Lydia Lunch

Lydia Lunch (1959) was one of the musicians who revolutionized the concept of the rock musician during the "no wave" sub-movement of New York�s "new wave." The new wave had affirmed the primacy of the rock "author." No wave ridiculed that primacy, asserting the stupidity of elite art. But precisely anti-musicians like Lunch ended up simply affirming a new kind of author, paradoxically even more "authorial" (original, creative, personal) than those they intended to denigrate. In many ways Madonna was the commercial version of Lydia Lunch: Lunch was the first to structure her art around sexual provocation. Unlike Madonna, however, Lunch made it a purely psychic matter, amplifying alienation, neurosis, claustrophobia, etc. to the maximum. Lydia Lunch�s are not songs, but nightmares. And they are the nightmares of a street kid, a typical representative of that generation that grew up too fast, living in fear in bare, dark little rooms, without having found a meaning in life.

The project Teenage Jesus And The Jerks was launched within "no wave" (1977) by two figures typical of New York�s intellectual milieu: James Chance, saxophonist, and Lydia Lunch, singer and guitarist. The eighteen-year-old Lunch was the ideologue of the group. She was the one inspiring songs played in a very rough manner�indeed barely sketched out�as well as extremely violent and brief, exaggerating what was already a principle of punk. The ethic too was the nihilist one of punk, likewise pushed to the extreme consequences of depression and disgust.

The group�s repertoire, collected posthumously on Everything (Atavistic, 1996), consisted of melodic and rhythmic miniatures expressing bestial instincts. Lunch screamed them in a few seconds, while the others accompanied her by strumming sparse and equally shrill notes. The music of Teenage Jesus was what remains after a methodical process of draining and corroding sound. Theirs was not merely primitivism; it was a deliberately non-musical approach.
But the heart of their art was not sonic experimentation, but the feeling of anguish. At the center of their pagan representation of alienation was Lunch�s voice. In a few seconds the singer condensed an extremely intense and uncontrollable emotion, a kind of disjointed, childish sob. Shrill and hysterical, exhausted by the toxic density of these super-concentrated injections, the singer extracts the maximum of autobiographical hallucination from her minimal vocal means. Chance and Lunch recorded together only three tracks, The Closet, Less Of Me and My Eyes, among the group�s most furious and abrasive.

The music of that group was the most sincere and in-depth document of the confusion and loneliness of metropolitan youth, gripped by the terror and despair of everyday life. Each song, set in a gray and oppressive atmosphere, is a small poem by a twilight poetess afflicted by various psychological complexes, whose torment�an explosion of the mind�is expressed in frantic nursery rhymes screamed in the tone of a terrified child: Burning Rubber, Baby Doll, Orphans. It is not music, but a fragment of music.
The theme of spoiled, or abused, childhood recurs constantly, as in the confused nightmare of a psychoanalytic session (I Woke Up Dreaming). The squalid rooms she has lived in appear to her as horrifying prisons (The Closet). Lunch is a master at conveying the anguish of the �child-adult,� helpless before the monster of the metropolis. Her voice drags itself along in an intermittent moan, in jolts�exhausted, convulsive, spasmodic�over the icy rhythm of the instruments (which are also used at the minimum of their sonic possibilities, like mere noises).
In the purely instrumental pieces (Red Alert, Friend In Flop, Race Mixing), which are deafening specks, the performers� actual limitations are evident, capable of only two or three notes before retreating into chaos. Lunch in particular uses the guitar, with commendable consistency, exactly like her voice�at times a droning distortion, at others a repeated sob.

Sincere spokespeople for a terrifying indictment of the adolescent condition (not by chance the group is named after the �Jesus of adolescents�), and thus of the psychological violence suffered by everyone in the most fragile years of their existence, yet too unbalanced and physiologically incapable of surviving, Teenage Jesus disbanded in 1979.

Lunch achieved a certain notoriety thanks to her poses as an intellectual Lolita, a child-prostitute, a coarse and amoral woman. Her darkly tinged hyper-realism lends itself both to this kind of �negative� publicity and to compassion. It is not difficult to reconcile the contrast between the fear that emerges from her lyrics and the brazen arrogance of her attitude.

Lunch formed Beirut Slump in 1978 with singer Bob Swope. The sound became even bleaker. The neurasthenic spasms of Teenage Jesus turn into monotone laments devoid of emotion, funereal cadences on the verge of catalepsy, metallic tolling from an out-of-tune guitar. Their pieces (Try Me, Staircase, See Pretty) become increasingly hallucinatory, to the point of brushing against the free-form cacophonies of Mars (with whom Lunch had played for a few weeks).

