#MeToo is symptomatic of a culture of women feeling repressed but the music INDUSTRY WAS ALWAYS SEXIST

KIM GORDON SONIC YOUTH

- Kiran Acharya

Kim Gordon has come home. Although her name is more immediately associated with New York and the faded memory of the Lower East Side’s ‘no-wave’ scene, in which artists mixed with filmmakers, actors, and the earliest punk musicians and rappers, she has returned to the California of her youth to continue an artistic career that is now into its fourth decade.

She began painting and making visual art in the 1980s, and recent solo exhibitions in London, New York and Dublin are now joined by No Home Record, Kim’s debut solo album. It’s a collection that’s been anticipated not just since her critically-acclaimed collaboration with experimental guitarist Bill Nace as Body/Head, but since the release of her memoir, Girl In A Band, in 2015 and first single under her own name, Murdered Out, in 2016.

Kim started making music without any formal training, toying with guitars, drum machines, and lyrics often cut from magazine advertisements. Taking personal inspiration from early punk pioneers The Slits, The Raincoats and Patti Smith, she met her Sonic Youth bandmates at the age of 27. Over the next 30 years they would make 16 albums and 46 music videos, bringing the best elements of America’s avant-garde to stages across the world. Sonic Youth’s layers of noise, dissonance and percussive invention grew into a more melodic and textured sound by the early ’90s, when they were able to bring bands like Nirvana and Babes In Toyland to European audiences.