The smartphone era has been disastrous for boomer artists. It’s not their fault, really—it’s the most nihilistic epoch in human history. Creative output is invisible without corporate backing and heavy digital promotion, and what is out there that strikes that populist chord is often mired in irony and insincerity. To even make it into art school you have to mine your own trauma to stand out; the autobiographical mode has become the default, a place where we overshare as if the world was a giant diary and we are the silly monkeys with cymbals clamoring for attention.
It might not be such a bad thing that boomer creatives feel cringe in comparison. Madonna’s earnest Celebration Tour features drag queens in referential cosplay, a litany of random celebrity judges for an on-stage voguing ball and guest appearances from her children—who affectionately receive 10s across the board. Every few weeks a song like “Running Up That Hill” or “Fast Car” appears in a TV show or goes viral on TikTok, acting as a career revitalizer (Kate Bush even thanked Stranger Things for giving the song a “new lease on life”). The rarefied “authenticity” these artists became famous for—naked, unselfconscious, and often weepy—contrasts directly with the bad bitch personae that conquer the airwaves and the disaffected Twitter youths that brush against it.
But where most of this cohort struggles to relate to young people on their level, Kim Gordon thrives in the muck. Notably the oldest among her former Sonic Youth bandmates, Gordon’s career post-breakup has been the most interesting and consistent in its aesthetic concerns—a conceptual blending of noise and pop sensibility that never quite becomes “noise-pop” proper, instead emphasizing the dissonance between the sounds. Gordon’s 2019 album No Home Record exemplified that she not only understands the modern things the younger generations deal with on a daily basis, but participates in it directly—Airbnb superhosts, naive trap-gamelan and late, late capitalism, like going to yoga in Shein leggings.
Kim Gordon’s brand of cool has always been successful precisely because it isn’t a brand at all. Her concepts are intrinsic and rapturous, rendered in blankets of feedback and nonsense phrases that are expressionistic and accessible all the same. Her stoic face graces the cover of fashion magazines decked out in Balenciaga and Celine. She posts blurry selfies shot from below to show off her new t-shirts. In her memoir, she name-drops someone every other sentence and talks shit about half the people she mentions. “Cool” is less a matter of curation for Gordon and more a matter of how she moves through the world, flitting from connection to connection, engaging in superficial LA culture while openly stating how mentally ill it all is.
On The Collective, Gordon’s second record for Matador, she extrapolates on one of the myriad ideas present onNo Home Record, the intersection of whisper-rap and hyperreal modernity. Gordon was inspired by The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, a Thouron Scholar, adding a layer of metafiction already entrenched in Egan’s body of work. The Candy House is a sequel to Egan’s previous novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, each chapter focusing on a different character and being written in a different style exploring the fallout of tech companies, the impossibility of authenticity in our current age, and trauma as something we can discard. It’s easy to see why the book sparked a creative urge in Gordon upon first listen. The Collective opens with “BYE BYE,” where Gordon vacantly prattles off a list of chores and a shopping list overtop a trap-industrial beat and what sounds like a car alarm.
It’s something that could easily be laughed off as pretentious satire, utilizing a hokey form of Black music to parody the vapidity and numbness that comes packaged with an iPhone. But Gordon’s compelling, enigmatic delivery—coupled with Justin Raisen’s cacophonic production—is hard to resist. This apocalyptic mood is carried throughout the entirety of the record. “BYE BYE” leads into “The Candy House,” which opens with a glitchy explosion and is structured around a 16-bit Mortal Kombat beat. Gordon’s sped-up vocals morph into a dubby chuckle. “Pass me a black napkin please,” she demands on “I’m a Man.” “Dropped out of college, don’t have a degree / And I can’t get a date / It’s not my fault!” You can imagine Gordon throwing back martinis while skipping arout the bar as she slurs out her laments. The material concerns here—being gatekept from a well-paying job, being the fuck-up in your family, repressing yourself because of systemic disempowerment—are all valid concerns, but it’s still whinging. Everyone can relate, but no one cares.
The alluringly titled “Psychedelic Orgasm” is sonically the album’s queasiest, her vocals buried under autotune and fuzzy synths, but you can just make out Gordon wailing about TikToks and potatoes costing twenty dollars in LA. Like many tracks on The Collective, it’s essentially a doom metal song fed through an algorithm and regurgitated with laconic complaints that feel plucked from an Instagram Reels binge. “The Believers” seems to merge all of the individual elements from the rest of the album while also being one of the only songs to feature bass, a nod to her no-wave roots and her work in Body/Head—her distortion-laden noise-rock side project with Bill Nace.
The Collective threatens to unravel throughout its entire duration—an anxious, consistent assault on the senses. It’s not an angry record, though; like all good art about modernity, Gordon feels more observational, inhabiting the bodies of many characters, people with AirPods on the train home from work and the oblivious strangers trying to get their attention, peddlers on the street weaponizing small talk and moms who hate their in-laws and are worried for their social media addled teenagers. The album succeeds wholly on its immediacy, and both its soundscapes and directionless lyrics slap you in the face with its message. It’s impossible to listen to The Collective without knowing exactly what Kim Gordon is talking about.
Austin Jones is a writer and perfume enthusiast. His unfiltered thoughts are available for free on Twitter @belfryfire.
