21st-Century Cassandra

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted February 1, 2005.

"As oft the clashing sound
Of arms was heard, and inward groans rebound
Yet, mad with zeal, and blinded with our fate
We haul along the horse in solemn state
Then place the dire portent within the tow'r
Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour
Foretold our fate; but, by the god's decree
All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy." – Virgil, "The Aeneid"

Like the infamous doomed prophetess of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid, art-punk poetess Lydia Lunch has forged a lengthy career out of showing and telling citizens of our global village things they'd rather not see or hear. Indeed, she seems most comfortable residing in those dark regions of human interaction, where societal and cultural niceties – and hypocrisies – forbid truth-telling of any sort, in lieu of imagined fantasies of control and command. If William Gibson's invented cyberspace was, as he wrote in the canonical novel Neuromancer, a seamless "consensual hallucination," then Lunch's thankless job in our burgeoning virtual reality is to remind us of the high price of being flesh-bound creatures of desire, something she has executed with aplomb in her latest noir-infused exercise in hard-boiled electronica, Smoke in the Shadows.

"On one hand, we're showing more pornography than ever. On the other, we have a fascist government that's trying to take away a woman's right to an abortion. Under repression, extremity is going to blossom."

"I think that any obsession is good," Lunch asserts. "If it's not obsessing you. In other words, you've got to learn how to control your desires. You don't have to deny them; you just have to keep them in check. We are as a culture addicted to violence. The problems start, especially in culture, when you add sex to that mix. You can show as many dead bodies as possible, but God forbid you show some rough fucking. And I don't get that."

Lunch's avant-garde prophecies about sex, violence and the desire for both that frustrates the normal course of everyday life – on disturbing display in her latest album as well as past masterpieces like Queen of Siam and Drowning in Limbo – are generally avoided by the sexuality-shy American mainstream. But it is also because of those unpopular but dead-on estimations of the aforementioned that she's chosen exile in Europe, at least for now.

"One of the reasons I left this country and I'm living over there is that, after 20 years of talking about this stuff, I just can't live under it anymore," Lunch confides. "I do most of my work in Europe because I can't get even ten shows a year in this fucking country, and I don't even know why that is. But if I want to do photography, pornography, spoken-word, poetry or whatever, the Europeans just understand that I'm trying to articulate the passions of the time. They're not frightened by it, and they don't need it to be housed in the cloak of entertainment."

Whether it's because Europe possesses histories extending thousands of years past what still remains our relative American infancy, or because they just aren't as afraid of their own sexual energies, the countries across the pond from our own FCC-surveillance society are more willing to engage in spirited debate about their own drives, rather than live in a constant state, such as ours, of double-consciousness and double-talk.

"On one hand," Lunch argues, "we're showing more pornography than ever. On the other, we have a fascist government that's trying to take away a woman's right to an abortion. Under repression, extremity is going to blossom."

Unless you deal with extremity head on, which Lunch has attempted to do ever since she formed the vital New York No-Wave outfit Teenage Jesus and the Jerks back in the late '70s. Ensuing collaborations with everyone from Sonic Youth to Swans to the Birthday Party found Lunch patiently carving out her particular punk poetics for an audience hungry for anything but the glorified strippers that have graced the screens of MTV addicts worldwide. The moderate success she has enjoyed has allowed her to build a catalogue of over 20 potent releases, many of which have been released on Lunch's own music and poetry imprint, Widowspeak. Add that to Lunch's various exhibits and rants on everything from underrated Beat poet Herbert Huncke to the vagaries of the Bush administration for outlets as diverse as Rolling Stone and Hustler, and you have one busy muckraker.

And from where she's standing, nothing much has changed in America since she took the fight to Reagan back in the early '80s. "When I went to give my speech 'In Our Time of Dying' about the impending war in Iraq in 2002," Lunch confides, "I could have gone back and taken huge portions from my speeches from 1984 and reapplied them. Because there is no fucking difference between Reagan and Bush, except that Bush is worse. His regime is more arrogant, smug, concerned with the people who put money in their pockets and less humane than Reagan's. Those are the only differences."

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com, while finding the time to rant for Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, AOL and others. His first novel, The Dangerous Perhaps, should be done by the time the War on Terrorism is over.

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