“I can do that”: how Kim Gordon set out to destroy rock
By the early 1990s, Sonic Youth could firmly call themselves one of alternative rock’s most influential bands. They had released a string of albums during the previous decade, having formed in 1981, gaining a reputation for being experimental and boundary-pushing. Guitars were tuned in unconventional ways, and noise and texture were prioritised. At the same time, the band’s lyrics were hardly a second thought. Violence, anti-fascism, love, mental illness and feminism were just some of the themes that made it into their songs, proving Sonic Youth’s genius – they had every aspect of songwriting mastered.
Kim Gordon, the band’s bassist and co-vocalist, often wrote about female oppression, delivering her words with a snarling sense of irony, playfulness or raw emotion. In fact, Gordon’s voice is one of the most compelling aspects of Sonic Youth. She was unafraid to warp and mould her voice into something animalistic at times, often indulging in an unsteady wobble in her tune.
This is pretty evident in the band’s cover of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ by The Stooges, where Gordon sounds as though she’s in pain as she sings. Elsewhere, on ‘Swimsuit Issue’, when she sings lines like “You really like to schmooze/ well now you’re on the news” and “sunset bungalow”, her voice feels mangled like she’s forcing it out from the depths of her chest.
At first, you might compare her rough-and-ready vocal delivery to punk, a genre that emerged several years prior to Sonic Youth’s inception, but Gordon once thought punk “felt tongue-in-cheek”. While the band were certainly inspired by certain punk groups, and their approach to music can certainly be considered ‘punk’ in terms of their DIY attitude, Gordon didn’t want Sonic Youth to just become another punk band.
For Gordon, no-wave was much more attractive as a true alternative to the mainstream. In her book Girl in A Band, the musician explained how she’s always been drawn to rebellion. After all, she grew up in the ‘60s. She explained that she was “too young to be a hippie but brushed by whatever rebellion and amped-up freedom there was in the air. Art had always given me direction, a way forward, even when I sometimes felt I was floating”.
Thus, when she moved to New York and discovered the no-wave scene bubbling in the underground during the late ‘70s, she knew that was it. When she “saw and heard no wave bands, some equation in my head and body pieced together instantly.”
She added, “A phantom thing had been missing from my life—and here it was, finally, unconventional, personal but at the same time not, and confrontational. One of the biggest appeals was how purposefully abandoned and abstract the music sounded.”
Gordon identified the differences between punk and no-wave, explaining how “punk rock felt tongue-in-cheek, in air quotes screaming, ‘We’re playing at destroying corporate rock.’ No-wave music was, and is, more like ‘No, we’re really destroying rock.’ Its sheer freedom and blazingness made me think, I can do that”.
No-wave musicians revelled in dissonance and abrasion, often centring their songs around these unusual compositions that were hardly accessible to the mainstream. Oftentimes, however, no-wave artists incorporated instruments like saxophones or made offbeat, danceable songs, with artists like James Chance and Liquid Liquid making music that was refreshingly different and fun.
No-wave proved to be an influence on noise rock, and soon enough, Sonic Youth would become one of the sub-genre’s most significant bands. They really did something revolutionary, gutting rock from the inside out and suggesting that atonality or extended, fluid pieces of noisy instrumentation could be strangely beautiful, too.
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