Girl in a Band: A Memoir

"Kim was the bass player in Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth were a very innovative band that came out of the New York, ‘No Wave’ scene. In all honesty, Kim Gordon used to slightly annoy me, I always found her a bit humourless and pretentious. She was much older when I was on the scene, she was about 40 when touring with Nirvana. However, I think to her chagrin, she was always very elegant, and very beautiful. She’d try her best to punk herself up but in truth, she always looked like she worked for McKinsey. Initially, I didn’t get Sonic Youth at all. That was my failing; I was too narrow-minded. Sonic Youth were very innovative, some of their stuff is fantastic. And the story behind all this, the story she tells in her book, is really interesting. The book has changed my opinion of Kim completely. When she was growing up, she had an older brother who had incipient severe mental health problems. They weren’t understood at the time, but he was a paranoid schizophrenic. He gave her a hard time, a really hard time. She was always trying to prove herself to him. This is the root of why I thought she wanted to be cool at any cost, which I didn’t like. Genuinely cool people don’t care if they’re cool or not, or at least learn to give the impression that they don’t care. But with Kim, it was clear that image was very important. I suspect her art background was probably a factor… Together with her boyfriend Thurston Moore, she formed Sonic Youth. I think even more than is usually the case, this band and her relationship with Thurston constituted her whole identity. Kim and Thurston had a child and then moved from New York out to the country, where they were treated a bit like they’d arrived from Mars. Kim, of course, knew everyone in the New York scene. Her take on The Heartbreakers was that they were just washed up junkies, that they were useless. Which is probably a lot more accurate than the ‘second coming’ stuff you get on the band. “The late philosopher Roger Scruton loved REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’” Anyway, the tragedy came when Kim discovered Thurston had been having an affair, an affair he wasn’t really prepared to end. They separated personally and split the band, and it broke her to pieces. Her entire identity was destroyed. It’s a searingly honest book. She can really write. The book ends on a reasonably up note: Kim seems to have found herself again, and gone back to the art scene, and there is some happiness there. But the whole setup—from the relationship with the brother, through wanting to be cool, wanting to be less middle class, getting with this ultra-cool band—Kurt was a huge fan of Sonic Youth—and then the whole thing turned out to be unsupported; a house of cards. It’s a tragic and brutally honest book, but brilliantly, brilliantly written."