OK. It’s official. I’m old. This just flashed on the annoying little banner at the bottom of CNN Headline News:
KOOL THING: rocker Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth turns 50 today.
Yowza! It’s hard to believe that Sonic Youth has been around that long. But it’s even harder to believe that they have become “popular” enough to be featured on Headline News. Anyway, happy birthday, Kim!
4 responses so far ↓
1 Elliott // Apr 28, 2003 at 6:11 pm
So in 1988, when “Teenage Riot” came out, she was 36?
As a thirty-four year old I am always suprised by the way hip, happening, vibrant years, like 1987 or 1989 seem so hopelessly dated now. Yeah: teenage riot. It’s 1987, and has been for all of fifteen minutes and I’ve slipped on some ice on the Boston Common and bruised my elbow after I got jumpy at the site of a cop cruiser because I have a bunch of beer in a backpack, and the following day, laughing about getting run out of a party by the host’s drunk mother (that was some real Mildred Pierce action, by the way: nightgown, badly applied lipstick, glassy eyes, jaw clenched in determination, but without the courage or clarity to speak plainly. Her kid had to almost translate ‘you have to go’. We got wasted in a station wagon, and people came out to apologize throughout the night…).
The point is 1987 was a real thoroughbread of a year, and it could not be more gone. The only people I knew then that I am still in regular contact with are my family. The people I know now were on their own trajectories.
More to the point: Kim Gordon was a year older then than I am today.
2 scotty the body // Apr 28, 2003 at 6:13 pm
Ya, THurston really scored with the older woman thing, that’s for sure.
For me, 1987 was just average. I didn’t even get Daydream Nation until 1989, I think. Double albums were too expensive for me then.
Jason Bowers had that awesome single CD serving that we had plenty of access to, though, as of 1990 or so.
3 Elliott // Apr 28, 2003 at 7:01 pm
Not much compares to that show at the Gothic.
What was that, 1991? 1992? I remember being totally slack-jawed at the end of it. Before the show, I filed Sonic Youth under “Difficult Music with Intelectual Lyrical Content”; after, under “Stone Hard Rock-n-Roll”.
Part of it was the volume, I think: it was so loud, you had to hear it. Another part was, well, visual: seeing the band play the instruments helped me tease apart the music, especailly the guitar sounds. Visual is a funny term, though, because the things at the concert changed the way I heard the music in a strictly aural way.
That was powerful shit, and it definitely contributed to my fear of music, which might be described as the complete collapse of my ability to discern if I enjoyed, or even heard a piece of music I listened to, relative to the context in which I heard it.
Age had beat my sense of certianty to a bloddy pulp, as with a heavy stick, and I remain relatively young.
Happy birthday, rocker Kim Gordon.
4 Scotty The Body // Apr 28, 2003 at 7:20 pm
That was the show with The Fluid and Mudhoney, right? The one that was so loud that it made Jason Bowers puke on the floor but he was rockin’ so hard he didn’t even leave his seat.
Leave a Comment