Music: Kim Gordon: Avant-garde doesn’t have to be young

Aging in pop, it’s a problem. For the artists who are aging, a pop cultural aspect, but also a cultural one, because in pop, i.e. in the commodification of bodies and their images, you can see the way in which aging is dealt with in our society can be observed under a magnifying glass. Although, artists is actually nonsense. In pop and elsewhere, it primarily affects female artists.

In the worst case scenario, men transform into a kind of likeable and still charismatic self-parody. If Mick Jagger is still alive, he will still be performing at 95. Madonna probably not – and if she does, then it will be accompanied by the same malice that has accompanied her for several years now and which, condensed, is pretty much the kind that affects older women when they dare to do what older men can do much more naturally , namely carry on as before.

In the case of rock music in general – i.e. across genders – there is the additional problem that its stories and myths are associated with virility and excess. Everything is easy in jazz in this respect, getting older is associated with knowledge and wisdom and mentorship. In rock, however, aging cannot be easily integrated into the genre’s own narrative.

The now 70-year-old guitarist, bassist, singer, visual artist and fashion label owner Kim Gordon has, with her two solo albums at the latest, developed a sound aesthetic that eliminates the automatically disparaging view of older pop artists as if in passing. With her band Sonic Youth, founded in the early 80s, Gordon combined avant-garde and rock. The traditional song structures were not destroyed, but were stretched into extensive feedback improvisations and connections to the new music of the 20th century. In 1999, Sonic Youth released the album “Goodbye 20th century,” on which they covered pieces by composers such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich and Christian Wolff.

With the connection to the avant-garde, a distanced level enters the music. The avant-garde doesn’t have to be young. Still, even at their most abstract moments and at every point in their career, Sonic Youth sounded more agile and alive than, say, Limp Bizkit.

Ten years ago, Sonic Youth separated, the band split following the separation of Gordon and the Sonic Youth singer Thurston Moore (who has since then, despite all the partial free jazz elements, continued to spell out more traditionally tuned guitar music with his solo albums). The music Kim Gordon has recorded since the split is surprising and breaks with everything she had produced up to that point. Of course there are connections to the past: the chilled, at the same time strangely breathless speaking vocals, especially and a certain tonality of guitar noise that connects to the duo Body/Head by Gordon and guitarist Bill Nace.

On the now released album “The Collective” both voice and guitar are underpinned by stoic, rapt bumping trap beats produced by Justin Raisen. Raisen has worked with Sky Ferreira, Charli It’s already blurring in the rhythm of the whole thing; Noises, beeping, cockroaches and quiet echoes. For “The Collective,” Raisen created a delicate but somehow subliminally massive dub-industrial.

Over this and all of this, Kim Gordon puts very bulky and never brutal guitar noise – and above all her voice, which creates an associative stream of text in almost all tracks, which seems as if someone were reciting the results of automated writing on absinthe. For example in “I Don’t Miss My Mind”: “Doctors and nurses, tingling eye/ Bleeding inside, touch me there/ That’s a modern pose/ Modern pose/ Romanticism in porn/ Breathless/ Stressful/ Loveliness/ Distressed/ That’s the mess«.

On the album’s second single, “I’m A Man,” Gordon sings feminist role prose, an unflattering portrait: “I lost my way/ Don’t make me have to hide/ Or explain/ What I am inside.” After this very cold music, which is one of the most forcedly emotionless things Kim Gordon has done so far, you don’t want to know exactly what’s going on inside the lyrical self. In the piece “It’s Dark Inside” an offensive female perspective is sung: “A flower’s wiltin’/ Take away the guilt/ They don’t teach clit in school/ Like they do lick pussy right.”

Interiority and exteriority are placed in a special relationship on “The Collective”. Nothing is acted out here, but the music has nothing aseptic, but rather pulsates, transforms and develops strange ramifications. However, she is not passionate; it is all too idiosyncratic in its structure and too psychedelic in its effect. And last but not least, this album is in a certain way unassailable, especially when it comes to the misogynistic view of aging women that female artists in pop and elsewhere have to contend with.

Before you come up with stupid thoughts and malicious formulations, you are thwarted by the intellectuality and an elusive conceptuality, which leads to music that is not primarily clever, but very eerie: “The song is breathing down my neck.”

Kim Gordon: The Collective (Matador/Beggars Group/Indigo)

Subscribe to the “nd”

Being left is complicated.
We keep track!

With our digital promotional subscription you can read all issues of »nd« digitally (nd.App or nd.Epaper) for little money at home or on the go.
Subscribe now!