"I Feel Bad For You. I Feel Bad For Me": Enjoying the Restless American Spirit of Kim Gord

Vibes: Unease, Restless, Cynicism, World-Weariness, Hypnotic, Gothic, Dark, Contemplative

Similar Artists: The Pop Group, Suicide, The Doors, Bauhaus, St. Vincent, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Fall

One of the defining features of the American mentality is its restlessness. From an early period, foreign observers like Tocqueville remarked that "...there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance." Tocqueville blamed this "restlessness of temper" on our "taste for physical gratifications." As he explained, "he who has set his heart exclusively upon the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time at his disposal to reach, to grasp, and to enjoy it." A dog with two bones, driven mad by the freedom of choice. With an almost shark-like inability to stay still, we must keep swimming, forever churning up our lives and the lives of those around us.What a metaphor for the creative destruction engendered by capitalism.

A psychiatrist would identify such feelings in a patient as the symptoms of psychopathy. The patient seeks constant stimulation, ceaseless action, which often leads to socially irresponsible behavior and a lack of impulse control. Yet a mental health professional would rarely ask deep structural questions about why the patient is this way. He or she would probably boil the question down to the consequences of brain chemistry, or to even smaller causes, such as the results of our genetic heritage, our DNA. Either way things humans have little say over. Symptoms to treat, risk factors to monitor, environmental stressors to avoid. Perhaps in the future these are genetic imperfections that can be rooted out, Gattaca-style. For now, deal with the fallout.

Despite a lack of understanding of DNA, germ theory, or modern psychology, I find Tocqueville's answer to be far more incisive, worthy of reflection by contemporaries. Americans are ruled by the relentless pursuit of profit, and as a result, it has disturbing consequences on the American psyche. While the machinations of capitalism are distinctly modern, the feelings behind it are thoroughly antediluvian. Much as Cain did, the American way is to take by force from others for your benefit. Socialism can be boiled down, as Veblen articulated, as an attempt to move beyond this predatory stage of human development. Even if you buy the propaganda that says capitalism gave us all these great material benefits and technological advances, the hardships and tribulations faced by the working poor can and should be moved beyond. We can move into a new stage, where we can have more than freedom of choice but instead freedom from fear. Or so many had thought in FDR's time when capitalism was in a crisis it may never have recovered from.

This great and noble neoliberal experiment over the last 50 years has truly been a degenerative period in human development. Punk arrived in the mid to late 70's as the first product of our nascent neoliberal hell world. Paranoid, angry, distrustful of others, punks personified the cultural degeneracy that capitalism's predatory nature causes to fester. Through first negation and then later an articulation of a better world, the descendants of punk continue to craft a music that is informed by the restlessness of spirit that Tocqueville described centuries ago.

On to the review!

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It is amazing to think that Kim Gordon's No Home Record is her first solo endeavor. As a guitarist and bassist for Sonic Youth, Gordon was a trailblazer not just for the 80's "No-Wave" Wall-of-Dissonance sound that Sonic Youth perfected, but also for women's fight for their rightful place in punk and underground music. In a boys' club, she was more than 'a girl in the band.' She carved her own path, influencing hundreds if not thousands of women in her wake.

So why is this her first solo album? Perhaps because she has spent more of her time since Sonic Youth focusing on visual art. The visual arts had always influenced post-punk (as artists picked up instruments, approaching them in a fundamentally different way than trained musicians). The same can be said for Gordon, who was trained first as an artist at the Otis College of Art and Design. After decades in Sonic Youth with husband Thurston Moore, the dissolution of the band and her marriage brought hardships but also opportunities. Gordon returned to the gallery, wrote her memoirs, and engaged with other musicians on a series of side projects.

I imagine it must have been tough writing new music considering how much of the musical process was tide up with memories of Sonic Youth and her ex-husband. The challenge is to make it thoroughly your own, a product that won't be compared to that of Sonic Youth. The past can be a great anchor, weighing one down.Yet anyone who has followed her career would tell you it was a matter of time before Gordon struck out on her own with a solo album. The long wait, once contextualized with her personal struggles, is understandable. I will say, well worth it too.

