A conversation with Kim Gordon from 2000
Sonic Youth's queen of noise talks about leaving New York, why Disneyland is better than Disney World, the benefits of getting all your gear stolen, and the radicalism of Joni Mitchell
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the ‘90s and ‘00s and present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
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THE OPENERS
This week, I served on the Grand Jury for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, which was awarded to neoclassical/jazz-rock auteur Jeremy Dutcher for the second time, for his second album, Motewolonuwok (which features string arrangements from Owen Pallett and a songwriting assist from Basia Bulat). Jeremy isn’t that well known outside of Canada, but if you’re into late-period Talk Talk or Jeff Buckley at his most out-of-body transcendent, do give this special album some of your time—prior to its release last October, I spoke to Jeremy for an Apple Music feature where he guides listeners through the album track-by-track (which is especially handy, given that many of the songs are sung in his native Wolastoqey). Or, for a more expedient display of his talents, watch him fill up every last inch of Massey Hall with his gale-force voice at the Polaris gala:
At Stereogum, Ian Cohen administered last rites to Japandroids, and he graciously invited me to the funeral service to share some words on the small supporting role I played in the band’s origin story.
This week’s additions to the stübermania 2024 playlist:
FKA twigs, “Eusexua”: This is one of those instances where I really wish MTV and MuchMusic still had game-changing cultural capital, so that they could play the shit out of this video and make it the modern-day “Thriller.”
Nilüfer Yanya, “Like I Say (Runaway)”: A transmission from an alternate-universe 1998 where Radiohead follow up Ok Computer by getting into Erykah Badu instead of Aphex Twin.
Tindersticks, “Always a Stranger”: One of the drawbacks to having instant access to all of the music, all of the time, is that a band you’ve adored for decades will release a new album and you’ll easily lose sight of it amid the daily deluge. I totally forgot I had a promo copy of the new Tindersticks record sitting in my library for the past three months until I saw some reviews pop up around last week’s release date. So let this be your reminder—and mine—that Nottingham’s finest gloom-soul sophisticates have just dropped their 14th album, Soft Tissue, and after all these years, they still never let you down, even as their songs still do their damnedest to bring you down. And to this day, no band wields a string section to more devastating effect.
The Jesus Lizard, “Alexis Feels Sick”: The first Jesus Lizard album in 26 years, Rack, instantly justifies its existence by featuring the first song ever to pay punning tribute to Girls Against Boys’ drummer.
Fazerdaze, “Cherry Pie”: This synthy psych-pop delight from the first Fazerdaze album in seven years (Soft Power, out Nov. 1) is not a Warrant cover, but sounds so good, it could make a grown man cry all the same.
Jane’s Addiction, “True Love”: This time last week, I was contemplating grabbing a ticket to see Jane’s Addiction’s Sept. 18 at Budweiser Stage in Toronto. Alas, Perry and Dave had other plans. But even more improbable than the band’s instant implosion last Friday is the arrival of a new single in the immediate aftermath. If we did indeed just witness Jane’s Addiction’s last gasp, then this wistful psychedelic ballad is a suitably mournful note to go out on, like the sad flipside sequel to “Classic Girl.”
Thurston Moore, “Hypnogram”: Before we get to this week’s Kim Gordon interview, let’s see what her ex-bandmate/hubby is up to. Thurston Moore has a new album out this week, Flow Critical Lucidity, and while it belongs to the more traditional song-oriented side of his discography, it doesn’t slot so easily into the noise-rock or mellow-acoustic buckets he usually favours. Rather, as this seven-minute centerpiece demonstrates, the album manages to be both intimate and epic, relying more on delicately latticed textures than skull-piercing feedback.
Click here for the Apple Music version.
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Kim Gordon
The date: June 3, 2000
Location: Phoner—Kim was in New York; I was in my apartment in Toronto
Album being promoted: nyc ghosts & flowers
The context: Throughout the post-Nirvana ‘90s, Sonic Youth were essentially playing chicken with the mainstream, careening toward a potential crossover moment, but ultimately taking a hard left turn away from the limelight. By decade’s end, they were dropping a steady stream of improvised experimental EPs on their own SYR label while saving their more conventional ideas for their proper LPs on DGC. But on nyc ghosts & flowers, the line between those two modes was becoming increasingly blurred, and the album’s sprawling set pieces didn’t seem to satisfy fans in either camp.
For what seemed like the first time ever, these perennial critics’ darlings were put on blast: the album infamously received a 0.0 from Pitchfork (then in its unregulated Wild West phase), but even that review seems sympathetic next to the roasting they got from Melody Maker when they previewed the album at the All Tomorrows Parties festival in April 2000. But this era of Sonic Youth was as much a rebirth as a nadir, a moment to reorient themselves after getting all their custom-tuned gear stolen in an infamous 1999 truck theft, and shake up their ranks by adding a fifth member, Jim O’Rourke for their spring 2000 shows, which included a North American jaunt with Stereolab.
