Kim Gordon – BYE BYE 25!

Kim Gordon proves that punk rock’s rebellious spirit doesn’t fade, it just locates new targets. Her latest release, ‘BYE BYE 25!’, takes the original ‘BYE BYE’ from 2024’s The Collective and transforms it into something far more pointed than a simple packing list for a trip.

The reworked track emerged from producer Justin Raisen’s idea to rebuild the song from its ending backwards. Gordon’s stroke of genius was replacing the original lyrics with words that the current Trump administration has flagged for cancellation in grant proposals and research projects. It’s protest music disguised as performance art, or perhaps vice versa.

The song rattles off terms like “female,” “climate change,” “Hispanic,” “women,” “mental health,” and “immigrants” – words that have become casualties in what Gordon calls the administration’s war on language itself. Her delivery maintains the deadpan rap style that made the original so polarizing, but now each word carries the weight of institutional censorship.

“I guess Trump does believe in cancel culture,” Gordon notes with characteristic directness, “because he is literally trying to cancel culture.” The irony isn’t lost – the man who built a political brand opposing cancel culture has effectively created his own version, just with different targets.

The track arrives strategically ahead of the “No Kings” protests, with proceeds from the song and its promotional merchandise going to reproductive rights nonprofit Noise for Now. Organizations affected by these linguistic purges include the CDC, NASA, and the National Science Foundation – agencies now walking on eggshells around words that were once considered basic scientific terminology.

Gordon’s approach turns bureaucratic oppression into art, making the abstract concrete through repetition and rhythm. The words become a mantra of resistance, each representing research projects killed before they could begin, conversations silenced before they could start.