[dead_battery]

She lived on grilled and buttered Chock Full O’Nuts corn muffins. She met a man, and they bonded over a guitar leaning against the wall in her Eldridge Street apartment, a Drifter discarded by another woman – as it turned out, he knew the woman, and he’d played that guitar before. They moved in together, and started a band. It was called, for a bit, Male Bonding, and a few other things, and then it was called Sonic Youth.

She couldn’t have been more conscious, the first time she picked up a bass guitar, that she was crossing a threshold – between listening to and making rock and roll – and it was different for a woman on the other side. In 1980, before they started the band, she’d written an essay about No Wave testosterone for Real Life magazine, called ‘Trash Drugs and Male Bonding’, deciphering a Rhys Chatham performance as a ritual of male intimacy through musical heroics. How serious was she when she wrote the following much quoted reverie, in a tour journal a couple of years later? ‘I always fantasised what it would be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys who have crossed their guitars together, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat, that powerful form of intimacy only achieved onstage in front of other people, known as male bonding.’

It seems that, under the proto-slacker sarcasm, she was dead serious. She was obsessed at the time, she writes, with the way men used guitars, like women and video games, to be close, the way they needed a triangle to get ‘some version of intimacy’: ‘I wanted to push up close to whatever it was men felt when they were together onstage – to try to ink in that invisible thing … I joined a band, so I could be inside that male dynamic, not staring in through a closed window but looking out.’ That the memoir is called Girl in a Band (from the lyrics to ‘Sacred Trickster’ on their final album, The Eternal, which is in turn a question scores of journalists asked Gordon: ‘What’s it like to be a girl in a band?’), and that this is still a good title in 2015, means both that the threshold between consuming and playing music is still marked by gender, and that it’s marked differently now, thanks to her.

Because there she was, looking out from inside the triangle, returning – as she puts it in the book – the audience’s gaze, but also looking out from inside herself. She was also listening, I can see now when I watch the countless concert videos on YouTube, and perhaps that’s the more powerful thing. She wasn’t a natural onstage, she was an imperfect instrument, which was what made her so riveting: she was able to show herself breaking through whatever part of her gave a shit about that. ‘I’ve never thought of myself as a singer with a good voice, or even as a musician,’ she writes. ‘I’m able to put myself out there by feeling as though I’m jumping off a cliff.’ She would reach for the rawest edge of her voice, not grooving with the bass in some conventionally sexy way so much as pacing forward and backwards with it, towards us and away from us. She was pulling the guitars and drums together, sometimes pushing them ahead, sometimes following a split second behind, while the band dodged what you wanted from music, allowing a pretty chorus now and then only to take it apart, make it drone when you wanted it to soar, collapse instead of gather into an anthem, scatter into dissonance instead of gathering into harmony, until music having become just sound became more fully music again.

*

Gordon had a huge influence on the Riot Grrrls, and she pays respect to Kathleen Hanna and the whole movement, especially their avoidance of all media. But what was so striking about Gordon onstage, and her part in the thirty years of Sonic Youth, was a bit different: there was an equality there, in the turn-taking; there was a dream, dreamed by at least some of her female fans, that even straight marriage could be a balanced partnership, and an artistic one, too. It was like that image of masculine-feminine collaboration Virginia Woolf uses – a man and woman getting into a cab together, to go somewhere – in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf claims the best writerly mind would be like that: collaborative within itself, androgynous by virtue of being man-womanly, or woman-manly. She and Moore were that onstage, and, as far as we could tell, in their lives and in the making of their music. For this to fall apart in a conventional way – ‘mid-life crisis, younger woman’ – broke a million hearts. Many of those readers will come to this book for the dirt on the ex-husband, the younger woman. And there’s a bit of that. But the book’s real revenge is quieter, and more important.

When I moved to Kim Gordon’s New York, it started disappearing, and then CBGB’s closed and now it all feels gone. ‘Did the 1990s ever exist?’ Gordon asks, near the end of the book. She has a habit of interrogating the audience, like that first Dan Graham performance in front of the mirror. About New York these days, she asks: ‘What’s this place all about?’ Some of her rawest anger is reserved for the new city: ‘The answer is consumption and moneymaking.’ It is a ‘city on steroids’, ‘more like a cartoon than anything real’, a ‘moated kingdom’. She lists the missing places: how can all the worlds that made you and that you made disappear so completely, and if they’re gone does it mean they were false?

A conventional memoir might exploit our nostalgia for the lost city. And there is a dirty old New York here, and a record of the seemingly easy cross-currents of inspiration in a pre-corporate underground art and music scene, but there’s none of the melodramatic romanticising of being a young artist in New York that you get in, say, the blockbuster memoir by Patti Smith, Just Kids. If rock stars’ memoirs are supposed to reify our fantasy that artistic stardom can provide you with a ‘suspended adulthood’, as she puts it, she refuses to comply. This is a book about the very adult problem of having worked so hard at an artistic career that you can wake up to accidentally see a text message on your spouse’s phone and find your cities, your industry and your marriage irrevocably changed, all at the same time, in such a way that to sort out what is what, what you have done to get here, can ‘make your brain split open’. When you’ve been making your money touring with a band that’s broken up because of the aftermath of that text message, and you have to fund your daughter’s college education, revenge is, first and foremost, finding a new way to make money, on your own; in interviews, Gordon has been disarmingly frank about this memoir being exactly that.

But it’s more than that. It’s a record of a life lived as the rare artist who has managed to negotiate an industry vertiginous with corporate consolidation and technological change. Midway through, she stops recounting the story of her life, and starts listing, album by album, what she was thinking about, listening to, watching and reading as each of Sonic Youth’s albums got made. In the place where she should be telling us about wild rock star antics, dishing on what her marriage was really like, she records her intellectual labour, all those years inside that triangle, under the ‘pinnacle of energy’, between those bonding male guitarists. And when we might start getting nostalgic about the loss of a music industry that could pay a brand new experimental art rock band an advance big enough to make an album, and a time when such a band could make a living touring small venues, the time before Spotify and so on – instead of feeding our nostalgia, Gordon asks the reader these frank, big questions about what we consume when we consume rock and roll, why we pay ‘to watch the destruction of the artists’ own lives’.

Gordon regrets writing about Kurt Cobain even as she writes about him; she doesn’t want to contribute to that mythology, the suffering artist, the tragedy of grunge. She criticises Lana Del Rey for selling female suffering. The book ends not with catharsis but in an improvisatory stream of stories about audiences and artists who rebelled against each other. She’s taken ‘the rock star thing’, she tells us, as far as she can, and points us back to her artistic work – visual art and performance, and the experiments in sound that she’s doing in her new collaboration with Bill Nace, Body/Head. Their first album, Coming Apart, is improvisatory, smart, and if you want to imagine it pulsing with the anger and undoing of the last couple of years, you can. The opening line to ‘Trash Drugs and Male Bonding’, that essay she wrote before Moore and Sonic Youth and everything, was ‘Throughout one’s life, one becomes “out of tune”.’ She has always been interested in making music that is like that, like life. This question she doesn’t ask straight out, but it’s there: if you wanted this book to be about a life destroyed, why?