KIM

She wears shiny black sports shorts and a shiny black blouse done up to the neck with a bow. Dark sheer tights. I can’t see what she’s wearing on her feet. 

That magic moment when the star steps on stage. She’s there, in the same room as me, in Birmingham. And people around me feel the same. There’s a sense of a long journey come full circle, recognition, and breathless adulation from some corners. A large percentage of the audience is female, much more than back in the days with the band that will remain nameless. Someone shouts “Icon!”. I cringe. 

But deconstructed rock goddess is Kim’s stock in trade, and many here have come to marvel at just that. At how that is maintained and presented. She was the element that prevented Sonic Youth from being just another college rock outfit. An aloof passive aggression, backed by three geeks. The seductive portal that lured me into their compelling sound world. That dynamic echoed tonight; her worldliness contrasting against her young wannabes. And I return, against my instinct, as I haven’t much cared for the promotional releases this time, expecting only a spectacle that I can say I have witnessed. 

These projections of mine are fast eaten away as I am reminded of why I hold her in such high regard. The music, her music, takes over. 

Dirty loops of guitar, scratchy noodles, artless sketches made at home, the words pasted across their rhythms, cross-cutting the natural flow of speech, sheets of noise, an ugly texture explored until it becomes beautiful, a super-cool garage groove, motoric trances, anti-tunes, amateur hour karaoke, all swirled and scraped like peanut butter and petrol on a mattress of wires and gaffer tape. “Did you get it at the gift shop”, whispered like a line from a porno. She and the band layered in slide show video of carpet, burning metal, interstate highway and footage of themselves rehearsing, the juxtapositions a surreal meta-scape that screams high art product from nothing but the litter blown by the breeze across the sidewalk.

I am no longer a teenager in a bedroom, my only friend your record, its poetry a future fantasy that I hoped to one day walk within. Now, older, but no wiser, just more wary, I watch you weave your spell with envy, until I am lost in its fabric and forget it’s you that’s talking, until you stop and vanish. Mystery intact.