The greatest New York anthems, according to Kim Gordon
As the most populated city in the US, it’s no surprise that New York City has tried to assert itself as the cultural capital of the country and, indeed, of the world. The amount of variety in the musical output of the metropolis alone is staggering, and its influence over the direction of other scenes is one that is unlikely to ever dwindle, whether you’re looking at the work of The Velvet Underground in the 1960s, Television in the 1970s, or Sonic Youth in the 1980s to name but a few of its most celebrated acts.
Having emerged at a time when punk was beginning to mutate into various subgenres, Sonic Youth’s founding members Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo adopted a style referred to as ‘no wave’- a strand of guitar-driven punk rock that was heavily informed by avant-garde jazz and a strong desire to improvise and experiment with form. Song structures were often sprawling, melody was largely abandoned in favour of dissonance, and rhythms were decidedly more complex than they had been on most punk offerings before.
Although she was raised in Los Angeles, Gordon was acutely aware of the artistic innovations happening on the East Coast long before she relocated to New York in 1980 and would have grown up listening to many of the bands that the city produced. However, when she embarked on her move to the opposite side of the country, she rapidly became interested in the no wave scene that included acts such as the Contortions, Mars and Glenn Branca, whose band Ranaldo had been in prior to forming Sonic Youth.
Despite having become early adopters of the style, after their earliest releases, they began to move onto other forward-thinking styles that deliberately sought to avoid convention. At various points, they were working within the realms of noise rock, industrial music and grunge, but at no point did they ever compromise their ethos of thinking outside the box.
While they disbanded in 2011 after 30 years together as a group, members have continued to release boundary-pushing records in an even wider variety of styles, and Gordon’s chosen direction is perhaps the most intriguing of all. Taking on a synth-heavy sound for her debut solo album, No Home Record, in 2019, she would pivot towards experimental hip-hop and trap for her most recent release, 2024’s The Collective. She may have celebrated her 71st birthday shortly after the record’s release, but even in her elderly years, her tastes are considerably more refined and on the pulse than most people who are a fraction of her age.
Gordon hasn’t ceased to look at the music that surrounds her in New York as being a major influence, and in 2020, she hosted a special broadcast for BBC Radio 6 Music where she played a number of her favourite tracks, both past and present. While the selection dotted around various parts of the globe and transcended genre boundaries with abandon, the playlist circled back to seminal New York acts on six occasions.
Picking a disparate mix of tracks, Gordon made nods to the her own influences such as Television and DNA, more modern adopters of the no wave and experimental rock style from the city in Gold Dime and Talk Normal, as well as some tracks from the city’s long lineage of hip-hop innovators in Nas and Cardi B. For anyone else, this selection would seem somewhat disjointed, but for Gordon, it only goes to prove that she’s one of the most diverse tastemakers the city has ever produced.
Kim Gordon’s definitive New York anthems:
- DNA – ‘Blonde Redhead’
- Gold Dime – ‘Hindsight’
- Television – ‘Venus’
- Talk Normal – ‘In a Strangeland’
- Nas – ‘N.Y. State of Mind’
- Cardi B – ‘Bodak Yellow’
