From earliest memory, I knew that my aunt worked in book publishing. As an editor of children’s books at a large, corporate publisher, she would send me boxes upon boxes of cast-offs that she’d find around the office. Even before I had learned how to read, I would thumb through these books in my solitude—as the only child of an unhappy couple, left to entertain myself in our house in the woods on a hill, without neighbors or cable television, before video game consoles, computers, and the internet entered the home.

My aunt was one of my first idols. She lived and worked in Manhattan—her apartment and office both crowded by long shelves and tall piles of books: books on every table, books under every table, books beside the bed, books on top of the bed. She’d even written the foreword to a leather-bound, gilt-edged, woodcut-illustrated edition of Wuthering Heights, which takes pride of place on my bookshelf to this day.

Since infancy, I’ve looked to my aunt as the embodiment of urbane sophistication and literary savvy; instinctively, I attempted to emulate her. By the age of ten, I’d decided that someday I’d move to New York City—to edit books and to write my own. My aunt warned me that the path may be harrowing. Precocious and foolhardy, I convinced myself that I could do both.

I moved to Brooklyn in 2008, at the dawn of the so-called Great Recession, which irrevocably strained, among so many aspects of American life, both the vitality of the publishing industry and the cost of New York City housing. For the next ten years, I’d work in entry-level positions at small, independent book publishers, while training in the art of making supplemental income—freelancing on the weekends, teaching English comp at night, selling my books to secondhand bookstores—in fact, when I was let go from a publishing position, I took the cardboard boxes of cast-offs that my aunt had sent to my office (instead of my apartment, where I didn’t have room for them), brought them in a taxi to the Strand, and sold the lot for $600, which was my monthly rent at the time.

Over these past sixteen years, I’ve moved six times—outpriced from one apartment to the next. Once, when I asked for a salary adjustment to compensate for a rent increase, I was told that raises were awarded for merit, not necessity; I hadn’t contributed enough to the company’s revenue to merit a raise, but if I needed to find more affordable housing, I should look in New Jersey. Going forward, I couldn’t help but view my contributions to a company’s revenue as the most significant indicator of my value.

From the start, I’ve wrestled with a great amount of guilt about cultivating a career as a writer while working for book publishers. I worry that the time and energy I invest in my writing is inadvertently stolen from my employer and their books. In another publishing position, with the capacity to acquire projects, I felt constant pressure to spend my time and energy both inside and outside the office in pursuit of the company’s next bestseller—not an unreasonable expectation, but not an easy one for me to accept. I worried that my writing was a fanciful distraction—and that publishing it was a conflict of interest.

I’ll admit, I have stolen time and diverted my energy intentionally over the years—listening to certain musicians at my desk as I research for the essays about them, taking notes in Microsoft Outlook emails, editing drafts of Word docs with track changes turned on—so I appeared to be on the job while on the clock. Vainly, I sensed some resentment, if not hostility, from my colleagues toward my personal writing and publishing endeavors, though it’s also entirely possible that I projected my insecurity onto my colleagues, as I faced rejection after rejection and feared that I was an imposter. At the same time, I discovered that I didn’t have the knack for the role of acquiring editor and considered quitting the industry altogether.

Then, I realized it was the managing editorial position that was best-suited to my obsessive-compulsive habits of checking, finding, and fixing mistakes—dating back to the second grade, when my classmates would ask me to spell-check their homework. Now, I edit my way through the day with a mental red pencil, catching typesetting errors on all manner of printed material—subway ads, restaurant menus, the labels on household products.

At the end of the workday, for the most part, I’m able to either complete my tasks or leave them at the office for tomorrow. Where the acquiring editorial role requires the editor to stand front and center in the production of the company’s books, the role of managing editor keeps me behind the scenes—alleviating but not eliminating my guilt.

Because, finally, stacks of my first book—a collection of essays about some of my favorite female singers—are beside me, freshly printed finished copies in a cardboard box. And I remain worried that the time and energy I’ll continue to invest in this book will continue to detract from my contributions to my various employers.

