Kim Gordon > Quotes

“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.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“People pay money to see others believe in themselves.”
― Kim Gordon

“Still, I’ve always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“The only really good performance is the one where you make yourself vulnerable, while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless. I wrote an article for Artforum in the mideighties that had a line in it that the rock critic Greil Marcus quoted a lot: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.” Meaning, the higher the chance you can fall down in public, the more value the culture places on what you do. Unlike, say, a writer or a painter, when you’re onstage you can’t hide from other people, or from yourself either.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“In general, though, women aren’t really allowed to be kick-ass. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. 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. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don’t tend to last very long. They’re jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. 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. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that’s its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing!”
― Kim Gordon

“At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“I like being in a weak position, and making it strong.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“In “Shadow of a Doubt,” I was trying to describe the connection you feel when your eyes meet another person’s. You project all kinds of things on those eyes, feel them seeing into and past you, sometimes feel the sex behind them too.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“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.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“I’ve always felt there’s something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians—that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want. It’s new, and they’re escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It’s a variation of what Freud called the “death instinct.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself. The capacity to be inside that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you somewhere else.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“Everything people call fabulous or amazing lasts for about ten minutes before the culture moves on to the next thing.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“Hold me tight, down on my knees, so I don't go burning 'cross the breeze.”
― Kim Gordon

“I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone’s noticing me.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston’s and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“[...] to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“Every woman knows what I'm talking about when I say girls grow up with a desire to please, to cede their power to other people. . . everyone knows about the sometimes aggressive and manipulative ways men often exert power in the world, and how by using the word empowered to describe women, men are simply maintaining their own power and control.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“Guys playing music. I loved music. I wanted to push up close to whatever it was men felt when they were together onstage—to try to ink in that invisible thing. It wasn't sexual, but it wasn't unsexual either. Distance mattered in male friendships. One on one, men often had little to say to one another. They found some closeness by focusing on a third thing that wasn't them: music, video games, golf, women. Male friendships were triangular in shape, and that allowed two men some version of intimacy. In retrospect, that's why I joined a band, so I could be inside that male dynamic, not staring in through a closed window but looking out.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“Families are like little villages. You know where everything is, you know how everything works, your identity is fixed, and you can't really leave, or connect with anything or anybody outside, until your physically no longer there.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“That stage in life when older people assume that just because you've graduated college you know who you are, or what you're doing, and in fact most people don't.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“It wasn't some Puritan thing. Straight-edge was asking adherents to take control of their lives, not to be blind consumers, and not to be tricked into thinking that drinking and drugs were cool since in fact they were the tools of a previous generation”
― Kim Gordon

“Maskenfreiheit. It means “the freedom conferred by masks.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone's noticing me.”
― Kim Gordon

“I’ve always felt uncomfortable giving people what they want or expect.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things - a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“but I couldn’t decide if I was a courageous person in real life or whether I could only sing onstage. In that way I haven’t changed much in thirty years at all.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band