Sadpony was visiting Raisen over Christmas when they created the foundation of what would become the new album’s corrosively arresting lead single, “Bye Bye.” The pair had just been making beats intended for Playboi Carti, an iconoclastic rapper known for his music’s rough edges and in-your-face attitude. When they finished this beat — which begins with a loop that sounds like a car’s seatbelt alarm and eventually ignites into a conflagration of synthesized chaos — Raisen said he told his brother, “I think this might be a little too wild for Playboi. But it could be cool for Kim.”
It was. “I thought it would be good to do mundane lyrics,” Gordon said, “as opposed to making it as intense” as the instrumentation. The finished song finds her reciting a packing list in a rhythmic deadpan, giving the whole composition a hypnotic strangeness: “Milk thistle, calcium, high-rise boot cut, Advil, black jeans, bluejeans, cardigan, purse, passport.” Is this Gordon’s actual travel list? “Kind of, but it was embellished,” she said. “I don’t actually travel with milk thistle.”
When “Bye Bye” was released in January, it resonated beyond Gordon’s usual fan base. The song has blown up on a certain corner of TikTok: One post that has been viewed 300,000 times shows a young, tattooed musician listening to “Bye Bye” in awe, with the caption, “Kim Gordon just cured my fear of aging.” Another popular post shows a man nodding along to the track; caption: “Kim Gordon making this absolute banger at the age of 70.”
“What Kim’s doing is totally, absolutely normal. What’s not normal is when women or people who are marginalized in other ways have stopped making art” for reasons having to do with ageism or sexism, Hanna, of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, said. “We’re not witnessing a miracle, we’re witnessing what happens when the thing that’s supposed to happen is just allowed to happen.”
Raisen sent Gordon those TikToks, and she’s not sure what to make of them. “It never occurred to me that I would be seen as cool because I’m 70,” she said with a dry laugh, “considering that I’m still waiting to feel like an adult in some ways.”
But — despite being roughly as synonymous with countercultural coolness as water is with wetness — Gordon is still not quite used to being seen as “cool,” for any reason.
