 by Laura Kennedy Col-lab-o-rate: 1) to work jointly with others or together esp. in an intellectual endeavor 2) to cooperate or willingly assist an enemy of one's country and esp. an occupying force 3) to cooperate with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected col-lab-o-ra-tor: Lydia Lunch It's been nearly 25 years since a teenager from Rochester, N.Y., gave herself the name Lydia Lunch and started a punk rock band called Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. With songs that ranged in length from 36 seconds to just over 3 minutes, the trio’s music was brutal and abrasive, and Lydia's presence utterly mesmerizing. Her lyrics took sex and violence, chewed them up, then spat them back out. Seeing them for the first time was a lot like riding a roller coaster: it gave you a thrill, sc  ared the shit out of
you, made you sick, and when it was over you immediately wanted more.Lydia has given us more, plenty more in fact. But she hasn't made listening to it any easier. In retrospect the lyrics she wrote as a teenager were the jumping off point not only for her own body of work, but for an entire generation of female artists: “I can’t talk I can’t enunciate and I’m treated like Sharon Tate” (from the song “I Woke Up Dreaming” 1978). The argument could be made that Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ songs have remained timeless. The passage of years hasn’t softened the shock of hearing them, and they remain incisive both musically and lyrically. Put them next to Sleater Kinney or Le Tigre and Lydia becomes not only a visionary but a high priestess. That’s not meant to take anything away from the riot grrrls’ generation. Let’s face it, few enough artists of either sex are radical at their inception as well as 20 years on. Quick, name a dozen. The lifeblood of Lydia Lunch’s work has been her ability to collaborate with artists as uncompromising and diverse as herself. She’s made art ranging from films and music to spoken word projects and photography. She’s worked with Nick Cave, Exene Cervenka and Henry Rollins. Her association with filmmakers Beth B and Richard Kern has earned her a place on the short list of underground cinema divas while serving as a visual counterpart to the aural assault of her spoken word projects. Her biggest “commercial” breakthrough thus far is having a song included on the soundtrack to the film “The Blair Witch Project” which is strangely apropos, given the conceptual nature of that “event.” Touching as it does on themes of fear and manipulation (and using media hysteria to its advantage) it was just as savvy of the filmmakers to request Lydia’s participation as it was of Ms. Lunch to agree. Ever the collaborator ... While some artists seem to mellow over time, Lydia still manages to piss off audiences routinely. But it isn’t a routine. It’s not a rant either. She has never softened herself for public approval. She is both a visionary and a realist. And she happens to have a few things to say. Lydia Lunch appears in Minneapolis for two nights. On Mar. 6, she presents an evening of film and video footage from her archives, at Grumpy’s. On Mar. 7, she gives a performance of spoken word at First Avenue. What follows is an interview with Lydia by phone from her home in LA. Pulse: What draws you to someone as a collaborator? What you’ve done so much of and so well is to work with others and to create diverse types of music or art. Lydia: When I decide upon a collaborator, and specifically someone like Rowland Howard (from Birthday Party) with Shotgun Wedding or Foetus (JG Thirwell), there’s obviously this huge chunk of their energy or soul that I think combined with mine is going to create a third element that would not exist without this marriage. Pulse: Sure ... and we all know how that can go bad as well. Lydia: Well I don’t feel that any of the things I’ve done have ever turned bad. In fact, the only person I’ve ever had a problem with is Nick Cave, and that’s because he never understood what I was about. His philosophy is the antithesis of what I’m about. He just couldn’t understand, especially a woman, being so forthright and pleasure-centric and life embracing. Although I concentrate in my work on what the dark passions and obsessions that we, especially as women have. There needs to be a feminine voice trying to understand the darker side of what drives us. Pulse: With Nick Cave, how did that collaboration come about? Lydia: Someone had given me one of the Birthday Party records, “Prayers on Fire,” which I thought was the best thing happening. I went to see them play with maybe about 20 people in the audience. I immediately went backstage and said to Rowland Howard: That’s it, I must work with you. There was a thwarted attempt to make an album, which took many years to dig out of the vaults, which became Honeymoon in Red, which Nick Cave sings a few songs on. And at the same time we wrote this collection of 50 one-page plays. It was Nick’s idea to do these one-page plays, I said why not do 50 of them. We wrote them in about two weeks and they eventually turned into this comic book called “Ashpyxiate.” It was drawn by this incredible cartoon artist Mike Matthews, who’s now deceased. But it was just a really phenomenal piece of graphic literature, very funny and very disturbing and ridiculous at the same time. But Nick and I could just never see eye to eye. Although I thought that Birthday Party was one of the greatest bands to ever exist. Pulse: Speaking of great bands, in many of your music projects there are clear-cut references, but going back as I do often to listen to Teenage Jesus ...  