Lydia Lunch and the Big Sexy Noise
PhilaMOCA
531 N 12th St.
Philadelphia
July 8, 2024
“I think I wanna start wearing a burqa,” my friend, dressed in short-shorts and a tube top, told me while we were killing time waiting for the bus that would bring us to underground rock celeb Lydia Lunch’s lace-laden, Mary Jane retro, no wave roots show Tuesday night at music venue PhilaMOCA.
“That seems a little weird,” I responded, “since you’re not Muslim and it’s 100 degrees outside.”
“Yeah, everyone says I’d get canceled, but won’t tell me why they think that. I don’t think it’s actually appropriation,” she said. “Anyway, I just wanna be fully covered.”
An attention-hungry atheist pining after a burqa struck me as a loaded attempt to turn heads while simultaneously shunning the potential of being seen. That kind of tension seems intrinsic to a generation born into a heavy surveillance state — one informed by paradoxical oversharing and social policing — that has made attention both more addictive and deadly than ever before.
That’s why I was glad to get inside the independent music venue where Lydia Lunch was ready and waiting to tell her truth, no matter the cost. Not to mention that the 65-year-old, self-proclaimed “confrontationist” headliner brought along three bandmates boasting enough musical talent to shred a whole room into a scrap pile.
Lunch has managed to maintain a wide fan base over her decades-long career, which she grew from scratch from a “no wave” music philosophy — a term that some believe Lydia Lunch literally coined as a teenager, and which she has translated herself to mean “not audience-friendly.”
Maybe Lunch doesn’t see herself as friendly, but she’s a flirt for sure. And over the course of the night, it was clear with what — and not whom — she was flirting. Even when she told her bass player to “bend over and keep bending over,” she had eyes for another. The prospect of attention is what Lunch likes to tease.
In a black lace dress and heels, Lunch donned her own kind of uniform. But rather than a burqa, she wore a form of funeral attire that seemed satanically feminized by scarlet nails and lipstick, the latter of which was occasionally concealed by a whiskey-filled red solo cup.
There was an immeasurable amount of eye contact traded between musicians and crowd. Lunch would lock looks with individual audience members, smile and lick the air, then turn to shoo away someone trying to get an iPhone photo of her act.
She spotted a man wearing a No Trend tee-shirt: “Nobody knows how good they were, ‘cause they were fucking hated,” she shouted before proceeding to call the same shirt sporter a little bitch while snarling out song after song about parasitic men.
Virtually every song was dedicated “to the ladies” and written about Lunch’s anger at “men” — an entertaining dynamic given that her front row was primarily made up of gender ambiguous twenty-somethings.
And every song started off with the same introduction. “I don’t know what the laws are…” Lunch would declare before making a deliciously incoherent comment.
It was unsurprising that several of her social commentaries interspersed through the set list fell flat. “Ladies, it’s not the age of victimization anymore!” she announced at one point. Some audience members started to cheer, then went quiet when Lunch completed her next line: “It’s the age of #You’reNext!”
I cracked up conspicuously as Lunch spoke with the jovial drawl of Liza Minelli about how all women should carry guns, drama dripping off her whole persona like perfume, before growling through banger after banger about men letting her down.
“Another man comin’ while the bed is still warm!” she chanted furiously while her band of three men went berserk on their instruments.
“Young love don’t pay my fucking rent,” she riffed repeatedly in her next song.
“Trust the witch,” was the name of another piece she performed closer to closing, at which point she physically pointed to every show patron in her line of sight and dubbed us all “Witchy!” one at a time.
Whether or not any of us agree with Lydia Lunch’s policy proposals or worldly perspective, it is impossible, at least during a sold out show in the artist’s favorite Philly venue, to disagree with her music. Which is part of the point: She doesn’t have to sell out to sell her songs, because the songs sell themselves.
I’ll admit I don’t frequently listen to Lunch’s recorded work. But her live performance was unforgettable — especially because the trio with which she’s touring is otherworldly. With the likes of Timo Ellis on electric guitar, Tim Dahl on bass and Kevin Shea on drums, it must be impossible to miss the mark.
