Kim Gordon

It's hard to get hot over a painting; there's no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness. Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it's easier in music.

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 can't think about whether I'll disappoint Sonic Youth fans. It's not like I want people to be disappointed, but I just can't control that.

I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.

I see it as more of a teenage activity than, you know, she's only 11, but you know, I think it's great that she knows so many girls who want to play music. And I see it more as a teen activity than I do as going into music.

I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.

I don't see myself as a rock star. I don't see myself in that way. I'm interested in work that offers some sort of critical dialogue.

I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.

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.

L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things. But Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s.

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?'

I'm kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there's some point where it doesn't allow for the complexity of things.