As hinted at in my introduction, the vibes of this album are of a sort of Gothic hypnosis, an eerie meditation. The soundscapes are dark, uneasy, and repetitive. Many songs remind me of Siouxsie and the Banshee's Juju (1981), '70s electro-pioneers Suicide, and the unsettling droning of Jim Morrison. The unease builds over the course of the album. Even amidst the comfort of a vacation home in "Air BnB," Gordon articulates a deep restlessness amidst the abundance of "slate walls, 47 Inch TV." This "Cozy and Warm" Air BnB cannot quiet the mind entirely. Or perhaps Gordon is in a sort of Gothic zen, at home in the disquietude of the moment. I really enjoy the juxtaposition of the atonal cries of guitar, the relentless building of the drumming with the seeming luxury of the Air BnB. It speaks to the cultural contradictions of capitalism that we must inhabit on a daily basis. The leisure and luxury is our immediate environs, but there is an unease underneath the surface that belies the depredation and cruelty that makes our upper-middle class lifestyles possible. This becomes more clear if one watches the music video for the opener "Sketch Artist." One sees humans collapsing, and a uber driving shuttling strangers all day and night: a landscape of deep alienation and one that will presage an inevitable human collapse. The price for our convenience (Air Bnb, Uber) is the grinding of the gig economy worker into dust.

The follow up, "Paprika Pony," utilizes a trap beat and Gordon's husky whispers to continue the unsettling vibes. The beat is actually quite dance-able despite the dissonant chords and ominous lyrics like "You Take a Bite, Out of the Apple" If the fall of the Garden is inevitable, then let's enjoy the fall. There is a sinister lust behind the song that one must simply embrace. It is primordial, it is inevitable. This continues with "Murdered Out," which in its industrial instrumentation and Gordon's scream-singing, recalls Marilyn Manson. The lyrics reference "Black Matte Spray" - hard to get more gothic than black paint. Again there is something alluring about the lurid here. In a Rolling Stone interview, Gordon clarifies the significance of this black paint. "To Gordon, black matte spray represents a rejection of status quo. 'Like an option on a voting ballot, none of the above,' she wrote in a statement about the song. '[Black matte] is the ultimate expression in digging out, getting rid of, purging the soul. Like a black hole, the supreme inward look, a culture collapsing in on itself.' The mentality of the song mirrors much of the punk movement's anti-social expressiveness. The world was ending and why shouldn't we enjoy its collapse? Amidst a neo-liberal hell world, an expressive, celebratory even, culture. All this is personified in this Black Matte paint.

The industrial-feel continues on "Cookie Butter." The song features a single recurring baseline and a paradiddle that repeats on some garbled, possessed drum machine. I close my eyes and I picture some unholy ritual of satanists, divination, the devil. The lyrics are simple repetitions of a pronoun and a verb: "I eat, I drink, I forget." The singer is caught up in the trance. On the surface cookie butter would seem to call to mind the saccharine, but the deeper you go, the more bitter it gets.

Even the more tranquil songs on the album like "Earthquake" seem to build into this horrible energy by the end of them. One can feel an impending doom, not dissimilar to that on the Doors' "The End." All I can think of is what horrible act will befall me as the song lumbers onward. The droning of the guitar as it bends from one sour note to the next takes your mind to dark places. The lyrics refer to some unclear obsession of the singer - "This song is for you, If I could cry and shake for you" - which are never fully clarified. The overall tone of unease is the true focus of the song. Gordon wants you to inhabit that uncomfortable space, to reflect on the feelings it awakens.

This all culminates in the droning, meditative walk of the finale "Get Yr Life Back." This song features Gordon's most overt economic critique: "The end of capitalism, winners and losers." Again consequences of our economic system become quite clear: "the blood is flowing, the streets are wet." The violence is muddled by the monotony of capitalism's inexorable march onward: "every day, every day, every day." Gordon references the enjoyment of life (capitalism's?) little things: Chocolate, cocoa butter. In this song's vague lyrics I picture someone deep in thought in the middle of their daily jog or walk on a crisp, foggy morning. At one point they pass some trendy, yoga studio that has turned an eastern religious philosophy into a trendy, marketable tagline: "Get Your Life Back, Yoga." Capitalism is an unholy machine, it will swallow and reconstitute whatever it can. It has no limits, no shame. One hopes the subject wakes from the catatonic despair. One can only hope...