Squeezed right next to a stage speaker to the far left of the front row, I wound up fortunately positioned directly below the bassist. As Dahl seizured out over his guitar, consuming the whole body of his bass while intricately pushing the group’s rhythm forward, I felt the kind of connection I’ve always imagined my parents’ generation held to live music before the internet age spread isolation icing on the crumble cake of corporate capitalism.
When I think “no wave,” I admit that I sometimes think “no talent.” In the past, I thought that Lydia Lunch was primarily just a punk persona, which often predicts, albeit overtly, musical ineptness. But through all the noise and dissonance and spoken-word lyrics, what I heard Tuesday night was some hardcore rock.
I also usually can’t stand the exaggerated performances of vanity-influenced rock stars. And it’s often for the same reasons that late 20th-century alternative artists like Lydia Lunch rejected classic rock in the first place: The commercial clichés can be too much to stand.
But when Tim Dahl pursed his lips and performed reverberating windmills with his arms, I really believed he was putting all his might towards churning out a renewable energy form to keep the crowd alive. It was like I had a second spine, into which sensation was creeping in for the first time — the dull familiarity of disconnect I understand as socially ubiquitous was replaced by the discovery of a new body, one belonging to a momentary collective.
My sneaking suspicion that Big Sexy Noise has been busy writing legendary rock tracks in disguise — or perhaps without the disguise of one dimensional character acts constructed to attain corporate sponsors and commercial viability — was supported when Lunch launched into a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover of “That Smell.”
“I hate this band but I love this song!” Lunch informed the audience.
“Whiskey bottles and brand new cars/ Oak tree you’re in my way/ There’s too much coke and too much smoke/ Look what’s going on inside you,” she sang. “The smell of death surrounds you!”
Openly and persistently through song and speech, Lunch refers to America as nothing more than a fascist kleptocracy. I think that’s the right word to describe our society; it hits on how our country is not only fixated on stealing wealth and power from people on a global level, but is increasingly concerned with figuring out how to hoard our attention.
Lydia Lunch likely has a chip on her shoulder when it comes to conscious consumerism. She insists on framing everything from a feminist point of view. She is highly superlative in her opinions and comes across in show as a black and white thinker.
But at no point in her performance did I feel pressure to patch up our differences or distance myself from her because of her beliefs.
Lunch has given her listeners a serious gift by resolutely rejecting her own pseudo-celebrity status. As an independent artist, she refuses to take on a brand identity as we understand it today, because to do so would be to sacrifice her musical integrity through shrinking the complexity of her personhood. And because she doesn’t have a brand, I don’t have to subscribe. I can just put my guard down and listen.
And when I actually listen to Lydia Lunch, it’s immediately obvious that even when she talks in binaries, she’s saying something deeper.
The intent to offend, as Lydia Lunch has called it, meant something different in the 1980s than it does today. But I can have curiosity about Lunch’s outlook because of her candor. Because I buy that her anger comes from a feeling of powerlessness that she’s combatting by using what power she does hold to tell the truth, whether or not that comes with a cost. That’s the definition of accountability, in my book. Not a Twitter apology.
Her chronic bashing of men could be seen as gender essentialist — or it could be seen as an expression of lasting anger informed by repeated personal experiences with abuse. It could even — get this — be seen as both things at one time.
But for those of us who have come of age largely online, it’s refreshing just to feel like we’re seeing something real with our own eyes, period. Extra points when it doesn’t fall into the category of hardcore “no’s,” like straight up hate speech.
As much as I want to embrace Lydia Lunch as a role model in spiting all sell-outs, making it through today’s malls of media and monopoly is a complicated task for everyone. We all have to make sacrifices to survive. And I don’t think Lydia Lunch is interested in being anyone’s role model, anyhow.
I guess my review goes like this: When Lydia Lunch looked me in the eyes, threw her fiery tongue out with a smile, flipped off her audience, and then repeated the bit over and over again to every person who’d bought the $15 ticket to her show, I wasn’t entirely sure of what I was seeing — but I liked what I saw.
NEXT:
Check out Lydia Lunch’s website here to see where she’s playing next — including at some East Coast shows throughout this week.
