One of my favorite albums of 2024 is The Collective, the second solo album from Sonic Youth co-founder and visual artist Kim Gordon. From producer Justin Raisen’s Earth-shattering industrial beats to Gordon’s discordant guitar noise, The Collective is another exceptional record from a true visionary. What’s just as transfixing as the music itself are its accompanying videos, featuring Gordon’s daughter, Coco Gordon Moore, as the lead actor, director, and occasionally both.
For the deluxe edition of The Collective, Gordon added two new bonus tracks: the distorted art-trap banger “ECRP” and the Jersey club-indebted “Bangin’ On The Freeway.” There are videos for each, and they mark Coco’s debut in the director’s chair. The former takes a tour through the sprawl and detritus of NYC construction, and the latter is a vertiginous road trip on Los Angeles highways. Each is vastly different from the other, highlighting the duo’s variegated skill sets in constructing a visual narrative in conversation with its sonic material.
I spoke with Kim and Coco over Zoom to discuss their collaborative video-making process, how these videos speak to the songs themselves, and what they enjoy about getting to work with each other.
So, obviously, you’re mother and daughter. But how did you guys come about working together on these videos?
Kim Gordon: Well, the first video [“BYE BYE”], Clara Balzary made. I ran into her, and I was somewhere, and I was talking about how I just came up with an idea for a video, and she had done one before, kind of after the fact, for a song for my first solo record because she wanted to work with Coco. She had this idea she made into a video, and it was kind of the same situation here, like she said, “Oh, I wrote this short with Coco in mind,” and so she just adapted it for the song. Most of the money for videos was spent on the first one [laughs]. So I asked Coco if she wanted to direct a video for “ECRP,” and I was in New York.
Coco, you’ve been in your mom’s videos acting. What’s it like being at the helm and directing?
Coco Gordon Moore: It’s very different because it’s almost really weird, especially with “Bangin’ On The Freeway,” one where my mom was more in it, versus “ECRP,” where it was more about the buildings. It’s hard to direct my mom. It feels wrong to be telling her if I want her to do something. I actually had a hard time with that just because I feel like being in the video. I’m like, “Oh yeah, tell me [and] I’ll do whatever you want,” but it definitely felt funny to be asking her to do certain things and being a little nervous, too. But it was fun. I honestly really like editing more than filming and directing because I feel like I understand what I want the video or project to be when I’m editing something more so than when I’m creating it.
Was it more of a collaboration coming up with the ideas? Or, Coco, did you have sole creative control?
Gordon Moore: It was definitely a collaboration. My mom told me what she envisioned or what she was thinking about when writing the songs.
Gordon: It was Coco’s idea to get the car cams and videos for “Bangin’ On The Freeway.” It was kind of collaborative, actually.
Gordon Moore: Yeah, I knew I wanted it to be in the car. Whenever you’re in Ubers, I think it’s so funny to see yourself in there on camera. It’s like security footage, almost like being watched. And for “ECRP,” I used this really old digital camera I had since high school, and it’s not even one of those full ones that looks grainy. It has a weird HD zoom thing. So it was fun to work with something different.
How do you feel like the videos speak to the songs themselves? How are they in conversation with each other?
Gordon: The “ECRP” one is very New York. The song was partly inspired by the idea of post-industrialization through the guise of a D.H. Lawrence book [laughs] and the idea that New York is pretty chaotic. You see new buildings going up, but there’s also so many old buildings. There was the destruction of the East River Park, and Coco got some really good footage of the fencing around that. It’s hard to get to the river even now with other fencing and just building going on down there, so it was a little bit about that. We went to this show — Christopher Wool’s — in this building that was being renovated for luxury apartments. But they found this space and could use it because they realized that people could look inside from the other buildings, and it would be they didn’t know how to solve it. It was something about a privacy issue. So they let Christopher Wool do this installation. I thought that was interesting to see the different layers of the renovation, like how they took it down, but this bone structure was still there.
Did you want to capture that sense of industrialization?
Gordon: Yeah, everybody’s so pro-technology. In D.H. Lawrence’s book Women In Love, it’s kind of the atmosphere of things that cropped up after World War One, basically seeing what technology did, and its destruction that’s still happening. It’s just an onward momentum of technology. There are a lot of good things about technology, but when you think of all the bombs being dropped in Ukraine and Palestine, it just seems like a land grab. There’s a slight undertone of that in the song.
Coco, did you feel similarly about conveying those things from a visual perspective?
Gordon Moore: Definitely. New York is the perfect place to capture that. I forget which park it was, but there was all this construction happening around this gorgeous park. There are so few outdoor spaces we have in New York, and they’re building some horrible, ugly, big building. There’s even a tree that’s fenced in, like you can’t go to the tree. The tree has a fence around it and orange tape. Nature’s being blocked from us for these luxury buildings that are being put up. I thought that imagery was funny, like this small tree being fenced away from us. There was also all the signage in the video, and there was a lot of graffiti about Gaza. The timing was very interesting, starting to [reflect] what the video’s saying or the song is saying. I just feel like the song had this dizzying effect, and I wanted to have that for the video, which I try to do with these buildings because it’s just more and more and more. I guess that also works with technology. There’s no pause to think about what this all means and what it’s doing. It’s just this chaos of collapse. It’s funny that it was these two songs and videos, too. One was very LA, and one was very New York. It was fun to have that contrast. New York people aren’t really on the freeway here, but LA is all about the freeway. It was fun to have that contrast making the videos.
How’d you go about exploring that contrast? Is that something you set out to do, or is that something that happened naturally?
Gordon Moore: In some sense, it happened naturally because it was very clear when my mom asked me about doing “Bangin’ On The Freeway” that I was going to do it in LA. That was very obvious. It was naturally going to have an LA look. I wanted to capture the feeling of being stuck in the car, almost this energy of wanting to get out of the car, needing to escape almost.
I wanted to ask you one more thing: What do you two enjoy about working together on these videos?
Gordon: Well, it means I get to hang out with Coco more. She lives in New York, and I live in LA, so it’s nice to see her in action, making stuff.
Gordon Moore: I think seeing you is the highlight of it. Also, going back to being in your videos, there’s something about your music that I really love moving to. There’s something very cathartic about being in action to one of your songs. It’s a very good feeling.