Lydia: (laughing) Oh really. You need a dose of it. Pulse: Yes, I need a dose! But listening to it recently, I thought to myself, there is no musical reference point for this at all. Lydia: No, there is none. Pulse: I would have to go to Eric Satie or Edgar Varese or some of the other early avant garde composers. Lydia: And even then, even though Satie has definitely influenced me, you can’t find it in Teenage Jesus unless you’re using a magnifying glass because it’s not in there. I started from a point of anti everything, especially with the idea that whoever inspired me was no longer inspirational, because it was too traditional. While compiling this video history which I’ll be showing in Minneapolis, I think how can someone that young be that fascist? How can this music be so German, so dictatorial, so primal, but .... it’s beyond primal. It’s almost really early industrial, but not in the way we think of industrial now. And originally one of the thoughts was, this is music that would make workers work faster. (laughs) Pulse: Really? You had this in your thoughts? Lydia: After I’d already been doing the music, I was like—this is music for Chinese factories. Very 1984-ish. Pulse: And not only ahead of its time then, but I would have to argue ahead of its time still, and not to stroke you or anything ... Lydia: Honey, I’m stroking myself so don’t worry about it... Pulse: Every time I pull that record out (No New York) I say to myself that nobody since then has come close to touching this in terms of brutality. Lydia: There’s just no fat in that music. My biggest influence, outside of literature, has always been Marcel Duchamp. Pulse: Now that surprises me, I wouldn’t think surrealism... Lydia: Not surrealism, just Marcel Duchamp. Isolated, as an individual. And also dada to some degree because of the ridiculousness of it. But Marcel Duchamp specifically. Pulse: Any particular pieces? Lydia: Oh, his last piece, which he claims took 20 years, he claims he was playing chess. It’s in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is such a magnificent piece of art. If you haven’t seen it in person, you walk into this room and there are these two giant barn doors, and you’re like, “Okay, what?” There’s two peepholes. You walk up to the peepholes... and the background of it, the depth of it, it’s just so dimensional. Illuminating Gasses and Waterfall is the subtitle. The background is this glittering waterfall. In the foreground is this pile of hay and a tipped over lantern and this nude woman, totally devoid of body hair, with her legs spread, with this gigantic vulva. And you cannot, no matter how you step on your toes, try to see her face. About a year and a half ago I went back to the museum again. I was giving this ecstatic dissertation on the fascination this piece holds for me. Someone threatened to tell me what the face of the woman looked like and I nearly went into hysterics. I left the room crying. The mystery of the piece, which to me is the greatest piece of art in the world, meant that much to me. It took 20 years to create this piece, all the while he was playing chess. I just love the concept of that, as well as the multi-faceted nature of everything that he did, to go from painting to sculpture to installation to elevating inanimate objects to high art, or low art, as it might be. Pulse: You spoke before about art that thrives on misery and that it’s completely at odds with your way of looking at the world. Lydia: I’ve worked my entire career and my entire life to get over what the original traumas and what the day-to-day traumas are. My work may appear to be negative and brutal but that’s only because I’m trying to decipher how to get to the other side of that. And I’ve spent by now over twenty years trying to do that. It’s one thing to dissect what our problems are, it’s another thing to live within them with every cell in your body for the rest of your fucking life. No. Because then the victimizers have won. My original rebellion was always that They are Not Going to Win. They may originally turn us into something... but our goal as originators and individual thinking human beings is to break that fuckin chain and to go beyond it. That’s been my struggle all along. Pulse: Which brings me to your book “Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary.” It’s autobiographical. You describe yourself as a nihilist. You equate your need for sexual conquests to an addiction, compare yourself to an addict. Towards the end of the book you talk about a revelation, the need to change. Do you consider yourself to be in recovery? Lydia: No, I consider myself fairly recovered. But the intellectual decision to reach transendence came years before I could actually put it into practice. First of all, I don’t think any of our obsessions are wrong if we can understand why we are forced into them and what eventually we need to get out of them. But so much of addiction is based around this endless hunger that will never be satisfied, whether it’s for drugs or sex or alcohol. Either there is some wound or some hole or some vacancy that no matter what you stuff in there is not going to be filled. I knew this maybe a decade before I could actually get to the point where, enough is enough and figure out the key to get over this. But basically my addiction was to the energy, an energy exchange. It wasn’t just to ugly sex. It wasn’t just to conquests. It was this addiction to energy which I have. I’m probably one of the most adrenalized people I know. Something’s got to feed that, until I learned how to feed it myself. Pulse: But all along you created ... Lydia: ... and organized and collaborated and documented. Creating is one part of it. There’s so much more, having been as independent as I’ve been, that goes along with it. It goes beyond being a full-time job. It’s no wonder I haven’t had a day job in twenty years. I don’t have time. Withou  t the collaborators the music would not exist, of course. But that also
means, often, bringing them to your house, feeding them, taking care of them, babysitting
them, stroking the songs out of them. You’re mining for fucking gold. You’re in
a coal mine looking for that one nugget. So there’s so much more ... if it was just
the creative process, what a luxurious life. But you have to have a lot of energy to rally
all those troops and then to find someone, over and over again, that’s going to