Ironically, Sonic Youth’s pivot toward stridently uncommerical, room-clearing avant-rock messthetics came during a period of peaceful domesticity for principal members Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, who had left Manhattan to raise their then-six-year-old daughter Coco in the more quaint climes of Northampton, Massachusetts (though she was visiting NYC on the day of this interview). And if a music journalist wanted to speak with Kim Gordon in the year 2000, they had to adhere to strict mom hours. This interview for Eye Weekly constituted the first and only time I’ve ever had a phoner scheduled for 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Having been out late to see Do Make Say Think play a show at the Bloor Cinema the night before, even a phoner with Kim Gordon couldn’t get me out of bed—so I set my alarm for 8:58 a.m., I did this interview while still nestled under the covers.
So whose idea was it to hook up with Stereolab for this tour?
It was sort of mutual. They needed to come back and do some makeup dates. We've toured with them before, mostly in Europe, and it just happily worked out that they could do most of our tour here.
You have Jim O'Rourke playing with you now—is he on bass or guitar?
Both: bass, guitar, PowerBook...
Is there any PowerBooking on the new album?
No, There might be a little synthesizer and Groovebox, but there might be some things that Jim triggers. When we do older songs, or at least songs from the last record, he might add some stuff to them.
On the last couple of tours, you avoided going too far back into your repertoire—when I saw you in '98, you only did "Death Valley 69" from the '80s…
Well, some songs we really can't play because we don't have the guitars anymore, or we've forgotten the tunings or something. And then, certain songs sound good at a certain time, and if you don't feel like you can play them as well as you did at the peak of playing them live, they're not that much fun to play. We might reprise "Kool Thing" for this tour... we did some dates after the last tour in Europe where we did more of a greatest-hits kind of set. But usually we want to mostly play the new songs, because they take on a life of their own.
I've been reading reports from the UK on your All Tomorrow’s Parties set, and apparently that was not a greatest-hits show…
No!
It reminded me of what the band was saying when you opened for Neil Young [in 1991] and how it was thrilling for you to get in front of a huge audience and still have the power to shock and agitate people. Do you still get the same thrill when you’re in front of a supposedly more open-minded indie rock crowd and still get that angry reaction?
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure some people were bummed that we were playing mostly instrumental songs and things they hadn't heard. But there are also always some core fans who really like that and are like, "Oh, what's that?" They want to hear something new. So it's really for those fans. We're not a festival band, you know? It's fun to play something different that they aren't expecting.
Are you finding that, even as you're trying to stretch out, a lot of fans still hold onto the rock mentality of wanting to hear the hits?
I guess so. I mean, everyone has a different idea of entertainment. Some people want to party and rock out more, and other people's idea of entertainment is being confronted with something weird or something they haven't heard before or something that challenges them.
Do you still get moshers?
Less and less.
It seemed that, after Lollapalooza, when you started doing the SYR EPs and hosting shows at Avery Fisher Hall, it seemed like you've had your fill of the big rock experience. So I was wondering why you wanted to open for Pearl Jam this summer…
It's really one of the only ways to get the record company to pay attention to our record, because somehow that rings the bell for them, even though most people are filing in while you're opening. But [Pearl Jam are] paying us well, and they have a reputation of treating their opening bands really well. So, it seemed like a good thing to do. Because otherwise we'll never play in Florida again!
Why, are there no clubs down there?
It's just so far to go, and there's never really been any good-sized venues for us. It's either these really small clubs that are just really crappy... I don't know, it's just weird down there!
But I guess touring down there gives you a chance to take Coco to Disneyland—I mean Disney World.
I have to say that I've been to both places and I prefer Disneyland, because it has all the old stuff—there's a certain authenticity to it, whereas Disney World is all new and tacky and not charming, compared to what I grew up with going to Disneyland.
At the time Bad Moon Rising came out, you said...
You sound Southern—you're not from Toronto, are you?
I am actually.
You sound like you're from Virginia or something—you have that sort of Pavement-boy drawl.
That just comes from listening to Pavement. Also, I just woke up—I usually sound more Canadian after noon. Do you find there's a Toronto accent?
Yeah, I went to school there for years at York University.
Was that a major culture shock?
It was actually a major culture shock going east from California. Like, we’d drive through St. Louis and suddenly, all the buildings were brown. That was sort of shocking.
So when Bad Moon Rising came out, you said it was the first time that you felt Sonic Youth was an American band, as opposed to just a downtown New York thing. But now that Sonic Youth has become an international band, did that inspire you to sort of bring it all back home again and make an album about New York?
