The smartphone era has been disastrous for boomer artists. It’s not their fault, really—it’s the most nihilistic epoch in human history. Creative output is invisible without corporate backing and heavy digital promotion, and whatout there that strikes that populist chord is often mired in irony and insincerity.
But where most of this cohort struggles to relate to young people on their level, Kim Gordon thrives in the muck. Notably the oldest among her formerbandmates, Gordon’s career post-breakup has been the most interesting and consistent in its aesthetic concerns—a conceptual blending of noise and pop sensibility that never quite becomes “noise-pop” proper, instead emphasizing the dissonance between the sounds.
by Jennifer Egan, a Thouron Scholar, adding a layer of metafiction already entrenched in Egan’s body of work., each chapter focusing on a different character and being written in a different style exploring the fallout of tech companies, the impossibility of authenticity in our current age, and trauma as something we can discard. It’s easy to see why the book sparked a creative urge in Gordon upon first listen.