Today, I’m a full-time managing editor and an adjunct English professor, with a steady stream of weekend freelancing and a tote bag of unwanted books ready to haul to the Strand. As the publishing industry recovers from the economic fallouts of the COVID pandemic, and as job security in general grows more precarious than ever, I’ve accepted the possibility that, for the foreseeable future, I’ll need to juggle several jobs in order to keep from living paycheck to paycheck.

Having witnessed my aunt’s success in corporate publishing throughout the 90s, and having watched well-paid editors played on films and TV shows, I hadn’t imagined my path toward a substantial income would be such an uphill shuffle—which is nothing if not a labor of immense love. And as for my book, it’s too incredible to believe that it exists; I can hardly bear to hold it in my hands.

Writing these words, I’m sitting in the living room of my childhood home, about five feet from the shelves that long ago contained those hallowed books from my aunt. In this exact spot, even before I had learned how to spell and write, I would scribble on blank paper with Magic Markers and staple the pages together—always, this desire, this drive to make books.

Now, these shelves contain what’s left of my mother’s CD collection, which she has winnowed in preparation to sell the house and move to an apartment after thirty-seven years here. Still there, after all these years: my mother’s Joni Mitchell CDs. Near the bookshelf, next to the couch, a small Bose CD player waits on an end table. I pick up Blue—the very copy that accompanied me through the bluest hours of my youth. I put it on.

__________________________________

I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am by Zachary Pace is available from Two Dollar Radio.

On September 7, 2013, Manhattan’s White Columns gallery opened an exhibition of visual art by Kim Gordon. The first survey of her ongoing practice, it gathered paintings—hand-lettered broken-up band-names (“Weak Sister”) and witticisms (“Why are you making music like that?”)—alongside sculpture (tree-branches encrusted in glitter, denim skirts slathered in acrylic), with selections of video, text, and sound, spanning more than 30 years of songwriting and performance. The unspoken centerpiece of the retrospective was a new work: a canvas crumpled on the floor—a pile resembling a queen-sized comforter kicked off the mattress during sex or sleep—ebony words applied in her dripping, misshapen font, indecipherable because scrunched. A nearby plaque told its title: The Sonic Youth.

Kim Gordon, The Sonic Youth, “Design Office with Kim Gordon—since 1980,” 2013.

*

I’m a born-again fan of Sonic Youth. I didn’t learn how to admire their music until 2012, a year after the band dissolved. Now, nearly a decade since the release of their final album, The Eternal, my reverence—especially for the complex texture of Kim Gordon’s voice—verges on evangelical.

Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo—all vocal/guitarists—had their inaugural performance as Sonic Youth in June 1981 at White Columns gallery, then located on Spring Street. In 1982, they released a self-titled debut EP with drummer Richard Edson, and two subsequent LPs, Confusion Is Sex (1983) and Bad Moon Rising (1985), with drummer Bob Bert. The third LP, EVOL (1986), premiered drummer Steve Shelley, who became the fourth core member. Their subsquent dozen LPs, numerous side projects and collaborations, are unanimously unclassifiable; Sonic Youth is notorious for vehemently mistreating the instruments to extract unprecedented noise.

Although it took me years to fathom, I’d started listening in 2004. “Unmade Bed”—the second track from their then-latest-album Sonic Nurse—engulfed me at 18. (One of their more palatable songs, Thurston’s singing mellow, fluent, the lengthy instrumental bridge never goes totally over the edge into the freefall of guttural guitars and chaotic drums for which they’re either loved or loathed.) This was the surging flood that Sonic Youth eventually immersed me in: the definitive ideal of the sublime.

*

Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, wrote, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . . whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

When you and I say something’s sublime, we often do imply the evocation of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling, but rarely do we also imply the evocation of pain and danger.

Burke recognized that pain and danger are not themselves sublime. The real sublime, he specified, lies in “the sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger,” which he called delight. “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful.”

