Despite being a founding member of Sonic Youth, one of the most influential bands of the 1990s, Kim Gordon doesn’t consider herself a musician. After graduating from art school, she moved to New York and got involved in the avant-garde music scene. A year later, she met her bandmates-to-be, picked up the bass, and formed Sonic Youth. Their focus on creating meaning through noise and disorder, rather than harmony and structure, is especially striking in their early records; this is what makes Gordon more of an artist than a musician.
When I started playing the bass, Gordon was the god I worshiped, and the photograph of her wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “Girls invented punk rock, not England” was my icon. She doesn’t slap the bass or invent overly-complicated lines and lyrics like a typical musical prodigy. I am drawn towards big names in the music industry that aren’t classically trained because I also learned my instrument the non-classical way: from YouTube tutorials and jamming with my dad. Kim doesn’t get on stage to show off her knowledge. Her performances are driven by her emotions and enthusiasm for music as a multifaceted art form, which makes her impact on alternative music irrefutable.
Ever since the band officially broke up in 2013, Gordon has distanced herself from making music under the umbrella of rock. Now, at the age of 72, she has participated in numerous shifts in both the popular and underground art scenes throughout her career. In 2024, she released “The Collective,” her second solo album named after a piece from her 2023 art show at 303 Gallery. The painting from which the album draws its name is an abstract piece, a swirl of red and blue covered in smartphone-shaped holes in the canvas. The album is in direct conversation with this painting. Through its unexpected sonic chaos, the album offers reflections from an ex-rock star grappling with the sudden impacts of technology on art.
The genres and themes in her third record, “PLAY ME,” are similar, as Gordon blends industrial dub and rap under snappy lyrics about the internet, Trump, hustle culture, and feminism. The signature sound we get in her albums is indebted to her producer Justin Raisen, whom she’s worked with three times. Raisen has produced albums for artists ranging from Lil Yachty to Sky Ferreira and Yves Tumor.
The titular track “PLAY ME” sticks out from the album’s tracklist with a juicy saxophone riff that resembles a 90s R&B groove. Here, the lyrics, which include the titles of stereotypical Spotify playlists pieced together, like “seventies hippie,” “villain mode” or “jazz in the background,” outshine the melody. The subtext is quite clear: it is Gordon’s commentary on the Spotification of music.
In a recent interview, Gordon openly criticized streaming platforms for their cultivation of convenience culture. “I thought it was funny,” she said, “the idea of coming home from work and putting on a certain playlist, it is advertising the illusion of what this mood is gonna be.”
Here, I completely agree with her — streaming platforms have bent our listening habits. They’ve curtailed our ability to appreciate an album in its totality and encouraged us to treat music as background noise to fill the void of day-to-day life. Perhaps it is unfair to label this track as milder than the rest, since the lyrics are much more biting than the others on the album. It almost sounds like a generic jazz rap groove that could fit in an algorithm-generated playlist for constructing a specific mood, and Kim is doubling down on the irony.
The rest of the album doesn’t shy away from adding industrial trap ingredients to Gordon’s increasingly satirical lyrics. A handful of tracks combine these two elements seamlessly. “BUSY BEE” blends an eerie drum groove played by Dave Grohl, a scratchy guitar riff, and a trap beat. It is sonically powerful, which works very well with Gordon’s repetition of the line “Busy bee, making money, on your knees, like it’s honey.” “SQUARE JAW” is more industrial, resembling a milder version of early Death Grips.
However, other songs feel unfinished and unfit for the arc of this project. “BLACK OUT,” “POST EMPIRE” and “DIRTY TECH” are driven by cheap and repetitive beats that could be found on a Soundcloud-rap diss track. When you contrast them with more complex-sounding songs, like the shoegaze and synth-heavy “NOT TODAY,” the album sounds melodically inconsistent.
On a similarly sour note, Gordon’s irony is often exaggerated to an extent that robs the lyrics of their depth. The narrator of “A GIRL WITH A LOOK” is thematically lost, and although Gordon rhymes well with the line “You’re a boy with a hook / I’m a girl with a look,” the lyrics make little sense. In “DIRTY TECH,” she raps, “I like it when you talk dirty tech to me” over a bass-heavy beat. The joke is understood, but it doesn’t go beyond that, and the song remains empty.
Gordon’s work on “The Collective” raised my expectations for an equally experimental and dissonant record that “PLAY ME” could not satisfy. Perhaps the shorter format of the songs on “PLAY ME” indicates that she had a different vision for this album, as nearly every song is two minutes long and often feels purposefully unfinished. Her other projects prove that she is able to experiment with new sounds while remaining bold and provocative, a quality that she failed to replicate in her newest record.
Nevertheless, I still enjoyed elements of this album. Its unorthodoxy is a tribute to her long-lasting eagerness to redefine the meaning of underground music and her refusal to act as a conventional artist. She is 72 and decided to release an industrial trap album. Despite my criticism of “PLAY ME,” I eagerly anticipate her future projects.
BIO: Andrea Miloshevska PO ’28 is from Skopje, North Macedonia. Just like Kim, she also hopes to be making industrial trap when she is 72.
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