she had timed it beautifully, reinventing herself as spiritual goddess
Madonna always attracts as much publicity for her personal behaviour as for her music. Her adoption of ancient Kabbalah in the late 1990s became a source of speculation. She told CNN, ‘studying Kabbalah is actually a very challenging thing to do.’ Belief in Kabbalah also requires followers to shed their egos, something the Material Girl is unlikely to do. She once said ‘she wouldn’t be happy until she was bigger than God.’
Within a decade Madonna had taken herself from heretic to devout. No wonder she said she wouldn’t change her life for anything. Money, wealth, fame, beauty, motherhood. The only thing missing was the love of a man.
In December 2000 she married British film director Guy Ritchie of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels fame, with whom she’d had a son Rocco earlier that year. Ritchie is ten years her junior. The two set up home me in a house in Notting Hill, West London, with Lourdes, Rocco and the nannies, servants and personal assistants.
In 2001 she hit the road on the Drowned world tour, which featured songs from Ray of Light and Music. It was the first time audiences had seen her since 1993 and fans lined up in their thousands to get a glimpse. At forty-three, Madonna a was incredibly agile. A relentless yoga and dietary regime had kept her in top shape.
The 2003 album American Life featured the techno influence of Mirwais. It was her worst sales performer, not even reaching a million copies in the USA. The touchy subject matter of the title song, and its overtly war-mongering video, clashed with the Iraqi War. Recognising she was out of synch with the public, Madonna recalled the video, claiming it was out of respect for soldiers and civilians caught up in the horror.
Desperate to regain the headlines, Madonna appeared on the MTV awards French-kissing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. This time the antic wasn’t shocking, just boring—and a little sad.
Just when it looked like she had lost her grip, her Reinvention tour became the biggest grossing tour of 2004. With her 2005 album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, she was back on top, rocketing to number one around the globe. It was a triumphant return to her dance club roots and was firmly steeped in the musical genre Madonna had claimed as her own more than twenty years and 250 million records ago. Hard Candy of 2008 was Madonna’s most sexual album, more graphic than Erotica. That didn’t stop it topping the charts in the USA, Britain, Australia, Canada and countries throughout Asia and Europe. In 2009 Madonna said goodbye to husband Guy Ritchie. It didn’t take long for photos of her with her latest love conquests to appear in the tabloids. Divorce gave her more column inches than marriage and she played that hand heavily.
Whether you’re for or against her, Madonna has undeniably influenced popular culture, her insatiable appetite for power and fame, making her a true rock chick.
KIM GORDON
Noise Queen
Kim Gordon Crowned the Queen Mother of Punk or the Godmother of Grunge, depending on your perspective, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon has been led into the realm of music by her love of art — drawn in by a handsome young punk, Thurston Moore, her lover and musical collaborator for more than twenty-fi ve years.
Their band Sonic Youth has its own flavour made of the 1980s no wave, noise, alternative and experimental music genres, but with its own signature sound. Their music is still relevant today to both diehard fans and newcomers.
Born on 23 April 1953 in Ferguson, Missouri, Kim Althea Gordon, is the younger of a pigeon pair. She has a brother named Keller. In 1958, when Kim was five, the Gordon’s moved to Rochester, New York. Over the coming years Kim also spent time in Hawaii and Hong Kong. But the family’s base was in Los Angeles where her father was a lecturer in sociology at UCLA. Her brother was into the hits of the day, quintessential 1960s music, including Bob Dylan and Kim shared his interest.
Both her parents held progressive outlooks. They sent Kim to University High School in LA where she could explore her artistic side. She took private dance lessons and art classes. After graduating high school in 1971, Kim studied art at Santa Monica College. But her father convinced her to study for a degree at York University in Toronto, Canada. Kim moved there in 1975 to study dance and the arts. She also performed in a band at the Ann Arbour Film Festival.
But soon she was back in LA studying at Otis Art Institute of LA County. Much of her work involved appropriation—finding objects to create art from. Kim favoured advertisements in magazines. Music, pop culture and painting were also interests. She graduated in early 1977 and at 24 made her way to New York.
Kim earned a living doing odd jobs while she tried her hand at everything from writing articles to playing the drums. She waitressed, painted upper-class apartments and pretended to be a secretary (she didn’t type). One of the best day jobs was working in a copy shop frequented by the art crowd. Artists would come into the shop to make copies of their work, print off flyers for exhibitions or create fanzines. The graffiti-neoexpressionist artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, was a customer.
Home was a typical rundown walk-up on the Lower East Side where junkies and prostitutes prowled day and night. Kim’s mentor Dan Graham lived upstairs. Graham was a conceptual artist who Kim had met when he’d given a lecture at Otis in LA. He introduced her to the New York art world and to the secrets of the Lower East Side with its clubs and human curios.
In 1980 she made another live musical appearance, this time in one of Graham’s performance art pieces at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, a gig that gave Kim the music virus.
Not long after, Kim first saw Moore performing with the Coachmen at Manhattan club Plugg on West 24th in Chelsea. Within months they were living together. Moore, a Boston, a gig that gave Kim the music virus. guitarist and singer, began to teach Kim bass. She was still learning when they took the stage at A’s in SoHo in December 1980 to play an experimental musical set under the name Red Milk. Performing with them were Dave Keay (drums) and Anne DeMarinis (keyboards), the first of many lineups. The gig lasted fifteen minutes and was a cacophony of insanely loud and incoherent noise.
After Red Milk came the Arcadians, with whom Kim played her first gigs at CBGB in January 1981. Then came Sonic Youth, who debuted at Club 57 in May. The name is a combination of Sonic, from Patti Smith’s husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and DJ Big Youth.
Sonic Youth’s first real break came at the Noise Festival that year at White Columns, an art gallery in New York. The festival ran for nine days and was centred on experimental music. Glenn Branca, who created symphonic scores for multiple electric guitars and percussion and who Moore would later play with, was on the bill as well as Rhys Chatham, Dog Eat Dog and Ad Hoc Rock.
By December 1981, when Sonic Youth recorded its first EP at Radio City Music Hall’s recording studios, the line-up had changed again—Lee Ranaldo was on guitar with Moore. Glenn Branca was so taken with the band that he started Neutral Records to sign them. The eponymous EP featured five songs: Kim’s ‘I Dreamed I Dream’, and ‘The Good and the Bad’, ‘I Don’t Want to Push It’, ‘She is Not Alone’ and ‘The Burning Spear’.
Kim wrote the lyrics to ‘I Dreamed I Dream’ from slogans and words she’d read in magazine advertisements—another example of using appropriation, as she had done in her art school days. Moore and Ranaldo played their guitars at full throttle and used power drills and metal pipes to create an exchange of noise that would define Sonic Youth’s sound. The band hit the road on a six-date tour. They didn’t sell many copies of the EP, but that didn’t dampen spirits. Kim and the rest of Sonic Youth weren’t looking for fame and fortune. They just wanted to make music. Getting paid for it was a bonus.
Their first LP Confusion is Sex was released in April 1983. Reviewers grappled to describe the assault on their senses. One compared listening to the album with major dental surgery. Another likened it to Hell. But there was consensus that Sonic Youth was pushing the boundaries in the way
no other band had before.
Another two tours followed, but now they were playing to audiences in Europe and drawing the biggest crowds to date—up to a hundred hyped-up, aggressive and out-of-control indie music fans who were crazy for the band. They played in fields, industrial sites and discothèques in Italy, Germany and Switzerland. And slept wherever they could find a floor or a couch. It wasn’t glamorous and often Kim and Moore, the only couple on tour, would find themselves sharing with another band member. But this lack of privacy didn’t faze Kim and few outside the band would have known she and Moore were a couple, they were so understated.
Tired from touring and irritated by a perceived lack of support from their label, Sonic Youth split with Neutral Records. By 1984 they were without a contract. They continued to make music and everyone went back to their day jobs to make ends meet.
