Kim Gordon Quotes & Sayings

I watch 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' with my daughter. We're very into Buffy and Buffy's friends. — Kim Gordon

Klamath was all about fishing and socializing and cooking and eating, and waking up the next day to start over again. — Kim Gordon

The only really good performance is the one where you make yourself vulnerable, while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. — Kim Gordon

[...] to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless. — Kim Gordon

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

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

I try not to think too much about what the audience is thinking and what they think I should do. — Kim Gordon

Working on art, as opposed to being in a constant collaborative state, as in a band, is something that I've always done - to a smaller degree, but it always remained a part of my integral self. — Kim Gordon

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

Basketball and ping-pong are my two forms of exercise. — Kim Gordon

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

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

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

Back then, and even now, I wonder: Am I "empowered"? If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a "strong woman"? Sometimes another voice enters my head, shooing these thoughts aside. This one tells me that the only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don't fall to your death. — Kim Gordon

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

In retrospect, it's ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore ... Still, I've always believed - still do - that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside. — Kim Gordon

I'm a relatively shy person, but I love being challenged and putting myself in positions that are scary. — Kim Gordon

For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless. — Kim Gordon

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

I mean, I don't even think of myself as a musician, really. — Kim Gordon

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

No one talks about woman power. The Spice Girls - they're masquerading as little girls. It's repulsive. — Kim Gordon

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

I love Northampton. As exciting and glamorous as New York can be, I'm always really relieved to get back there. — Kim Gordon

It's hard to write about a love story with a broken heart. — Kim Gordon

I feel most free onstage. The audience, it's an abstraction. You don't really see anyone out there, but you feel the audience inside you. — Kim Gordon

Hold me tight, down on my knees, so I don't go burning 'cross the breeze. — Kim Gordon

It's amazing how many things you can do when you're just pretending. — Kim Gordon

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

There were others of course - The Velvet Undergound, the Doors- who took risks in the 1960s, when no one knew where any of it was going. Before them were the Beats and before the Beats the avant-garde artists, the futurists, Fluxus, and before that, the blues, outsider music, a mourning for what's expected but will never happen, so why not dance and play and forget for a few moments that we're all alone anyway? — Kim Gordon

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

Women are natural anarchists. — Kim Gordon

If you're at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful. — Kim Gordon

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

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

I've never been good with structure - doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do. — Kim Gordon

People pay to see others believe in themselves. — Kim Gordon

A friend of mine introduced me to Thurston Moore because she thought I would like him. He was playing with the tallest band in the world, the Coachmen. They were sort of like Talking Heads, jangly guitar, Feelies guitar. Anyway, it was love at first sight. His band broke up that night. And we started playing. — Kim Gordon

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

After you've graduated, you're supposed to be an adult and go out into the world, and you're still not formed. It's an interesting ... horrible, horrible time. — Kim Gordon

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

I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age. — Kim Gordon

I've always felt uncomfortable giving people what they want or expect. — Kim Gordon

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

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas. — Kim Gordon

At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. — Kim Gordon

I'm a mom, but I don't always want to look just like that. — Kim Gordon

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

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

It is fun to smash guitars. — Kim Gordon

I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it. — Kim Gordon

I always wanted to rebel. — Kim Gordon

I love the way Lady Gaga finds humour in fashion, but it's still very stylised. — Kim Gordon

It's really hard for me to sing and play bass. — Kim Gordon

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

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

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

But I would make it through "Death Valley." Lee, Thurston, and I, and then just the two of us, stood there. My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it. I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life. — Kim Gordon

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

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

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

There's the added element of adrenaline if you're performing. You're aware of spatial relationships and the music. — Kim Gordon

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

We'd have to start wearing long wigs and eye shadow and glitter pants." "Okay, okay, well, that's life, — Kim Gordon

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

In rock music, people have certain assumptions that it makes people more enlightened, and it really doesn't. — Kim Gordon

Joy Division was scheduled to play at Tier 3, but Ian Curtis killed himself a week before the gig. — Kim Gordon

The last two records I liked playing a lot. — Kim Gordon

I like that show 'Ray Donovan' - I'm obsessed with that. He's in Hollywood, he's some kind of a fixer, but he's also kind of a thug. And 'Scandal,' the D.C. one with Kerry Washington. — Kim Gordon

In a lot of the art world, you have to present yourself as you know what you're doing at a young age. Music gave me another outlet. The 'no wave' bands were such an inspiration; it felt so free - once you start doing it, it's hard to stop. But I can't get away from art. It comes back around. I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't pursue it. — Kim Gordon

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

Everyone's so interior now, they're not really looking around them. They're on their phones. — Kim Gordon

Unless you're singing something that's kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it's just difficult. — Kim Gordon

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

. . . when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten. — Kim Gordon

If you don't fit into a certain type, there's a lot of strength in just being who you are. — Kim Gordon

Clothes are signifiers and symbols of how people communicate with each other. — Kim Gordon

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

. . . for me the page, the gallery, the stage became the only places my emotions could be expressed and acted out comfortably. — Kim Gordon

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

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

The other song we did was my cover of "Addicted to Love." There used to be a sort of karaoke booth on Saint Mark's, where anyone could go in and record themselves. I chose "Addicted to Love" because I liked Robert Palmer's video, with its background cast of zombie models identically dressed and holding guitars. I took the tape with the canned version of the song back to the studio, and we sped up the vocal to make it sound higher in pitch. Later I brought the cassette mix to Macy's, where they had a video version of the karaoke sound booth. You could customize a background while two cameras filmed you. For my backdrop I picked jungle fighters, and I wore my Black Flag earrings. The entire bill came to $19.99, and in a slick, commercial MTV world, it felt gratifying and empowering to pay for the whole thing with a credit card. — Kim Gordon

I never thought about doing anything other than making art. — Kim Gordon

An unending kiss--that's all we ever wanted to feel when we paid to hear someone play. — Kim Gordon

The clothes in themselves are empty. But what they throw off and what clothes mean as signifiers is incredibly interesting - to see what people do with it. That's more interesting to me than flipping through a magazine or seeing the fall look. — Kim Gordon

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

How was she not the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others in order to achieve some degree of perfection and power that's forever just around the corner, out of reach? It was easier for her to disappear, to free herself finally from that body, to find a perfection in dying. — Kim Gordon

I still don't really feel like a bass player. — Kim Gordon

Because our daughters have school and it's just such a hassle going down to New York all the time, we can really only go on the weekends, we kind of ... Steve came up here and worked out stuff for the second half of the record. — Kim Gordon

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

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

I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years. — Kim Gordon

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

Participant Inc. gallery, — Kim Gordon

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

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

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

I like the adrenaline of playing improv - it makes me feel really calm. — Kim Gordon

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

Everything people call fabulous or amazing lasts for about ten minutes before the culture moves on to the next thing. — Kim Gordon