Sonic Youth - "Kool Thing" (forgotten song)

I realized recently that so far my discussion of Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth here were mostly in the context of the Kim / Thurston split ("Diamond Sea", "Girl in a Band").  Women's History Month is a good excuse to fix that and to remind everyone why Kim is the Lemmy of alt/college rock.

I certainly knew about Sonic Youth prior to "Goo", their 1990 major label release, but just through coincidence of timing this was the first LP of theirs that I bought and really embraced.  "Kool Thing" was the first single off the LP and is certainly more accessible than their previous work.  At the time I enjoyed it as a great song, but it wasn't until much later that I learned the back story that it is about a 1989 article in Spin Magazine where Kim interviewed LL Cool J and the resulting cultural chasm between them, part of which is attributable to not finding space for feminism in the machismo of LL's style of hip-hop (e.g., "The guy has to have control over his woman").

Of course, the video and song are filled with many clever LL "Kool" J references (e.g., "walking like a panther", "I don't think so", "let me play with your radio"), and even briefly features Chuck D  (I always felt he was significantly underutilized in this song, but to be fair the story goes theirs was an unplanned, serendipitous collaboration resulting from Public Enemy being in a nearby studio).

Enough about the back story -- there's a good "official" video and many live versions available, but this 1993 live version is a good reminder of when and why Kim (and Thurston) were the queen (and king) of the scene...

"Fear of a female planet"
Sonic Youth - "Kool Thing": live 1993, official video

LL Cool J - "Going Back to Cali" (from which the official "Kool Thing" video borrows)