Kim Gordon Biography

Kim Gordon is an American musician, singer, songwriter and bassist, guitarist, and vocalist in the alternative rock band Sonic Youth. In addition to her work as a musician, Gordon has had ventures in record producing, fashion, and acting, and has worked consistently as a visual artist throughout her musical career. She debuted as a producer on Hole’s debut album Pretty on the Inside (1991) and founded the Los Angeles-based clothing line X-Girl in 1993.

Kim Gordon Age

Kim Gordon’s birth name Kim Althea Gordon was born in Rochester, New York, U.S. on April 28, 1953. She is 66 years of age.

Kim Gordon Family

Kim Althea Gordon was born in Rochester, New York, and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is the second child of Althea (d. 2002) and Calvin Wayne Gordon (1915–1998). Her father was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Gordon has one older brother, Keller (b. 1949), whom she described as “brilliant, manipulative, sadistic, arrogant, almost unbearably articulate,” and “the person who more than anyone else in the world shaped who I was, and who I turned out to be.”

She attended and graduated from Los Angeles’s Otis College of Art and Design. After graduating she moved to New York City to begin an art career. There, she formed Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore in 1981.

Gordon and Moore married in 1984, and the band released a total of six albums on independent labels before the end of the 1980s. They would subsequently release nine studio albums on the major label DGC Records, beginning with Goo in 1990. Gordon was also a founding member of the musical project Free Kitten, which she formed with Julia Cafritz in 1993.

Kim Gordon Husband

She was married to Thurston Moore with whom she formed Sonic Youth in 1981. They tied the knot in 1984. On July 1, 1994, Gordon gave birth to a daughter, Coco Hayley Gordon Moore. However, Kim and Moore later separated and divorced.

Thurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a member of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label. Moore was ranked 34th in Rolling Stone’s 2004 edition of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” In May 2012, Spin published a staff-selected list of the top 100 rock guitarists and ranked Moore and his Sonic Youth bandmate Lee Ranaldo together at number 1.

Kim Gordon Career

In 1981, Gordon joined the short-lived band CKM, with Christine Hahn and Stanton Miranda. They met her future Sonic Youth bandmates Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore through Miranda. At the time, she was 27 years old and had never played an instrument. Gordon began dating Moore and, together with Ranaldo, the couple then formed Sonic Youth in 1981.

Originally the band released their first two albums, Confusion is Sex in 1983 and Bad Moon Rising in 1985 on Neutral and Homestead Records, respectively, before signing with SST to release EVOL (1986) and Sister (1987). Gordon and Moore married in 1984, three years after beginning Sonic Youth. In October 1988, the band released Daydream Nation through Enigma Records.

In 1993, Gordon co-owned, with Daisy von Furth, a women’s streetwear clothing company in Los Angeles, called X-Girl. The company was a spin-off of X-Large, a men’s streetwear company co-founded by Michael Diamond of the Beastie Boys. The first X-Girl store was opened in Los Angeles in 1994. Actress Chloë Sevigny served as a model for several pieces in the clothing line. Also in 1993, Gordon formed the musical project Free Kitten with Julia Cafritz.

In 2003, Gordon was featured in the Gothenburg Biennale and exhibited Club In The Shadow, an installation art collaboration with artist Jutta Koether, at Kenny Schachter’s Contemporary Gallery in New York City. In 2005, she submitted another collaboration with Koether for the Her Noise exhibition in London, United Kingdom, entitled “Reverse Karaoke.” In the same year, an artist’s book Kim Gordon Chronicles Vol. 1 was published and featured photos of Gordon throughout her life. The following year, Kim Gordon Chronicles Vol. 2 was released and featured her drawings, collages, and paintings.

Public image

Gordon is a popular culture icon, epitomizing an “ineffable, magnetic coolness” and “a certain brand of aloof, downtown cool.” Some journalists have noted her as a public figure who has “never given much away” about herself. Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys commented on Gordon’s persona, stating: “Wherever Kim ends up, she is the coolest person in the room. But I know her, and I know she’d rather be at home grilling hot dogs.”

Kim Gordon Net Worth

Gordon is an American musician who has gained her wealth from her music career and other works. She has a net worth of $6 million.

Kim Gordon Songs

Solo

• No Home Record (2019)
• Sonic Youth

Free Kitten

• Unboxed (1994)
• Nice Ass (1995)
• Sentimental Education (1997)
• Inherit (2008)

Body/Head

• Body/Head 12″ (2013)
• Coming Apart (2013)
• No Waves (2016)
• The Switch (2018)

Glitterbust

• Glitterbust (2016)

Kim Gordon Book

• Gordon, Kim (2014). Is It My Body? – Selected Texts. Dijon, France: Les presses du réel. ISBN 978-3-95679-038-6.
• Gordon, Kim (2015). Girl in a Band: A Memoir. New York: Dey Street Books. ISBN 978-0-062-29590-3.

Kim Gordon Never Questioned That She Would Succeed At Something

At 66, musician and visual artist Kim Gordon is as radical as ever on her first solo album No Home Record.

Kim Hill asks the former Sonic Youth bassist about her work, her fascination with Airbnb, and how she ended up making a cameo on Gilmore Girls.

She tells Kim Hill that she likes checking out short-term housing rentals online and is interested in how they seem to offer a place to start over or pretend you’re someone else. “It’s sort of the opposite of one’s home which is curated by oneself, surrounded by objects of love or sentimentality, things you pick out.”

After years in New York, Gordon moved back to her childhood home city of Los Angeles after separating from her husband of 27 years, Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore. (She wrote about the divorce in her 2015 memoir Girl in a Band.)

Gordon says she made the move partly because she was sick of the harsh New York winters and was hearing good things about the LA art scene.

She’s happy enough there now, apart from missing her daughter Coco – a writer and sometime-model who lives in Brooklyn.

While Gordon describes herself as sensitive and a people-pleaser, she says she’d never “do something generic” just to fit in.

“In that sense, I don’t care what people think.”
As an art student in her 20s, Gordon didn’t have a backup plan for if a creative career didn’t eventuate (which she now thinks is crazy) but she’s always had self-belief.
“I guess I never questioned that I would succeed at something.”

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