I'm not cool. Never have been. Wouldn't even know how to go about it.

But I did see Sonic Youth at CBGBs in New York City a few weeks before the release of the NYC-based band's landmark Daydream Nation album.

And even the coolest of the cool can't take that away from me.

Thanks, Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth bassist and coolest woman in rock.

"Don't mention it," Gordon says with a laugh, speaking from the New York home she shares with Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore.

She hears it all the time, of course. They all do: Gordon; Moore; guitarist Lee Renaldo; drummer Steve Shelley; even recent recruit Jim O'Rourke, the musical genius whose addition to the band served to make an already legendary group even cooler.

But coolness is one thing. The remarkable accomplishment of this combo that first performed 23 years ago at a NYC art gallery's Noise Festival (curated by Moore) has been the level of mainstream recognition Sonic Youth has received.

It's not to be measured in hits, of course, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another artist that has so defiantly clung to its noisy, experimental no-waves roots while happily ensconced for 15 years (and counting) on a label the size of Geffen Records.

"We don't really cost them money," Gordon says with a shrug. "I think they make money back on us. And it's not like they're pouring money into us for promotion."

Not necessary. One of the most influential bands of the past two decades, Sonic Youth has its following.

And so long as they continue to produce albums the calibre of their latest, Sonic Nurse, that following isn't about to jump ship.

Still, as they tour in support of their best album in years, Gordon and Co. would probably welcome new converts. (Hence, their decision to tour with Lollapalooza this year ... though that didn't work out so well.)

"When you do something you want as many people as possible to hear it," Gordon says, "but it's definitely not a priority. It's great when that happens, but radio is so constrained.

"We know we could write songs that were more 'normal' -- verse-chorus-verse. But on a song like Unmade Bed (from Sonic Nurse) that seems the most radio-friendly, there is melody all through it, though it doesn't have a conventional chorus that repeats."

Sonic Youth is not about repetition, any more than it is about airplay. That's been made clear through two decades of aural experimentation. The music does not lack for hooks (check out Peace Attack, the epic that closes Sonic Nurse), but is more intent on constantly exploring new avenues for the guitar-bass-drums combo.

"It does get harder and harder to write songs," Gordon admits, "because you don't want to repeat yourself and yet there is something inherent in our sound. You know, we do use differently-tuned guitars, which immediately makes it sound a certain way.

"That is definitely the challenge and there are words and songs on this record that we felt could have gone one way but took another way because we felt like we'd done that."

In that sense, the input of producer/multi-instrumentalist O'Rourke has proved invaluable.

"He is, as they say in basketball, a really good role player," Gordon says of O'Rourke.

"Whatever is needed for the song he'll do or he'll think of the best way to bring out a certain aspect of a song to take it one step further. And he likes structured songs as much as he likes noise."

Which about sums up the interests of Sonic Youth, a band that for two decades has been successfully marrying structured songs to noise. ("People think we're jamming all the time," Gordon jokes. "We're not.")

They've been called everything from no-wave to punk to grunge to post-rock. In the process, some critics have dismissed the band as being, in the words of former drummer Bob Bert, "really good at jumping on bandwagons."

"Well," Gordon responds, "I think Bob Bert is not as articulate as he'd probably like to be. I wouldn't say it's fair to say that we jump on bandwagons, but we're definitely influenced by other music.

"I mean we never thought of ourselves as a grunge band, and pretty much went out of our way to say it, but we were influenced by Nirvana in the sense that we liked the low-end that (producer) Butch (Vig) got. But those sort of labels are a meaningless thing."

Gordon pauses for thought.

"We were really post-no-wave, to be exact," she says.