About a year or so ago, I was at a planning meeting for the weekend incarnation of my job and news had just come through about the break-up of one celebrity couple or another (I think it might've been Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman, if memory serves, but I can't be sure). In any case, the discussion turned to maybe doing a larger piece on surprising break-ups of very public couples. Everyone chimed in with their picks, and the usual suspects were cited (Brad & Jennifer, Marc Anthony and J.Lo, etc.) Wanting to contribute as always, I raised my hand and said: "Thurston Moore & Kim Gordon," and it was if someone had thrown a wet beach towel over a roaring flame. Eyebrows arched. "Who?" asked the collective throng. Now, granted, being an unrepentant music geek working within the cogs of a very mainstream operation finds me routinely making cultural allusions that fall on deaf and/or entirely disinterested ears, but I hadn't considered Sonic Youth to be an especially esoteric name to drop in about twenty years. I explained who Thurston and Kim were, and one of the higher ranking editors chuckled accordingly, suggesting that the nation of suburban soccer moms who comprise the core demographic of the program probably wouldn't know ... much less care ... about the luminaries in question.
In retrospect, that may have been the right call. How Sonic Youth could still be perceived as a strange, unknown quantity at this stage of the proceedings may seem baffling to me, but I sometimes forget that I live in New York City, which even in its current culture climate still owes precious little to the rest of the continental United States (where Daughtry, Bon Jovi pass as "rock" on a radio landscape otherwise ruled by Beyonce, Katy Perry and their vile ilk, but I'm entirely digressing).
I've posted a number of times about Sonic Youth here,... which is surprising, really, as they've never been one of what my friend Rob B. and I used to call "the Crucial Few." Sure, I thrilled to my first hearing of "Death Valley `69" off 1985's Bad Moon Rising, and dutifully snapped up copies of Evol, Sister and Daydream Nation upon their respective, dissonant releases. I loved early Sonic Youth records for their high-volume attack, their unconventional tunings (which always sounded intriguingly "wrong") and their thinly-veiled fascination with Charles Manson. Simply put, I greatly preferred Sonic Youth when they were inaccessible and scary. From Goo onward, not only did they relatively trim the more "out there" elements of their sound, but they significantly paired down the weird of their sentiment. By 1992's Dirty, I'd pretty much completely lost interest in further Sonic Youth albums (although I'm told they went back to their envelope-pushing roots later on).
Regardless of my luke-warm feelings for their records after the early 90's, I continued to hold the band -- and especially Thurston and Kim -- in high esteem. Between Thurston's encyclopedic brain and insatiable hunger for music and Kim's effortless cool, it was hard not to root for them. They just seemed like they had it all figured out.
And that's precisely why it was so jarring in the fall of 2011 to hear that Kim and Thurston were splitting up. After being so seemingly with it and together for all those years, this perfect couple was becoming so suddenly imperfect. This was why I thought they were ripe for inclusion in a round-up of surprising break-ups. How could Thurston and Kim not keep it together after creating such music and being married for so long?
Obviously, my fairy-tale fanboy perceptions of the marriage of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore were purely projections. Like everyone else, they're human, and thus prone to the same human frailties and failings the rest of us are.
Just yesterday, Elle Magazine published a candid interview with Kim Gordon wherein she disclosed the fundamental reason for the split. While no names were mentioned (and even if they had been, that wouldn't alter the circumstances), the scenario that Kim describes was so strikingly cliched and .... frankly ... banal that I found it profoundly depressing. I won't give away any of the gossipy deets, but click here to read it.
And just for posterity, here's Sonic Youth when they had it all together...
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