I’ll start this review by saying that I’m not a super fan of Sonic Youth but I’ve always been aware of them, ever since a friend put “Kool Thing” on a mix tape for me back in the early 90’s. This book was compared to Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which I loved, so I was interested to learn both more about Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth.
The memoir starts off powerfully in the near present. Gordon and her husband and bandmate, Thurston Moore, have broken up but they are finishing up a tour of Latin America. The show must go on. Gordon does a good job of describing the strangeness of trying to build a relationship on stage with someone you no longer have a relationship with.
Gordon then goes back to her beginnings—in Los Angeles—as part of an “academic family, as opposed to a showbiz family.” This is where the book is the strongest for me as Gordon moves back in forth in time, creating hazy but interesting memories of her teenage years. Her Los Angeles then was the late 60’s Los Angeles of Charles Manson, riots, and rootlessness. Her older brother, Keller, struggled with mental illness and Gordon suggests that the echoes of her relationship with him influenced many of her future relationships.
Gordon doesn’t try to craft a tightly plotted narrative here, but rather constructs short chapters that focus on different impressionistic moments in her life—often starting with a more current memory and using that to launch the story into the past—to the New York music scenes of the 1980’s and 1990’s, to meeting Thurston and forming the band, and to encounters with a wide range of artists—musical, visual, etc.
It was interesting to see folks like Kurt Cobain, Henry Rollins. Neil Young, Spike Jonze, and Kim Deal through her eyes, but the parts that interested me more were her discussions of balancing motherhood and the rock and roll life style as well as the way she talks about her art—both before she formed Sonic Youth and after its demise. Often I felt like the narrative created a barricade of names and projects (this song, that friend, that photo shoot, this fashion experiment) that kept me at a distance but both the opening of this memoir and the closing feel raw and real.
While reading this book, I went to YouTube a number of times to remind myself of certain songs and that led me down a rabbit hole of videos including a hysterical (and recent) discussion between Kim Gordon and Carrie Brownstein as well as a grainy video of Kim Gordon and Courtney Love on MTV’s 120 minutes. The interweb is a dangerous thing.
