Top 100 Kim Gordon Quotes
#1. I'm kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there's some point where it doesn't allow for the complexity of things.
Kim Gordon
#2. I've never been good with structure - doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do.
Kim Gordon
#3. Klamath was all about fishing and socializing and cooking and eating, and waking up the next day to start over again.
Kim Gordon
#4. I am basically a shy person, so performing sometimes helps me focus - having all those people concentrate their attention on you. I don't see it so much as becoming another person onstage; it's more exploring a different side of your personality.
Kim Gordon
#5. I still don't really feel like a bass player.
Kim Gordon
#6. I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.
Kim Gordon
#7. In rock music, people have certain assumptions that it makes people more enlightened, and it really doesn't.
Kim Gordon
#8. What is a star? Is stardom a kind of suspended adulthood? Is it a place beyond good and evil? Is a star a person you need to believe in--a daredevil, a risk-taker, a person who goes close to the edge without falling?
Kim Gordon
#9. I tend to want to listen to melancholy music, but sometimes if you're feeling too sad, you can't.
Kim Gordon
#10. I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.
Kim Gordon
#11. Well, it was kind of accidental that Jim started playing with us, although it wasn't sudden ... we hadn't really looked around to think who could be a fifth member.
Kim Gordon
#12. I'm a relatively shy person, but I love being challenged and putting myself in positions that are scary.
Kim Gordon
#13. It's really hard for me to sing and play bass.
Kim Gordon
#14. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.
Kim Gordon
#15. The Westway, the old strip club on Clarkson Street, is still there, but today it's owned by a hipster restaurant entrepreneur who caters to the ironic cultural lifestylers, more fashion world than art, people who are "cool" because they live in New York.
Kim Gordon
#16. I love Northampton. As exciting and glamorous as New York can be, I'm always really relieved to get back there.
Kim Gordon
#17. Families are like little villages. You know where everything is, you know how everything works, your identity is fixed, and you can't really leave, or connect with anything or anybody outside, until your physically no longer there.
Kim Gordon
#18. I've done art on my own, and I've also collaborated with other people to make art. And collaborating with other people is always interesting because you end up doing things you probably wouldn't do otherwise.
Kim Gordon
#19. I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.
Kim Gordon
#20. No one talks about woman power. The Spice Girls - they're masquerading as little girls. It's repulsive.
Kim Gordon
#21. I can't think about whether I'll disappoint Sonic Youth fans. It's not like I want people to be disappointed, but I just can't control that.
Kim Gordon
#22. I like being in a weak position, and making it strong.
Kim Gordon
#23. I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone's noticing me.
Kim Gordon
#24. I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know ... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.
Kim Gordon
#25. I love the way Lady Gaga finds humour in fashion, but it's still very stylised.
Kim Gordon
#26. My parents lived by Rancho Park. And my mom, later in life, got into playing golf. She and her male cronies would get up at five in the morning and sneak onto the back nine. I kind of just started getting into it. For a long time, I was really puzzled by why people liked it.
Kim Gordon
#27. Marriage is a long conversation, someone once said, and maybe so is a rock band's life. A few minutes later, both were done.
Kim Gordon
#28. I don't have any desire to do something that sounds explicitly rock. Like, I don't have a burning need to be a rock musician. I feel like I've taken that as far as I can take it, for me.
Kim Gordon
#29. [...] to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.
Kim Gordon
#30. I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself. The capacity to be inside that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you somewhere else.
Kim Gordon
#31. Cockroaches were a problem, too, and to me the people who invented Combat, the little black roach-trapping contraption, are urban folk heroes.
Kim Gordon
#32. For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless.
Kim Gordon
#33. We'd have to start wearing long wigs and eye shadow and glitter pants." "Okay, okay, well, that's life,
Kim Gordon
#34. I'm a slow learner. When people are so talented or facile at picking up an instrument and playing covers, like Yo La Tengo, I admire that. But I could never do that.
Kim Gordon
#35. I mean, I don't even think of myself as a musician, really.
Kim Gordon
#36. I've always felt uncomfortable giving people what they want or expect.
Kim Gordon
#37. In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz.
Kim Gordon
#38. I like the adrenaline of playing improv - it makes me feel really calm.
Kim Gordon
#39. Joy Division was scheduled to play at Tier 3, but Ian Curtis killed himself a week before the gig.
Kim Gordon
#40. I see it as more of a teenage activity than, you know, she's only 11, but you know, I think it's great that she knows so many girls who want to play music. And I see it more as a teen activity than I do as going into music.
Kim Gordon
#41. Mulholland Drive has more filmic and real-life drama than any other road in L.A., as well as being the favored route of the Manson family for crosstown travel and creepy crawling exploits . . .
Kim Gordon
#42. I never thought about doing anything other than making art.
Kim Gordon
#43. Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that?
Kim Gordon
#44. There's the added element of adrenaline if you're performing. You're aware of spatial relationships and the music.
Kim Gordon
#45. still carry around with me a battle between working conceptually - art based on some overriding idea - and my pure carnal sensory love of materials.
Kim Gordon
#46. I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.
Kim Gordon
#47. I give Iggy credit for deconstructing the very idea of entertainment.
Kim Gordon
#48. And then, I was thinking of doing a record just like starting with voice, because I did this one song that was just kind of a cappella, and I did it for this art piece I did where people could come and play music to go with a voice.
Kim Gordon
#49. It's hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.
