Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that?
I never felt like I had anything really figured out. When I was a teenager, it was all about teenagers having an 'identity crisis.' That was the phrase that was used. But in my early 20s, I was still like, 'When am I going to be over that?'
My parents lived by Rancho Park. And my mom, later in life, got into playing golf. She and her male cronies would get up at five in the morning and sneak onto the back nine. I kind of just started getting into it. For a long time, I was really puzzled by why people liked it.
It's hard to say when the life of a band starts and stops... but playing music together is an act of trust. When that's broken, it's impossible to continue.
I mean, most of it is probably more obscure and just more noisy than either of those two bands, but Thurston has stuff all the time that he's involved with that is fairly obscure and experimental.
Everyone's so interior now, they're not really looking around them. They're on their phones.
I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.
Part of my desire to play music was because I wanted to escape the art world and the politics of it; the petty gossip-y art world. But you know, I feel like they're both equal forms of expression.
I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years.
I love the way Lady Gaga finds humour in fashion, but it's still very stylised.
I still don't really feel like a bass player.
The last two records I liked playing a lot.
I'm a relatively shy person, but I love being challenged and putting myself in positions that are scary.
I was very aware of performers who have a persona, whether it's Siouxsie Sioux or Patti Smith or Lydia Lunch, and I'm just this middle-class girl coming from a more conventional upbringing, this California person. But in a way I felt like it's important to represent the normal.
I do retweet some of the things that people say about the things I've done, but I don't necessarily want to use it to promote myself because I find that it gets kind of boring. There should just be a whole different site for that. Because it's just kind of boring and gross to use it just self-promotion.
In the early eighties, there were a lot of artists involved with the music scene. All those young artists, before their careers took off, were into music. Robert Longo used to play some guitar. He had a band for a while. Basquiat had a band. I mean, people were always trying to mix music and art - in fact, I'm guilty of it myself.
No one talks about woman power. The Spice Girls - they're masquerading as little girls. It's repulsive.
I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it.
I never thought about doing anything other than making art.
