170 Quotes by Kim Gordon

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

But I would make it through “Death Valley.” Lee, Thurston, and I, and then just the two of us, stood there. My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it. I don’t think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.

All that young-girl idealism is someone else’s now.

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.

Still, I’ve always believed – still do – that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.

Back then, and even now, I wonder: Am I “empowered”? If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a “strong woman”? Sometimes another voice enters my head, shooing these thoughts aside. This one tells me that the only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don’t fall to your death.

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’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.

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