Kim Gordon
#50. Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live.
Kim Gordon
#51. I'm aware of how pop culture really infiltrates your expectations in a way that even if you think you're savvy about pop culture, it's so hard not to have these expectations of what a relationship should be. So I constantly feel like I have to bat those expectations down.
Kim Gordon
#52. There's only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.
Kim Gordon
#53. But everything has been so gradual that it's sort of all come from, just hard work and basically being at it.
Kim Gordon
#54. but I couldn't decide if I was a courageous person in real life or whether I could only sing onstage. In that way I haven't changed much in thirty years at all.
Kim Gordon
#55. You know, we have our own audience, and it's not like - they just know we're not going to do certain things.
Kim Gordon
#56. . . . when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten.
Kim Gordon
#57. I was very aware of performers who have a persona, whether it's Siouxsie Sioux or Patti Smith or Lydia Lunch, and I'm just this middle-class girl coming from a more conventional upbringing, this California person. But in a way I felt like it's important to represent the normal.
Kim Gordon
#58. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson turns 'making the personal public' into a romantic, intellectual wet dream. A gorgeous book, inventive, fearless, and full of heart.
Kim Gordon
#59. Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I'm grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.
Kim Gordon
#60. If you're at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful.
Kim Gordon
#61. L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things. But Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s.
Kim Gordon
#63. . . . for me the page, the gallery, the stage became the only places my emotions could be expressed and acted out comfortably.
Kim Gordon
#64. I try not to think too much about what the audience is thinking and what they think I should do.
Kim Gordon
#65. One day I picked up the phone to hear a middle-aged female voice asking if there were "any green Salles" left; she wanted to match Salle's art to the color scheme of her living room furniture. It's all such a joke,
Kim Gordon
#66. The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.
Kim Gordon
#67. In "Shadow of a Doubt," I was trying to describe the connection you feel when your eyes meet another person's. You project all kinds of things on those eyes, feel them seeing into and past you, sometimes feel the sex behind them too.
Kim Gordon
#68. You're always going to feel like you're catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men.
Kim Gordon
#69. I watch 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' with my daughter. We're very into Buffy and Buffy's friends.
Kim Gordon
#70. I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.
Kim Gordon
#71. I think of myself as unconventional, I guess. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.
Kim Gordon
#72. I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years.
Kim Gordon
#73. Hold me tight, down on my knees, so I don't go burning 'cross the breeze.
Kim Gordon
#74. It's hard to say when the life of a band starts and stops ... but playing music together is an act of trust. When that's broken, it's impossible to continue.
Kim Gordon
#75. When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn't negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.
Kim Gordon
#76. I don't see myself as a rock star. I don't see myself in that way. I'm interested in work that offers some sort of critical dialogue.
Kim Gordon
#77. Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.
Kim Gordon
#78. I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play ... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.
Kim Gordon
#79. ...one of those mutual I-can-tell-you-are-a-super-sensitive-and-emotional-person-too sorts of connections.
Kim Gordon
#80. It's amazing how many things you can do when you're just pretending.
Kim Gordon
#81. The love for a child is more an unconditional sort of love ... Although some parents are really narcissistic. In general, I think there is an expectation that love will be unconditional, but obviously it's not - even after living with someone for years.
Kim Gordon
#82. I never felt like I had anything really figured out. When I was a teenager, it was all about teenagers having an 'identity crisis.' That was the phrase that was used. But in my early 20s, I was still like, 'When am I going to be over that?'
Kim Gordon
#83. I mean, most of it is probably more obscure and just more noisy than either of those two bands, but Thurston has stuff all the time that he's involved with that is fairly obscure and experimental.
Kim Gordon
#84. It wasn't some Puritan thing. Straight-edge was asking adherents to take control of their lives, not to be blind consumers, and not to be tricked into thinking that drinking and drugs were cool since in fact they were the tools of a previous generation
Kim Gordon
#85. I wasn't very confident about clothes; I was always hunting through racks, never sure what looked right. It can be like that again when you're older.
Kim Gordon
#86. That stage in life when older people assume that just because you've graduated college you know who you are, or what you're doing, and in fact most people don't.
Kim Gordon
#87. Hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn't interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture. I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to defy people's expectations.
Kim Gordon
#88. I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
Kim Gordon
#89. Clothes are signifiers and symbols of how people communicate with each other.
Kim Gordon
#90. You can't be a strong or cool woman and be represented except in a harsh way, looking mean and cold and hard. It's like reverse sexism.
Kim Gordon
#91. An unending kiss--that's all we ever wanted to feel when we paid to hear someone play.
Kim Gordon
#93. I really want to start playing basketball. I actually bought a new basketball.
Kim Gordon
#94. Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston's and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are.
Kim Gordon
#95. Anyone becomes mannered if you think too much about what other people think.
Kim Gordon
#96. Part of my desire to play music was because I wanted to escape the art world and the politics of it; the petty gossip-y art world. But you know, I feel like they're both equal forms of expression.
Kim Gordon
#97. Everything people call fabulous or amazing lasts for about ten minutes before the culture moves on to the next thing.
Kim Gordon
#98. Unless you're singing something that's kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it's just difficult.
Kim Gordon
#99. When Punk Rock happened, it created an opening in the culture ... it made it ok to think you could play music, even though you had no musical training.
Kim Gordon
#100. It's hard to get hot over a painting; there's no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness. Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it's easier in music.
Kim Gordon
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