Top 40 Kim Gordon Quotes

I never thought about doing anything other than making art.

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 would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.

I love the way Lady Gaga finds humour in fashion, but it’s still very stylised.

I mean, I don’t even think of myself as a musician, really.

Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.

I watch ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ with my daughter. We’re very into Buffy and Buffy’s friends.

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.

It’s hard to get hot over a painting; there’s no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness. Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it’s easier in music.

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 think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you’re doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.

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’m kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there’s some point where it doesn’t allow for the complexity of things.

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.

Working on art, as opposed to being in a constant collaborative state, as in a band, is something that I’ve always done – to a smaller degree, but it always remained a part of my integral self.

I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.

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.

No one talks about woman power. The Spice Girls – they’re masquerading as little girls. It’s repulsive.

Rap music is really good when you’re traumatized.

I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age.

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.

You’re always going to feel like you’re catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men.

The last two records I liked playing a lot.

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.

L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things. But Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom’s family was one of the early families in California, so there’s history going back to the 1840s or ’50s.

It’s really hard for me to sing and play bass.

I’m a relatively shy person, but I love being challenged and putting myself in positions that are scary.

Everyone’s so interior now, they’re not really looking around them. They’re on their phones.

I am basically a shy person, so performing sometimes helps me focus – having all those people concentrate their attention on you. I don’t see it so much as becoming another person onstage; it’s more exploring a different side of your personality.

But everything has been so gradual that it’s sort of all come from, just hard work and basically being at it.

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.

It is fun to smash guitars.

Basketball and ping-pong are my two forms of exercise.

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’ve done art on my own, and I’ve also collaborated with other people to make art. And collaborating with other people is always interesting because you end up doing things you probably wouldn’t do otherwise.

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.

I’ve never been good with structure – doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I’m supposed to do.

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.

I still don’t really feel like a bass player.

Anyone becomes mannered if you think too much about what other people think.