Kim Gordon’s Capitalist Realism

“We’re post, right?” Gordon asks her listeners with a verbal wink on the track “Post Empire” from Play Me. Her new album is looser and more settled than its predecessor, but it is no less political. If The Collective drew inspiration from Jennifer Egan’s speculative fiction novel, The Candy House (2022), a multicharacter, polyphonic work that questioned the destabilizing effects of the technological on the personal, Play Me goes further to delineate the boundaries between these two aspects. The track “Black Out” conveys the grim claustrophobia of a world with AI and Donald Trump, while “Dirty Tech” delivers a more playful (and ironic) take on sex, technology, and the workplace (“I like it when you talk dirty tech to me”). On “Subcon,” Gordon rhetorically asks, in a veiled swipe at Musk, “You wanna go to Mars, and then what?”

Gordon has long held an interest in sci-fi — “The Sprawl” mentioned earlier revealed the influence of William Gibson — but her sense of futurism on The Collective and Play Me is more immediate. Her engagement with contemporary figures and the way the marketplace of late capitalism shapes everyday life demonstrates her nonconformist approach to political songwriting, one unaligned with a tradition involving figures like Pete Seeger or Joan Baez. As with her past work, Gordon is concerned with matters of agency and complicity. As a recording artist, she is conscious of her participation in sustaining the systemic conditions of the capitalist marketplace and the risks entailed, those of reinforcing gender norms or elevating profit over art.

While Gordon’s songwriting with Sonic Youth identified the edges between sex and intellect, art and politics, in the service of creating a critical space of resistance and subversion, her solo LPs suggest the abandonment of such a project — not out of resignation, but due to the impossibility of such a space under our current conditions of hyperpolitics and techno-capitalism. It is not enough to be “transgressive” anymore, whatever that might mean. The anxiety of selling out, which defined the independent music scene during the 1990s, has long been moribund. Even the songs on The Collective and Play Me, whether the soul music sample on “Play Me” or the pulsing, dread-filled melody of “Bye Bye,” convey the rudiments of hip-hop cliché, signaling not so much derivativeness but self-awareness about a larger cultural exhaustion. Artistic expression thrives on the past, even when work like Gordon’s attempts to break away from such habitual reflexes.

In Capitalist Realism (2009), Mark Fisher writes of how Kurt Cobain’s suicide marked the end of a certain utopianism in rock music, which was already being overtaken by hip-hop. In both instances, authenticity was integral to their creativity — a feature recognized and commodified by the corporate music industry. As Fisher argues, drawing on the observations of fellow music critic Simon Reynolds, the respective forms of “realism” that hip-hop artists or figures like Cobain drew upon, whether anti-black racism in urban America or white working-class aggrievement in the Pacific Northwest, were displaced by a “capitalist realism” that turned such experiences into merely style and product, emptied of the social relations that informed them.

Gordon’s solo music can be understood against this backdrop. Neither staking a position of authenticity nor consenting to the demands of the marketplace — against all archetypes, Gordon is, after all, a seventy-something white woman recording hip-hop albums — the politics of her past three LPs have centered on bringing social relations back into focus, along with the techno-infrastructure that is both sustaining and fragmenting them. With its contemporary stylishness and social commentary, there remains an ad-copy aspect to Gordon’s approach insofar as Play Me reflects the cultural and market landscape seemingly as it is, selectively embracing its features of musical taste while calling out its more exploitative political and economic measures.

If Springsteen’s songwriting tends to speak from a specific place, Gordon’s themes of dislocation, transience, and alienation articulate the non-places of global capitalism. As the anthropologist Marc Augé has written, these modern spaces produced by capital — airport terminals, hotel rooms, interstate highway systems — appear as if devoid of history or cultural precedent. Tracks like “Bye Bye” infuse a glimmering sense of humanism into such locations and conditions of depersonalization and abstraction.

Indeed, Gordon’s deadpan delivery on “Bye Bye” — she performs a more politically minded version on Play Me — sounds like an update to Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” but one defined by the prosaic items of late capitalism rather than the eccentric musings of an underground counterculture. There is no underground or counterculture any longer, Gordon implies. There is no outside to global capitalism.