The rock-star memoir is a notoriously erratic genre. Often rife with cheapie cash-ins — name-dropping, gossip, self-aggrandizing tales of hedonism — it rarely delivers a strongly felt account of life behind the glamour. But Kim Gordon’s new autobiography, “Girl in a Band,” a heartfelt if occasionally scattered chronicle of her career as the bassist, vocalist and founding member (with now ex-husband Thurston Moore) of seminal New York City rockers Sonic Youth is an exception. With her faintly androgynous good looks, air of dissipated glamour and explosive bursts of ferocious playing and singing, Gordon has long been the embodiment of a certain kind of cool — and her book offers an alluring window into a time of life on the cutting edge.
Raised in the fringy aftermath of early 1970s Southern California counterculture, Gordon arrived in New York in 1980 at a time of now-unimaginable creative chaos. Over the next three decades, she made some of the era’s greatest records with Sonic Youth, an arty, bristling juggernaut of streetwise elan and alien soundscapes.
In recounting these times, Gordon demonstrates poet’s gift for lyrical compression: Compared with Los Angeles, she writes, “New York was a jumble, all colors, shapes, angles, altitudes.” And she is brave, smart, and funny — and winningly self-deprecating — about her role in downtown culture, admitting that she “felt frumpy and nerdy a lot of the time.” Gordon is an entertaining enough raconteur but not, perhaps, a natural writer: a brief excursion into generational historiography — “Did the 1990s ever exist?” she wonders — is the kind of thing one would expect to hear in a late-night dorm-room rap, not from an avatar of downtown hip.
And then, finally: What about Thurston? Gordon’s 2012 divorce from her partner and bandmate of 30 years was viewed as an act of betrayal among devastated hipsters. “The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact,” Gordon writes, “was now just another cliché of middle-aged relationship failure.”Her account of their parting is blunt and revealing, and Moore does not come out of it looking very good.
But Gordon is so fundamentally likable, and the period she chronicles so febrile and essential, that one feels inclined to overlook her book’s somewhat glancing, provisional feel. If “Girl in a Band” is uneven, it’s for good reason: “It’s hard,” Gordon says with moving openness, “to write about a love story with a broken heart.”
MEMOIR: ROCK MUSIC
“Girl in a Band”
by Kim Gordon (Dey Street)
