Review by New York Times Review
THE WAY YOU read a memoir has everything to do with how much you know about the subject going in. If I'm reading a memoir by, say, a scientist I've never heard of, I'm likely to swallow what's being fed to me without question, bias and errors included. On the other hand, if the memoir is by a pop culture figure I've followed obsessively, I might go the opposite way, zooming in on any minor inaccuracies : You say that television special came out in 1978, but I know for a fact it was the tail end of 1977, because the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack wasn't even out yet, and now how can I trust you about anything? Either extreme has its dangers, and both run the risk of putting me in a place where I'm not looking at a book with clear eyes. This is a fancy way of saying that I'm probably in the sweet spot when it comes to Kim Gordon's memoir, "Girl in a Band." Gordon, of course, was the bassist for Sonic Youth, the legendary downtown noise band co-anchored by two guitarists, Thurston Moore, Gordon's husband for 27 years, and Lee Ranaldo. The drummer was Steve Shelley. (I wouldn't feel right not mentioning the drummer.) I know Sonic Youth's music pretty well, partly from my time working in a record store after high school, where it was shelved between Social Distortion and Soundgarden. My other introduction was through hip-hop, specifically Public Enemy. In 1990, the band put out the album "Goo," with a song called "Kool Thing" that featured vocals by Chuck D. So they've always been on my radar, beeping around, but it's not like I'm far enough down the rabbit hole to have collected the rare British seven-inch of "Death Valley '69" - though I know enough about them to know that such a thing exists. I came to Gordon's book with lots of respect for her place in the music world, and lots of curiosity. Sonic Youth has never had a reputation for shying away from unpleasantness in the search for truth and beauty, and the book does the same, opening with a scene in drizzly São Paulo, as the band played its last show together and Gordon and Moore's marriage finally fully unraveled. "My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it," Gordon writes. "I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life." From here she takes the reader into her childhood. The organization of the book is as unconventional as you'd expect from an artist like Gordon (the first chapter is titled "The End"), and I'm a sucker for unconventional organization, especially early on, when you're trying to pick up a rhythm as you read it. The chapters are short, no more than three or four pages, short enough that you might call them songs. They jump around a bit but run roughly chronologically. Gordon recalls growing up in Rochester, N.Y., and moving to Los Angeles when her sociologist father took a job at U.C.L.A. She paints a cleareyed portrait of her mother, who stayed at home and struggled to stay creative. She remembers her charismatic and mentally ill older brother, Keller - "brilliant, manipulative, sadistic" - her closest companion in childhood, "the person who more than anyone else in the world shaped who I was, and who I turned out to be." It's not an especially chatty book; there aren't long recreated conversations. But every subject is handled with careful introspection, detail and real feeling. We're in Gordon's head as she figures out the world around her. There's an early Sly Stone song called "Plastic Jim" where he describes a phony poser: "Plastic Jim/Will give you a conversation/To avoid a situation/That needs contemplation." There's no plastic here. Even when the material verges on Forrest Gump territory, full of celebrity cameos - during one short stretch in the late '60s and early '70s, she's dating Danny Elfman in high school, then hanging out with Bruce Berry, the roadie whose overdose inspired Neil Young to write "Tonight's the Night" - it never feels forced or showy. She's clear on how the people around served her as artistic inspirations, sparking her ideas and giving her the confidence to express herself. Sonic Youth doesn't appear until almost halfway through, after an extended eulogy for the New York of the 1980s, in all its edgy glory: "That city I know doesn't exist anymore, and it's more alive in my head than it is when I'm there." When Sonic Youth does show up, Gordon slightly alters the form of the book. She gives us a guided tour through some of the records she remembers. Chapters are headed with song or album titles. There's some gossip - Lydia Lunch trying to seduce Thurston Moore. There are some sociology-tinged riffs, like one that compares Madonna in the '80s to Lana Del Rey today (the comparison isn't favorable: Gordon says that Del Rey "doesn't even know what feminism is"). She even gets to the collaboration with Chuck D, who was coming down the stairs in his oversize shoes at a Greene Street studio when the band invited him in to do his part on "Kool Thing." Once the song-specific essays change the book, it's hard to change it back. For a while the book feels more like a collage. Her asides on Kurt Cobain (whom she liked), or Courtney Love (whom she doesn't), or cofounding a clothing line work against the rhythm she's established. The problem clears up when Gordon returns to family life - specifically to the birth of her daughter, Coco. She describes her artwork, motherhood and marriage: the first, familiar and comforting; the second, challenging and rewarding; the third, heartbreaking. After 27 years together, she suspects Moore is having an affair. She turns out to be right. These are some of the rawest passages of the book, and not just because they are some of the most recent. When she says she has compassion for him but cannot forgive him, it feels as if she's picking her words like weapons. The marriage ends. So does the book. It doesn't have a big final scene, not after the angry and sad explanation of the breakup. It's about survival, both as a person and as an artist. Gordon starts a new band, Body/Head, with her longtime friend Bill Nace. The overall feeling is one of levelheadedness, a little resignation, lots of anger and a permanent love of the power of art. She stays cool because she is cool, even in those rare moments when she's not. ? Gordon offers a eulogy for the New York of the 1980s, in all its edgy glory. QUESTLOVE is the author of "Mo' Meta Blues" and a founder and the music director of the Roots, the house band for "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 15, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
