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?
Kim Gordon
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 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'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.
It's amazing how many things you can do when you're just pretending.
I don't really feel comfortable anywhere except when I'm working alone at home. It's exhausting to be out around people.
I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.
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 like the adrenaline of playing improv - it makes me feel really calm.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a mom, but I don't always want to look just like that.
I watch 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' with my daughter. We're very into Buffy and Buffy's friends.
I'm a relatively shy person, but I love being challenged and putting myself in positions that are scary.
I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.
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.
It's really hard for me to sing and play bass.
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.
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 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.
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.
I still don't really feel like a bass player.
I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing 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 love the way Lady Gaga finds humour in fashion, but it's still very stylised.
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 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.
Everyone's so interior now, they're not really looking around them. They're on their phones.
I never thought about doing anything other than making art.
No one talks about woman power. The Spice Girls - they're masquerading as little girls. It's repulsive.
The last two records I liked playing a lot.
I've never been good with structure - doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do.
I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years.
In rock music, people have certain assumptions that it makes people more enlightened, and it really doesn't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone becomes mannered if you think too much about what other people think.
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.
But everything has been so gradual that it's sort of all come from, just hard work and basically being at it.
I mean, I don't even think of myself as a musician, really.
I try not to think too much about what the audience is thinking and what they think I should do.
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.
Unless you're singing something that's kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it's just difficult.
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.
You know, we have our own audience, and it's not like - they just know we're not going to do certain things.
Rap music is really good when you're traumatized.
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.
