by Kim Gordon
Basically, the Noise Fest came about because there was nowhere else for downtown bands to go onstage and play. I organized an exhibition of visual art by some of the musicians playing the festival. Over a nine-day period, three to five bands performed nightly, one of which was Sonic Youth. Later, a cassette was put out, documenting the performance.
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THERE WERE SO many moments of formation for Sonic Youth; it’s hard to pinpoint one. In the beginning, the band was just Thurston, Lee Ranaldo, and me, with different drummers entering and exiting like pedestrians stopping to stare briefly at a shop window. We had many different names before deciding on Sonic Youth: Male Bonding, Red Milk, and the Arcadians. These were phrases taken from current passions, names that vanished as fast as moods. But as soon as Thurston came up with the name Sonic Youth, we simultaneously knew how we wanted the music to sound.
Lee had played with David Linton at the Noise Fest. We had seen him before, playing around the city, and asked him to join us. We lined up a couple of gigs as Sonic Youth. The first practices were us sitting in a loose circle playing with no drummer at all. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call “playing,” to be honest. We strummed and made droning sounds on our guitars. That’s when Thurston came up with the idea of playing his guitar percussively, with a drumstick. We didn’t have a drummer, and there was no other way to keep a beat.
We were a baby band and, as such, had no idea what we were doing. Thurston, as I said, was a longtime student of CBGB. CBGB was his chapel, his temple, and so, with concrete logic, Thurston said he would go ask the owner, Hilly Kristal, for a gig. Just by showing up at CBGB so often, Thurston felt he’d established a relationship with Hilly, or that at the very least Hilly would recognize him as the tall, lanky kid who said hi to him almost every night. Thurston was successful, and Sonic Youth got a slot at CBGB as the first of four bands on a bill. There is no worse positioning for a band. But we approached what we were doing as the first in a series of stepping stones, one of which included recording our first album.
It was an EP, recorded in 1981. Five songs total. You could listen to the whole thing in less than half an hour. Sonic Youth, the EP—I’m not sure what it was to be honest. We recorded it for Glenn Branca’s label. Josh Baer, the director of White Columns, had asked Glenn to create a record label. Glenn said yes, the label was christened Neutral Records, and Sonic Youth was its very first artist.
To put it mildly, we didn’t have a lot of money for recording. Finally we scored a deal at a place called Plaza Sound, a big, old, spectacular room in Rockefeller Center where Blondie, the Ramones, and entire symphony orchestras had recorded, as rumor had it the place was owned by Columbia Records. We were allotted two eight-hour sessions. Our then drummer, Richard Edson, had a big hand in helping structure our music before we got started. Richard also played in a band called Konk, which was considered “cool” in the downtown scene but was stylistically very different from us. Konk was rhythmic and minimal, and Sonic Youth was dissonant and wild, but first records succeed now and again because you don’t quite know what you’re doing but you go ahead and do it anyway.
First we recorded all the basics, coming back later to do the vocals and mix. We had no specific tunings—they were either regular ones or else we detuned. From start to finish, the entire process took about two days. It was the first time I saw how our big loud sound was transformed in the end into something relatively contained. It was a complaint we would hear from many over the years—that Sonic Youth’s sound wasn’t nearly as intense recorded as it was live.
A lot of the first songs we all wrote and recorded were droning, with vague middles and even vaguer endings. “I dreamed, I dream . . .” was originally done as an instrumental. The lyrics were random. All of us, I remember, wrote down lines on a piece of paper, and when it came time to overdub the vocal, I randomly cherry-picked from the list. It’s a way of working I sometimes still use. We told the sound engineer we wanted a big bass sound, like Johnny Rotten’s post–Sex Pistols band, Public Image Ltd. I whispered my vocals and Lee Ranaldo added his own vocal accompaniment.
“The days we spend go on and on.” Those lyrics somehow became a foreshadowing of all the events, all the music, to come. Sonic Youth would go on for three decades, and our first record was reissued twenty-five years after its initial release. Critics would point out how meaningful the lyrics were, not realizing how randomly they came about in the first place.
When Thurston and I finally left the Rockefeller Center studio, it was four A.M. A blizzard was coming in, the sidewalks and streets piling up with snow. It was New York at its most muted and beautiful. We had our big amps with us, but we couldn’t find a taxi. Back then New York still had its fleet of checker cabs, big boxy things, tailor-made for moving equipment, and we eventually flagged one and shoved our lo-fi gear into the trunk and backseat and squeezed ourselves in. There we were, two transplanted downtowners, immigrants amid the hard bones of those tall, unlit skyscrapers, as the heavy snow padded down. For a few moments, I felt like I belonged to some grown-up uptown showbiz world, and then the cab prowled home through the snow back down to Eldridge Street.
