http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n06/kristin-dombek/woman-manly
Woman/Manly
Kristin Dombek
BUYGirl in a Band by Kim Gordon
Faber, 288 pp, £14.99, February, ISBN 978 0 571 31383 9
‘Sound is war,’ a sound tech I know likes to say. He means that when you try to extend its life, things get messy. Sound is fragile and decays quickly; when you fight that, it can become wild. Plug a bunch of instruments into amplifiers to try to get the sound of a rock and roll band to vibrate in the ears of twenty people in some dirty little club and you have trouble on your hands. Everything affects everything else. I play a shitty bass guitar – open it up and it looks like someone took sandpaper to the wiring – and in every practice space and venue there’s a new interaction between my bass and the system or the room, a buzz or click or the sound of some radio transmission. Try to get clean, balanced sound that will soothe or terrify ten thousand people in an arena and you are playing a dangerous game with nature. To capture the sound of a band on a recording can be a process so laborious and stressful that a lot of bands don’t make it through the mixing process without breaking up. We work hard to extend and capture sound, copy it and make it represent, repeat or revise a narrow set of conventional rhythms and harmonies transmitted to us digitally, turn it into sonic wallpaper, something that lends a bit of movie-soundtrack significance to an experience, or just a kind of aural junk.
For thirty years, Sonic Youth turned the war of sound into a war on the reproducibility of music for consumption, and the failure to create the perfect rock product into music itself. I didn’t really get it, at first. I didn’t see them until they played Lollapalooza in 1995, by which time every indie rock kid was complaining that Lollapalooza was already lame and indie was no longer indie. Since guys liked Sonic Youth, learning to like them had seemed like a way to borrow a little male bonding, like wearing flannel, skipping class to drop acid, or fumbling my way through a hacky sack circle. Figuring out my sexuality in the 1990s came with the ambiguity of never knowing whether I was making out with boys in order to be like them, or trying to be like them in order to make out with them.
The day felt diffuse and ominous, as festival days can, but I was too young to know whether it was the day or me. Kurt Cobain had killed himself the year before, or, we suspected, had been murdered. His widow, Courtney Love, covered the Nirvana song ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ and the crowd booed and threw things at her until she started screaming at us. Cypress Hill was the only act that moved a few thousand Michigan kids out of our stoned, depressed stupor to dance. What I remember about Sonic Youth was that they seemed very rigorous about what they were doing – they reminded me of the intricate, dissonant classical music I’d learned about growing up. And there was Kim Gordon, lined up between Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, in the middle of the huge stage, not a token girl bass player, not a riot grrrl in an angry all-girl band, but a musician among musicians, standing next to her husband, to all appearances equal, taking turns. It meant something, the way she was, and I started listening.
I didn’t know that day that she was a new mother, that Cobain was her dear friend, or what it’s like to be in the rhythm section, how much she was keeping it all together up there. Since 1981, in New York City, Sonic Youth had been turning rock music into untamed sound and back again, and bringing this experimental work to a mainstream audience, whether we got it or not. They jammed drumsticks, drills, screwdrivers, rubber bands, and who knows what else into the bodies of their many guitars, which were often set up in previously unheard tunings. Their lyrics mocked and criticised the machinery of pop stardom and media sexism. They were collaborative and egalitarian, and seemed to have set up a kind of laboratory aimed at discovering new ways for sound, disordered and freed from the familiar forms, to be disturbing and sublime again. Their performances had a ritual quality. Gordon didn’t so much sing as incant. At the end of a song like ‘Teenage Riot’, Gordon and Moore and Ranaldo would sometimes draw out their last chords as long as physically possible before they faded away, walking slowly back and forth across the stage holding their guitars like sacramental objects, lifting them above their heads, rubbing them reverently or carelessly against their amps. They could do this for a very long time, until you heard notes that hadn’t previously existed, and things that definitely weren’t notes at all. They were going for ecstasy.
