Monday, October 17, 2011
MIDDLE AGE RIOT: I know we don't usually do gossip here, but it seems relevant to me that Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon are splitting up after 27 years of marriage. That, on top of the fact that I read in Everybody Loves Our Town (an oral history of Seattle's music scene from the late 1980s to the late 1990s or so) that the Novocelics (Chris/Krist and Shelli), the Cornells (Chris and Susan Silver), and the Bucks (Peter and Stephanie Dorgan) also are all divorced, weirds me out a little bit. In the early 90s, those couples all seemed, from the outside, like permanent fixtures, matched pairs lucky enough to have young love, a little maturity, exciting lives, and mutually-reinforcing careers. 20 years later is, well, 20 years later. It just makes me feel old, that's all.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I've never been a particularly big fan of Sonic Youth (I prefer my rock with a little more melody and a little less dissonance), but this announcement kind of hit me, since they seemed like the functional John/Yoko, without all the weird stuff/screaming/breaking up the band.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, the opposite of John and Yoko.
ReplyDelete"...WITHOUT all the weird stuff/screaming..." ???? You really haven't listened to much Sonic Youth, have you? http://youtu.be/WMKPiiB7ngc PS: I will really miss the weird screaming noise of this band if this is truly the end. Disconnection notice, indeed.
ReplyDelete"weird stuff/screaming" is an apt description of the musical aspects of their collaboration.
ReplyDeletei saw them at the 9:30 club in D.C. in 2002, and they did not seem to be getting along, quite then. Thurston went out of his way to embarass her for calling out songs on the set list in the wrong order.
also, so Kim's single?
I vividly remember being super happy at one of my softball games because I had read (probably on an AOL message board) that Kim and Thurston's daughter Coco was born. Yes, oldness is upon me. As long as Kim and Bill from Jawbox are still together, I can continue to feel good about the institution of '90s rock marriage.
ReplyDeleteActually, the Thurston/Kim split leaves Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley (Yo La Tengo) as the Last Indie Rock Couple Standing. And they've been together since the mid-'80's. Such genuinely nice, unassuming, non-rock-star-attitude-bearing people. (I've seen YLT live about a zillion times.) And they run a heck of a band, too.
ReplyDeleteThough I just felt old when I saw that Paul Simon and Edie Brickell have been married for 19 years now (and good on'em), with three kids.
ReplyDeleteWe ARE old, alas.
ReplyDeleteThere are Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, but they married towards the end of Luna's run before embarking on a dup project. But they reminds me that the edge really has to go to the other two thirds of Galaxie 500, Damon and Naomi. They've been together since high school, which puts them back to the late 1970s.
ReplyDeleteDamon and Naomi! Good call; I had forgotten that all three members of Galaxie 500 had gotten together at Dalton (an excellent NYC private school), and later at Harvard, so it stands to reason that D&N were an item way back then.
ReplyDeleteAs for Dean and Britta, whose music (in and out of Luna) I admire, the story of their romance is not exactly edifying from the "indie rock married couples" perspective. See Wareham's memoir, Black Postcards, for the candid and unflinching details.
His memoir is very wry. Having seen Britta in concert a few times and at the Black Postcards signing, I would not be as hard on Dean as he was on himself.
ReplyDeleteI am/was only a part-time Sonic Youth fan, but this bums me out. :-(
ReplyDelete