It's that, and the fact that Thurston and I don't live here anymore. You know, we never wanted to play up the New York thing so much, it's such a cliche in a way. But now that we don't live here, I guess it was sort of a looking-in perspective on the history of New York. But also, you know, the whole idea of New York being a place of experimentation and all that for art—I mean, musically, I guess it still is, but art-wise, it really isn't. It's stuck to the '80s thing, where you have big galleries again, and people are very conservative. And you see painting trends like computer art and computer paintings—very formalistic painting.
So you’re saying the idea of New York being an art hub has almost become as much of a tourist cliche as the Statue of Liberty?
Yeah, because of the real estate, it's just gotten so expensive. It really has changed.
The same thing is going on here—there's a big problem with artists trying to get access to loft space, because they're just knocking down all the old warehouse buildings and putting up condos.
Yeah, it's high-end real estate. I mean, people move to Williamsburg or whatever. New York has always been somewhat of a commercial marketplace, but there is the sense that the experimentalism that went on with Fluxus in the '60s and '70s is gone.
So is art dead?
No! But on nyc ghost & flowers, it's almost like fetishizing experimentalism in New York, because it's kind of a thing of the past—not musically, but culturally.
Where are you living now?
Western Mass—the lesbian capital of the world.
Have you found an inspiring art scene there?
Oh, I don't know. I don't really think of it as an art scene. There are a lot of colleges up there. It's just more about living on the edge of things instead of living in the middle of them.
Did you find that, after living in downtown Manhattan for so long, it started to feel like a small town?
Oh yeah, in a certain way, there's not that much difference. Definitely, at Lafayette and Prince downtown, it is like a small town. There's a certain intimacy about walking around on the streets of New York City—you run into people you know. So, in that way, I actually find that it's not that different than Northampton.
Everyone knows who's doing what...
Well, not that. I guess it could get to that. But we don't know that many people there.
So the college kids aren't stalking you...
No. There's these girls at a senior house across the street, and they run the radio station, and every now and then they put flyers under our door when, like, a Kill Rock Stars band comes through town for some gig they're putting on. And we walked over to the Student Union and saw Kathleen Hannah's new band, Le Tigre. That was fun.
After spending the past few years immersed in the SYR free-form thing, is it hard to think structurally again and slip back into the routines of being a major-label band?
The process isn't that separated. With these songs, more than anything, it's more organic, the way our first songwriting was. We didn't have that many guitars and they weren't very good guitars—you'd kind of pick up something and see what you could get at discount.
So in retrospect, how debilitating was it having all your gear stolen?
It wasn't debilitating creatively, just financially. But in a certain way, it was kind of refreshing. Thurston is now playing Gibsons for the first time, these new Gibsons that we bought in Texas to kind of replicate these Les Paul Gibson Specials that I had been playing, and they didn't sound nearly as good. The ’90s versions don't sound as good as the '60s versions. But they're about $4,000 less!
Did the Goodbye 20th Century record inform this album, in the same way that the previous SYR EPs informed A Thousand Leaves?
I don't know... maybe in the sense of there being a certain liberation in doing that music as an experiment. Definitely, playing some of those compositions, they're very radical, and it definitely makes you question what you think you're hanging onto as security and kind of push you to go a bit further with experimenting. I hate to use that word…
We do need to come up with a new word for that, because us critics are running out of good adjectives too.
We were listening to these Velvet Underground outtakes from Loaded yesterday, and there's that song "Cool It Down," and I was like, "God, this sounds like Royal Trux!" It was astounding—it was like the blueprint for a Royal Trux song.
Are you taking an active role in shaping Coco's musical tastes?
She does listen to a lot of French pop, and then she hears all the weird stuff Thurston plays. She's really into the new Le Tigre record. She really does respond to good girl pop. But she's never heard Britney Spears. Spice Girls? They're history. She's never heard them! She was into Jay-Z last year—"Hard Knock Life."
Okay, one last question... for a lot of Sonic Youth fans, the EVOL/Sister/Daydream Nation triumvirate still reigns supreme. But now, over 10 years on, do you think there's like a bit too much importance placed on those records?
Well, you know, some people only like Dirty and Goo. It depends on when they first started listening to the band, or a certain period in their life when they were into certain things. Maybe later, they'll come back and re-listen, hopefully, to the more recent records. For me, I was really into Joni when she was a pop and folksinger, and then when she went off on the jazz thing, I was just like "woah!" But now I can certainly appreciate where she was coming from. As you get older, you change, and you want to explore other things. When you look at the Mingus record and then you look around at what other people were doing, it's pretty radical.
ENCORES
nyc ghost & flowers is nobody’s favourite Sonic Youth album, but it does boast at least one corker in “Renegade Princess,” which is the closest Sonic Youth ever came to channelling the pure CBGB abandon of Patti Smith’s Horses.
For more Sonic Youth deep cuts, here’s three whole hours’ worth of excellent SY obscurities:
Click here for the Apple Music version.
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please pay a visit to my PWYC tip jar!