Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over

Nick Soulsby

Description

Before #MeToo, before Riot Grrl, there was Lydia Lunch. 

A central figure in the No Wave scene of the seventies—as founder of the seminal Teenage Jesus & The Jerks—Lunch has pursued a fourdecadelong career turning the substance of her life into unapologetic, stark, and beautiful art. From the eighties onward, Lunch became a lone voice publicly calling out the patriarchal aggression and day-to-day violence enacted by the powerful—and never gave a good goddamn whether you wanted to hear it or not. Refusing to be silenced, she took to stages the world over, fearlessly speaking the truth, whether of her own life with its legacy of parental abuse, her wild times owning the streets of New York City, or the world she saw around her. 

Seeing no boundaries between creative mediums, Lydia has enacted her vision through music, spoken word, film, theatre, and more. Released as an accompaniment to Beth B’s documentary The War Is Never Over, this book is the first comprehensive overview of Lunch’s creative campaign of resistance, a celebration of pleasure as the ultimate act of rebellion. Across these pages, Lunch and her numerous collaborators—including Thurston Moore, Jim Sclavunos, Kid Congo Powers, Bob Bert, Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, and Vivienne Dick—recount life at the front line of the musical extremes of the seventies and eighties underground, the wild times, the disciplined productivity, life lived as a defender of the voiceless, and an unapologetic force of righteous fury.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Rock
• Genres
• Styles

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911036463
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over
A Companion To The Film By Beth B
Nick Soulsby
A Jawbone ebook
First edition 2020
Published in the UK and the USA by
Jawbone Press
Office G1
141–157 Acre Lane
London SW2 5UA
England
www.jawbonepress.com
Volume copyright © 2020 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Nick Soulsby. Additional interviews conducted by and reprinted by kind permission © Beth B. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.
Title page photograph by Christina Birrer.
Jacket design by Paul Palmer-Edwards

