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.