The title of this very fine memoir is understated. The girl in question is the guitarist and vocalist of the alt-rock band Sonic Youth, which Gordon and Thurston Moore founded in 1981. Gordon's chronicle of her youth in Los Angeles, with stays in Hawaii and Hong Kong, is infused with melancholy, because underlying the narrative is the fact that Gordon and Moore married, then painfully broke up. Girl in a Band is also an account of places that no longer exist, such as gritty 1980s New York. Gordon is vulnerable, likable, and humble, a shy and introspective outsider; despite playing in a band for 30 years, she never really considered herself a musician. She writes about her first mentor, John Knight, a conceptual artist who taught her that anything could be viewed in aesthetic terms, and friends and colleagues, including Andy Warhol, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love, with great sensitivity. A remarkably astute and observant memoir and tale of finding one's place in the world, this is a must for Sonic Youth fans and all outsiders-at-heart.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this intriguing memoir, Sonic Youth founding member Kim Gordon describes a life in art and music that led her through the undergrounds of Los Angeles and New York City, a journey framed by the dissolution of her 27-year marriage to bandmate Thurston Moore. Raised in L.A. by academic parents, Gordon surfed the last waves of '60s counterculture into art school and the seedy, dynamic New York City of the late-1970s. An article she wrote for Real Life magazine titled "Trash Drugs and Male Bonding" led her to play guitar in a performance art piece; soon afterward she met Moore, five years younger than the 27-year-old Gordon but already a working musician. Gordon writes, "I joined a band, so I could be in that male dynamic, not staring through a closed window.... That essay unlocked the next thirty years of my life." The strength of Gordon's prose lies in her evocation of places-the dappled light of L.A. canyons, the clamor and steaming heat of Hong Kong, the N.Y.C. loft scene. The descent of her older brother, Keller, into schizophrenia shadows the first half of the book; Moore's adultery the second. Although Gordon includes expected list of celebrities she met throughout life, her unique sensibility never fades. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
For 30 years, Kim Gordon was a Girl in a Band: Sonic Youth, the seminal alternative rock, postpunk New York group she formed in 1981 with her then-boyfriend, later husband, Thurston Moore. Until the band-and their marriage-broke up in 2011, the author sang and played bass, made art, and raised a daughter. Gordon's life story, as she tells it here, may not have been nonstop bohemian glamour, but with her deadpan and often very funny running narrative, she doesn't make it sound too shabby either. The book is more panoramic than reflective: while the performer's thoughts on various projects, artistic decisions, balancing motherhood with touring, and the ever-present male gaze are provocative, her strength lies in telling a solid art-world yarn. There's also something of an elegiac tone throughout: for the author's marriage and her band, for a period in art and music that was ripe with possibilities-and perhaps especially for a vanished Manhattan. VERDICT Gordon's career as a musician, artist, critic, performer, producer, and designer spanned the last truly hip era of downtown New York. The names and the nostalgia-for those who remember or who wish they did-are well worth the price of admission.-Lisa Peet, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The blonde enigma from the band that spoke softly and carried a big noise tells her story, from art-chick beginnings to success to marital and musical catastrophe.Sonic Youth fans were stunned when married co-founders Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon announced in 2011 that couple and band were no more; for 30 years, both seemed impervious to the usual marital strains. Gordon, who lost Moore to another woman, took it even harder, and the bitterness is there on the first page of this autobiography, her therapeutic self-assessment as an artist struggling to define herself in a male-dominated environment. Gordon scrutinizes herself as the daughter of a distant father and a mother who had sacrificed her ambitions and also as the masochistic sister of a cruel (and schizophrenic) older brother. It's a history she carried with her when she headed from California to the No Wave underground of New York in 1980, where she met Moore, the lanky, punk-obsessed guitarist and soul mate who was already worshipping at the altar of CBGBs. Eventually, Gordon found herself submitting to his dominating personality. "The codependent woman, the narcissistic man: stale words lifted from therapy that I nonetheless think about a lot these days." Of course, she also thrivedas a musician, visual artist, mother and icon. Gordon goes into intriguing detail on specific songs and doesn't hold back on Moore or other figures, even ones with worse disasters than her own: "Courtney [Love] told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, Uh-oh train wreck coming.' " Written with the same cool passion she brings to her lyrics, Gordon delivers a generous look at life inside the punk whirlwind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
