Kim Gordon
Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that?Collection: Society
I see it as more of a teenage activity than, you know, she's only 11, but you know, I think it's great that she knows so many girls who want to play music. And I see it more as a teen activity than I do as going into music.Collection: Teen
It's amazing how many things you can do when you're just pretending.Collection: Amazing
You can't be a strong or cool woman and be represented except in a harsh way, looking mean and cold and hard. It's like reverse sexism.Collection: Cool
Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I'm grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.
I feel most free onstage. The audience, it's an abstraction. You don't really see anyone out there, but you feel the audience inside you.
I watch 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' with my daughter. We're very into Buffy and Buffy's friends.
I've never been good with structure - doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do.
It is fun to smash guitars.
I'm a relatively shy person, but I love being challenged and putting myself in positions that are scary.
Anyone becomes mannered if you think too much about what other people think.
It's hard to get hot over a painting; there's no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness. Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it's easier in music.
Basketball and ping-pong are my two forms of exercise.
And then, I was thinking of doing a record just like starting with voice, because I did this one song that was just kind of a cappella, and I did it for this art piece I did where people could come and play music to go with a voice.
Because our daughters have school and it's just such a hassle going down to New York all the time, we can really only go on the weekends, we kind of... Steve came up here and worked out stuff for the second half of the record.
But everything has been so gradual that it's sort of all come from, just hard work and basically being at it.
I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.
I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.
I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years.
I mean, I don't even think of myself as a musician, really.
I mean, most of it is probably more obscure and just more noisy than either of those two bands, but Thurston has stuff all the time that he's involved with that is fairly obscure and experimental.
I try not to think too much about what the audience is thinking and what they think I should do.
It's really hard for me to sing and play bass.
The last two records I liked playing a lot.
There's only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.
Unless you're singing something that's kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it's just difficult.
Well, it was kind of accidental that Jim started playing with us, although it wasn't sudden... we hadn't really looked around to think who could be a fifth member.
You know, we have our own audience, and it's not like - they just know we're not going to do certain things.
Rap music is really good when you're traumatized.
I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.
Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.
I think of myself as unconventional, I guess. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.
You're always going to feel like you're catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men.
I don't really feel comfortable anywhere except when I'm working alone at home. It's exhausting to be out around people.
I never thought about doing anything other than making art.
In rock music, people have certain assumptions that it makes people more enlightened, and it really doesn't.
I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.
I don't have any desire to do something that sounds explicitly rock. Like, I don't have a burning need to be a rock musician. I feel like I've taken that as far as I can take it, for me.
Everyone's so interior now, they're not really looking around them. They're on their phones.
L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things. But Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s.
I really want to start playing basketball. I actually bought a new basketball.
My parents lived by Rancho Park. And my mom, later in life, got into playing golf. She and her male cronies would get up at five in the morning and sneak onto the back nine. I kind of just started getting into it. For a long time, I was really puzzled by why people liked it.
Working on art, as opposed to being in a constant collaborative state, as in a band, is something that I've always done - to a smaller degree, but it always remained a part of my integral self.
I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it.
I like the adrenaline of playing improv - it makes me feel really calm.
I'm a slow learner. When people are so talented or facile at picking up an instrument and playing covers, like Yo La Tengo, I admire that. But I could never do that.
I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.
In a lot of the art world, you have to present yourself as you know what you're doing at a young age. Music gave me another outlet. The 'no wave' bands were such an inspiration; it felt so free - once you start doing it, it's hard to stop. But I can't get away from art. It comes back around. I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't pursue it.
I can't think about whether I'll disappoint Sonic Youth fans. It's not like I want people to be disappointed, but I just can't control that.