Kim!
Gordon!
Is! Mad!
The Artist, Author, and Musician Talks Anger and Other Sources of Inspiration
- Interview: Brendan O’Connor
Kim Gordon is just like us: sad, angry, and stuck at home. She might go out for a short walk through her Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz, or a quick run to the store, masked up. She had planned to go on tour through the spring and summer, but that's cancelled. "I'm basically unemployed, like so many people," she told me. "Everyone in the music industry, anyone who would have been on the crew, or other musicians—it's a whole domino effect." Fortunately, one of her nieces has been living with her since the fall, so she's not totally on her own, but for the most part Gordon is scrolling through Twitter and wondering what could happen next.
Gordon grew up in California under Governor Ronald Reagan, watching as he dismantled social services, signed legislation disarming the Black Panthers, and mocked striking migrant farm workers. As many of her contemporaries railed against his presidential administration, Gordon and her band, Sonic Youth, took a more oblique approach, focusing on what she called in her memoir "the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture." Every so often their inscrutable art-punk lyrics would contain a recognizable political sentiment (i.e. "I believe Anita Hill"), but this was an exception; for the most part, their lyrics were subtly unstitching that quilt with guitars as precise as sewing needles.
I discovered Gordon's abrasive music and aloof persona as an angsty teenager from the comfortably middle-class suburbs of New Jersey, dabbling in punk and socialism during the second Bush administration. Equally transfixed and confused by her and her work, Gordon's stubborn refusal to articulate the political sentiments I sensed lay at the base of her music frustrated me, even as the music itself transformed my sense of what was artistically possible. I spent years holed up in my basement playing with fuzz pedals and alternative guitar tunings, writing terrible lyrics about the global war on terror and all the girls who weren't kissing me.
Years passed. Obama was elected, and then Trump. I put down my guitars, though I never really stopped listening to Sonic Youth. And towards the end of 2019, Gordon became an outspoken supporter of the democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders, canvassing with friends and hosting phone banks. Even after the pandemic hit, she continued to do so, posting photos to her Instagram account of her virtual phone banks hosted over video conferencing software. (She also contributed $6 to Amy Klobuchar's campaign.)
We spoke by phone the day after Sanders announced he was suspending his presidential campaign. In the weeks that followed, Sanders would encourage his infamously recalcitrant supporters to vote for the presumptive nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, which Gordon committed to do—albeit resentfully.
Gordon isn't promoting anything at the moment: her most recent album (her first as a solo artist) came out in October, and as she mentioned, her upcoming summer tour is cancelled. But I wanted to know how her involvement in the campaign had changed the way she thought of herself as an artist, a person, and a political actor.
As brilliant as she is, it was reassuring to hear the same notes of anger, confusion, and loss in Gordon's voice as I've heard in those of my friends. None of us know what to do or what comes next. Not even Kim Gordon.
Brendan O'Connor
Kim Gordon
Twitter is terrible and exhausting. So why are you on Twitter? You do some great tweets, but you're Kim Gordon. You don't have to be on Twitter.
I don't know! I was off of it for a long time. Now, instead of being sad about the virus, I'm turning that anger towards capitalist politicians.
Lately it seems like you're speaking much more directly—through both your activism and your music—about the end of capitalism, perhaps more so than when you were a part of Sonic Youth. What’s changed?
I guess I could say that the group—and myself as an artist—felt that if you're doing something that goes against the grain of a homogenized culture, you're swimming upstream, and that was a way to be political. Now, I feel, is not the time to step back. In part I really did get inspired by Bernie Sanders. And felt abhorred by Trump.
We’re talking the day after Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign. How are you feeling?
Well, awful! It was kind of inevitable, I guess. One thing that's been really eye-opening to me is how similar the establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans are to each other. That makes things look kind of bleak.
When you say establishment Democrats and Republicans are similar, what do you mean?
They both have a corporate, capitalist agenda. They bow to Wall Street. The Democrats have cultural, social issues that are more progressive, but their economic issues really aren't. Look at how bad the economy is for the working class, and the poor, and even the middle class. People were already struggling when the pandemic started. The core of Bernie's ideas aren't radical; they're what should be. Biden should see that he's not going to have a chance against Trump unless he presents a real distinction between him and Trump. If he wants to really get people 45 and under enthused about him, he needs to have some real policies, not this tinkering-around-the-edges bullshit. That's what the Obama era was.
Will you vote for Joe Biden?
I'll have to vote for him, but I won't donate unless I see him having real ideas that matter to real people. I'll donate money to Congressional races.
How did you come to be involved in the Sanders campaign?
I have an old friend who works on his campaign. When they first came out to L.A., she invited me to come to this meeting with other people who could be "influencers." That's a horrible word. My friend Elaine Kahn, she's a poet. She got very involved and asked if I wanted to host a phone bank. I hosted some and canvassed some. I have always liked to question authority. It seemed more meaningful than being mad on the sidelines. Although I'm still mad on the sidelines.
How do you feel about being an "influencer"? You sound slightly ambivalent.
I didn't really think about that. I didn't want to be one of those dumb celebrities. I don't even see myself as a celebrity anyway. But I realized that I do have a lot of followers on Instagram, and I started getting a lot of feedback like, "This is so nice to see, this is so encouraging." It actually did make a difference to people.When I went out canvassing—I'm a very shy person, so it was kind of painful, but it shows other people that they can do it too. That's really what it's about. You get kind of nihilistic, because you think the system's broken, you think electoral politics doesn't work, but Bernie is inspiring. He opens people's eyes, he makes them feel that they have power.
Have you experienced that feeling before?
Only when I was a teenager in the 60s, going to Vietnam demonstrations or marching with the teachers' strike. I didn't have to go to school for a semester. [laughs] Going to demonstrations, being with people—you feel bonded together over a certain injustice that was being done. That's a very powerful feeling.
“Now, I feel, is not the time to step back.”
One of the videos that you made for the campaign seemed very allusive to Martha Rosler's "Semiotics of the Kitchen." It was so delightfully weird, and really interesting given the discourse—some good, some not so good—about gender and Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders supporters.
That was my friend Elaine's idea. We kept trying to come up with something like "Bernie Babes" or "Sanders Sisters." It was kinda corny. All the "Bernie Bros" stuff—that was all so ridiculous. I saw Warren supporters being really nasty on Twitter, but it's not the whole story. The establishment media—MSNBC, CNN—they guide the dialogue. Now what they're doing is blaming Bernie, but they would blame him no matter what. They would blame Bernie just because he ran, if Biden loses. They're spinning it up because they don't really believe in Biden.
What do you think the role of artists and poets and musicians is in this moment?
I don't know if political art works, quite frankly. It's more of a comfort to that part of the culture—a galvanizing of spirit amongst a community that's disenfranchised for the most part— rather than something that speaks to the GOP, or even the Democratic establishment. They don't care. The artist's role is to pose questions.
At some point, presumably, we will reach the other side of this pandemic. What do you think things are going to look like?
I think in a year people might be coming for Congress with pitchforks if they don't do the right thing.
Will you be out there with a pitchfork?
Oh, yes.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Brendan O'Connor is a freelance journalist working on a book about immigration, capitalism, and the far right for Haymarket.
- Date: April 30, 2020
- Interview: Brendan O’Connor
- Illustrations: Camille Leblanc-Murray
- Images/Photos Courtesy Of: Kim Gordon
