Feminist in a band: Woman power according to Kim Gordon
First a confession: I never understood the music of Sonic Youth. I don’t dislike them — if they ever reunite and decide to come to Manila, I would most likely watch. Out of curiosity. I was excited about this book for the same reason. I wanted to know what the fuss was about. It always seemed to me that liking Kim Gordon is associated to coolness. She’s an easy woman to like if you’re a woman. She’s an outspoken feminist. She’s a girl who is taken very seriously in an industry dominated by men. She’s the antidote to “It Girl” culture, unmanufactured, unfussy, and cool without trying. Kim Gordon is someone I feel obligated to like, as a fan of music and as a woman.
Girl In A Band is the first memoir I’ve read since Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Like their authors’ music, the two couldn’t be more different. Smith likes to compose entranced ramblings that, for some reason, read like poetry. Her storytelling is descriptive — you feel like you are actually at the lobby The Hotel Chelsea, watching rock ‘n’ roll icons go by as you read Smith’s words… “We dwelled in our little room as inmates in a hospitable prison.” Gordon is the opposite. Blunt and unromantic, she makes no effort to conceal her love or hatred for anything — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Her lack of fantasy, intersected with paragraphs of vulnerability, almost makes her relatable, likable even. I suppose she would hate that, because (as evidenced by her choice to continue making experimental music via Body/Head, a project with Bill Nace) she’s not about being liked, not about being the mainstream popular girl. Even her clothing line X-Girl was punk rock (P.S. It’s still big in Japan). In Girl In A Band, she is just open, like a friend on the other end of the line, analyzing whatever it was that just happened.
I was interested in the book because celebrity feminists intrigue me. All the cool girls claim to be feminists and they band together through common projects. (Gordon appeared in an episode of HBO’s Girls, a show created and written by Lena Dunham — whose tweets Gordon also famously painted for a major exhibit.) Those who make the mistake of revealing an uninformed idea of feminism (i.e. Dunham) become headlines, retweeted and shared many times over, branding them for life as that girl. Meanwhile, women like Emma Watson are further dividing the movement — it’s third wave feminists (coming from the Riot Grrrl era) vs. white feminists, mainstream feminists, etc. Third wave. Does this suggest that some feminists are better brews than others? More artisanal, maybe? I wanted to understand what feminism means to Kim Gordon, because it seems, the definition varies with every woman. Which is why debates ensue. Which is why some women end up being judged or even bullied by the same people who claim to be fighting on their behalf. Why is Gordon’s opinion so important? Because she’s a woman — no more important than any of us — who happens to have written a book.
‘NO ONE EVER TALKS ABOUT WOMAN POWER’
Girl In A Band has a very rock ‘n’ roll first chapter. Sonic Youth is playing their last gig and Kim is a wreck — concurrently, her marriage with guitarist Thurston Moore is also on its last days. They’ve steered clear of each other on tour. She says Thurston looks “finally free,” and it’s kind of pissing her off. It’s the Kim Gordon we like and think we know: angsty, aloof and very punk rock.
And then as she chronicles the events that have led her to Sonic Youth, to Thurston and her daughter Coco, she starts mentioning all these names — from Danny Elfman to Neil Young, Marc Jacobs to Sofia Coppola, Kurt Cobain to Micheal Stipe. She talks about her family, her dad and brother mostly, with a kindness that seeps through even when her sentences are structurally resentful. In between, the narration feels like a roll call of people she can’t not mention — people who’ve been good to her, people she’s wary of. Gordon gets particularly interesting when she talks about things she doesn’t like (I wish she’d done more of that.) Prior to the book’s release, the portion in which she talks about Lana Del Rey, “who doesn’t even know what feminism is,” was mildly edited. The paragraph turned from statement to mere question. She, in so many words, calls Courtney Love mentally ill, as well as vehemently expresses her dislike for Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins’ music — and I quote: “Ewww….”
Reading the book, I was on the look out for obvious feminist statements — the memoir’s title, Girl In A Band, suggests it would have as much. But Gordon’s feminism is subtle. It creeps up on you like Sonic Youth does, hiding in plain sight between REM and The Cure, between stories, sentences, albums, gigs. Suddenly you are so aware of it and you don’t even know why.
The title of the book, according to Gordon, is a question most often asked during press interviews: “What’s it like being a girl in a band?” It’s a question that she answers sporadically throughout the book, incidentally also describing what it’s like to be a girl anywhere.
“Being a girl bass player is ideal, because the swirl of Sonic Youth music makes me forget about being a girl. I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she says. Early on in the book she would also say, “In general, though, women aren’t really allowed to be kick-ass. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft and control, and polish is for women.... At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.”
She would talk about the Spice Girls, who would misappropriate the phrase “girl power” coined by Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna who spearheaded the Riot Grrrl movement. And how she made an effort to punk herself out (“It’s ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair.”) And how — maybe one of her strongest and most personal statements — she had no interest in being just the female half of a couple.
Girl In A Band is a plainly stated memoir about a middle class girl from West L.A. who loved her dad and was bullied her brother, married her band’s guitar player, got divorced, and has a daughter who is now also in a band. But as Gordon herself says, “The radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.” My first thought after reading the book: I know so much about Kim Gordon — now what? A week later, I am still reading about her, about Riot Grrrl, about third wave feminists, about how Patricia Arquette, Emma Watson, Lena Dunham and other mainstream feminists are not equipped to speak in behalf of all women, and I’ve been trying to listen to Sonic Youth. I’m just here for dictation, I don’t wanna be a sensation…. Thurston Moore’s guitar playing tells the story, but guess whose feminist riffs are stuck in my head?
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Girl In A Band A Memoir by Kim Gordon is available at National Book Store.
