by Christopher J. Lee
Is the distortion on Kim Gordon’s new album The Collective the same as the distortion found on Sonic Youth’s debut Confusion is Sex? The short answer is no, of course, but I raise this question in a conceptual sense. Gordon has been active for over four decades with no signs of hesitation or decline, whether on her own, with Body/Head (with Bill Nace), or one-off collaborations with other artists. Her sound has been both consistent and expansive, anchored in an ethos established by Sonic Youth. In her memoir, Girl in a Band, from 2015, Gordon writes that “noise was an insult, a derogatory word, the most scornful word you could throw at music” and, furthermore, how “Thurston [Moore] said he wanted to reclaim the word noise, even though nobody really knew what a ‘noise band’ was or was supposed to sound like.”
Sonic Youth went on to do just that, pioneering an aesthetic of distortion that served at different moments as a cover for still-developing talent, a resistance to 1980s commercial radio, a caustic means of political criticism against Reaganism, and, finally, as a meta-technique of musical composition – distortion for the sake of distortion – that made listeners confront the most fundamental aspects of the electric guitar. In the same way that Willem de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s made viewers aware of the painterly qualities of painting, Sonic Youth did the same for rock music, self-consciously making the melodic and abrasive possibilities of the electric guitar cohabitate, at times commingling and at other times in conflict with one another. Gordon, Moore, and Lee Ranaldo were not the first to employ distortion, nor were they the last, but there was a purity to their approach. Sonic Youth’s foregrounded engagement and next-level exploration of this aesthetic element in its own right – not as a haphazard mistake, not as a rookie technique – went on to influence countless bands while also genuflecting towards their elders, whether the Stooges, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, or the Velvet Underground.
Characteristically, The Collective is full of distortion albeit in a manner different from Gordon’s solo debut, No Home Record, released five years ago in 2019. Beyond this initial fact, there are two further observations to be made. First, this LP is essentially a hip-hop album, and second, Gordon is 70 years old. This latter detail matters little, except to say that Gordon remains as forward thinking as ever. This album isn’t a nostalgia outing like Rough and Rowdy Ways, which Bob Dylan dropped only a few years ahead of Gordon at the ripe age of 79. Rather, The Collective is fully alive to our present moment. The hip-hop elements – the trap percussion, the heavy bass lines, the thick production quality – establish this fixation. This is not the gentrified hip-hop of Jay-Z or Kanye West, but closer to the art/industrial rap approach of Death Grips or Dälek via Atari Teenage Riot, whose name tips its hat to one of Sonic Youth’s best-known compositions. A palpable circularity of influence can be detected on this album.
Ever attentive to trends defining the musical landscape, Gordon and Sonic Youth long skirted around hip-hop, whether with the rudimentary sampling of Ciccone Youth found on The Whitey Album or through Gordon’s duet with Chuck D on “Kool Thing” off Goo. Yet none of these experiments really worked. The Whitey Album, which was intended as a satire of Madonna’s music and fame, was neither serious nor entirely a farce. Meanwhile, “Kool Thing” amounted to little more than a cameo for D. Like other efforts during the same period – R.E.M.’s collaboration with KRS-One on Out of Time comes to mind – the result was thin, unsatisfying, and a little goofy.
The Collective works because it abandons the rock format entirely in favor of a sonic cut-and-paste approach. Using hip-hop templates to frame and structure this method, this new album is comprised of delineations and collages of different ideas rather than formal songs as such. The production helmed by Justin Raisen (Charli XCX, Lil Yachty) is at a very high level. Glimmers of this montage technique could be heard on No Home Record. On that album, tracks like “Sketch Artist” and “Paprika Pony” layered and synthesized fat bass lines, blasts of feedback, cello fills, cheap electronica, trap, and piano melodies to keep the listener on their feet. Meanwhile, songs like “Air BnB” and “Hungry Baby” more closely approximated the output of Sonic Youth with their coarse guitars, perhaps reflecting leftover ideas from that period. Named after a Chantal Akerman film, No Home Record wasn’t exactly All Things Must Pass, but like George Harrison’s triple album, it left you with a stronger impression of Gordon as a songwriter, encouraging a return to and reconsideration of Sonic Youth’s back catalogue.
Gordon could probably read a grocery shopping list and make it seem literary, exciting, and profound. This is essentially what she does on The Collective’s ominous sounding first track, “BYE BYE.” She runs through a list of things to do and bring on an unnamed trip. “Lip mask, eye mask, ear plugs,” Gordon says in her characteristically deadpan delivery. “Travel shampoo, conditioner, eyeliner, dental floss, money for the cleaners.” There isn’t much here on the surface, though this litany of everyday items does fall into themes found in her past work. No Home Record was partly about dislocation as the title and tracks like “Air BnB” imply.
The Collective takes this focus a step further into less personal terrain to elaborate more general conditions of modern alienation. Beyond accounting for the mundane on “BYE BYE,” Gordon talks about “drywall for days” and the emptiness of “romanticism in porn” on the track “I Don’t Miss My Mind.” The album closer, “Dream Dollar,” has her cynically calling out to “Cement the brand!” These commentaries on consumerism and contemporary ennui, in tandem with broadsides against patriarchy, informed her earlier work with Sonic Youth on songs like “The Sprawl” from Daydream Nation (“Come on down to the store / You can buy some more, more, more, more….”) and “Swimsuit Issue” from Dirty (“Don’t touch my breast, I’m just working at my desk / Don’t put me to the test, I’m just doing my best….”). Here, her critical assessments of gender are worked out further on “I’m A Man,” “It’s Dark Inside,” and “Shelf Warmer,” each of which take on toxic masculinity in different visages, whether the gun owner or the bad boyfriend, who can also be the same person.
Taken together, The Collective marks a more radical stance than No Home Record with its bleaker, more panoramic vision of the present. In contrast to the exuberant warmth that has greeted it, this album is austere and starkly pessimistic. Rarely letting her guard down, Gordon’s debut solo album possessed a few introspective moments that conceded some vulnerability. The songs “Earthquake” and “Get Yr Life Back” seemingly referenced her split from Moore and making a new life for herself. Moving in the opposite direction, the title The Collective gestures toward the social rather than the individual. It comes from the fourth track, “The Candy House” – a reference to Jennifer Egan’s sci-fi novel of the same name, which is about technology and collective memory. Gordon is intent on retaining her personal identity, repeating “I won’t join the collective,” but harbors a residual uncertainty and even an anxiety of being alone by virtue of this choice.
It is interesting to compare The Collective with Laetitia Sadier’s recently released album, Rooting for Love. Both Gordon and Sadier founded influential bands (Stereolab for Sadier). Both had relationships with other band members which affected the course of those projects. Both seem to be grappling with the connections between the individual and society, even the planetary as in the case of Sadier. Their current solo albums mutually stress a career-long dissatisfaction with convention, but, more than this, an intuitive knowledge of more ground to cover and new possibilities ahead.
“Extreme noise and dissonance can be an incredibly cleansing thing,” Gordon writes early on in Girl in a Band. The pervasive distortion on The Collective sounds like many things – disaffection, money, fronting, musical comradery, memory, guilt, even shelter. It also sounds of age and the passage of time – the uncanny signature of an enduring vocation and style of a singular artist. Perhaps it remains cleansing, too. Whether by choice or by force of circumstance, Kim Gordon is still committed to personal evolution, embracing new techniques and dispensing with what she doesn’t need in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of herself and the critical role of the artist today.