That studio worked like a good-luck charm for us. When the master came in, Glenn was pleasantly surprised by how good we sounded. The EP’s cover was taken from a self-portrait the artist Jeff Wall made where he basically created a doppelgänger of himself in an enlarged print light box. We copied the idea, adding our picture twice over, so we came across as a band of eight instead of just four. Later, when Sonic Youth played Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the first time, and I met Niagara, the lead singer of Mike Kelley’s Destroy All Monsters, she said to me, “I can’t believe you let yourself be photographed without lipstick.”
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Photo by Alex Antich, originally published in Purple magazine
WHEN I FIRST began playing onstage, I was pretty self-conscious. I was just trying to hold my own with the bass guitar, hoping the strings wouldn’t snap, that the audience would have a good experience. I wasn’t conscious of being a woman, and over the years I can honestly say I almost never think of “girliness” unless I’m wearing high heels, and then I’m more likely to feel like a transvestite. When I’m at my most focused onstage, I feel a sense of space with edges around it, a glow of self-confident, joyful sexiness. It feels bodiless, too, all weightless grace with no effort required. The need to be a woman out in front never entered my mind at all until we signed with Geffen.
But in the beginning, I was just trying to make it through. No one in the band ever thought about being on a major record label. None of us were thinking that far ahead. Thurston was the one who often came up with what to do next.
What do bands do after making a record? They go on tour. It seemed like the right thing to do, and somehow we got ourselves a gig at the Walker Art Center, a progressive museum in Minneapolis. We also got to tour in England for the first time. For the kind of music we were making, it was frankly easier to find an audience in Europe. Bands are treated better over there, which I chalk up to the socialist governments and the way clubs double as cultural centers that governments partially fund.
In the early eighties, the music scene in England was large for an island, chaotic and cutthroat. Musicians literally paid to get onto a bill. Via a friend, we landed a gig opening up for an industrial band, with another girl named Danielle Dax opening for us. Before the show, Danielle cornered me in the bathroom. “Look,” she said, “there are a lot of important people coming here tonight to see me.”
Her meanness and competitiveness were almost shocking—it was like junior high all over again. Like a lot of English acts, Danielle had a specific look about her, a mask, an almost freakish persona. For the English, rock and roll has a lot to do with climbing over that country’s class structure, kicking out the bars of their birth. They saw us, four New Yorkers, as a bunch of middle-class brats who probably lived in lofts right above art galleries, who were putting on an act that wasn’t rea
l, wasn’t authentic, wasn’t earned. This is made all the more ironic by the fact that many British bands, including the Beatles, came right out of art school.
Our first London show was a semi-disaster, with one of my bass strings breaking midway through. Thurston ended up hurling his guitar into the audience, and then the metal grille that separated bands from the audience slowly lowered down and the show ended. Some people thought Sonic Youth was the best thing on the bill, while others thought we were pretentious and arty. It wasn’t a perfect introduction to England.
I also felt limited as a singer. When the band first started, I went for a vocal approach that was rhythmic and spoken, but sometimes unleashed, because of all the different guitar tunings we used. When you listen to old R&B records, the women on them sang in a really fierce, kick-ass way. In general, though, women aren’t really allowed to be kick-ass. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don’t allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don’t tend to last very long. They’re jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that’s its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing!
I’ve never thought of myself as a singer with a good voice, or even as a musician. I’m able to put myself out there by feeling as though I’m jumping off a cliff. Neil Young once said that it’s more about having an authentic voice than a good voice, though of course Neil has a great voice. From growing up listening to jazz, I picked up another, cooler aspect of the female voice—the idea of space, and in-between-ness, and the importance of phrasing. It’s worth remembering that from the beginning, rock and roll was never based in musical training or technique, just as punk rock was never about being a good musician and No Wave was at its core about pure expression. Punk rock changed everything, including the whole idea of being a “rock star.” It’s strange to look back and listen to lyrics from 1960s bands and realize they felt unease when they began to gain fame that separated them from their “brothers and sisters” and from “the movement.” I always loved “Out of My Mind,” the Buffalo Springfield song, where Neil sang about rock star entitlement, that the only sound he could hear was the screams outside his limousine.
The rock star thing has always felt dishonest to me—stylized and gestural, even goofy. I’ve always felt uncomfortable giving people what they want or expect. Dan Graham once described Lydia Lunch onstage to me, how Lydia just stood there, refusing to move. “Lydia Lunch is a genius!” Dan said. “She is really frigid—see how she doesn’t move her body at all? She doesn’t want to give anything to the audience.” Even though Lydia had a much scarier persona than I ever did, I could relate to that. Later I grew to really enjoy playing bass; it was a physical thing that connected to my love of dance, though when you’re playing an instrument onstage, it’s hard to feel that it can really move people. Eventually, when Jim O’Rourke joined the band, I was freed up to just sing, and move around more.
