Sonic Youth Gossip - Kim G vs Cool J

source Wikipedia

The album featured the single "Kool Thing", on which Chuck D from the rap group Public Enemy guested. The song is purported to be about the disillusionment that Gordon experienced after interviewing LL Cool J for Spin Magazine the previous year. "Are you going to liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression?" Gordon asks in the song.[4] "Kool Thing" became the song that many casual music fans associate with the band.

source Phoenix New Times

A couple of years back, Sonic Youth singer-bassist Kim Gordon interviewed L.L. Cool J for Spin magazine in an attempt to get a feminist/hard-core perspective on rap's estimable MC. Early in the interview, it became obvious that the two shared little common ground. Their clashes were sometimes comic, as when Gordon tried to turn L.L. on to the Stooges, while all L.L. could talk about was his love of Bon Jovi. At other points--like when the rapper asserted, "The guy has to have control over his woman"--you could tell Gordon would have loved to deck him with her notepad.

This head-butting interview served as the inspiration for Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing," the star single of the band's major-label debut Goo. Gordon says her Cool J encounter proved that New York's hard-core and rap scenes might as well exist on different planets.

"It was totally ridiculous for me to assume that we had anything in common," she admits in a telephone interview from a tour stop in New Orleans, Louisiana. "That's why I tried to make the article show how elite and small the downtown scene that I come out of is. I was trying to make fun of myself. I don't know if that came across."

Actually Gordon makes a stronger statement with "Kool Thing" than she did with the Spin piece. She injects irony into the pair's culture clash, at one point even making fun of her politics by asking Cool J stand-in Chuck D, "Are you going to liberate us girls from the male, white corporate oppression?"
Boosted by mainstream radio play and medium rotation on MTV, "Kool Thing" has become the band's most successful single to date. Of course, there have been some compromises. Gordon originally wanted to wear a beret and carry an Uzi in the "Kool Thing" video, part of a "poseur-leftist girl lusting after Black Panthers" concept. Her bosses at Geffen Records quickly vetoed that.