Kim Gordon

Kim Gordon holding a photo of her and Iggy Pop, 1991. Photo by Tony Mott

autobiography
“Girl in a Band” from Dey Street Books

text by JEFF RIAN

 

The title of Kim Gordon’s new memoir, Girl in a Band (Dey Street Books), comes from the song “Sacred Trickster” on Sonic Youth’s last album, The Eternal (2009): “What’s it like to be a girl in a band? / I don’t quite understand.” Which says a lot about her role in rock music at a time when a generation of creative, even literary, musicians were influenced by punk and English and American rock and wanted to perform and record outside the strictures of corporate labels and stereotypical rock. As the singer and bassist of Sonic Youth, she was utterly different in look and behavior from predecessors like Janis Joplin or Lydia Lunch. She is also an artist,…