If something’s truly sublime, it must push you flush against mortality—terrifying you through dread of unavoidable death—before pulling you back, into the awful delight of survival.

*

At its most severe, Sonic Youth’s sound assaults—bashing, screeching. It’s indeed painful to the ears of a sensitive listener. Even at its most serene, critics have repeatedly described this sound as ominous, and it’s true: 99 percent of the songs could background a scene in a horror film (and they did compose and record the score for a French horror film, Simon Werner a Disparu).

But I delight in listening because of that dangerous tenor, their tendency to swerve from tonal optimism to droll nihilism. Sonic Youth soundtracks the sense of doom that constantly haunts me; it helps me embrace uncertainty.

You can hear this characteristic in an outtake from the Sonic Nurse sessions, an instrumental tune titled “Kim’s Chords” that recalls how it feels to drive out of LA into Malibu on a blue-sky day for three-minutes-twenty-two seconds, until suddenly the car skids off that cliff-side highway, smacks into the Pacific, combusts, and then sinks for three more minutes.

Kim, born in California, wrote in her memoir Girl in a Band 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.”

*

Burke’s sublime feels kindred to what Freud deemed that oceanic feeling—Romain Rollard alluded to it in their 1927 correspondence: la sensation de l’Eternel (qui peut très bien n’être pas éternel, mais simplement sans bornes perceptibles, et comme océanique).* It was elucidated by Julia Kristeva in her book This Incredible Need to Believe: “The intimate union of the ego with the surrounding world, felt as an absolute certainty of satisfaction, security, as well as loss of our self to what surrounds and contains us.”

Though Kristeva maintains that this feeling is “unshareable,” I think it’s vaguely comparable to the wanderlust prompted by seeing an airplane coast across the skyline—it’s an overcast midwinter afternoon in New York, you’re yearning for the sun above Big Sur—and suddenly thrill and risk flow through you, tempting you to go. It’s this kind of homesickness, lacking origin and cure.

Another facet of that oceanic feeling: the desire for “losing the boundaries of the self . . . into the pain-and-joy of becoming fluid, of liquefying oneself to be other.” For me, it’s akin to beholding the Pacific, inundated with the urge to submerge my body in it. You can hear this melancholic longing in “The Diamond Sea”—the 19-minute closing track on Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine (1995)—during its extended, formless, instrumental outro. The guitar overtones conjure sunlight strafing the inmost curl of a breaking tidal wave, a searing sound, shrill as a newborn shrieking to go back inside the womb.

“Positive and negative, joy and extreme pain, together or in alteration. This brew of plenitude and sensory emptying crushes the body and exiles it” (Kristeva). “The psyche is in its turn annihilated, beyond the self.”

I seek that kind of sublime all the time: to merge with the sound by any tangible means (I wear my Washing Machine tee-shirt and play “Washing Machine” on laundry day), to remember the demise that is my only destiny, and feel relieved I’ve eluded it for now. I write this, sublimating my fear into representation, to temporarily exit my anxiety and still exist.

*

“The Burning Spear”—the opening track on Sonic Youth’s debut EP—is 28 words long, Thurston’s birth-cry:

I’m not afraid to say I’m scared
In my bed I’m deep in prayer.
I trust the speed, I love the fear
The music comes, the burning spear.

The guitars squeal menacingly, the bass and drums sprint, a drug-fueled high-speed police-chase through Alphabet City. From the get-go, Sonic Youth confronted pain and danger head-on: they love the fear. (“Fear being an apprehension of pain or death,” wrote Burke.)

“I Dreamed I Dream” (track two on the EP) launches with the speedy pulse of the bass accompanied by a ticking drum—12 seconds—before the guitars join. Tension upon tension (sneaky, prowling), they’ve outrun the police-chase of “The Burning Spear” and they’re laying low in Tompkins Square Park.

Now, Kim Gordon doesn’t sing—she speaks—her opening lines in Sonic Youth’s catalog.