Whether grunge and indie rock would ever have sounded like they did, and would have reached as wide an audience, without Sonic Youth, whether they sold out, whether they’re overrated or one of the most important bands of all time – these matters have been taken up by countless music critics and fans for three decades, every guitar they used catalogued, every song analysed. (For an example of the hyperbole Sonic Youth can attract, see Matthew Stearns’s book on Daydream Nation, the album with the Richter candle on the cover, for the 33 1/3 series: ‘Certain records arrive like howling bullets at crux moments and split the face of music wide open, exposing long-concealed sonic musculature, ripping tonal tissue from previously unexplored sockets, and melding it all back together into a form at once oddly familiar but, at the same time, unrecognisable …’). I wasn’t that big a fan. But the Seattle scene that Sonic Youth helped to inspire sent grunge and lattes and angst east to my Midwestern city, and the New York where they lived and made music sent us thrift store leather, black jeans and black T-shirts, and a dream of avant-garde collaboration. It was their New York where I went to grow up.
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Kim Gordon moved there in 1979, to the city that she’d learned about in art school in LA – the New York of Judson Church and Yvonne Rainer, of Andy Warhol and Patti Smith and Lou Reed. It was disappearing as she arrived, as cities do. She wasn’t sure whether she should be a dancer or artist or filmmaker or writer or musician; what mattered was less what kind of artist than to be one, there. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen were recently dead, and she’d pretty much missed punk, Television, the Ramones, Lydia Lunch and Teenage Jesus. She caught the end of No Wave nihilism before it destroyed itself in fights over who should be included on a compilation album Brian Eno was trying to make. The tide was turning to New Wave and pop, and money was flooding into the art scene.
It’s the most conventional thing she’s done, Gordon has said in interviews, writing a memoir, and this much, at least, is a conventional story – the vague artistic ambitions, the disappearing cities. She gives a brief black-and-white memory of Rochester, New York, where she was born, its factories and aqueducts and cold winters, a city she’s forgotten ‘like any birth canal’. And then the California of her childhood and adolescence, where her ancestors had owned a ranch in what is now West Hollywood. Los Angeles in the 1960s was a ruin and a construction site. She walked with her friends inside the giant sewage pipes leading out to the ocean, played on the dirt mounds that would become on-ramps to the freeways about to be built, in a city vanishing even as she grew up inside it, until it was ‘overtaken by more cars, more gas stations, more malls, more bodies’ and mini-malls covered in terrible stucco, their parking lots filled with SUVs.
She writes of her father’s jazz records, most importantly John Coltrane. She had a schizophrenic older brother, who teased and bullied her throughout her childhood, leading her to turn off completely, to which she attributes what others have called her remote, detached demeanour, and the need to express the feelings she keeps hidden through art and music. The family lived for a year in Hawaii, and another in Hong Kong. In the late 1960s, they were back in an LA haunted by the Manson murders: ‘There was a sense of apocalyptic expanse, of sidewalks and houses centipeding over mountains and going on for ever, combined with a shrugging kind of anchorlessness. Growing up I was always aware of LA’s diffuseness, its lack of an attachment to anything other than its own good reflection in the mirror.’
Her New York had an art and music world as cosy and fertile as it always seems in an artist’s memoir, where all the people the artist meets are people we know, because of course they’re the ones she would mention. She slept on Cindy Sherman’s floor, worked at a copy shop with Jim Jarmusch’s girlfriend, and as a receptionist for Larry Gagosian’s gallery, where she met Richard Prince. These were the Basquiat 1980s, when before he made it big Julian Schnabel worked as a cook at Mickey’s, where Jeff Koons hung out. She admired female artists who were critiquing the commodification of art, like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Louise Lawler, and was friends with Dan Graham, who shepherded her through the downtown art and rock scenes, introduced her to Gerhard Richter. She did art installations in people’s homes, then at the White Columns gallery. Her first musical performance in New York was with Graham, in Performer/Audience/Mirror, as part of an all-girl band that was supposed to act out a rock show in front of a huge mirror, and comment on the audience between songs, disrupting their desire to consume the performance invisibly. The women didn’t do what they were supposed to do, Graham was upset, but Gordon felt something ‘lodging new in my brain’, realised that performing was like ‘a high-altitude ride’.