I truly believe anyone remembers Sonic Youth. My favourite recollection about them is a concert I attended in Milan in 1998, supporting the great album A Thousand Leaves, partly at least dedicated to Allen Ginsberg. The concert was at the city Seaplane Base, an open space where you can listen to nice music at night but when it rains, as it happened that July night, you take all the water upon you. Dripping wet as I was, I enjoyed a show where Moore and friends interacted with cracking thunders, wind and everything, and they were excellent showing a mastery in their own instruments and an inventiveness that is hard to find in nowaday music, or in every age music.
So I was very excited for this last Gordon discographical release: I read an interview and a retrospective in a magazine issued in my country during the week, I saw the videos the artist has released through the internet, and I prepared myself to the mix of contemporary pop music and noise the singles I’m a Man, Psychedelic Orgasm and Bye Bye were preparing me to. In fact, the album, as the previous No Home Record (Matador, 2019) is produced by Charlie XCX (but also John Cale and Yeah Yeah Yeahs) longtime collaborator Justin Raisen.
Raisen is able to work both with patinated pop stars as much as with more artsy projects, and here we have an interesting mix of both things. The Collective (Matador, 2024), whose artwork is rooted in another Gordon picutre exposed in an exhibition of her last year, in order to discuss the feeling of being multiplied as an individual and of loosing identity thanks to technology, is basically a trap/dub industrial album that wouldn’t disfigure in a Throbbing Gristle or Psychic TV more updated discography.
Gordon, who doesn’t consider herself as a rock icon as she is for many fans but who contemplates her career more as the one of a visual artist than of a musician in this moment in her life in which she moved definitely from New York to Los Angeles, realised possibly one of the best contemporary music records possible as far at least as the given coordinates. Trap is a style of music than in the last ten years or so took over the main part of the music industry, but it betrayed soon the expectations many had as far as a renewal of popular music.
Even in my country this music, which is a style of slow and psychedelic rap derived from how hip hop was chewed in African and the Middle East world – the use of autotune, as an example, implanted over Arabic melodies with that characteristic distortion as a result was taken as a symptom of the victory of a non-Wester culture over the technical instruments of the capitalist world at the beginning – had a biggest raise as far as records sold and number of streams through the internet thanks to artists such as Dark Polo Gang and Ghali, but with the passing of time the revolution resulted into a new omologation.
Trap rhythms are all quite the same now, and the use of a slow verbal flow instead of the excited rhymes of many of the past generations of MCs is mostly a device in order to hide a lack of confidence with the use of complicated rhythms and all their secrets. But many musicians adopted this language also because of its dark side, that exaltation of “thug life” and money as the only horizon in order to emerge, the mysoginy and the flank of the lifestyle of criminals.
None of this emerges in Kim Gordon new record, at least until we run into lyrics such as the ones for the song I’m a Man, where the self-victimization of men and their loss of identity in the post-MeToo world is claimed and passed through a sieve at the same time, and so the mysoginy and toxic masculinity are passed through X-Rays echoing some of the music we have described, but only in order to make a step ahead.
All songs are subsequent, without a silence the one after the other, in order to create a mutant, unsettling and various unique landscape. After listening to various effects applied to the voice, in the following I don’t Miss My Mind we hear some guitars that, upon a limping rhythm, could have been taken from an album by the industrial noise hip hop collective Dälek, as in the above mentioned I’m a Man.
Someone would find too much repetitive a music like this, but this quality is the same we found out in different music through the ages, starting with etnic sounds and progressing through experimental rock: it’s the sound of the drum, the sound of the loss of time, in this case I would guess also the loss of history. I don’t remember the name of that writer who stated that Americans live as in a Luna Park, with no consciousness of what’s behind and around them.
Anyway, The Collective continues with Trophies, a dark dream where the structure and the autotuned voice find sometimes a break just to let all the inside void overflow through our imagination. It’s Dark Inside is full of obese ecstasy, with noise razors that cut the dense air while Gordon states lines as “You want to be American? Get a gun”, and Psychedelic Orgasm, accompanied by a video directed and realized by the artist, is a song that Tricky at the most paranoid peak of its creativity could have written.
Net of pre-millennium tensions torn by some exstatic autotune moments apart, Tree House makes me think also about other artists who exsperimented with rhythms, noises and echoes such as Mark Stewart, while Shelf Warmer, the only song on the album where guitars aren’t martyrized by effects is a song about how trashy capitalism is in reality as through a closer, more intimate look. The Believers is another pounding and incessant nightmare, while with the final Dream Dollar the final stereotype of this years’ music is spat all over throughout our conscience.
Coming from four or five listens, I can’t tell for the moment if The Collective is another album destined to grow with time. The fact that I loved it since the beginning makes me doubt it a little but I’m not new to being caught out in a lie by my own experience. For the moment I can only tell this is the album trap music was exspecting from a long time in order to show how serious and deep this music can be.
The fact that is a 71 years old artist to do so, and not someone coming from a younger generation, is only a symptom of how difficult artistically these times are. Last advice to you is not to miss in theatres all around the world the movie The Last Summer by Catherine Breillat, where Gordon is soundtrack consultant and where you can enjoy some SY songs in a couple of scenes plus a Body/Head composition through the ending titles. The movie is really nice in my opininion and it deserves a little bit of success and reflexion.
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