Kim Gordon
Union Transfer
1026 Spring Garden St
June 14, 2024
“I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man,” 71-year-old Kim Gordon swore on repeat in a husky tone. Her skinny legs were lengthened by $1,000 Celine sports shorts and silver heeled boots, but the metallic voice of the revered “badass feminist rock goddess” was veiled by an electric march that could’ve been stripped from a violently misogynistic death metal track.
Backed by three younger bandmates, Gordon — known best as the former frontwoman of alternative rock band Sonic Youth — is spending the years typically set aside for retirement out on tour, turning her 2024 album of perspective-hopping poems observing the ubiquity of consumerism, away from TikTok virality and towards sold-out stage performances.
On Friday she played at Philly’s Union Transfer, an independent music venue housed inside an 1889 former luggage transfer station that has hosted top acts — like Cigarettes After Sex, Frank Ocean, and Dinosaur Jr. — despite its relatively small size.
The night was opened by Bill Nace, a Philly-based collaborator of Gordon known for his experimental and introspective soundscapes with the likes of Steve Gunn and Yoko Ono. A scattered crowd arrived for his opening set, appearing uniformly stone-faced in their reception of Nace, who stubbornly explored overtones and volume by fixating on single notes played by disjointed instruments that I’ve seen nowhere else.
When Gordon got up, the space suddenly brimmed to capacity — suggesting that Gordon, whose music I find equally introspective, has mastered dissonance in an entirely different way, using her DIY sensibilities to sell the perspective of a septuagenarian woman to the masses.
The crowd was intergenerational, no doubt drawn to the show due to Gordon’s legacy and past projects. The front row was made up of 20-somethings like me. I learned about Gordon’s music through my brother, who, like many others, discovered Gordon’s new work on TikTok, where her oft-deadpan spoken-word social commentary has spread like wildfire.
It’s likely her integration of mind-numbing industrial trap beats into her work that has caught the attention of a younger crowd. But for members of a fatalistic generation addicted to escapism as a wounded way of coping with issues beyond our control — like the rapid overheating and flooding of our planet — it’s not just the straightforward overwhelm of Gordon’s noise music that sends me. It’s her persistence on continual growth, on exploring different sounds drawn from all walks of life even as she stays true to her personal political opinions, that makes me want to listen.
Over the last decade, essentially since the splitting of Sonic Youth (which aligned with Gordon’s divorce from Thurston Moore, with whom she started the group), Gordon has come into her own as a solo artist, particularly through albums The Collective, released this year, and No Home Record, published in 2019. A visual artist who started making music in her late 20s as part of the “no wave” scene, Gordon has long been concerned with creating art that captures the competing chaos of life. As the unraveling of society becomes a theme permeating the mainstream media perhaps more clearly than ever before, she’s in the perfect position to keep cashing in on her talents.
Now living in Los Angeles, Gordon chronicles the voyeuristic brainwashing of Americans by, ironically enough, paying attention just to the consumer-centric desires of both herself and her target audience.
Her song “Bye Bye,” which she used to fittingly conclude her live set on Friday, is the most popular song from The Collective. It describes her to-do and shopping lists before taking off for travel: “Sleeping pills, sneakers, boots, black dress, white tee, turtleneck, iBook, power cord, meditations,” “Bella Freud, YSL, Eckhaus Latta,” “Cigarettes for a killer,” are just some of the lines.
On Friday, she read and flipped through pages of the lyrics while wearing her own designer garb, as if she couldn’t be bothered to remember the items she’d so carefully curated into poetry. But her semantic choices are smart; they are memorable precisely because of their mundanity and simplicity.
She follows the same formula for her song “AirBnB” on No Home Record. She ultimately just repeats the phrases we’ve previously been sold: “Andy Warhol prints on the wall, cozy and warm, cozy and warm, super host, super hosted, super hosted.”
Her mention of Warhol in “AirBnB” reminded me of a quote by the visual artist, one that Gordon tends to reference herself while describing her art during interviews: “Pop is just taking the outside and putting it on the inside or taking the inside and putting it on the outside.”
Gordon seemed to interpret that idea in a uniquely human way, subtly centering her listicles of shiny but shitty objects around a more profound inner emotional instinct: The pursuit of redemption.
For example, the refrain for that last song is “Airbnb, could’ve set me free.” In “I’m a Man,” Gordon makes a political jab at the idiocy of self-victimizing U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley with the lyrics “It’s not my fault I was born a man … I can buy as much as anyone/ I’d like to shave my beard just so/ Manicure my nails, put on a skirt/ But at the end of the day/ I lost my way.” She also laments potential for salvation killed by a lust for consumption — of power, wealth, etc.
