Lydia Lunch: the anti-hero who carried on punk’s rebellion
The punk ethos in the genre’s early days was about defying every rule in the book. While it may have been easy to go out and perform as a punk whenever onstage, the true punks of the genre lived and breathed the mindset every hour of the day rather than carrying it out as an act. Although many claimed to have the core of punk in their bones from the beginning, Lydia Lunch was the epitome of what a true punk looked like.
Enamoured with the idea of punk from an early lunch, Lunch initially left her ordinary life in suburban America in search of thrills in New York City. After becoming a mainstay at hallowed rock dungeons like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, Lunch realised that she wanted to take music in a different direction than what she heard in the clubs daily.
While the bands that were up on stage claimed they were playing songs far nastier than what was on the radio, the formula behind the likes of Ramones was still the essential pop tunes that could clutter any top 40 station. Picking up a guitar, Lunch would take her music in more sinister directions, relying on various discordant melodies that told the twisted stories behind her lyrics.
Despite hints of the modern poets that came before her, like Patti Smith, Lunch’s approach was a lot more direct than her predecessors. Throughout her run of albums in the 1980s, Lunch was at the precipice of the no-wave movement, wanting to strip all of the prettiness from the new wave acts and inject some nastiness into the mix.
While she would befriend other members of the post-punk movement, each of Lunch’s sonic vignettes seems to be about capturing a feeling rather than any specific melodic tone. Though more than a few songs have sections that jump out as genuinely melodic, the core ethos is about making the listener feel what Lunch is feeling rather than shoving a catchy tune down their throat.
While there are hints of post-punk in particular tracks from her back catalogue, an album like Queen of Siam feels like a punk-rock take on what jazz musicians would do. Rather than focus on the different cascading notes of jazz, though, Lunch’s approach was centred around different noises, taking the sounds of guitars, feedback, and her own voice to breathe life into songs like the title track and her take on Dusty Springfield’s ‘Spooky’.
Lunch’s work also endeared her to the next generation of misfits coming up in her wake. Outside of her usual crowd in New York, Lunch got a massive following through her work with The Birthday Party, even splitting an EP with Nick Cave and the band in 1982 entitled The Agony is the Ecstasy.
For all of the callous sounds of her records, though, Lunch was never into personal destruction like the rest of the punk community. When talking about her approach to music, she discussed wanting to find a way to be happy through her art in the face of destruction, recalling, “At an early age, I had to find ecstasy at the mouth of the apocalypse. Pleasure is my ultimate rebellion. It’s what they steal from us.”
Whereas punk may have been the nasty, vicious answer to traditional rock and roll, Lydia Lunch rebelled against the initial rebellion, daring to make music as an escape. As she continues to appear in works by Against All Logic and moves into the world, the punk fire that Lunch started in the 1980s is still raging on just fine.