“Look before you leap, OK,” sparkles her crystalline vocal-cords.

The announcement of a radical, stalwart voice, the voice that’ll ask (in 1990, on Goo, in “Kool Thing”): Are you gonna liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression?

Kim is capable of conventional singing—Sonic Youth’s penultimate LP, Rather Ripped (2006), presents her voice at its peak approachability—but nevertheless, she usually opts for tones that’re lovely-ugly: phlegmatic, thick-tongued lilts and hoarse, throaty moans. “Talk Normal” implores one of her text paintings, as if mocking potential criticism.

Kim Gordon, Talk Normal, “The Noise Paintings,” 2010.

“She has a distinctly physical response to language,” wrote Hilton Als in Kim’s 2009 monograph of impressionistic watercolor portraits, Performing/Guzzling. “Her speech, suffused with pauses and directness, quiet reflection and near novelistic sense of detail and memory for conversation, is the aural corollary to her visual work, which swims in the language and non-language of what she sees [. . .] as though recalled from a collective, half-forgotten dream.”

*

“Another source of the sublime, is infinity,” wrote Burke. “Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and the truest test of the sublime.”

I’ve always been drawn to the mathematical symbol for infinity, the lemniscate: ∞

That oceanic feeling encompasses the ongoingness of this figure: the past as immeasurable as the future, nonbeing endlessly extending behind us, and ahead. We float, dead-center in these roiling high seas.

Burke noted that madmen, in thrall to infinitude, “remain whole days and nights, sometimes whole years, in the constant repetition of some remark, some complaint, or song; which having struck powerfully on their disordered imagination [. . .] every repetition reinforces it with new strength.”

1982’s “I Dreamed I Dream” contains a phrase that recurs in 2009’s “Massage the History”—all the money’s gone. In the former, at age 29, Kim reiterates: all the money’s gone—in the latter, 27 years later, she goes on to warble: but it was never here.

I keep a playlist on my phone—only “I Dreamed I Dream” and “Massage the History”—set to shuffle, so as one stops the other starts. Listening to the two on loop, I make this little infinity; holding a beginning in my left hand and an ending in my right, I massage their history.

*

The swansong of The Eternal commences with ambient glistening for six seconds; the bass and drums cruise in, flirting for sixteen seconds; Thurston enters with a toothsome lick on acoustic guitar, mimicking Kim’s melody. She croons:

Oil dripping on my head
Let’s go back to bed.

Back to the unmade bed of “The Burning Spear”—in youth—in prayer, in love with fear?

She proceeds in hushed head-voice. When her vocals fade out, the instruments stall, slipping onto a suspenseful plateau, inclining so gradually they almost imperceptibly build back into a tempestuous pitch—then shattering guitars and slamming drums. It sounds like heavy metal, like the cellar-door of the subconscious blasted open.

“Something’s really at stake in this performance,” Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times in 2009. “[Kim sings] ‘Come with me to the other side / Not everyone makes it out alive.’ There’s some trick emotion here, in the singing and the music, something unsettled and uncertain.”

It’s that oceanic feeling crashing down again, needing to reach its source, wanting to take you home.

*

“Massage the History” ends on the word “neck”—its last line:

I want you to suck my neck.

According to liner notes, it technically ends on “suck”—

I want you to suck my neck.
Suck.

To my ear, Kim utters half of suck—“suh”—making the final (full) word, neck.

After Sonic Youth’s dispersal, Kim’s next album was under new band Body/Head, a guitar-only duo with Bill Nace. Recorded December 2012, released by Matador September 10, 2013, their debut LP Coming Apart comprises 68 minutes of distorted strumming and gaunt vocal riffs repeated, reinterpreted in trancelike stupor.

Through Body/Head, Kim’s voice—visceral mixture of rapture and torture—approaches a primal scream. In Girl in A Band, she recounts that when coming of age, she visited the home of Arthur Janov, who was (in her words) “the creator of the primal scream, a therapy technique that was supposed to return you to your birth trauma experience and release you by encouraging screaming and other vocal disinhibitions.”