Hysterie (Widowspeak, 1986) is an anthology of these early murky years (Teenage Jesus, Beirut Slump, Eight Eyed Spy).

Lunch�s first solo album, Queen Of Siam (Ze, 1980 - Atavistic, 1999), transports her decadent theatrics back in time: made with the orchestra of Billy Ver Planck (arranger of Walt Disney soundtracks), and under the aegis of Pat Irwin, the shadowy heroine�s new right-hand man, the album is a mishmash of genres without head or tail, an absurd puzzle of pieces that do not fit, an exercise in friction and crooked juxtapositions, an immature fruit of her existential boredom.
A capricious child, Lunch moves effortlessly from pop music to nursery rhymes. Her sick and desperate singing becomes quiet and submissive, relying on melody in an overtly imitative way. The songs can be divided into two categories: virginal and orchestral. To the first group�where her persona as a �worldly� Lolita, an entertainer in daycare brothels with adjoining dance floors and nightclubs, stands out most�belong the �disco� lullaby of Atomic Bongos, the surreal cabaret of Carnival Fat Man, the breathless and dazed round of Blood Of Tin, the bored litany of Mechanical Flattery, the slowed-down nursery rhyme of Tied And twist. To the second�born of her kitsch and chansonnier ambitions�belong the classic Billie Holiday-style blues of Lady Scarface, the �negative� big-band swing of Knives In The Drain, and the exotic flamenco whispered under her breath of Los Banditos.

Lunch�s career seems like a direction without an outlet. The child appears to have no message, babbling meaningless nursery rhymes.

Meanwhile the group changes, and Eight Eyed Spy is formed, with Pat Irwin on guitar, Jim Sclavunos on drums, and former Contortions member George Scott on bass.
The group�s sound is more blues-based and more animated. The instrumental phrases, though still rough and concise, are decidedly more elaborate. That does not change the fact that the aesthetic remains the same �negative� one: Sclavunos� chaotic drumming integrates disastrously with Scott�s dry, abrasive bass, and even more improbable is the symbiosis of such a rhythm section with Irwin�s sax, wild yet orthodox in its lumbering tone (Lazy In Love). The two guitars then form another repulsive contrast (exemplary in the voodoobilly of Motor Oil Shanty), one scholastic and �sixties�-styled, the other devoted to miniature dissonant solos (Boy Meets Girl). From so many contrasts arises a strong sense of disintegration, which is precisely the ideal backdrop for the claustrophobic and erotomaniac witch. Her frantic, breathless nonsense simulates sexual acts (the virginal orgasm of Love Split With Blood) or hysterically vomits into a desolate landscape (Swamp Song). Although the arrangers�Scott above all�try to rein in Lydia�s cacophonies within a self-conscious �sixties� sound, Lunch�s singing has by now become conversational speech, a subdued everyday tone. Lunch seems to have reached the lowest point of her moral depression, sinking her claws into the most abject banality, content to see waste gush forth instead of blood.

Also as a film director and writer, Lunch displays a contradictory desire to provoke and, ultimately, to experiment.

With Scott deceased and having lost Irwin along the way, Lunch moved to Hollywood and recorded an album with the remnants of the Weirdos. The music of 13.13 (Ruby, 1982) is dragged and rough as usual, and her accompanists have more than ever the mere role of making some background noise. Their second-hand British dark-punk monotony is offset by the bored delirium of the perverse vamp, here engaged with a long poem of love and death spread across the album�s eight songs. However, the poetic ambition in the style of Patti Smith risks collapsing the sound. No longer restrained, the verbosity dangerously floods the grooves, far exceeding traditional time limits. No longer compressed into two minutes, Lunch�s singing struggles to grasp despair. What benefits, however, is certainly her talent as a performer.
Each song has a different voice: wicked and hallucinatory in 3x3, emphatic and messianic in Stares To Nowhere, fatal and arrogant in the brutal sadomasochistic ritual of Snakepit Breakdown, desperate and whiny in the apocalyptic Afraid Of Your Company, anguished and feeble in the deafening hypnosis of Suicide Ocean. Aside from the surprising, tender, and hypochondriac brief piano solo of Dance Of The Dead Children (a danse macabre in the style of Satie for the �dead children� referenced in all her songs), the approach to the models of fellow artists Smith and Siouxsee marks the abandonment of the �sixties� models promoted by her previous group and establishes a return to the laws of harmony even in the contexts most typical of Teenage Jesus.