Contents
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE: BABY DOLL
1 FREUD IN FLOP
2 TEENAGE JESUS
3 GIRLS ON FILM
4 BEIRUT SLUMP
5 QUEEN OF SIAM
6 8 EYED SPY
7 DEVIL DOGS
8 13.13
9 LONDON AGONY/BERLIN ECSTASY
10 IN LIMBO
11 THE RIGHT SIDE OF MY BRAIN
12 FINGERED
13 THE WORD
14 SOUTH OF YOUR BORDER
15 HARRY CREWS
16 OUR FATHERS WHO AREN’T IN HEAVEN
17 SHOTGUN WEDDING
18 MATRIKAMANTRA
19 THE ANUBIAN LIGHTS
20 UNIVERSAL INFILTRATOR
21 BIG SEXY NOISE
22 NEMESISTERS: MEDUSA’S BED AND SISTER ASSASSIN
23 RETROVIRUS
24 CYPRESS GROVE
25 COVENS AND CATASTROPHES
26 MY LOVER THE KILLER
EPILOGUE: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER
CONTRIBUTORS
SELECTED WORKS
CHRONOLOGY
BETH B FILMOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION
When every last vestige of life has been wrung from a historical moment, someone wealthy will pay to whack a monument on top. It’s a symbolic gesture indicating that a personage, place, or idea is nothing more than dead concrete, so safely anodyne that the comfortably well heeled can memorialise it as a pointer to long-departed youthful passion. The same process occurs in music and our wider culture. Martin Luther King—a figure hated by millions who went on to contest the role of capitalism in racial submission—has been whitewashed into a secular saint acceptable even to Donald Trump; Kurt Cobain’s gun fetishism and conservative libertarianism is muted to make him a liberal icon; Bob Marley has been so emasculated he stands for little more than sunshine and marijuana.
Watching Beth B’s film Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over , what awed me was seeing someone so keenly aware that the core function of our creative industries is to enact that process of sanitisation; to render an artist—by middle age—fêted but ineffective, applauded yet void. Lydia Lunch has, more or less politely, declined that pressure for some four decades. A devotion to nomadism, physical and intellectual, seems to have made her immune to the drag factors that tell humans to buy a couch, sit down, shut up, and repeat themselves ad infinitum.
Instead, what Lydia has created is a wildly diverse wealth of emotional, intellectual, and artistic expression. The daunting sprawl of her work stems from a very deliberate desire to seize every opportunity to create and to share. Therefore, anyone approaching Lydia can choose whether the path lies through her half a dozen major books, or the dozen further works she has written; whether it is found in the couple of hundred music releases she has issued; if the live experience of Lydia’s near continuous touring is what ignites the spark; or if it’s the dozen or more films she’s been in; the extensive photographic work she has exhibited; the theatrical productions, workshops, spoken-word performances, and even séances.
SELF-ALCHEMY
The performance of, and testimony to, pain is ever increasingly ingrained across modern music. The bookshelves heave with biographical studies of undesirable life circumstances. Our TV schedules are loaded with presentations of hurt. The internet is awash with both symptoms and confessions of psychic injury and impairment. Bipolarity is a fundamental requirement of modern musical lyricism, with the most commercially dominant music washing back and forth between triumphalism and despondency. While Lydia was an innovator and a forerunner of the public performance of trauma, her fundamental purpose differs significantly from much of the acting out engaged in across the modern domain of faux-celebrity and (un)reality viewing.
Growing up in Rochester, New York, at a time of significant upheaval in American life, Lydia endured years of abuse at the hands of her father while her mother worked nights as a nurse. In speaking about it as a core component of her early spoken-word performances, specifically in the piece ‘Daddy Dearest’, Lydia did not wear it as a badge of honour symbolising her rise, nor did she apply it as a wax polish making her successes shine brighter. In some cases, trauma is used as a reinforcement of privilege excusing one’s behaviour and refusing responsibility for what one does. Lydia’s presentation, by contrast, was stark, factual; it placed responsibility where it was deserved and never asked for pity or exception.
The traumas we experience as children become the grooves and indentations into which our ongoing development is poured. Life and further experience in some cases will modify the topography of our personalities, soften the deviations in the terrain, but the initial marks are always there. In other cases, there’s no amount of life that will cement over the cracks, and the marks scored in us will always bisect our souls. But that does not mean it is all we are; each individual is a world entire, in which that pain is just one feature. The whole of a person cannot be summed up by reference to only one flaw, no matter how catastrophic. In the case of Lydia, she is not some mere automaton reproducing a childhood trauma. The suggestion would seem insulting, a casual denigration of a significant body of work. What’s important is what an individual does after a moment of trauma.
Trauma—in Lydia’s projection, and made very clear in Beth B’s film—is a cut made on a soul, an imposition. It is not something rubbed out to leave a perfect clean spirit, nor something defeated by therapy, willpower, or medication and left in the past. Trauma as a foundational stone of a personality is built into personality, unavoidably a component of who someone is. The question is the extent to which it can be mitigated, used, responded to, or controlled—but it cannot be erased. Lydia’s strength and aggressive resistance is a positive reaction she has forged, a movement away from disturbance, and a declaration of control over and responsibility for oneself. By refusing to let the harm done to her dominate her, she freed herself from fear or inhibition and was able to decide who she intended to be.
Beth B, in creating the film Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over , has not just documented Lydia’s ongoing struggle, she has also made another mark in her own reckoning with past events. The exercise of male power within her own family, and her mother’s subsequent breakdown and reinvention as an artist, left enduring marks on Beth. Encountering Lydia in late-70s New York City was a revelation to her, with Lydia appearing to personify a new model for womanhood—one that could exercise will, possess and satisfy desire, live without apology. Exploring control, power, sensuality, and violence through her films culminated in recent years first in Call Her Applebroog , a 2016 documentary portrayal of her mother, the artist Ida Applebroog. Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over is a logical counterpart to, and next step after, that film.
1977–84
Heading to New York City as a teenager runaway, Lydia was motivated to start a band after seeing no-wave outfit Mars enact their tightly rehearsed and practiced maelstrom of sound. Lydia initiated a spell of time in which her energies were devoted to a succession of bands of her own. Teenage Jesus & The Jerks are relatively long lasting—a full two-and-a-half years. The band coexists for a year of that with a side-project, Beirut Slump—an apparent opportunity to spend time with friends, the creative’s alternative to slouching in front of a TV. From there, the wheel revolves ever faster. Queen Of Siam is a one-off studio project; 8 Eyed Spy get started around the same time, then cease abruptly barely a year later. Devil Dogs have a bare four-month lifespan, then 13.13 make it through two line-ups in six months before Lydia terminates the effort. The Agony Is The Ecstasy are whittled down from a four-piece, to a three-piece, to closure inside not much more than eight weeks; In Limbo last no longer.
It is fair to take Lydia at her word—that she’s a conceptualist—so what we’re seeing is the traditional focus on ‘the band’, or on a particular career path, here plays a vastly reduced role compared to the importance of the specific idea Lydia is seeking to express. Most bands merely exist, then seek the ideas to occupy the unit, with an ongoing cost resulting in terms of the money needed to keep a band afloat, the energy needed to negotiate competing artistic views and personal desires in order to coexist. Lydia reverses this equation at a very early stage. ‘The band’ is not the critical element; the players are steered to the degree necessary to realise the result, but are given freedom to act within those overall boundaries. The players can change so long as the sound or message is delivered, the desired tour executed, the recording made.
The bands in question are, to this day, brutal propositions. Teenage Jesus & The Jerks still sound alien, stripped down to a minimalism not reached even by the hardcore of Minor Threat and the like. Beirut Slump are a maximalist proposition but seesaw in a queasy, unsettling slalom ride that defies easy listening. Lydia pivots in the opposite direction with Queen Of Siam , splitting down the middle between the big-band side of the album and the nursery rhyme side. 8 Eyed Spy too are relatively catchy, rockist, despite pos