Turn Down the Music and Read: Girl in a Band

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Turn Down the Music and Read: Girl in a Band

I really wanted to love Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band (Harper Collins, 2015) because she’s a badass rocker and all the cool kids are reading it. I ended up liking it…eventually.

Gordon, of course, is the multi-talented guitar player and vocalist for Sonic Youth and, for many people even more importantly, half of a marriage held up as proof that super cool artistic people could also have durable romantic partnerships. When she and her husband, fellow bandmate Thurston Moore, announced their divorce in 2011 after 27 years of marriage, the shattered innocence of a million Gen X fans could be heard from space. WHAT? Kim and Thurston were our role models for staying married and not selling out!

But I’m racing ahead here, to the part of Girl in a Band that critics of Gordon’s latest book say is the salacious part that her publishers must have forced her to write. For me, it’s not until she starts talking about her marriage and motherhood that the book started to have some flesh and blood and humanity.

The first 200 pages of Girl in a Band read as pretty straight reportage, albeit with insights into Gordon’s childhood – particularly, a tough relationship with a troubled older brother – that explain a great deal about why she craved the emotional release that came with performing with Sonic Youth. Music was only one of her creative outlets and it’s one of the things that makes Gordon special – not just the drive to write, create art, and play music, but the energy to pursue all of it, and the self-awareness of why she needs to.

In a heavily male-dominated field, she embraced her femininity, and radiated fierceness. She continues to hold her own in a tough industry.

Also, she was born in Rochester. So obviously, that goes into the plus column.

But at some point if you’re not a diehard Sonic Youth fan, and I’m admitting here that I was just a dabbler, the “then we made this album, then we released this song, then we went on that tour, then we saw this guy,” rhythm felt a little plodding and rote, like reading a playlist. But I could see why the superfans would gobble that up – for the right musician, I would too.

It wasn’t until Gordon started writing about motherhood and marriage that I finally got hooked, and once I did, I finished Girl in a Band in one sitting. I for one am curious how a rock star mom manages diaper changes in club bathrooms, and how when her daughter hit the tween years she didn’t want anyone to know who her parents were. These parts of the book make you feel like you could sit down with Gordon over a cup of coffee and have a laugh about your kids’ foibles and a cry about their vulnerability and awesomeness.

Similarly, I appreciated the honesty with which Gordon relays not just the painful discovery that her husband had been cheating on her, but the number of times she gave him another chance – some people might have tried to put all the blame on an ex, but Gordon doesn’t let herself off the hook completely. She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who tolerates duplicity in anyone, especially not in herself. I admired the way that Gordon’s revenge on her husband hasn’t been revenge at all, but simply moving forward with the creative, expressive life she’s sought all along through her music, art, and yes, this book. (She never once mentions the Other Woman by name, which of course has sent a million readers to Google.)

So even if Girl in a Band was slow to build, I count myself as a more educated fan for reading it, and it definitely ended on a high note.