Her next stop was London. Lunch quickly befriended Steve Severin, guitarist of Siouxsie Sioux, and recorded a track, The Agony Is The Ecstasy (4AD, 1982), which, beyond serving as a spiritual testament, surprises with its length (a full twenty minutes, almost a fifth of her entire output). In this long ode, Lunch more fully realizes the �dark� ambitions of her previous record.
This murky psychodrama opens with a horrific overture by Severin (distortions, noises, piano clusters, free percussion, creaking guitar), a shadowy chaos that prepares the explosion of the scream, an extremely long and horrifying �no!� The child�s frenzied declamation stands out in a terrifying atmosphere of claustrophobia. Overdose-like guitar riffs underscore her psychic trauma, while the singing twists with muezzin-like invocations. She is a child addressing the immense chaos of emptiness, like a dead star in the deserted vastness of space. The coma proceeds relentlessly toward the end: a diffracted electronic whisper, like a distant echo, enters and exits the brain, as if finally answering that scream, which still cries out aloud� in the silence remains an irregular beat (a heartbeat?).
A cosmic and Freudian suite, an Interstellar Overdrive of the subconscious, and a supreme dissertation on modern solitude, one of the great masterpieces of psychedelic rock, Agony encapsulates the poetics of desolation that had been at the center of her previous work and launches toward infinity, thus acquiring a metaphysical depth.

Lunch scales another peak of her depressing threnody with In Limbo (DoubleVision, 1984), a collection of six litanies that confirms her as the most tormented damned soul of her Dantean circle. The album was actually recorded in New York two years earlier: Pat Place on guitar, Thurston Moore on bass (also responsible for much of the material), and Jim Sclavunos on sax. The instrumental weave is increasingly slow and nerve-wracking, still immersed in the hyper-extended atmospheres of the most hallucinatory psychedelia, bordering on the languid, apathetic, and fatal atmospheres of film noir, yet devastated by the atonal wails of guitars and the funereal blares of the saxophone. The singing is stretched to infinity according to the agony/ecstasy principle, exhausted, sick, depressed, frustrated, alienated, paranoid, extended into an extreme spasm of emotion; a high howl of pain worthy of Greek tragedy; a free-form song that coins a kind of �psychedelic lied.�
In I Wish I Wish, the metallic detunings of the guitar and skeletal piano propel the singer�s long vowels, immersed in ever more mystical agony. In 1000 Lies, her hoarse whisper floats in an instrumental nebula rhythmically punctuated by the darkest guitar dissonances and �absurd� sax squawks. Some Boys is a bolero-like crescendo of dramatic recitation that creates the most chilling suspense. Still Burning is her existential country-blues: a-melodic singing, a bored gait, and a fatalistic line like �Take the wheel of the world and drive.�
More than songs, these are poems, hermetic and dark. Like a coitus interruptus repeated endlessly, Lunch�s apathetic declamation builds tension for an emotional explosion that never comes. They are atrocious flashes of lucidity that fade into devastating self-pitying laments, ceremonial hymns of the �born dead� celebrating their eternal impotence.

Lunch also lent her voice as a singer to Sonic Youth (Death Valley 99), to the Birthday Party (Honeymoon In Red), and to Thurston Moore (The Crumb).

During the same period, she toured the world with the rock opera The Drowning, composed and performed with her life partner, Clint "Foetus" Ruin, who at the time was best known for performances in which he rolled over shards of glass. The opera�a mix of Afro-tribal free jazz and Lunch�s hysterical, childlike wails�is one of the expressive peaks of her slow existential agony. Lunch then composed two soundtracks, Drowning Of Lucy Hamilton and South Of Your Border, marked by heightened theatricality and a self-indulgent inclination toward horror-sado-masochistic tones. Increasingly vulgar and lascivious, the eclectic intellectual of Greenwich Village�s new Bohemia still seemed in search of meaning for her art.

