It’s primetime for the progeny of Generation X, and Coco Gordon-Moore, daughter of Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, is peak cool. But as an It girl, she’s ambivalent.
Like her parents, Coco gives off a disaffected vibe that says she's unfazed by her de-facto fame. In her cover feature for the new winter issue of Dazed magazine, Gordon-Moore talks about prioritizing her privacy online and how she differs from other celebrity offspring.
“I was a late bloomer – or maybe normal, but late in that context of experimenting,” she says. “I’ve seen first-hand what fame can do to a person, and I have no interest in it.”
Her stand-offish approach to her family’s notoriety is a refreshing alternative to the standard attention-seeking we’ve come to expect from famous people’s kids – especially amid her parents’ rather public split, which Kim Gordon details in her acclaimed memoir Girl In A Band.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
Coco doesn’t have a publicist or an agent. And she doesn’t really do social media (she does have Instagram, but her account is private). She’s just a college student who plays in a punk band called Big Nils and makes art and occasionally picks up a gig posing with mom Kim for Marc Jacobs’s AW15 campaign (shot by David Sims).
But the one privilege of being Coco Gordon-Moore we envy the most? She accompanied her parents on tour with Sonic Youth since she was around six months old.
We’re into Coco for the same reason we’re into other kids of alternative celebrities like Lily-Rose Depp or Frances Bean Cobain: Their brand of cool is a direct result of their legendarily cool parents, but they’ve got their own thing going on, too. While it might help in some ways, having famous parents can complicate what a young adult like Coco does with her own life.
She tells Dazed: “I do think about (putting stuff online) maybe more than other people, because it’s going to be referenced as, ‘This is their daughter and this is what she’s doing.’ I guess people do look up my name, and that’s horrifying. I don’t think about it that much until someone sends me a link that’s like, ‘People are talking about this.’ Someone made me a Wikipedia page and my parents had it taken down because it was so creepy. It said I was in a band in fourth grade. Like, how do you know that?"
At the heart of the generation whose music, art, and style we generally label alternative is an ideological hard pass on superficiality. This niche rebellion against the ubiquity of shallow, fame-obsessed online content and social media is a natural product of the Gen X legacy.
But what really makes lives like Coco’s interesting to watch, even though she isn't actively seeking fame, is that in a way she represents millennial culture’s intellectual potential. Our generation has been unprecedentedly steeped in pop culture, which has its cons, but our globalized access to information is all-inclusive: art of all kinds, cultures of another time. Our parents may have done it first, but we make it our own thing.
(And fortunately that doesn’t keep Coco from Tweeting aphorisms @mooreweed.)