Some Thoughts on 'Girl In A Band'

"Looking cool" has many different meanings and interpretations for people.
- One of the memoir's essential and illuminating quotes.

Imagine you’re the child of an academic, you spend your childhood around the kids of Hollywood film producers; in your teens you spent time working for someone who is now the world’s most powerful art dealer and later hung out with almost all the people who made the New York art and post punk music scene what it was and - more importantly - became.

Apparently you - and almost all of your friends - hate what New York has become. Not a moments thought is taken to consider how you and your very well-known friends might have contributed to that commercialisation whilst achieving great commercial success. MoMa is just a “giant midtown gift store” but strangely that doesn’t stop you performing there. Gordon laments the retail fashion chains, H&M, Forever 21 etc; you know, the ones regular people can afford to shop at, unlike Marc Jacobs. There’s plenty of talk of punk/punk rock. When used in reference to a culture and music genre, it’s appropriate. Often punk is used in the same way Sonic Youth has long referred to it in interviews and, famously, in 1991 The Year Punk Broke. A simultaneously ironic and sincere nod to aesthetics. Following the publishing of excerpts from the book, a lot of online comment latched on to the quote claiming Smashing Pumpkins weren’t punk rock. A lot of it misses the way in which the term is used - which is fair since it’s probably a little bit of an in-joke. There’s nothing remotely punk rock about Gordon these days either. If a girl was in a band and wrote a memoir and titled it Girl In A Band: A Memoir, take that as a cue to the level of thought and  literary skill that has gone into the book.

[Note: I'm only halfway through the book. These are just some thoughts I've had so far.]