Drowning Of Lucy Hamilton (Widowspeak, 1985) is the most evocative of these works. Lunch plays piano and guitar, while Lucy Hamilton (the �China Burg� of Mars) alternates between guitar and bass clarinet. The seven instrumentals comprising the work reinforce the impression that Lunch had become a composer of chamber music, albeit extremely degraded: Emerald Pale, hypnotized in slow and icy free jazz structures; Drowning, a miniature of dissonant piano; How Men Die In Their Sleep, full of burbling detunings; Lucy�s Lost Her Head Again, immersed in a diffuse chaos of random chords; 3:20 Tuesday Morning, a jam of violent distortions and aborted melodies�together reinventing a musical landscape that unknowingly descends from Satie�s sonatas, the fanfares of the AEOC, Messiaen�s �Quartet,� and the cacophonous pieces of countless avant-garde composers. Lunch achieves this by radicalizing two of her long-standing approaches/provocations: the use of deliberately spastic sounds and the dragging of the piece without ever reaching a climax.

Stinkfist (Widowspeak, 1987), composed in 1983, is a percussive piece typical of Foetus� conceptual works, here featuring her partner�s awkward vocalizations and an ensemble of seven percussionists furiously striking everything that produces sound, from drum machines to sheets of metal. Meltdown Oratorio (1987) testifies to the depraved theater of Lunch and Ruin, who for years have performed pieces dedicated to the most sordid and degenerate forms of sexual drive. It contains all the �unpleasantness� of her music, from tribalism to distortion, but rendered with Wagnerian force.

A specialist in creating chilling suspense, hinting at brutal occult rituals, and extolling salacious promiscuity, Lunch elevates herself as a bard of filth, nausea, and disgust. The highly dynamic saga of her �scum-rock� represents the terminal point of the descent into the infernal circles of the new amorality that the Sex Pistols had initiated.

Lunch (guitar), Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth (bass), and Sadie Mae (drums) formed Harry Crews, perhaps the first female supergroup. But it is Lunch, with her uncontrollable personality, who dominates the album Naked In Garden Hills (Widowspeak, 1989). Lunch�s spoken passages are often cloying, but her disgusted wails remain one of the most creative registers in rock. The instrumental parts are mostly left to chance, with Gordon�s vibrant, powerful bass in the foreground (especially on The Way Out) and Lunch�s amateurish guitar producing nerve-wracking hisses. A few tracks (Man Hates A Man and Knockout Artist) feature aggressive jamming, and a couple (Bring Me Down and Car) even manage to build dramatic atmospheres around adolescent sexual trauma; but the majority of the pieces are too banal to be artistic, even in Lunch�s �minimal� sense.

Despite the large number of projects, Lunch has not recorded much. Indeed, her first true album (excluding EPs, collaborations, compilations, live recordings, spoken-word, etc.) of the past ten years is Shotgun Wedding (Triple X, 1991). Assisting her is guitarist Rowland Howard (formerly of Birthday Party and These Immortal Souls). The album partially resumes the approach begun a decade earlier with Queen Of Siam: Lunch sings in an affected and apathetic manner (more hysterical than sensual, more Patti Smith than herself) about her desires and frustrations in Solar Hex, set to a repellent swamp blues. The tone of the album is sinister, between sadomasochistic rituals and black magic, and it works best when she duets with the devil in the hypnotic crescendo of Endless Fall. Howard dominates the instrumental sections with his atmospheric guitar work, culminating in the spectral and tense What Is Memory, worthy of a film noir. The rest of the album consists of pieces composed by the guitarist for Lunch�s lyrics, or covers.

In parallel, Lunch released �spoken word� records�prose texts that live off the same relentless pursuit of provocation, in a manner not too different from what Madonna does, albeit with far greater commercial success. P.O.W. (Staalplaat, 1992) is dedicated to the Gulf War (a few years late�), but it makes news mostly for its convoluted packaging. Her compositions for recitation are by now as �provocative� (depravity, sadomasochism, and so on) as they are cloying. The triple album Crimes Against Nature (Triple X, 1993) is a loquacious testimony to how little the ideologue has to say about the most scandalous topics of the moment, and how her intelligence remains trapped in a vocabulary that is as risqu� as it is limited.

A living emblem of punk�s negative charisma, Lunch has turned her own flaws into art: she is boring, stupid, ignorant, predictable, presumptuous, pretentious, arrogant, vulgar, lewd, and of terrible taste. Her art reflects this excess of deficiencies. But if this is the form, the message must be sought elsewhere�in a hyper-realistic diagnosis of modern existence, reduced to its barest terms. When Lunch recites �it's all about getting fucked� (from The Gun Is Loaded, one of her purely spoken albums), she has no intention of shocking: she is simply expressing in the most poetic way she can the squalor of existence for much of the women of her generation, their disappointments, and their cynicism. Hers is perhaps the only example of art that appears fetid and repugnant to its audience.