On 9 June Kim and Moore were married in Bethel, Connecticut. Sonic Youth went back to Europe where the band had its strongest following. Drummer Bob Bert was ditched during the tour, and Steven Shelley, ex-Crucifucks, signed up. Shelley has been at the musical heart of Sonic Youth ever since and the line-up has stayed stable since.
Around this time Kim teamed up with Lydia Lunch, an avant-garde performance artist who was part of the Greenwich Village crowd she hung with. They performed together only once as an all-female noise-rock duo on the LP Naked in the Garden Hills.
Leaving behind another label, Homestead, Sonic Youth signed to SST. Their first album for the label EVOL (‘love’ spelt backwards) was released in 1986. It was their highest selling album to date, clocking up forty thousand copies in the first year of release. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Like other bands of that era, Sonic Youth had signed away publishing rights before they knew what they were doing. That experience caused Kim to call in a lawyer to go over the SST contract before they put pen to paper.
Sister followed in 1988 and gave the band their first Rolling Stone review. The magazine called it a ‘howling broadside’. Sonic Youth also recorded a cover of Madonna’s ‘Into the Groove’ called ‘Into the Groovey’, under the alias Ciccone Youth. The dance clubs in Britain lapped it up.
Sonic Youth’s style of music was enjoying a level of success it hadn’t seen before. The band was finally attracting attention from the major labels. They met with Atlantic and Sony, but settled for Geffen. Their contemporaries, such as R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü, had consistently delivered respectable sales figures. Now it was Sonic Youth’s turn to enjoy commercial success with a major label behind them.
At the end of the 1980s, Sonic Youth played to their biggest audience ever at the Ritz in New York. And toured the Soviet Union. Rolling Stone declared their double LP Daydream Nation, ‘the sound of the New Rock Nation rising’. Record Mirror claimed Sonic Youth the ‘best band in the Universe’.
Kim’s celebrity rose beyond the band’s diehard fans. It was spurred on by the release of their music video for ‘Kool Thing’, from the album Goo (1990). The video was peppered with images of a sexy new-look Kim, who at one turn is wearing black vinyl, at another sparkling silver or all white. Boots, hotpants, halterneck tops. Faux fur. The words ‘sex symbol’ became to appear with her name.
In the early 1990s Sonic Youth played the Reading Festival in Britain where incredulously Kim made friends with Courtney Love, whom she deemed a real talent. She was so enamoured with Love and her band Hole that she produced their debut album Pretty on the Inside with Gumball frontman Don Fleming. Around the same time, Sonic Youth toured with Neil Young. At the other end of the musical spectrum was an upcoming band from Seattle, Nirvana. Sonic Youth and Nirvana were together on the Year Punk Broke tour. And Kim was instrumental in getting Nirvana signed to Geffen.
By the time 1995’s Washing Machine was released, Sonic Youth had put down ten albums. They were being hailed as the most prolific of the indie bands.
In the year she turned forty Kim fell pregnant with daughter Coco. While Coco was a baby Kim recorded another two original albums, A Thousand Leaves and SYR 4: Goodbye 20th Century. As the year 2000 approached, Sonic Youth played to a sell-out crowd in Paris, at Mutualit’T theatre in the Latin Quarter.
Touring was what the band did. There hadn’t been a year since their formation that Sonic Youth hadn’t gone on the road. In the 2000s they crossed the Atlantic many times to satiate the hunger of their European fans. Sonic Youth is still creating new music. Loud music. The Eternal, released in 2009, was their highest ranking album on the Billboard Independent Charts and the Billboard 200.
Throughout her career, Kim has been somewhat of an enigma. As one journalist said, ‘Attempting to pin a label on Kim Gordon is like trying to understand the lyrics of Sonic Youth’s songs: it’s beside the point.’
As well as her work with Sonic Youth, she’s dabbled in side projects. Free Kitten, her collaboration with Julie Cafritz and Yoshimi P-We, released a debut album, Sentimental Education, in 1997 and eleven years later the second, Inherit. Kim once said, ‘Music is really supposed to be about freedom’. She continues to spread her wings and soar.
