Now that a whole weekend has elapsed, this is probably old news already. With gossip moving at the speed of broadband these days, we’re probably not the first to tell you that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are getting a divorce. Then again, perhaps you haven’t heard. They decided to break the news as quietly as possible with the old sneak out a press release to one magazine at 7 pm on a Friday night tactic for dropping a newsbomb.
It’s a good strategy, often used in Washington for releasing something that will be politically damaging. You slip that news out there Friday evening when people are at happy hour and ready to get on with their weekend plans and generally keeping their computers off and their phones in their pockets, and then by Monday when everybody plugs in again it’s already old news and something else is about to happen somewhere in the world, if it hasn’t already.
Our plan is to lurk on eHarmony until Kim makes a profile.
Try as we might, we just can’t bring ourselves to care about this news at all. We don’t know Thurston Moore. We’re not friends with Kim Gordon. (Full disclosure: We are friends with Kim Gordon’s Panties on Facebook.) Maybe we’re just a right bastard, but compassion is a scarce enough commodity, and we’d rather save ours for people we’ve actually met. If we fall all over ourselves wringing our hands, wailing and moaning about Kim and Thurston, it basically makes us no better than the TMZ set, hashing out the sordid details of Paul McCartney’s divorce.
It’s an apt comparison. Sonic Youth are certainly the Beatles of indie rock. What people always forget about the Beatles though is that they broke up at exactly the right time. They had done just about everything they could do as Beatles. Can you imagine the Beatles playing through the 80’s? Into the 90’s? They would have sounded like Wings.
Try as we might, we just can’t give a shit about “The uncertain future of the band.” Sonic “Youth” is actually our parents’ age (and we’re 31). They’ve released sixteen (16!) full length records. There’s not really any need to make more records until we get around to buying the 13 albums we don’t own. The three that we do have on our shelves are so fucking good that we’re still not tired of them yet. It’s one of the reasons we’re actually happy about the impending Double Dagger breakup. Their records are so good, we’re not going to get tired of them anytime soon.
The only unresolved point of interest with the Sonic Divorce? Who gets the Washing Machine?