The record that reminds Thurston Moore of Kim Gordon
Sonic Youth was a love story. In the wake of the band’s deeply acrimonious end, that statement only gets bleaker with time, but the band was built around the relationship between bassist Kim Gordon and guitarist Thurston Moore, who were both also vocalists in the band. Their bond made their presence at the very forefront of alternative music seem so solid for the 30 years they were active, and bitterly, this is also what makes their split utterly final.
The harsh truth, however, is that any interview with either Moore or Gordon has to touch on the other at some point, even with their thriving solo careers. Believe it or not, that’s not us rock hacks being nosy either. Their bond was something the band themselves were proud to centre the band around.
In his memoir Sonic Life, Moore talks about seeing a vision for his life with Gordon when he saw Patti Smith play with her husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith on lead guitar. “It was an emblematic vision of all I would ever desire from rock and roll — transcendence, devotion, sonic love.” He practised what he preached, too; it’s not for nothing that Smith’s nickname found its way into Gordon and Moore’s band name.
It’s a shame, too, because the legacy of both musicians should go far beyond their relationship. In the Youth, they bridged the gap between rock’s mainstream and underground, avant-garde art. This is a band whose defining work, 1988’s Daydream Nation, is as influenced by Pere Ubu as it is ZZ Top.
This is shown even in their work away from the band, with Moore becoming an unlikely figurehead of London’s improvisational music scene, while Kim Gordon’s solo work remains as vital and beloved as anything the Youth released this century. Yet, despite all the fantastic music and the boundaries pushed, we still love a love story, don’t we? Especially when it all goes wrong.
Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band was such a huge success partially because it’s a look into the life of one of alternative rock’s most influential women and partially because it was a look into a relationship that, while high profile, was also as closed off as any bank vault. While Moore himself hasn’t published anything quite so salacious about Gordon, a surprisingly moving titbit did come from a very unlikely source, an article in Uncut.
Asked to go through the records that shaped him, he picks out one album in particular that will always remind him of his Sonic Youth bandmate. He says of the record, “I discovered jazz, in a way, through Kim. When I first went to her parents’ house in LA in the ’80s, there were all these records like John Coltrane and Billie Holiday with ‘K. Gordon’ written on, everything she owned growing up.” That record? One so aptly titled, does it make the whole thing quietly move? Billie Holiday’s Songs For Distingué Lovers.
