BYEBYE25!

A Protest in Plain Sight

There is a particular kind of protest that doesn't argue. It doesn't plead, petition, or explain. It simply repeats what has been silenced, holds it up in plain view, and dares you to look away. "BYEBYE25!" by Kim Gordon is that kind of protest. The song takes a list of words deemed too dangerous for federal use in the United States and makes them into music. The gesture sounds almost too simple. The effect is unsettling in proportion to how obvious the strategy is.

The Origin of a Protest Song

When the Trump administration returned to power in January 2025, one of its earliest and most methodical moves was the removal of language. Reports emerged of federal agencies scrubbing their websites, of grant applications being rejected for containing certain terms, of scientific funding put at risk by vocabulary. Words like "climate change," "immigrant," "uterus," "mental health," and "diversity" were flagged as politically problematic, made effectively taboo in official government communications and research.^[1]

Kim Gordon, who had already been tracking these pressures in the material that would become her third solo album PLAY ME, responded with an act of musical reclamation. She took "BYE BYE," a track from her 2024 album The Collective (originally built around a packing list as lyrical content, a catalog of objects and departures), and rebuilt it around the banned terms. The new version, released June 13, 2025, was titled "BYEBYE25!" -- the year of its release folded into its name like a timestamp on a document.^[2]

Proceeds from the single and an accompanying t-shirt were donated to NOISE FOR NOW, a nonprofit dedicated to reproductive rights.^[3] The connection wasn't accidental. The word "uterus" appears in the song's catalog of suppressed language, and the act of donating to a reproductive rights organization turned the protest beyond the rhetorical into the material.

The Bob Dylan Cue Card

The music video, directed by Vice Cooler and Gordon herself, deployed what critics called a "Bob Dylan-ish" visual vocabulary.^[4] Dylan's iconic clip for "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in 1967 showed the singer flipping through hand-lettered cue cards bearing fragments of the song's words, a refusal to be decoded, a statement of confrontational transparency. In "BYEBYE25!", the cards bore the censored terms, turning each word into its own image, its own moment of deliberate visibility.

The parallel between the two clips is not subtle, and it wasn't meant to be. Dylan's original was a document of generational resistance. Gordon's version updates the format for a specific political crisis, each card flipped a small defiance against bureaucratic erasure. The gesture acknowledges its own lineage while insisting on the particularity of this moment.

What the Song Does

The most striking thing about "BYEBYE25!" is its method. Rather than writing a conventional protest song, Gordon assembled her lyrical content from the acts of censorship itself. The song doesn't describe what is being lost. It becomes a vessel for what was targeted.

This approach has deep roots in conceptual art, an arena Gordon has moved through her entire adult life. To take found material (a list, a catalog, a bureaucratic document) and transform it into song follows the same logic that made Andy Warhol's pop imagery and language-driven painting so confrontational. The song is simultaneously critique and archive. The banned words, delivered over Gordon's characteristically industrial sonic textures, are literally kept alive.

The catalog structure of the song -- term after term, category after category, accumulating without editorial commentary -- creates a kind of numbing inventory. Each item is both specific and representative. One phrase combining several simultaneously flagged administrative categories has the surreal quality of something generated by an absurdist bureaucracy, a joke so bad it loops back into horror.^[5] Gordon doesn't editorialize. She documents. The effect is more damning than any polemic could be.

There is a double meaning built into the song's title worth sitting with. "BYE BYE" in its original form was already a song about leaving, about packing up and departing. "BYEBYE25!" transforms that departure into something more ominous: a farewell to the year that saw American political culture cross a particular threshold. The "25" doesn't just localize the song in time. It marks the crossing.

Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Language

The song also speaks to Gordon's longstanding engagement with the idea of the female body as contested political territory. The inclusion of reproductive anatomy in the list of proscribed terms is not incidental. Gordon has spent decades working in a music industry that routinely erased, dismissed, or tokenized women. The specific targeting of reproductive language rhymes with those decades of similar erasure in ways that the song makes legible without belaboring.

The pairing with NOISE FOR NOW sharpens this reading. The donation arrangement distinguishes the work from the kind of gestural protest that gets filed and forgotten. Gordon made the music financially useful to the movement it addressed.^[6]

Context Within PLAY ME

When PLAY ME arrived in March 2026, "BYEBYE25!" served as its closing track, capping an album that had spent its first eleven tracks probing the collapse of democratic culture, the ethics of AI, and the alienation engineered by algorithmic consumption.^[7] To end there -- with a methodical recitation of what the state had tried to make unspeakable -- gave the album its fullest emotional charge. It functions as both conclusion and receipt.

Thematically, it connects to the album's title track, which opens by listing the names of Spotify-generated mood playlists -- another kind of catalog, another form of language that has been filtered by invisible systems before it reaches the listener. Gordon throughout PLAY ME is interested in language that has been processed, managed, and pre-approved. "BYEBYE25!" offers the inverse: language that was processed out of existence, and her refusal to let that stand.

Cultural Precedents

The practice of naming what is being suppressed has a long tradition in protest art and literature. Samizdat publishing in the Soviet Union, the AIDS activism that made the names of the dead visible at public demonstrations, the "banned books" shelves in American libraries -- all of these draw on the same logic. Representation is resistance. Visibility is a form of protection.

Gordon is drawing on that tradition, possibly without explicit reference to it. The song participates in a lineage that understands the act of saying as political. In the context of a musician who has spent her career operating at the intersection of avant-garde art practice and rock music, the move makes complete sense. Her visual art, her fashion work, her collaborations, and her songwriting have all circled similar questions about what gets seen, what gets heard, and who decides.^[8]

A Flat Affect, A Sharp Edge

Not everyone reads "BYEBYE25!" as a purely political document. The dry, near-affectless delivery Gordon has cultivated across her solo work doesn't perform outrage. She doesn't sound angry. She sounds like someone reading a document into the record. Some critics read this as a limitation; others see it as the whole point.

Fury can be dismissed as emotional excess. Documentation is harder to argue with. The deadpan register that Gordon has deployed consistently since No Home Record (2019) -- developed further with producer Justin Raisen across The Collective and PLAY ME -- is a stylistic choice that does serious analytical work. It removes the listener's option of writing the song off as a rant. You are just being shown a list. You are just being invited to consider what it means that these words existed on someone's list.

From this angle, the song can also be understood as a meditation on language itself, on the fragility of shared meaning, on what happens to a culture when its vocabulary is systematically narrowed. The Trump administration had its list. The McCarthy-era blacklists had their lists. The Soviet state had its lists. The song doesn't name those precedents, but the method invites the comparison.^[9]

A Forty-Year Refusal

"BYEBYE25!" is a small song with a precise intention. It takes three minutes to say something that would require a political speech twenty pages to frame with less clarity. Gordon has spent her career finding ways to let form do the work that content alone cannot. In Sonic Youth, the dissonant tunings and extended noise passages said things about American culture that the lyrics could only point toward. In her solo work, the production choices and vocal delivery carry the argument.

Here, the argument is in the list. These words were targeted. Naming them is a form of protection. The song that closes PLAY ME does what all good album closers do: it gathers everything that came before it and holds it in suspension, leaving you with the image of a person holding up a card, each word on it a small act of refusal.

Kim Gordon has been refusing for more than forty years. "BYEBYE25!" suggests she intends to keep at it.