Eisenthal............Girl in a Band and Revisiting Sonic Youth

art by Madeline Garcia

Back when Facebook was still kind of new and exciting, before grandparents were using it to leave comments with their names signed at the bottom, there used to be a spot on your “About” section that was for “inspirational figures” like Mother Teresa or Marilyn Monroe. I only ever had one on there – Kim Gordon.

Ever since I fell down that rabbit-hole called YouTube on a string of Sonic Youth videos, I’ve admired Gordon. I felt drawn to her right away, to her dark voice and the way she’d stand on stage, playing bass in a baggy dress. She was this older woman in an otherwise male rock band. She oozed power and maturity.

I jumped to pre-order her memoir, Girl in a Band, this past winter, and against my better judgment, started to read it during finals. The music sites that I like to read made a big deal out of the fact that she discusses Thurston Moore’s affair and their divorce, or that she puts down Lana Del Rey, but they missed the point in all that click-bait. It’s a damn good book about the life of a damn good musician.

Girl in a Band is intimate and fascinating, and in the same way you read messages from a friend in their voice, you can read this book in Kim’s distinct sound. She describes an ’80s New York City, its clubs, its music and art scenes – how Sonic Youth came together, how different albums were recorded, the ideas behind certain songs. Her experiences first as a “girl in a band” and then as a “mom in rock.” There’s something crazy and somehow so rock ‘n’ roll about being on tour with a baby and leaky breasts. She does say that, “dripping breast milk during a video shoot is not very rock!” But there’s something about women dealing with that in the first place that’s pretty hardcore. It’s hard (if not impossible) not to need to listen to music you’ve been reading about for a couple hundred pages. I had stopped listening to Sonic Youth for a long time after that first year of YouTube-fueled discovery, but for a few weeks following Girl in a Band, I went back through Sonic Youth’s (extensive) discography, and it was so worth it. Their thirty years of music is sexy, noisy, dissonant, experimental, creepy, moody, intense, angry, aggressive, playful, all at once. It feels like pure energy, like thought, like art.

Of course, this memoir is about so much more than Sonic Youth. Girl in a Band pulls you into an artist’s world. It’s an education in the music and culture of the 1980s and ’90s, and a personal look at how relationships and motherhood fit within it. Gordon takes you on a journey, spending time with Lydia Lunch, Kurt Cobain, Yoko Ono, Philip K. Dick, Miles Davis, and more along the way. I loved taking that trip with her, and spending time with the pure awesome noisiness of Sonic Youth after such a long time away.