.
“And Justin knows my sensibility.
“I realised that when we made Murdered Out [on 2019 debut solo album No Home Record], he’d put my vocals from a different project on a trashy drum beat and sent it to me.
I just like deadlines
“I knew he was a punk then.
“That’s why he gets me and he likes my work.
“So that was the first thing we worked on together, then there were a couple of things we worked on at the end of the pandemic that we never went back to but this was the first song that felt really solid.”
Kim says she is not sure why now was the right time to make a second solo album.
She adds: “I guess I didn’t have anything else to do.
“People ask me that — I don’t have a good answer for it.
“I just like deadlines.
“Normally, if I wasn’t making music, I would go to my studio and be struggling with things there.
“Last January I worked on this dance project with this choreographer, Dimitri Chamblas.
“And that went to three different residencies and then we started touring it.
“It involved guitars with five of the dancers, so I went to make sure the volume was good.”
Psychedelic Orgasm is another standout on The Collective, which Kim describes as “kind of like a fantasy about if everyone went on a passive-aggressive strike by taking psychedelic drugs”.
On the industrial-sounding track I’m A Man, Kim examines a blinkered view of masculinity.
“It was inspired by the Republican Party politician Josh Hawley, who goes around whining about feminism and saying how it’s destroyed men,” she tells me.
It’s like Harry Styles got a new stylist that gave his career a boost. This new fluidity and dressing are great.
“The whining aspect and them feeling like victims was interesting to me.
“What does it really sound like if you say these things out loud?
“There’s so many subtleties and grey areas to this whole discussion.
“I thought it would be interesting to throw it out there in a different way, after the peak of old-style, traditional masculinity of protecting and providing, when cowboys rode upon their horses in the movies to save women.
“After that era of Ronald Reagan and Nancy, and conservativism, what was left?
“Men felt lost and so they became consumers, like women.
“They are marketed to.
“The song is about how masculinity changed.”
The song’s lyrics include “Manicure my nails/Put on a skirt,” and Kim says: “Is it groundbreaking that Harry Styles wears a skirt?
“I mean, Mick Jagger wore a dress in 1968 and David Bowie was always individual.
“It’s like Harry Styles got a new stylist that gave his career a boost.
“This new fluidity and dressing are great.
“But men who identify as kind of old school, they may not like it and for them to object to it could be closing doors, which maybe they should open.
“Then, for them to turn around and make them feel like they’re the victims is kind of absurd.”
In her hugely popular 2015 memoir Girl In A Band, Kim calls herself a “lower-case rock star”, never ever comfortable with being seen as supercool and worshipped by so many.
With her DIY attitude, she has opened doors for many women in music today.
She says: “It’s nice people think that, but I don’t like to embrace it because I don’t like my head to be there.
“I don’t really think anything about it, honestly, because it’s just the part of the music industry that I don’t relate to.
“Being cool is not my music industry. It’s the pop world.
“During the punk era, when women really started playing guitars, I was influenced by bands like The Slits and The Raincoats and even Chrissie Hynde.
Rihanna’s so smart
“In LA there were punk bands like The Bags too, but it felt like not many women were playing this music in the mainstream.
“And today it’s singer-songwriters who have been successful.
“It’s great to see people like Rihanna and Cardi B in charge of their careers in their domain. They’re so smart.”
Swimsuit Issue, a song from Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty, was written by Kim after an executive at the band’s Geffen record label was sued by a secretary over claims of sexual harassment.
Kim says: “It was a big scandal when we first signed to Geffen.
“And it was a little embarrassing, as we were already getting grief from our community about signing to this major label.
“But I just thought, ‘OK, well, I’m a woman writing songs so there’s a lot that I can write about’, and I just decided to write about that incident.
“In those days, pre-#MeToo, there was no social media.”
It was in her book that Kim wrote about the end of her 27-year marriage to Sonic Youth guitarist and fellow singer Thurston Moore, who she shared daughter Coco with.
The book begins in 2011 in Sao Paulo at the band’s final show.
The couple had separated after Kim discovered, by phone texts, that Thurston had been having an affair with his now wife, book editor Eva Prinz.
“Yeah, it was hard,” says Kim today.
“I wouldn’t have ever done a memoir but somebody approached me and after I said I would do it, I was like, ‘Why did I say that? I don’t want to write it’.
“So I tried to make it not all about myself, but about LA and the 60s, 70s and New York in the 80s, 90s.
“It was good for me — writing is sometimes the only way I can think about things.”
Next, Kim will release an art book influenced by her brother Keller, who suffered from schizophrenia and died last year.
She has described him as “brilliant, manipulative, sadistic, arrogant, almost unbearably articulate,” and “the person who more than anyone else in the world shaped who I was, and who I turned out to be.”
She says: “It’s an art book with a good long text, but it has pages of his notebook and pictures of him in there.
“It’s more of a tribute to him.
“It was emotional to make but writing is a constructive way to deal with stuff for me.
“I just wanted to make something positive out of it.
“He was schizophrenic and never got to fulfil his potential.”
Kim says she sees herself “pretty much like a visual artist that makes music” and she says it’s important to make art when she feels like it and as she can.
Time goes so fast
She adds: “It still feels natural for me to be doing it but maybe that is why I decided I should make another record now, because I may not feel like it in a few years.
It’s crazy how younger women are affected by this idea you have to be perfect.
“I’m almost 71 — time goes so fast.
“But I don’t go out that much to shows because I’m always protecting my ears, and not just the music, as people talk so loud.
“That is something that has sparked me more as I’ve gotten older because my hearing isn’t as good.”
Looking 25 years younger than her age and wearing stylish gold glasses, Kim says she has never felt any pressure with her looks or image.
She adds: “It’s crazy how younger women are affected by this idea you have to be perfect.
“I might have had some things done, like everyone does, but that idea of beauty has always been incredibly unattainable to me, to such an extent that I’ve never even really tried to attain it.”
Kim begins rehearsals for her live show the next day and says she is looking forward to getting out and playing the new record.
She adds: “I think we’re coming to the UK at the end of June and then maybe back in November when we do more of a fuller European tour.
“I’ve got the same touring band as I’ve had before and I’ve asked an artist friend of mine to make a film to the backdrop.
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“I can’t wait to see what it looks like.”