/ Pictured: portrait of Kim Gordon by Danielle Neu, 2024 /
Better late than never, let me regale you with my “Favourites of the Year!”
To start: Song of the
Year. On her challenging and confrontational solo album, The Collective
(released in March 2024), the now 70-year-old former Sonic Youth
singer-bassist, multi-disciplinary conceptual artist and intensely fierce babe
Kim Gordon reasserted her status as the epitome of unassailable, ineffable
deadpan cool with nonchalant authority. Understandably, listeners went nuts for
crunching first single “Bye Bye”, in which Gordon hisses and whispers what
sounds like a “to-do” list (“Buy a suitcase, pants to the cleaner / Cigarettes
for Keller / Call the vet, call the groomer, call the dog sitter / Milk
thistle, calcium, high-rise, boot cut, Advil, black jeans / Blue jeans,
cardigan purse, passport, pajamas, silk …”) over juddering, anxious trap beats.
But my song of 2024 was the ominous industrial grind of follow-up “I’m a Man”,
on which Gordon (who’s always loved a feminist diatribe) steps into the psyche
of an alienated alt-right man to icily scrutinize toxic masculinity (“Dropped
out of college, don't have a degree / And I can't get a date / It's not my
fault … I'm not bringing home the juice / I'm not bringing home the bacon …”).
“I’m a Man” makes a political point (Gordon’s lyrics demonstrate more empathy
than you might expect) AND rocks like a mutha. Watch the video below:
Most noteworthy passing: American author, playwright, actor, essayist, art critic and all-round bête noire Gary Indiana (né Gary Hoisington, 16 July 1950 – 23 October 2024) died of lung cancer aged 74. (As Indiana told an interviewer in 2014 “I’ve been smoking since I was practically two years old.” His brand of choice was Camel Filters. It’s amazing the dissolute Indiana lasted this long, considering his peers were people like David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar and Cookie Mueller). Anyway, words like “lacerating” and “scathing” barely suffice when discussing Indiana’s oeuvre. When I was in my twenties, buying each new work by Indiana and Dennis Cooper was de rigueur. (I probably purchased them at the long-defunct radical Compendium bookstore in Camden Town). I moved around a lot and wound up re-selling them to used bookstores for a pittance. Then Indiana’s books mostly lapsed out of print! (In more recent years, they’re gradually being reissued by Semiotext(e)). It didn’t help that Indiana gleefully burnt bridges throughout his life. As one of his associates noted almost admiringly, “He went through agents the way I go through T-shirts.” Some of his most noteworthy books were speculative fiction inspired by true crime figures like the Menendez brothers (Resentment: A Comedy (1997) and Andrew Cunanan (Three Month Fever (1999). (The viewers who clutched their pearls over Ryan Murphy’s recent Menendez miniseries would REALLY lose their shit over Indiana’s book. Indiana would have swooned over Luigi Mangione). For anyone interested in investigating Indiana, his memoirs I Can Give You Anything But Love is available in paperback. And his interview with Butt in July 2024 is essential. (I assume it's Indiana's last-ever interview, but don't quote me on that). As its intro summarizes: “Gary earned his notorious reputation over the course of his unflinching, decades-long career. He writes about addiction, alienation, corruption, exploitation, obsession, perversion, power and sexuality with unfiltered candour, leaving no room for politeness … His tendency toward destructive obsession was kept in check by his brilliance, cutting humor and heart.”
/ Pictured: “Gary Indiana Veiled” by Peter Hujar, 1981 /
“Maybe one reason I like female-fronted
punk bands is my mother was a yeller. Gives me a homey feeling,” Nate Lippens
muses in Ripcord (my favourite book of 2024 – well, tied for top spot with
Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr). “The anger of my old
punk albums is still fresh. This fearful rage sung in wild harmonies with
sped-up rockabilly guitar riffs is about careening drunk through disappointment
and sadness as time slips away, leaving something half-healed and half-wounded.
The singer keens, “A life of intermission, a life of intermission …””. Even if
you don’t recognize the lyrics to “Beyond and Back” from their 1981 album Wild
Gift, you’ll instantly identify the unnamed band Lippens cites as X. The
definitive and most enduring of original Los Angeles punk bands released their
ninth and final studio recording Smoke & Fiction in August 2024, and it’s
my album of the year. All the essential components that make X unique are
present and correct. Brevity (the album is 28-minutes long). Despairing
low-life beatnik poetry. The fiery zap of Billy Zoom’s punkabilly guitar. Exene
Cervenka and John Doe’s signature dissonant, spine-tingling harmonies. And they
wail and shred like their lives depend on it. (X still sounds reassuringly
desperate!). But Smoke & Fiction is also rueful, with reflections on ageing
and the passage of time. Its messages are bittersweet and unconsoling. “There
is no upside / Only your flipside / That's where the dark side resides” they
conclude on “Flipside”, while on the title track Exene laments “Wrapped up
tight in twilight / In a bed I am borrowing / My face turns to sorrowing / When
I'm dreaming about tomorrowing / I still hurt a little bit / But there's no
cure for this.” If this is indeed X’s swansong (and let’s face it, considering
their ages and Zoom’s health travails it probably is), they are ending on a
dignified creative high.
/ Above: portrait of Exene Cervenka of X. Below: the video for "Ruby Church" /
And finally, the cinematic event of 2024 MUST be French director Coralie Fargeat’s disturbing and provocative modern horror The Substance. Pal and I revisited it on Amazon Prime on New Year's Eve (crashed out on the sofa, drinking prosecco) for the first time since seeing it at the cinema (it hadn’t occurred to me that The Substance is the PERFECT film to watch on New Year’s Eve night!). What I love about The Substance: how it combines universal anxieties about aging with classic tropes of David Cronenberg-inspired “body horror” and hagsploitation (I see The Substance as an update of late 1950s movies The Wasp Woman and The Leech Woman), all filtered through an ultra-stylish, coolly detached European art house sensibility. The pervading sense of dread from the very beginning. Its alienated, almost post-apocalyptic “outsider” view of Los Angeles with perennially deserted streets. (This is partly because The Substance was entirely filmed in France, masquerading as Hollywood! The palm trees we keep seeing are in Antibes!). How the luxuriously appointed, pink-carpeted penthouse apartment of protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) - with its eerie, cavernous, white-tiled bathroom - gradually becomes the epicenter of hell. And the gutsy, committed performances of Moore and Margaret Qualley. (Moore’s is truly the comeback of the year. That Golden Globe award was well deserved). Of course, The Substance - with its prosthetics and geysers of blood and gore - works as a gross-out satirical black comedy, but its quieter moments are haunting, like Elisabeth savagely smearing red lipstick across her face in the bathroom mirror in a fit of self-loathing. Or her jittery, panic-stricken trips to the derelict graffiti-scarred building (with the metal shutter that only partially opens!) to collect her refills of The Substance – the indelibly chic image of Elisabeth in THAT yellow coat, sunglasses and gloves! My second favourite film of 2024 was Love Lies Bleeding by Rose Glass (female directors were on fire last year). Further reading: I originally wrote about The Substance here.
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