Just prior to the publication of Kim Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band, a characteristic controversy broke out on the internet. Among the people disparaged in the book is the young singer Lana Del Rey. “Today we have someone like Lana Del Rey,” Gordon writes, in summing up the fallen state of things (since the ’90s), “who doesn’t even know what feminism is, who believes it means women can do whatever they want, which, in her world, tilts toward self-destruction, whether it’s sleeping with gross older men or being a transient biker queen. . . . Naturally, it’s just a persona. If she really truly believes it’s beautiful when young musicians go out on a hot flame of drugs and depression, why doesn’t she just off herself?” Del Rey’s fans got wind of the insult and duly commenced to trash Gordon on Twitter, whom they had clearly never heard of. Gordon, for her part, retweeted the worst of the abuse.
Faced with a choice between the bassist of Sonic Youth and the nihilist nymphet Lana Del Rey and her army of Twitter defenders, the highbrow music fan knows whose side she’s on. And it’s not as if Gordon is wrong about Del Rey, whose embrace of American rock and roll myths, shot through with a cartoonish sense of female desire, really is infantile. The appeal of Kim Gordon is completely different. She came from the New York art world of the early ’80s, co-founded one of the most admired bands of all time with her boyfriend and eventual husband Thurston Moore, and has now written an honest memoir about the whole thing. She’s one of the most respected personalities in rock music, who somehow obtained a license in the world of male-dominated culture to combine the impossible—to be both sexy and smart, mature and attractive, a mother and an artist, confrontational and political and also eternally “cool.” How many women are able to do this in music or pop culture, or at all? Not many.
Which makes me think: Isn’t Del Rey, precisely through her disturbing, masochistic fantasies of rape, mental abuse, and violent sex, and on top of that her adolescent rejection of feminism (“feminism doesn’t interest me as an idea,” she’s told interviewers on several occasions), a better icon for our time? Don’t her words and lyrics say more about the contemporary position of women than the mature, self-confident, and in the end somewhat commonplace pronouncements of Kim Gordon?
Feminism and class (and taste) are interesting categories through which to approach Gordon’s memoir. The book, which describes in detail her acrimonious breakup with Moore and the disbanding of Sonic Youth, must have been very hard to write. The beginning and the end, especially, are full of details of the brutal breakup, with the band carrying on for several months of touring after the fact. This makes for disturbing reading, and Gordon handles it with a wry sense of humor. But I can’t let go of a feeling that everything falls into place rather too easily, and feminism, class, and taste have a lot to do with it. Again: Gordon’s memoir is compelling—even gripping—and well-written, with atmospheric images and disarming honesty. But throughout something feels not quite right. Gordon writes with an absolute sureness of self that enables her to reminisce with the same confidence about her art and musical output as the artistic circles she has lived in for the last thirty-odd years, and also to rebuke the likes of Del Rey, Courtney Love, and several other women, including Lydia Lunch and Madonna. The women Gordon likes and admires are Kathleen Hanna, Kim Deal, her friend and Free Kitten bandmate and fashion label co-founder Julie Cafritz, Chloe Sevigny, and Sofia Coppola—a classy, laconic bunch.
While I was reading Girl in a Band, I was also reading a new book in the33 1/3 series on Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This, by an Australian author Anwen Crawford. Crawford hasn’t a negative thing to say about her subject and the album’s creator, Courtney Love. She challenges the persistent public hatred of Love and the accusation that she “killed” her husband and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. She furthermore makes a formidable case for the album itself, presenting it as a manifesto of positive, alternative, grassroots feminism, a feminism that has nothing to do with positive adjustment, good taste, or middle-class-ness, and in which self-confidence is born of exclusion—for being a woman, for being queer, for living on the periphery. Given the mutual history of Gordon and Love, whose paths crossed constantly in the early ’90s, it’s tempting to use the coincidence of these two books’ publication to talk about that specific moment in history, a moment crucial for Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Hole, and for the whole accession of “alternative” music to the mainstream in the United States. (...)
The differences of perception between Courtney Love and Kim Gordon were, and remain, profoundly a matter of taste, which is to say of class. Courtney Love never said that she came from a working class or poor background, and stressed a few times that she didn’t. (Love’s mother was a psychotherapist and her father was the first manager of the Grateful Dead.) But she was kitschy, exhibitionistic, shameless, and at the same time vulnerable and ready to show it. Love came from a “complicated” family background. She grew up without much attention, and was passed from relative to relative, and traveled as a teenager to the UK to follow around Liverpool bands Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. In the ’80s she worked as a jobbing actress and a stripper. Side by side, Gordon and Love represent mirror images of the Nineties—of music, femininity, feminism, and politics. If Gordon was tastefully highbrow, Love was lowbrow, “distasteful”: the disgraced widow, widely regarded as someone who was, if not directly responsible for her husband’s death, then at least insufficiently “helpful,” who was too mad, too freakish, too much of a selfish junkie careerist to look after her suffering husband. But that’s not how her fans saw her. (...)
In the end Gordon created a space in her music, where irony toward her own experiences or masks could protect her from her fears. Love confronted her traumas in the opposite way. Her act wasn’t to hide before the menace, it was to become that menace herself. Her voice is not one of beauty, but it’s powerful: she’s giving everything she has, until she can’t speak anymore. It’s funny how Gordon dismisses Courtney as somebody exploiting suffering (like in “Doll Parts,” where Love compares herself to a dismembered, killed doll, yet the one “with the most cake”), as if it was impossible for a woman to fake it and get away with it. But at the same time, Courtney lived through it, through the hate and contempt of the people around her, and still managed to create compelling music. If she often seemed like an attention-craving jackass, it’s because she actually refused to think she should behave any different from the way men in rock behave.
