Kim Gordon Quotes

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.

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.

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries, because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.

When Punk Rock happened, it created an opening in the culture... it made it ok to think you could play music, even though you had no musical training.

If you don't fit into a certain type, there's a lot of strength in just being who you are.

When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn't negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.

Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live.

People pay to see others believe in themselves.

Rap music is really good when you're traumatized.

Women are natural anarchists...

I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men-white male corporate society. So why wouldnt a woman want to rebel against that?

At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.

I always wanted to rebel.

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

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.

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.

Twitter reminds me of an era in French literature - Emile Zola and Honoré de Balzac - and the beginning of modernity and gossip. They had these fashion magazines of the time on display with all of the Emile Zola references.

I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years.

You know, we have our own audience, and it's not like - they just know we're not going to do certain things.

There's the added element of adrenaline if you're performing. You're aware of spatial relationships and the music.

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.

I try not to think too much about what the audience is thinking and what they think I should do.

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

The clothes in themselves are empty. But what they throw off and what clothes mean as signifiers is incredibly interesting - to see what people do with it. That's more interesting to me than flipping through a magazine or seeing the fall look.

In retrospect, it's ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore…Still, I've always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.

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.

No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula LA glamour – sociopathy, narcissism – because it’s good rock and roll, good entertainment! I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behaviour, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill.

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

The love for a child is more an unconditional sort of love ... Although some parents are really narcissistic. In general, I think there is an expectation that love will be unconditional, but obviously it's not - even after living with someone for years.

I was talking to somebody about the L.A. hardcore scene, and they were saying that it was hard for them to picture punk rock at the beach. Like, the aesthetic didn't mix or something - black forms in the sand.

Clothes are signifiers and symbols of how people communicate with each other.

Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy… But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.

It's hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.

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. They came over in the Gold Rush, actually. I have all this guilt about raising my daughter in the East. Coco's very anti-California. It's her way of rebelling.

For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless.

I think of myself as unconventional. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.

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.

In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson turns 'making the personal public' into a romantic, intellectual wet dream. A gorgeous book, inventive, fearless, and full of heart.

Many designers are gay men making clothes for women. Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.

I'm aware of how pop culture really infiltrates your expectations in a way that even if you think you're savvy about pop culture, it's so hard not to have these expectations of what a relationship should be. So I constantly feel like I have to bat those expectations down.

I always felt like an outsider to the music world in a certain way. There was so much less of an art culture in L.A. - and particularly in the South Bay.

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 really want to start playing basketball. Basketball and ping-pong are my two forms of exercise.

I always think of baseball as so existential. Like, you're just out there in a field, in a big expanse of green grass.

I really like Olivier Assayas filmmaking. He always has this global - economy thing going on.

Fashion, at modern time, was actually a way for women to go out in the world. There was one painting of a woman sitting at a café, drinking a beer by herself and kind of pretending to read but really watching people, that sort of thing. It fascinated me.

Recently some work I made could be seen as feminist art or work that relates to the body. That's just what I'm feeling - like it needs to be done.

Political art never goes away. I started watching The West Wing show recently and I'm actually learning about how the government works in a way. It's kind of embarrassing.

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.