Ten miniscule films correspond to the pieces of Coming Apart; in each, one slight gesture loops in slow-motion for the song’s entirety. The film for “Can’t Help You”—the album’s most amicable track—features model (and nurse) Louise Erdman miming Kim’s noise-band name-painting technique: a pair of pantyhose soaked in paint is lashed against the canvas to create the lines of every letter.

“Since paintings are silent, a painting of a noise band’s name would still fail to represent it in full. The solidity of rock has vanished: all that’s left is noise,” wrote Frank Guan in Kim’s monograph, Noise Name Paintings and Sculptures of Rock Bands That Are Broken Up. “Even that noise, sealed away in written language, is temporarily inactive, more absent than present and more potential than real.”

*

Over the last few years, Kim’s music has consistently infused more commercial channels with the (life-affirming) essence of pain and danger.

June 8, 2015: Her track from the Converse sneaker-company’s compilation CONS EP VOL. III starts streaming “Slow Boy”—a collaboration with Dinosaur Jr. guitar-prodigy J Mascis—where, at one-minute-thirty-six-seconds, and again at two-minutes-fifty-seconds, Kim’s horrific wail trails off on an identical note by J’s guitar which then propels the phrase faster, higher than any human range. A kind of sublimation.

August 18 of that year: Peaches premieres a video for a single featuring Kim—“Close Up”—and in it, Kim rasps, Look to the right / Lemme get a close-up, her timbre intimidating, macabre.

March 18, 2016: She and surf-pro Alex Knost put out a self-titled EP as Glitterbust—52 minutes of libidinous droning, austere guitar, the seldom drum, and intermittent poetic recitation—five hyper-erotic angst-ridden tracks, drowning in distressed disillusionment.

September 12, same year: Matador releases a chilling single—“Murdered Out”—the first-ever track credited to Kim Gordon by name, alone. Cloaked in reverb, her speak-singing thrusts the hook—black matte spray—to grungy dance-club drumming. Interviewed on NPR, Kim said, to murder out a car, to coat it in matte-black spray-paint, is to murder out corporate identity, the logo. “It’s almost like a peaceful resistance. It’s denying that we’re part of the culture, that we’re not going to fit in. We’re making our own kind of anti-status symbol, in our own language that’s kind of subliminal.”

For now, though, Body/Head seems to be Kim’s preferred musical outlet. Two months after “Murdered Out” debuted, Body/Head released a live recording of their 40-minute set from the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. Adorned with a seascape by Raymond Pettibon, the album’s named No Waves.

*

“Even though Sonic Youth is associated with it, it would be wrong to call us No Wave. We just built something out of it,” Kim writes in Girl in a Band. “When I saw and heard No Wave bands, some equation in my head and body pieced together instantly. A phantom thing had been missing from my life and here it was, finally, unconventional, personal but at the same time not, and confrontational. What’s more, every No Wave gig felt precarious, a rush, a cheek-burn, since you knew the band onstage could break up at any moment.”

And so, November 14, 2011, on an outdoor stage in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sonic Youth played their final show. You can see low-resolution professional video footage on YouTube, imbued with this threat of imminent termination that Kim described. Go, hear her quaver the first verse of the set-opener, “Brave Men Run (In My Family)”—here, her voice is sibylline, her intonations diamond-cut, excavated from the diaphragm, scraping the throat on the way through gritted teeth. Listening, I’m awash in that oceanic feeling, the pain and joy of approaching danger. It’s astonishing. “Astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (Burke). “The effect of the sublime in the highest degree.”

“Teen Age Riot”—their hymn to youth, their anthem for anarchy—closes the set (nostalgic, euphoric) followed by seven minutes of apocalyptic noise improvisation, concluding shortly after Kim starts whipping the electrical cords from the outlets, striding offstage.

__________________________________

* “The sensation of the Eternal (which may very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible bounds, oceanic).”