That song, as a critique, insists that Hawley and other hungry hawks like him are past the point of absolution because they deny the complexity of their own humanity under the guise of consumerism as antidote: “I’m not ideal, I’m a person/ I won the war, but lost my way/ But I can buy as much as anyone.”
In other songs, Gordon flips the script, unearthing an unsquashable human curiosity to know what it’s like outside of our bubbles. In her song “Psychedelic Orgasm,” she writes about moving through her home of Los Angeles: “Going to the store/ Gonna cook it up/ Passing all the kids/ TikToking around/ Sipping on the smoothies/ Wish I knew what/ They were cooking/ They were cooking up.”
Just as she shares in the careless nihilism of today’s youth, she subverts it by pinpointing the way in which pleasure and joy are also historically circular: “This is ‘68/ Underneath the freeway/ Night burning, the fires begin/ Magic mushrooms, LSD, MDMA, Mushrooms, Magic mushrooms, Magic,” she concludes on that same track.
Over the course of her live performance, Gordon moved in and out of the spotlight, robed in blood red as she sang “I’m a Man.” She walked off to the side of the stage encased in darkness at other random moments during the night, as though she didn’t believe her presence was relevant to the crowd.
For the most part, the passionately chaotic performances from Gordon’s touring band stole the show. At one point I heard a guy next to me tell his friend to relax about not being able to follow Gordon’s lyrics. “Just lean into the music,” he instructed.
The pent-up-rage transformed into noisy electronic riffs was definitely enough to get the venue going wild. But Gordon’s voice was often lost in the noise of the night.
On the recorded tracks, Gordon’s electronic trap music contrasts artfully with her usually smooth but sensual voice, which channels wisdom and all-knowingness heard only at the Lucinda-Williams-levels of rockstar women. The media often hails Gordon as a role model in the world of women trying to make it big and avoid societal obsolescence. But I’m intrigued by Gordon’s voice and presence because of how she positions herself as an ever-youthful peer to other artists, just as confused and desperate to make sense out of a crazy world as anyone else, despite her decades of experience and accolades.
She has a platform and power, but she rarely plays the part of annoying, self-righteous activist, instead focusing on the continuation of curious experimentation while using clever humor to say things as simply as she sees them.
The only words Gordon muttered between songs during her Union Transfer set were an introduction to her piece, “Grass Jeans,” which she wrote in response to the “shenanigans going on in Texas and other states of the union trying to, uh, control women.”
That song barely touches, at least directly or literally, on the issue of abortion. But just as she used war-torn, heavy metal, musical masculinity in her live rendition of “I’m a Man,” she mixed up her electronic rock sound with Texas country twang on the production of “Grass Jeans,” selling a twist on style and tradition for a cause: Profits from that single go towards a nonprofit (Fund Texas Choice) that arranges travel for women in Texas to access-regulated abortion clinics out of state.
The fusing of loud and proud musical genres with demure lyrical reflections is just another form of dissonance. That instills Gordon’s voice with a kind of integrity, which keeps me from getting cynical about the fine line between marketing real music to a particular audience versus straight out pandering to young people.
Through her diverse modes of artistic expression, including music videos in which Gordon casts her doppleganger daughter as the lead, chopping off her hair or dancing maniacally in a grocery store parking lot, it’s clear that Gordon is interested in translating her baseline perception of the world as seen through screens and car windows. It’s also clear she cares about making music that sounds good enough to sell. She wants young people — either as her subjects or as her bandmates — to be part of what she’s peddling. When you take both of those goals into account, you have solid pop that softens the dissonance between inside and outside, that in the end forges connection.
That kind of for-profit public service seems somewhat starkly contrasted to the work of someone like Brian Nace, who performed with eyes closed, playing ostensibly for himself while banking on a niche audience showing up to support him.
I ended up enjoying Nace’s work, meditating and losing track of my racing thoughts amid the drone of his non-narrative sound. And while I think Gordon’s artwork reaches its full capacity as a recorded project, I had fun at the show — especially when Gordon occasionally came out of her shell and let loose, breaking out some mid-twentieth dance moves and getting guttural with her powerfully deep voice.
When Gordon was ready to wrap, she and the band completed the chorus of “Bye Bye” and disappeared from the stage. There was no expectation of an encore to be seen anywhere: The overhead lights burned brightly again, the backdrop screen of projected visuals transformed into a sound engineer’s disorganized computer desktop, and the crowd rushed for the doors.
It was as though everyone understood their collective relationship to the music and was ready to move on. For an hour or two, we had escaped into a dissociative state of musical overwhelm. But when Gordon’s job on stage was done, we were ready to return to plain old reality.
NEXT:
Kim Gordon is on a global tour through November. Find out when and where she’s playing next here.