When Sonic Youth started out, I really made an effort to punk myself out, to lose any and all associations with my middle-class West L.A. appearance and femininity. When I first arrived in New York, Rhys Chatham would always say to me, “You know, Kim, you’re always going to look middle-class.” To be more punk, he was implying, you had to be somehow uglier, as if there was an authenticity to be found in looking like an underdog. What Rhys meant, I think, was that I was who I was.
There was a popular look at the time—the vintage dress, the makeup—that just wasn’t me, nor was that the way people dressed in the art world. I didn’t fit into the downtown scene, and I knew I was never going to be like Lydia Lunch. I was, and still am, more of the push-everything-else-under-and-let-it-all-out-in-the-music kind of girl. Otherwise I’d probably be a sociopath.
A lot has been written about Sonic Youth, so what follows are the songs, or the albums, or the times that I have the most to say about or remember the best. “Addicted to Love,” for example, wasn’t and isn’t a song I liked, but the conceptual approach we took made the whole thing work. “The Sprawl” was fun to perform, and the music was always enveloping, whereas, for example, the lyrics of “Tunic” had a much broader meaning than I ever realized at the time. Here is what stands out for me.
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Confusion Is Sex: “Shaking Hell”
IN LATE 1982, the year we came out with our first full-length album, Confusion Is Sex, Dan Graham was researching the Shakers. This cultish religion that came out of the early days of America’s religious-freedom-seeking escapists fascinated Dan, especially the practice of female members dancing themselves into a frenzied, almost orgasmic hysteria. The juxtaposition of this with what were otherwise very conservative beliefs and rituals was bizarre to him.
Dan wondered what rock-and-roll music and the Shaker sect had in common. Both were variations of ecstatic worship to his mind. Shakerism, he wrote, was akin to early American hardcore, with the shaven heads of the boys in the audience at punk rock concerts resembling the heads of some exotic monastic tribe. Dan was fascinated by Patti Smith and the intensity and sorcery of her performances, as was Thurston. Dan eventually made a documentary art film called Rock My Religion, and in it he included a live clip of Sonic Youth performing our song “Shaking Hell.”
The lyrics—“She finally discovered she’s a . . . He told her so . . .”—related to the idea of women as creations of film and advertising. I’d been reading the great feminist writer/filmmaker Julia Kristeva’s essays about the “male gaze,” as well as other books related to the idea of the always-passive woman and the always-active male protagonist.
On a more personal level, “Shaking Hell” mirrors my struggle with my own identity and the anger I felt at who I was. Every woman knows what I’m talking about when I say girls grow up with a desire to please, to cede their power to other people. At the same time everyone knows about the sometimes aggressive and manipulative ways men often exert power in the world, and how by using the word empowered to describe women, men are simply maintaining their own power and control. Years after I’d left L.A., I could still hear my crazy brother’s voice in my ear, whispering, I’m going to tell all your friends that you cried.
Back then, and even now, I wonder: Am I “empowered”? If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a “strong woman”? Sometimes another voice enters my head, shooing these thoughts aside. This one tells me that the only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don’t fall to your death.
Though it’s hard to recall a time when she wasn’t a part of the scene, I remember when Madonna made her entrance into the world of pop culture. Madonna was exploiting her own sexuality, willingly packaging and altering herself to please audiences. Me, I was a mutt, tucking my California style under East Coast plainness—“the librarian type hee, hee,” as Mike Kelley would later describe my look back then.
With “Shaking Hell,” I was trying to push my inner self out, with an edge that matched who I had become in New York. I bleached my hair unevenly, then dyed it magenta. In retrospect, it’s ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to
do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore. I was going for a punky look, without really feeling I owned it. Later my look evolved into tomboy mixed with a slightly sexy Françoise Hardy cool—oversized indie rock T-shirts with boots, or corduroy shorts with seventies Jane Birkin–like tees on top, scoop-necked, flocked, with printed letters. My favorite one said GRACIAS. Still, I’ve always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.
The emotional intensity of the vocals in that song matched the music in a shamanistic way I don’t think I’ve ever repeated. “Shaking Hell” was messy and bone-chilling to sing, especially when the music dropped to a low rumble during the “Shake, shake, shake” ending. It was as if the ground had dropped out from beneath me, and I was left floating, until my voice shot out and carried me. I wanted to take the audience with me, knowing, as I did, that the crowd wanted to believe in me, and us, as we created something that had never existed before.
We recorded Confusion Is Sex in the basement studio belonging to our friend Wharton Tiers. Wharton was the building superintendent, and whenever we recorded, he was professional enough to shut off the boiler. Years later, Julie Cafritz from Pussy Galore and I did an interview promoting an album from the side project we did together, Free Kitten. One of us made the mistake of mentioning Wharton and the boiler. We assumed no one would ever read the interview, but unfortunately one of the tenants did, and Wharton lost his job. I still feel bad about that.