For years, women of my generation—the post-punk proto-hipsters who grew up in the cultural gap between second-wave feminism and the advent of the Internet—looked to Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon as proof that at least someone was getting it right. Really right. She retained her underground cred but wasn’t a starving artist. She had the drive of a New Yorker but the casual aloofness of a native Californian. She made visual art and started a clothing label, XGirl, on the side. On stage, she was surrounded by men—living the 1990s shoulder-padded dream of having it all, only in Converse and a miniskirt, with a bass guitar in lieu of a briefcase.

In Sonic Youth, Gordon was not just the band’s bassist but its “aesthetic (and business) conscience,” as Michael Azerrad puts it in Our Band Could Be Your Life, a history of punk and indie bands in the 1980s and early ’90s. It was Gordon who was tasked with delivering the news to their drummer that he was being fired, and later, when his replacement quit, she was the one to persuade him to come back. She provided creative gravitas, with her art-world connections, which eventually led to album covers by Gerhard Richter, Raymond Pettibon, and Richard Prince. “Within four years of existence, Sonic Youth emerged as an indie archetype, perhaps the indie archetype, the yardstick by which independence and hipness ... were measured,” Azerrad writes.

Like her contemporaries in the Riot Grrrl movement, Gordon was unapologetically feminist. She sang about the “fear of a female planet,” and wrote an entire song mocking Cosmopolitan’s advice to women. But whereas many Riot Grrrl bands and activists refused to talk to the media, Gordon was closer to the mainstream—appearing on MTV and making videos with Marc Jacobs at the same time that she was playing loud, discordant music and criticizing the co-opted girl-power message of the Spice Girls. Her influence throughout the industry was, and is, palpable: Gordon produced Hole’s first album, and recently appeared alongside Courtney Love in Yves Saint Laurent ads, where they were styled so similarly they looked like sisters. Several members of a younger generation of female musicians, like bassist Este Haim, cite her as a favorite. As Danish singer-songwriter MØ explained, “She had that attitude you could just feel.”

Part of her appeal was, undeniably, her partnership with Sonic Youth’s guitarist Thurston Moore, remarkable because it never attained the high-gloss finish of most celebrity relationships. Even when that veneer was partly shattered after her breakup from Moore (she found out he had been carrying on an affair with a woman 20 years his junior), she emerged somehow even cooler. The split was a form of validation: If it can happen to Kim Gordon, it can happen to any of us. “Thurston Moore Confirms He Is a Dick,” read one Jezebel headline. Her status was intact.

“Gordon was the ultimate hipster Renaissance woman I aspired to be,” wrote Lizzy Goodman in a 2013 Elle magazine spread that featured a photo of Gordon in gold heels and a black bodysuit—no pants—her trademark blond bob grown out slightly and covering one eye. At 61, she’s still gorgeous and stylish, but she has also not subjected herself to the obvious plastic surgery or fashion mood swings that have made other famous women her age seem dated. Or maybe she has, and she’s just better at making it look natural and effortless. Either way, she remained the ultracool girl next door.