Kim Gordon does not write like a rock star. She writes like the visual artist she is - detached but precise. Her sentences are sharp and uncluttered. She rarely raises her voice. She doesn’t have to. After her decades as bassist and co-founder of Sonic Youth — this memoir feels
Acid for the Children drifts, darts, and dances around like jazz improv. I found it was less concerned with chronology and more with sensation, memory, and that electric feeling of becoming. This is not a book about stadium tours, playing bass or even the dominance of the Red Hot Chili
There are rock memoirs that exist to build the myth, and there are rock memoirs that exist to tear it down brick by brick. A Perfect Union of Contrary Things (2016) does something more unsettling: it replaces the myth with something colder, stranger, and more human. This is definitely not
There are rock memoirs that feel carefully edited, smoothed down, and sanded clean. This book doesn’t sand anything. It leaves the edges sharp and the wounds open. It’s the story of a kid from California who grew up and found salvation behind a drum kit, and somehow lived
There’s a moment in Walking Disaster where pop-punk rock band Sum 41's frontman Deryck Whibley casually mentions that he nearly died — not in a “rock bottom” kind of way, but physically, clinically, repeatedly. And he doesn’t dress it up. No dramatic pause. Just the blunt reality
