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Her career began during the 1970s New York City no wave scene as the singer and guitarist of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, which is the era of her work that I'm most familiar with.
This is the discography of that band:
https://lydialunch.bandcamp.com/track/baby-doll
You should listen while reading...
No Wave
It's noise music with the instrumentation and aesthetic of punk rock. The most interesting thing about it is that it occurred along side and was contemporary with the earliest 1970s New York punk and yet it sets the stage for every flavor of post-punk genre to come.
While 1970s punk might have started in dingy clubs with musicians that were not trying to blow up, it instantly became the commercially viable pop rock of the era. It's interesting that while that evisceration of punk culture was going on, there were extremely influential and authentic punk acts that would push the genre into the directions we would see develop further in the 80s.
As far as I see it, 80s hardcore music owes its entire existence to the no wave scene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_wave
In this thread, we're going to look at Lydia Lunch in 1970s New York.
Yes, she was hot.
But she's also very good with words. She's written several books.
https://www.lydia-lunch.net/books
The first was Paradoxia from 1997 and since then she's been still kicking.
Here are some excerpts from So Real It Hurts, written in 2015.
https://www.howlarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/LunchEssay_NoWaveNow.pdf
https://www.howlarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/LunchEssay_WillWorkForDrugs.pdf
They are all about Lydia's favorite subject: Lydia Lunch.
This is a woman who can talk about herself uninterrupted for over an hour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMyqh0gDb-c
But I suppose few people are as interesting as she is, so she has some license to do this.
She can be kind of a bitch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E92qnnRlQ2w
To be fair, she was hardly the only person to have small patience with Nardwuar in the 90s. I wouldn't judge her too badly from this.
In all the stories that she tells, I consider her to be an unreliable narrator... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
There is an amount of fantasy to everything she does and says.
That isn't to say I think she makes everything up. In some ways she is more honest than her contemporaries were.
But there is a well crafted mystique that is part of her brand.
Being intentionally provocative and over the top is what she does.
And artistically, it's a good thing.
She is committed to seizing your attention and defying your expectations.
There would not have been Teenage Jesus and the Jerks if she was not like this.
It might sound like I don't like her, but I do.
I like what she represents and I don't care if not everything about that is something you can shove praise at.
She isn't afraid of the possibility that you're not going to like what you see. She is counting on that.
I think these are the only pictures of her I've ever seen where she doesn't look prepared for the camera though.
She is an aged woman at this point. And she's still doing her thing. So you have to respect it.
