The Only Performance That Makes It: Lydia Lunch wears her rage like an antique black dress at Kick Butt Coffee

Murder-jazz drummer Kevin Shea detonates percussive shrapnel between homicidal verbal outbursts.

Lydia Lunch & Kevin Shea (Drums + Vocals), Suzi Bravo and a couple of bad goth bands

Sinister Impulse Tour

Kickbutt Coffee, Austin, TX.

September 14, 2023

You think you know me? You don’t know me – a solitary ecstatic with the mouth of a murderer.

Lydia Lunch, multidisciplinary artist – poet, writer, photographer, sculptress, actress, and anti-musician – rolled into town over a week ago, taking over Austin’s foremost punk venue for a performance few in attendance shall ever forget.

And it is not just me…who is a fatalist…who’s extreme by nature…who suffers from episodic fits of frenzy, violent outbursts, megalomaniacal tendencies, radical mood swings or sociopathic tendencies…but I get it…

Rochester, New York’s best cultural contribution, born Lydia Anne Koch on the second of June in 1959, has been creating art since her teens that, as she told Anthony Bourdain, “address(es) the situation that I know other people suffer from.” Why? Because, as she said of her slate of underground films, ”We didn’t give a shit…We did it because we had to do something. We were burning. Our blood was on fire.”

What I want is for you to be free

Of misery, bullshit, agony and doubt

to be laughing like a lunatic Both middle fingers

flying in the face of fuckers who matter not

Her medium changes every time she passes through. Last year, she fronted her crackerjack “rock” band (if the Marquis De Sade was the father of rock ‘n’ roll) Retrovirus, playing blown-out, Metallic K.O.-esque renditions of her greatest hits. Their setlists are culled from Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, Eight Eyed Spy, and other Lunch-fronted ensembles that made, as she again told Bourdain, “the most hideous-yet-precise din I possibly could, as a tantrum against all of music and all of society.” This year, she hit a handful of Texas cities with Retrovirus drummer Kevin Shea, making another, fresher version of that anti-societal/-musical din. 

“My anger is on a global level - it’s never on a personal level. “

– yet more from that Bourdain interview.

NEXT TIME SOMEONE ASKS YOU WHY?

YOU TELL EM…AND YOU CAN QUOTE ME ON THIS

BECAUSE I FUCKING FELT LIKE IT THAT’S WHY

Before the main event – Lydia doing 12 poetic rounds with the world and her own head, Shea providing freeform percussive uppercuts – two industrial goth bands, who had about as much in common with What Lydia Lunch Does as chocolate does with liverwurst, creaked and clanged through a lotta dry ice and strobe lights. Then local treasure Suzy Bravo, of doom metallists Witchcryer, served as a burning sage bundle, clearing out the bad energy all that deus ex machina crap brought into the room. She took the stage in an ancient nightie, “BRUJA'' and various other bits of graffiti scrawled across it. Her glossolalia was closer to Lunch’s mark than what preceded, and possessed as much wit and warmth as rage. It was like receiving a kiss after a suckerpunch.

Some days, some days, some years

some decades are meant to be wasted;

I saw the best minds of my generation

scoring dime bags of dope on Ave. D

Waking up and nodding off, passing out and puking their

genius inseparable from their dis-ease…

Some days…some days…are meant to be wasted

I NEVER WASTED A FUCKING SECOND OF MY LIFE

“I’m doing too much shit all the time. I still have shit to do.”

– another confession to Bourdain

Lunch seemed to come out swinging as she strode onstage, her text in one hand, glass of red wine in the other, ready to do battle. She wore her rage like the antique black dress she came clad in. People cheered her entrance, but she wasn’t having it – furiously shaking her head, slashing her hands. She's likely the one performer on the planet who does not want the audience’s love. Shea preceded her, looking like a psychotic rent-a-cop in blank expression, mirror-lensed aviators and a black sweatshirt, bearing the legend “SECURITY.” Hilarious, considering the rhythmic barrage he let loose on the borrowed drumkit wouldn’t make anyone feel safe.

Yes, this performance was an un-safe space. Lunch poetically lashed out in an ongoing internal monologue turned outward, projectile vomited primarily at men – the root of everything evil in this violent, harsh world, in her estimation. 

“WHY IS IT ALWAYS MEN?!” she raged. “WHY IS IT ALWAYS MEN?! MADMEN, MURDERERS, RAPISTS, KILLERS, SNIPERS, PRIESTS, POLITICIANS, PEDOPHILES!” She scored bullseyes the whole way – it’s never women committing these crimes, is it? 

Several minutes later – buffered by Shea’s free jazz jabs at the drumkit, over Lunch’s own prerecorded vortexes of sound on the PA, storms of guitar and electronic washes – she gets to the crux: “I’M SUPPOSED TO CALM DOWN????”

“There have been 3431 mass shootings in the past 4 years,” she intoned, like the world’s most pissed-off newscaster. “400 this year alone. 386 schoolyard shootings since Columbine.

“I don’t understand the concept of aiming wildly into a classroom, a supermarket, a dance hall, a nightclub…just to commit suicide by Sharp Shooter…because if you want to take yourself out…take yourself out…and leave the innocent men, women & children alone.”

But Lunch laid out the key to this verbal exorcism a few minutes earlier: “...it’s not just poetry I’m purring into the mic…it’s an admission of my own chronic condition…but I don’t sweat the small shit…”

40(??) minutes later, it’s over. Lunch never holds anything back. She explodes all over every stage she takes, not exiting until every drop of bile, of poison, has been purged from her petite frame. Then she graciously embraces her public, those she has likely healed by saying, “Yes, I feel everything you do – every fucked-up, beautiful thought you have. This world destroys my ass, too. But we can all fight back.” Hopefully, what she uttered just minutes before is still ringing in the audience’s ears, swimming through their brains: 

You can’t save anyone from themselves. You will lose everything by attempting to play savior. You will never heal the wounded. You cannot repair the damage already done by selfish parents, vicious ex-lovers, child molesters, tyrants, poverty, depression, or simple chemical imbalance.

You can’t undo psychic wounds, bandage old scars, kiss away ancient bruises. You can’t make the pain go away. You can’t shout down the voices in people’s heads. 

You can’t make anyone feel special. They will never feel beautiful enough, not matter how  beautiful they are to you. They will never feel adored enough, no matter how much you adore them…

…The wounded will always find a way to spread their pain over a vast terrain like an emotional tsunami which devastates the surrounding landscape…

…They will not be happy until you’re as miserable as they are….

Thank you, Lydia. We needed that. But those who need it most probably won’t listen. And so it goes….

Thank you to Lydia Lunch for the text to her performance.

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