distribute it on a small label.Pulse: The process you’re describing, a lot of those are female qualities. Lydia: I think that the main point, beyond the gender divide is knowing how to fall into neither category but to allow both aspects. What’s perverse is that what traditionally are considered men’s traits are really what women do best. It’s so perverted. We’re socialized to be gender specific, which is ridiculous. Don’t cry, be tough, act like a man. Be nice, smile, please everyone. That’s the gender divide. And I think that within the individual we have to find a way to embrace all sides of these attributes. Pulse: Would that be a part of the key you talked about, as far as recovering? Lydia: A huge key. And I think it’s as important for men as it is for women. Everything is just so divided in western thought that there is this huge schism between the sexes anyway. I don’t think we need to bridge the divide, I think we need to understand it within ourselves. Bridge the gap within our selves. Pulse: You said that you began to realize this some years ago. How has this affected your work? Lydia: I just think that within my life I’m happier. I don’t know that it’s affected my work because I am still going to be dealing with the subjects that nobody else wants to deal with. Whether it’s on a political or a sociological or an emotional or a sexual level. It’s still going to be my job to be the journalist in the trenches of the shit mines, trying to uncover and find some conclusion to all this. Pulse: Doesn’t that make people, specifically men, quite angry with you? I’ve heard about near riots at some of your spoken word performances. Lydia: (laughing) Yeah, it’s usually me rioting against the audience! It’s a one-woman riot, and I’m the one who’s laughing! The thing is, there came a point where now I’ve got issues to pick on with women. I’ve just done this piece, and I actually performed it the other night. It’s coming out in a book next month called “Inappropriate Behavior,” and it’s called “Motherhood: It’s Not Compulsory.” I’m going to be doing it in Minneapolis. We can only cry victim for so long. We need to take responsibility for the shape that the world is in too, and we can start within our own homes. And breeding is one of the things that I just don’t understand—how all of these so-called alternative people... In this day and age, it’s not only vanity and an outrage against society when there are so many needy children, it’s the least fucking alternative thing you can do. I’m sure this is going to cause a few hackles to be raised in some of the females in the audience. I hope so. It’s now their turn to come under my watchful eye. Pulse: Should be interesting ... Lydia: I’m also going to be doing my historical war update. This war is no different than any war, the war is always raging somewhere. It’s always about the same things: god, money, oil, land. It’s a male-dominated arena. We can look at the (Margaret) Thatchers of the world and say, ‘There’s a woman and she did no different,’ but we need to look to places like Scandinavia where 50 percent of the seats of power are women, and they are making a difference. We can’t look at the few tired cliches, because there’ve basically been only 14 women in positions of world power. So even if they all sucked, there’s only 14 of them compared to how many men? How many in Congress, the Senate. Pulse: So do we think it all needs to come crashing down before it changes? Lydia: I think what’s happening now is a grand wake up call. I mean, no I don’t love innocent people dying. I don’t love people feeling frightened, I don’t like the turn of things but I’m encouraged by the dialogue I hope it opens. Because it’s the same as it ever fucking was. We are suffering now from the sins of the father. And until this turns around, and until there’s more compassion on a global scale—because there isn’t, there’s less. This started under Reagan. There’s less global compassion in politics. And globalization is not pro anyone’s culture. It’s disrespectful. It’s doesn’t encourage diversity, it encourages homogenization. I’m not happy at all about the unification of Europe or the Euro-dollar. It’s all about trade, it’s not about human lives or soul or respect or diversity at all. We’re becoming one giant corporate McDonald’s. Pulse: You said in “Predator’s Diary,” “New York City is a city that fears yet embraces its own reflection.” Do you still think that’s true? Lydia: Oh yeah. It’s got a lot to fear now. But I haven’t lived there in over a decade. A lot has changed, and I don’t think any of it is for the better. When people are telling me that they’re renting closet space for $1600 a month, how good can it get? That’s kind of elitism by design and that drives out what the soul of any one city is. The soul does not come from the pockets of rich people. Pulse: Remembering back to ... Lydia: ... remembering back to our $75 a month apartments ... (laughs) Pulse: ... and the kinds of spaces, I mean I remember your loft, you could practice there. Lydia: You could actually create in the space where you lived. Pulse: You could create, you could gather. Lydia: You could gather. Pulse: How do you feel yourself fitting into a community today? Lydia: I never fit into any community. Going back to the period you’re speaking of, I’ve always felt outside of everything and I took great comfort in that. I’ve always been autonomous. I’m not an isolationist per se. Community is important but I always feel I’m standing outside of it. I live on my own planet. And I invite others to come and visit it occasionally. And I find strength in that. pulse Laura Kennedy was the bass player for the Bush Tetras and appeared in Beth B’s film “The Offenders” with Lydia Lunch. See more about Lydia’s works at www.lydialunch.org. She appears Tues. Mar. 5, at Grumpy’s with her video archive and Wed., Mar. 6, at First Ave. in a spoken word performance. “I’ve worked my entire career and my entire life to get over what the original traumas and what the day-to-day traumas are.” — Lydia Lunch |