Just Jennifer

Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon (Dey Street Books, February 2015)

In 1981, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore (then boyfriend, husband of almost thirty years, now ex-husband) founded Sonic Youth, a post punk rock New York band that broke up in the 2011 with the break-up of her marriage.  But that’s not where Kim Gordon’s artistic, musical life began.  Brown was born in Rochester, but her family moved to Lost Angels when she was five where her father got a job as a professor at UCLA.  Growing up, Brown was tormented by her oldest brother Keller, a schizophrenic, something that made her reserved and introspective, music and art being an outlet for her emotions.  Brown’s music was heavily influenced by her father’s jazz collection: Charlie Parker, Stan Getz and especially John Coltrane.  After spending a year in Hawaii and another in Hong Kong, the family moved back to California when Brown was fourteen.  After two years of college in Santa Monica , Brown transferred to a school in Toronto, eventually making her way to Manhattan in 1980.  It was in this gritty, almost bankrupt New York, piled high with garbage due to perpetual sanitation strikes, where Brown was able to just be, working at a midtown bookstore and a Greenwich Village restaurant while absorbing the art and music that was indicative of downtown at the time.  As Brown chronicles her relationship with Thurston and Sonic Youth, she also chronicles a Manhattan, a New York City that is not longer.  She refers to modern day Manhattan as a “caricature of itself” as people try to be what came naturally to Kim Brown and her contemporaries.  After the birth of her daughter Coco, Brown decided to leave Manhattan and headed to Northampton, Massachusetts where Sonic Youth and Brown’s feminist philosophies had a following at the Seven Sisters’ schools.  Brown’s memoir is more than the story of her life and her band, it is the story of an ear, much like a sociological study (her father was a sociology professor) Brown’s tale is honest as she traces her career from art to music to fashion, all the while maintaining her feminist’s sensibilities and strong sense of self.