"Because we have so much eye candy and mind candy, spending so much time trying to pay the rent, all of this conspires to keep us from thinking too hard or taking action from that. Our time is stolen. So much of our daily life is stolen." -- Lydia Lunch
Lydia Lunch (born Lydia Koch on June 2, 1959 in Rochester, New York) is an American singer, poet, writer, and actress whose career was spawned by the New York No Wave punk subculture in 1976. Her large and diverse body of work typically features provocative and confrontational delivery and has maintained an anti-commercial, do-it-yourself ethic, operating independent of major labels and distribution deals.
"I am a humanist not a feminist. There's a big difference.""I just prefer instrumental. I don't need to hear what other people are singing. And if I need music as a backdrop to work or to think, I need to have that part of the brain clear - I don't need people feeding their fantasies into my vision.""I think it's important to encourage gluttony in all its formats.""I think my speeches are hilarious. I think I'm a natural comedian, but I like denying people the chance to laugh. I want to deny you the relief of the punchline.""I used to think feminism was a liberating force - now I see many of those people are just censors under a different name.""I would be humiliated if I found out that anything I did actually became a commercial success.""I'm a total pleasure seeker. I pursue anything that satisfies me. I usually get it. I have specific needs and I know what they are so I can achieve satisfaction.""I'm a very sympathetic person, but that doesn't always come across in my work because I'm too busy being mad at everything.""I'm completely optimistic - I know the end is coming!""I'm nihilistic, antagonistic, violent, horrible - but not obliterated, yet. I just refuse to be beaten down. I think it's stubborness that keeps me going.""If people could understand how much pleasure they could have by themselves, I think everyone would be a lot saner. I think that people really need a dose of quality time with one's self.""Just because my bank account hasn't swelled astronomically I don't consider myself any less of a success.""'Musician' is not a very respected title. I'm not a musician.""Part of the charm of what I do is the fact that it's completely unrelated to everything that came before.""Sure you're powerless, sure you're just one person, sure you can't change anything... but you don't have to be miserable about it as well.""The female format is a beautiful one in which to function. Foolhardy as it may be. I change my image all the time, it's whatever suits me at the moment.""Think your own thoughts."
After arriving in New York City at the age of 16, Lunch moved into a large communal household of artists and musicians in NYC, including Kitty Bruce, daughter of Lenny Bruce. Soon after she earned the surname "Lunch" by regularly stealing lunches for her often starving artist friends. After befriending the 'godfathers of punk' Suicide at Max's Kansas City, she founded the short-lived but influential No Wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in 1976 with her artistic partner, No Wave punk-funk-jazz musician James Chance. Both appeared on the seminal No Wave compilation No New York. Lunch later appeared on two songs on Chance's album Off White (credited to James White and the Blacks; Lunch used the pseudonym "Stella Rico") in 1978.
She appeared in two films directed by the husband and wife film-making team of Scott B and Beth B; In the short film Black Box (1978) she played an unnamed torturer, and in the feature length, neo-noir thriller Vortex (1983) she played a private detective named "Angel Powers". During this time, she also appeared in a number of films by Vivienne Dick, including She Had her Gun All Ready (1978) and Beauty Becomes The Beast (1979), co starring with Pat Place.
In the mid-'80s she formed her own recording and publishing company called "Widowspeak" on which she continues to release her own material from songs to spoken word .
Later, she was identified by the Boston Phoenix as "one of the 10 most influential performers of the '90s". Lunch's solo career featured collaborations with musicians such as J. G. Thirlwell, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Nick Cave, Marc Almond, Billy Ver Plank, Steven Severin, Robert Quine, Sadie Mae, Rowland S. Howard, Michael Gira, The Birthday Party, Einstürzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth, Die Haut, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Black Sun Productions, and French band Sibyl Vane, who put one of her spoken words into music. She also acted in, wrote, and directed underground films, sometimes collaborating with underground filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern (including several films such as Fingered in which she performed unsimulated sex acts), and more recently has recorded and performed as a spoken word artist, again collaborating with such artists as Exene Cervenka, Henry Rollins, Juan Azulay, Don Bajema, Hubert Selby Jr., and Emilio Cubeiro, as well as authoring both traditional books and comix (with award-winning graphic novel artist Ted McKeever).
Lydia Lunch is best remembered for her involvement in the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements, especially her starring role in Richard Kern's Fingered. Lunch has deliberately remained outside of the mainstream; though known about, her collaborations with mainstream artists, and her mainstream press coverage, are few and far between.
Music
Lunch's early music, especially her work with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and her first solo album, Queen of Siam, are the ones for which she is most well known.
Literature
In 1997 Lunch released Paradoxia, a loose autobiography, in which she documented her early life, sexual history, substance abuse and mental health problems. Time Out New York gave it a favorable review, while Bookslut ambiguously concluded "It’s to the reader to determine whether Lunch’s study goes deeper than that, or if instead, it’s a kind of literary and philosophical repetition compulsion, a reprisal of greatest hits from male nihilists, sexual adventurers and chroniclers of deviance.". PopMatters called it a "brutal but boring and predictable circus, about which Lunch shows no emotions. Only fatigue seems to have given her pause." Other reviewers praised Lunch's candor while expressing reservations about her prose.
