Kim Gordon, Koko: The grunge queen of cool rocks out in a sombre fashion
Kim Gordon, New York’s grunge-era Queen of Cool, exuded icy, regal poise at a steamy Koko packed with hipsters-with-haircuts trying, like her, not to break a sweat. The 71-year-old made them suffer for their art rock with 75 minutes of stumbling beats, sub-bass squelches and squalling noise, all apparently inspired by the abstract end of contemporary hip hop – with not a sniff of any tunes from her glory days in Sonic Youth.
In that band at the turn of the 1990s, Gordon reigned supreme together with her then-husband Thurston Moore, across a series of hugely influential albums that helped nudge their avant-gardist No Wave breed of post-hardcore punk towards the mainstream. The pair were soon dubbed the “First Couple of Grunge”, thanks to their mentoring role behind Nirvana’s Nevermind.
However, as Gordon forensically detailed in her 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, maintaining a marriage within an internationally successful group for 30 years was no picnic, and after a domestic split from Moore, the dissolution of Sonic Youth inevitably followed in 2011.
Initially empowered to pick up a bass guitar by punk’s DIY ethos, she never had formal instrumental training and to this day doesn’t consider herself a musician. After the band split, Gordon plunged back into the visual-art world from which she first emerged in the early ’80s, making the odd collaborative album of improvised cacophony on the side.
Yet, this irrepressible ideologue on gender politics was recently celebrated on the cover of one US alternative music magazine, under the tagline “American Icon”, thanks to a remarkable transformation in which she properly “went solo”, abandoning SY’s guitar-heavy style in favour of a hi-tech contemporary hip-hop sound, devised alongside Los Angeles producer Justin Raisen, and first showcased on 2019’s No Home Record.
Onstage at Koko, Gordon looked every inch the Gen X-style leader in a black long-sleeved satin shirt and matching white-bootlace-cinched boxer shorts. Boasting a near-identical blond bob haircut and slender physique as when I first caught Sonic Youth 39 years ago, she was enviably sprightly at 71, bunny-hopping like a teenager to the thrashy coda of opening track Bye Bye.
Her main set unfolded as a straight run-through of this year’s follow-up album, The Collective, which soon felt more claustrophobic and impenetrable than its predecessor. Against a lumbering grind spirited up by her young backing trio (plus considerable bonus sonics on pre-record), I’m A Man was quintessential Kim G, its lyrics a satirical monologue lampooning toxic masculinity. Psychedelic Orgasm, meanwhile, was a nightmarish bad trip, and just Shelf Warmer’s cavernous dubscape offered breathing space in the onslaught.
With the only stage “bantz” a murmured “thank you” towards the end, it was mighty hard work, rather like the feminist answer to Kanye West’s famously gloomy and self-indulgent solo performance at Glastonbury 2015, or like grumpy old Lou Reed on a not-so-perfect day.
The encore’s highlights from No Home Record included the catchy Air BnB, and Hungry Baby’s thunderous ramalama electronica, but a Sonic Youth classic like Kool Thing would surely have sent everyone home that little bit happier.
At Birmingham’s O2 Institute 2 tonight (seetickets.com), and at the sold-out Glastonbury Festival on Sunday