CHRISSY AMPHLETT
A Wild Child
She embodied everything that is rock’n’roll—her lyrics were guttural and the music was driven by rock guitar rifts, electronic keyboards and a thumping bass line and drums. Sex was Chrissy clad in an outrageous schoolgirl uniform with suspenders and high heels. Drugs were ever present as was booze. The Divinyls were a party band. The sneering, pouting quick-tempered retorts she dealt everyone who crossed her path, though, belonged to her alone.
Chrissy was quick to develop a scary reputation. Her eyes could spit venom at anyone who dared look at her. She had firmly planted the rock queen crown on her head and woe betide anyone who thought they were worthy of the royal attention. She was monstrously intimidating and incredibly fantastic. Everyone loved to hate her, but no one could deny the forcefulness of her personality. She oozed rock chick charisma and was magnificent in her reign.
Chrissy started life as Christina, born in the seaside town of Geelong on the Victorian coast in 1959. Geelong then was regional, not part of Melbourne’s urban sprawl as it is today. She was the younger of two daughters. Like most kids who lived by the sea, she gravitated to the beach on weekends, smoking pot and watching the surfers while car radios blared the Rolling Stones, Dylan, the Beatles and Sly and the Family Stone.
She found her voice at a young age and would often break into song. Sitting around the fire with her mates after a day’s surfing, Chrissy was the songbird. Singing ran in the family—she was the cousin of Little Patti, who had enjoyed success as a singer in the 1960s. Chrissy received more schtick about her famous relative than she did kudos for her strong vibrato voice. She sucked it in and kept on singing.
she had watched Debbie Harry climbing the charts and was inspired by the rock persona that Harry had created
Dropping out of school at fifteen, she wanted to be a rock singer. Heading for the big smoke of Melbourne, she hung around the live music scene, which was thriving in the early 1970s, and sang in a couple of bands. Daisy Clover took her to Sydney as the support act for Darryl Cotton and Zoot. One Ton Gypsy was an eight-piece ensemble playing Joe Cocker. But she was restless.
At seventeen she headed to London with a girlfriend on the Fairstar Princess ocean liner. For the next three years Chrissy bummed around Europe, forming impromptu rock groups and busking wherever she happened to be. The crowd she picked up with always had acid, pot and vodka on hand. Chrissy indulged in whatever was on the go. She lived in squats in London and pensiones in Spain and Italy. A little trouble with the Spanish police meant two months in prison and an escort to the border.
Facing her twentieth birthday, Chrissy determined to get serious about music. She flew back to Melbourne ready to start her rock career. She had watched Debbie Harry and was inspired by the rock persona that Harry had created. Chrissy wanted a taste of that l
ife, and she knew her voice could take her there.
She skirted around the edges of the music industry, performing in Let My People Come, a bizarre musical that had critics and the moral fraternity up in arms about its nudity and sexual dialogue. At one point, Chrissy’s character, the porn queen Linda Lips, appeared wearing a corset and curlers in her pubic hair to sing ‘Cum in My Mouth’. After the show closed in Melbourne, Chrissy headed with the production to Sydney. There she threw herself headlong into the rock’n’roll scene. She began smoking heroin, but shied away from mainlining—too many of the surf crowd of her youth had died shooting smack.
Working at whatever musical jobs came her way, Chrissy sang with radio station 2CH’s choir and had a part in Jesus Christ Superstar as a back-up singer and understudy for Marcia Hines’s Mary Magdalene. Singing in the musical and the choir paid the bills, but Chrissy wanted to be a rock singer. She formed a band, Baton Rouge, with Shayna Stewart, another singer in Superstar, and Jeremy Paul from the show’s band. But Baton Rouge was a basic covers band and she quickly became bored.
In 1980 she made the first significant connection, the one that would put her on the path to becoming a rock star. From the moment she met guitarist Mark McEntee she knew he was her creative doppelganger. The pair threw themselves into songwriting with a passion, producing what became iconic Divinlys songs, including ‘Science Fiction’, ‘Elsie’ and Chrissy’s ticket to rock stardom, ‘Boys in Town’.
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