Faced with a choice between the bassist of Sonic Youth and the nihilist nymphet Lana Del Rey and her army of Twitter defenders, the highbrow music fan knows whose side she’s on. And it’s not as if Gordon is wrong about Del Rey, whose embrace of American rock and roll myths, shot through with a cartoonish sense of female desire, really is infantile. The appeal of Kim Gordon is completely different. She came from the New York art world of the early ’80s, co-founded one of the most admired bands of all time with her boyfriend and eventual husband Thurston Moore, and has now written an honest memoir about the whole thing. She’s one of the most respected personalities in rock music, who somehow obtained a license in the world of male-dominated culture to combine the impossible—to be both sexy and smart, mature and attractive, a mother and an artist, confrontational and political and also eternally “cool.” How many women are able to do this in music or pop culture, or at all? Not many.Which makes me think: Isn’t Del Rey, precisely through her disturbing, masochistic fantasies of rape, mental abuse, and violent sex, and on top of that her adolescent rejection of feminism (“feminism doesn’t interest me as an idea,” she’s told interviewers on several occasions), a better icon for our time? Don’t her words and lyrics say more about the contemporary position of women than the mature, self-confident, and in the end somewhat commonplace pronouncements of Kim Gordon?
Feminism and class (and taste) are interesting categories through which to approach Gordon’s memoir. The book, which describes in detail her acrimonious breakup with Moore and the disbanding of Sonic Youth, must have been very hard to write. The beginning and the end, especially, are full of details of the brutal breakup, with the band carrying on for several months of touring after the fact. This makes for disturbing reading, and Gordon handles it with a wry sense of humor. But I can’t let go of a feeling that everything falls into place rather too easily, and feminism, class, and taste have a lot to do with it. Again: Gordon’s memoir is compelling—even gripping—and well-written, with atmospheric images and disarming honesty. But throughout something feels not quite right. Gordon writes with an absolute sureness of self that enables her to reminisce with the same confidence about her art and musical output as the artistic circles she has lived in for the last thirty-odd years, and also to rebuke the likes of Del Rey, Courtney Love, and several other women, including Lydia Lunch and Madonna. The women Gordon likes and admires are Kathleen Hanna, Kim Deal, her friend and Free Kitten bandmate and fashion label co-founder Julie Cafritz, Chloe Sevigny, and Sofia Coppola—a classy, laconic bunch.
While I was reading Girl in a Band, I was also reading a new book in the33 1/3 series on Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This, by an Australian author Anwen Crawford. Crawford hasn’t a negative thing to say about her subject and the album’s creator, Courtney Love. She challenges the persistent public hatred of Love and the accusation that she “killed” her husband and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. She furthermore makes a formidable case for the album itself, presenting it as a manifesto of positive, alternative, grassroots feminism, a feminism that has nothing to do with positive adjustment, good taste, or middle-class-ness, and in which self-confidence is born of exclusion—for being a woman, for being queer, for living on the periphery. Given the mutual history of Gordon and Love, whose paths crossed constantly in the early ’90s, it’s tempting to use the coincidence of these two books’ publication to talk about that specific moment in history, a moment crucial for Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Hole, and for the whole accession of “alternative” music to the mainstream in the United States. (...)
The differences of perception between Courtney Love and Kim Gordon were, and remain, profoundly a matter of taste, which is to say of class. Courtney Love never said that she came from a working class or poor background, and stressed a few times that she didn’t. (Love’s mother was a psychotherapist and her father was the first manager of the Grateful Dead.) But she was kitschy, exhibitionistic, shameless, and at the same time vulnerable and ready to show it. Love came from a “complicated” family background. She grew up without much attention, and was passed from relative to relative, and traveled as a teenager to the UK to follow around Liverpool bands Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. In the ’80s she worked as a jobbing actress and a stripper. Side by side, Gordon and Love represent mirror images of the Nineties—of music, femininity, feminism, and politics. If Gordon was tastefully highbrow, Love was lowbrow, “distasteful”: the disgraced widow, widely regarded as someone who was, if not directly responsible for her husband’s death, then at least insufficiently “helpful,” who was too mad, too freakish, too much of a selfish junkie careerist to look after her suffering husband. But that’s not how her fans saw her. (...)
In the end Gordon created a space in her music, where irony toward her own experiences or masks could protect her from her fears. Love confronted her traumas in the opposite way. Her act wasn’t to hide before the menace, it was to become that menace herself. Her voice is not one of beauty, but it’s powerful: she’s giving everything she has, until she can’t speak anymore. It’s funny how Gordon dismisses Courtney as somebody exploiting suffering (like in “Doll Parts,” where Love compares herself to a dismembered, killed doll, yet the one “with the most cake”), as if it was impossible for a woman to fake it and get away with it. But at the same time, Courtney lived through it, through the hate and contempt of the people around her, and still managed to create compelling music. If she often seemed like an attention-craving jackass, it’s because she actually refused to think she should behave any different from the way men in rock behave.
by Agata Pyzik, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Album art Hole's Live Through This
