Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon
Kim Althea Gordon is an American musician, songwriter, and visual artist. Born in Rochester, New York, Gordon was raised in Los Angeles, California, and studied art at the Otis Art Institute. She later rose to prominence as the bassist, guitarist, and vocalist of the New York City-based alternative rock band Sonic Youth, which she formed with ex-husband Thurston Moore in 1981...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth28 April 1953
CityRochester, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I love Northampton. As exciting and glamorous as New York can be, I'm always really relieved to get back there.
I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age.
Because our daughters have school and it's just such a hassle going down to New York all the time, we can really only go on the weekends, we kind of... Steve came up here and worked out stuff for the second half of the record.
Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I'm grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.
I feel most free onstage. The audience, it's an abstraction. You don't really see anyone out there, but you feel the audience inside you.
It's hard to say when the life of a band starts and stops... but playing music together is an act of trust. When that's broken, it's impossible to continue.
But everything has been so gradual that it's sort of all come from, just hard work and basically being at it.
I was very aware of performers who have a persona, whether it's Siouxsie Sioux or Patti Smith or Lydia Lunch, and I'm just this middle-class girl coming from a more conventional upbringing, this California person. But in a way I felt like it's important to represent the normal.
I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
I still don't really feel like a bass player.
Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.
I think of myself as unconventional, I guess. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.
I'm a relatively shy person, but I love being challenged and putting myself in positions that are scary.
I've never been good with structure - doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do.