Is this zone rap music? It depends on how you navigate it. Join the party as a fan of Sonic Youth – the era-defining noisenik unit that Gordon co-founded in 1981 – and this new album, “The Collective,” will be proud and powerful. alongside Leonard Cohen's “I'm Your Man,” Lou Reed's “Lulu,” and other profound declarations of ungovernability from rock'n-roll's big brains. But ultimately, “The Collective” is something very different: Gordon deploys his talk-sigh poetry and existential guitar shred over the trap rhythms of Justin Raisen, a young producer who told the New York Times he first considered floating the rhythm of “Bye Bye” to Playboy Cartithe greatest expressionist of today's rapscape.
So let's try to be rap listeners and imagine that this is an album made by a septuagenarian we've never heard of. Gently remove Gordon's 1990 duet with Chuck D on “Sonic Youth”Cool thing” out of your head and remember that, like so many 21st century rappers working in Carti's aesthetic gravitation, Gordon loves repetition and negative space. This love overloads his lyrics with artful inaccuracy, the ambiguity making each song even bigger than Raisen's pretentiousness already does. On the fried boom-bap of “I Don't Miss My Mind,” Gordon describes a “liquid kiss that doesn't exist” and a “flower of power more green than green.” When she asks “See what I mean? One way or another, you totally will.
Even the slightest modulations of his enigmatic impasse can disrupt his words. And it's rap all the way. “Shelf Warmer,” a tick-tock song about gift shop trinkets, appears to be about sex, while another song, “Psychedelic orgasm,” doesn't. During “Dream Dollar,” Gordon delivers the refrain “Cement the brand” – with a scornful wink that reminds us exactly who's holding the mic. This album is an act of heritage mutation. idea is to erase the mark. Unless, for a counterculture hero like Gordon, erasing the mark is actually the mark.
All these little conundrums add up to one big one: In rap music, words perpetually become sounds in ways that can challenge their meaning. In 1998, the same year that Sonic Youth released “A Thousand Leaves”, the great critic Kodwo Eshun described rap music as an “omni-genre,” a mode of music-making in which any sound could be sampled and, by extension, about which anything could be said – by which anything could be meant. So yeah, maybe Kim Gordon is a rapper now. Or maybe it's all rap. Or maybe rap music is everything.