Kim Gordon Quotations

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

Anyone becomes mannered if you think too much about what other people think

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

But everything has been so gradual that it's sort of all come from, just hard work and basically being at it.

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.

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.

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas

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

I never thought about doing anything other than making art.

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.

I'll leave a store if I hate the music. If it's just, like, techno, I feel like my brain is going to explode.

Rap music is really good when you’re traumatized,

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.

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.

I do retweet some of the things that people say about the things I've done, but I don't necessarily want to use it to promote myself because I find that it gets kind of boring. There should just be a whole different site for that. Because it's just kind of boring and gross to use it just self-promotion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I don't really feel comfortable anywhere except when I'm working alone at home. It's exhausting to be out around people.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I really want to start playing basketball. I actually bought a new basketball.

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

I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.

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.

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

I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.

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

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

The last two records I liked playing a lot.

You know, we have our own audience, and it's not like - they just know we're not going to do certain things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?'

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.

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.

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.

In the early eighties, there were a lot of artists involved with the music scene. All those young artists, before their careers took off, were into music. Robert Longo used to play some guitar. He had a band for a while. Basquiat had a band. I mean, people were always trying to mix music and art - in fact, I'm guilty of it myself.

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.

It's really hard for me to sing and play bass. Unless you're singing something that's kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it's just difficult.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.

Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy… But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.

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.

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

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.

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.

Women are natural anarchists.

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.

I always wanted to rebel.

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

No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula LA glamour – sociopathy, narcissism – because it’s good rock and roll, good entertainment! I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behaviour, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill.

I think of myself as unconventional. 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.

I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men-white male corporate society. So why wouldnt a woman want to rebel against that?

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.

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

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.

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

People pay to see others believe in themselves.

Many designers are gay men making clothes for women. Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.

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

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.

I tend to want to listen to melancholy music, but sometimes if you're feeling too sad, you can't.

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.

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.

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries .