Keep secrets with yourself, Gordon says with her silence. Men feel at once enticed and threatened by this quality they have called her things like “sexy” and “mysterious” and “aloof.” Women, though, recognize the code that Gordon speaks as a survival strategy, a way to stay sane and maybe even be taken seriously in this weird world. (She’s said she picked up her “idea of space, and in-between-ness, and the importance of phrasing” early, from her parents’ jazz collection.) Her lines are cryptic but also legibly caustic - a lot of Kim Gordon lyrics feel like inside jokes with Kim Gordon, jokes that are somehow very pointedly and personally and stingingly about you. Gordon is a master of the beckoning omission, the blank space, the pregnant pause. Once I came to better understand Kim Gordon, I realized that it wasn’t there. She’s a … what, exactly? One of the first times I heard the song I rewound that part a couple times, listening for the phantom noun. Then, very suddenly, the machinery jams, the tempo slows to a crawl, and we hear the voice of the bass player, Kim Gordon, at once nervous and bracingly warriorlike: “She’s finally discovered she’s a …. ![]() There’s a great song on the first Sonic Youth album called “Shaking Hell.” The opening minute and a half - steely, ominous, unsteadily motoric - sounds like a piece of factory equipment malfunctioning in the moments before somebody loses a limb.
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