Matrikamantra (Figurehead, 1998) is a double album, half studio and half live. The studio album is mainly noteworthy for Joseph Budenholzer's electronic soundscapes.

Widowspeak (Get Back, 1999) is a career retrospective.

Lunch sings on the mini-album Champagne Cocaine And Nicotine Stains (Crippled Dick Hot Wax, 2002) accompanied by Los Angeles duo Anubian Lights.

Smoke In The Shadows (Breakin' Beats, 2004), the first Lydia Lunch album in six years, reconstructs the anemic decadent atmosphere of Queen Of Siam twenty-four years later. Very little has changed: backed by a brigade of sympathetic musicians (including guitarist Nels Cline, saxophonist Vinny Golia, keyboardist Len del Rio, vocalists Adele Bertei and Carla Bozulich), Lunch delves into her depressing universe of dejected, meaningless lives accompanied by nocturnal languid smoky kitschy lounge noir jazz: the spoken Hangover Hotel with trumpet, vibraphone and distorted guitar, the loud Johnny Behind the Deuce for roaring dissonant horns, tinkling vibraphone and driving drums, the whispered Smoke In The Shadows with oneiric piano, wavering exotic instruments, snake enchanter's flute, funky bass and funky guitar solo, the sensually crooned I Love How You for slow-swinging orchestra, the dramatic Portrait Of The Minus Man over screaming suspense-filled horns, etc. At the same time she successfully updates her cliche' to the age of rap: the demonic Lost World, Touch My Evil over Latin polyrhythms and minimalist piano patterns, the soothing Blame over laid-back jamming and vintage electronics, and especially the vibrant, hysterical soul-infected Trick Baby. Her voice, that can't quite sing, scavenges emotions in an existential junkyard devastated by nihilism. Lunch moans softly over the reggae carillon of Sway, then mutters over the frantic beats and cosmic instrumental wails (slowly coalescing into jazz jamming) of Pass Like Night. The six-minute spoken-word performance of Hot Tip (drenched into jungle sounds and syncopated voodoo rhythms) encapsulates both Patty Smith's style (Land) and Jim Morrison's style (The End), crowning her maturation as one of the great, histrionic shamans of rock music. The "songs" repeat in different formats the same obsessive feeling of numbness, the vision of a life that is slowly decomposing. Lunch, the virtual inventor of post-modernist kitsch, is a genius living in a different spatiotemporal dimension from the rest of the music world.

Hangover Hotel (WidowSpeak, 2001) collects collaborations from 1995-2000, both spoken-word and sung.

Memory and Madness (WidowSpeak, 2003) documents a live spoken-word performance with saxophonist and trumpeter Terry Edwards of 2003.

Touch My Evil (WidowSpeak, 2006) documents a live performance with Anubian Lights of 2002 that followed the collaborative EP Champagne, Cocaine And Nicotine Stains (2002), virtually a reprise of the decadent program of Queen Of Siam. The EP offered the cheesy driving swing number Nothing But Trouble, the delirious and sensual femme-fatale exhibition of Champagne, Cocaine And Nicotine Stains, the exotic instrumental novelty Guernicana, the tribal, orgiastic fanfare of Potango Tango. The live album added songs from Smoke In The Shadows and the tribal and apocalyptic Creatura, with an organ that simulates the Doors' Light My Fire, the stately Nick Cave-ian sermon Hotel Room, the orgasmic electronic sabbah Cry Murder, the new frantic swing number One Body Too Many.

Fueling the Rose of Fire (WidowSpeak, 2006), with Mark Cunningham (of Mars) on trumpet, documents a live performance from 2005 (including two spoken-word pieces).

Deviations on a Theme (2007) is a career retrospective.

Shut Up and Bleed (Atavistic, 2008) collects the recordings of Teenage Jesus and The Jerks and Beirut Slump.

Twist Of Fate (Monotype, 2011) is a collaboration with multistrumentist Philippe Petit composed in 2008. It comes with a video of a live performance from october 2009, Psychic Anthropology, featuring Lunch on vocals, Petit on electronics and Joseph Budenholzer on piano.

Lunch, guitarist Weasel Walter, bassist Algis Kizys and drummer Bob Bert recorded old Lydia Lunch material on Retrovirus (ugExplode, 2013).

Retrovirus became a project with Weasel Walter (guitar), Tim Dahl (bass) and Bob Bert (drums) that debuted on the live Urge To Kill (Widowspeak/Brava, 2015), mostly devoted to old Lunch and Suicide songs.