There’s something to be said about getting old.
There’s many things to be said about getting old, actually, a glut of things. Sift through long enough, and you’ll discover a diamond. Whether the effort is worth all the agate is entirely up to you.
I am old. I am older than I ever imagined. At age ten, age thirty seemed impossible. The day I turned thirty, I sat with my mother and siblings in a funeral home.
This is all very depressing. No one should type through tears. And what a woman staring fifty in the creepy peepers has to say about aging is nowhere near as probably interesting, as potentially enriching, as what a woman sauntering down decade seven has to say.
Especially when that woman is Kim Gordon.
People marvel over Kim Gordon at her advanced age making such audacious, challenging (call it what it is, young) music and leave the scary part unexamined. Which is how it probably should be. I won’t be the one to tear the tarp off the beating heart. It’s not my tender spot to expose.
“Joyous” is one word of the many Kim Gordon has used to describe the songs on “Play Me,” the diamond descriptor. (“Jagged” and “glitch-y” are fine, if flourite.) And when I set aside a half hour to listen—which I’ve done three times in the past two days—the insect-ridden noise-hop party does indeed leave me feeling cheerier. The breezy horn sample in the title track, the plucked feathers of “Dirty Tech,” the phases of abrasion, the realization that Kim Gordon is the girl with the look and the hook…it’s all good, except the parts that are great.
Play Me, like No Home Record and The Collective before it, is so much more than off-kilter speak-sing over trip-trap beats. Her vocal performance, for example, is better here than it's been in years. But it’s like Marvin Gaye’s cousin said: “The dumb are mostly intrigued by the drum.”
(Dave Grohl plays drums on “Busy Bee.” He’s getting old too.)