At 72 years old, few musicians have had the enduring appeal of Sonic Youth star Kim Gordon. Last year, she released her second solo album, The Collective, finding new fans on TikTok with trap beats and stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Today, she released BYE BYE 25!, a remake of the track BYE BYE from the album, with a new video directed by Vice Cooler and Gordon herself. The reworked version includes words that are disappearing under the Trump administration, including “advocate”, “climate change”, “female”, “Hispanic”, “immigrants”, “mental health” and “uterus”.
Gordon’s latest release comes after Trump has purged the US government of “woke” initiatives, flagging hundreds of words for government agencies to limit or avoid. “Justin Raisen [producer and collaborator] had this idea to redo ‘Bye Bye’ starting at the end of the song,” said Gordon in a press release. “When I was thinking of lyric ideas, it occurred to me to use words taken from a site that had all the words that Trump has essentially banned, meaning any grant or piece of a project or proposal for research that includes any of those words would be immediately disregarded or ‘cancelled.’”
Proceeds from the sale of BYE BYE 25!, both the song and t-shirt, will be donated to the reproductive rights nonprofit Noise For Now. As the current administration continues to actively target the groups (like undocumented immigrants) and issues (like women’s rights) it simultaneously is barring from being named in documents, perhaps Gordon puts it best when she says: “I guess Trump does believe in cancel culture, because he is literally trying to cancel culture.”