By Raphael Jose Martinez
It’s impossible to describe Lydia Lunch. Calling her a musician, or an artist, or a writer, is like calling the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol an airing of social grievances. You wouldn’t be wrong, but you also wouldn’t be painting the whole picture.
A gadfly of virulent proportions, Lunch has been a creative force since the 1970s when she moved to New York City and became a fixture of what eventually became known as the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements.
Alongside her in those times was Beth B., a filmmaker just as intertwined with those movements as Lunch. Together they made such underground classic films as BLACK BOX and VORTEX.
Now, some 40 years on, they’ve collaborated again with the documentary LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER, which was completed in 2019 and is finally being released post-pandemic via Kino Lorber. Less a biography and more an exploration of the motivations and politics of Lunch’s art, THE WAR IS NEVER OVER doesn’t just give a retrospective-style look-back, it provides a modern contextualization. It’s not just about what Lunch did—it’s about why she did it. And more importantly, why she’s still doing it; why her words and art are just as relevant now than ever.
If not more so.
Never answering to anyone but herself, you might not agree with everything Lydia Lunch has to say—and there’s never a doubt that she’ll say something you won’t. But at the same time there’s no denying that she’s got a razor sharp mind behind it and even sharper tongue saying it.
I had the opportunity to speak with both Lydia Lunch and Beth B., not only about the new documentary, but about their decades of collaboration, the fluidity of art, the strange and often ugly economics of independent cinema, and why Barack Obama was a cocksucker.
To say I was a bit intimidated would be an understatement.
Raphael Jose Martinez (RJM): So I watched the film, and I really, really loved it. As I was saying to you, Beth, before Lydia joined us, I’ve been a fan of both of you and your work since I was teenager getting into more, for lack of better terms, alternative or non-mainstream art. You two have known each other quite awhile at this point and have been collaborating…
Lydia Lunch (LL): Longer than you’ve been alive, my friend.
RJM: [Laughs] Yes. That is actually true.
Beth B. (BB): Frightening facts, that’s right.
RJM: So what drew you together to do this project now?
BB: For me it had to with a full circle. When I first came to New York, Lydia was one of the people who inspired me greatly and in some ways I felt like it was important for younger people to understand the history of what Lydia was about, what that scene—the No Wave scene—was about. And to really use that as a pivotal point to explore a lot of the themes that Lydia has worked on and the themes that I have been involved with [through] my films as well, and the way that they have kind of coincided with each other.
LL: I think it’s interesting to do it recently, when we did it and it’s released now, considering what we just came out from under in the last five years of bullshit—with both the idiocy of Diaper Donnie Trump, his malignant sexism, anti-everything except for rich, dumb cunts, and also between the snowflaking of the new puritanical-ism, and the Cardi Bs, something has got to be making sense. I wouldn’t say in the middle of this, but outside those both extremes.
BB: I think it’s also that so many of the issues that were brought up in the late 70s, especially the ones that Lydia has talked about on and on—patriarchy, power, control, abuse of power—those things are 100% relevant today. It’s not like those things have gone away. And some people just don’t really know the history. So they think these are things that have manifested just recently, but in fact it is the history of centuries…
LL: The world.
BB: The world. Absolutely. Internationally. Not just this country.
LL: Forever. And this is one of the issues that really perturbs me greatly—and which is why I will still continue to be the woman on a hill with a bullhorn—is the political nonsense. Not just in America but in so many other countries. ‘Cause I think these are, and they always were, feudal times. There are always people who think they're kings, more so even now—fewer, with more money—having so much money that ten men have more money than most countries. The non-abolition of slavery, having left the plantation and now turning most people into slave-wage laborers—fuck you Jeff Bezos. There are just so many issues to me—which is why I could open my mouth to talk about my own issues—that these are historical, and hysterical, and ever non-ending problems.
RJM: That makes sense to me because I grew up… well, I didn't grow up…
LL: Neither did I!
CF: My twenties were the Obama era, and I had so many friends and so many people who were older than me being like, “Everything’s changed! It’s so much better than it was!” And at the time I was living in a small, rural town in southern Illinois with the last name Martinez—and I knew that it wasn’t different for me. That if cops pulled me over I’m fucked.
LL: Not even how you look, but your last name. Not even if you did look more like a Martinez.
RJM: I had circumstances where they felt tricked; “How do you look like this and have that name?!” The politics actually haven't changed.
LL: Well, I call Barack Obama “The Beige Puppet.” Because we had hope, but it was false hope. Or as Kafka said, “There is hope, but not for us.” First of all, I think he was kind of almost a plant in the sense that, well, he was discovered out of Harvard like so many of these other people that go on to exploit other countries. And he might have been used as a kind of place holder while America was actually becoming more fascist and authoritarian. But here we had a little, as we often do, ebb and flow. We thought Bill Clinton was good at first. Then we realized his “three strikes, you're out.” Barack Obama, I don't think he’s evil—I think his wife is much better—but I think it was allowing us a little false hope while they were doubling down on the dirty deeds done behind our backs.
RJM: Yeah. He’s to the right of Nixon, policy wise. And I was trying to explain this to my immigrant parents who are saying, “Finally, there's not a white person in the office!”
LL: It’d be great if there was actually a black man, not a beige puppet, in the White House.
BB: Part of the problem is that it’s all corporatized. Everything is corporatized. So you can’t even see beyond the politics of the corporations that control everything.
LL: Look, he was another cocksucker of the bankers.
BB: Yeah, all of them.
LL: And we knew that right away. He proved that right away. I think we need to abolish anyone who makes over $150,000—they should not be in fucking office. Because they don't know how the rest of us live. They're still complaining about $15 an hour wages?! How fucking dare you. How dare you.
RJM: That just happened last week here in Chicago, where the city raised it to $15 an hour…
LL: Oh! How generous! How about firefighters on the west coast? They only make $15. Firefighters?!
RJM: Or when they don’t want to pay them they just get prisoners to do it. That is literal slave labor.
BB: There you go. Slave labor.
LL: Our gulags. Anyway… back to the doc.
RJM: [Laughs] Well I wanted to speak on, not necessarily the doc itself, but the corporatization of film and music. Because in the doc, Lydia, you talk about the idea of taking the reigns of producing everything yourself, how that was the ethos you lived by. I know you, Beth, have done the same thing…
LL: Well, we also didn't have much of a choice. And we continue to do it. But carry on with the question…
RJM: Is it even possible to do that in the same manner anymore? Because nowadays I think the internet has democratized the availability of art, and the access to art, but at the same time you’ve got to upload your movie to Google’s YouTube. Or you’re using Facebook, or Facebook’s Instagram. So you have more independent control, but it’s still on somebody else’s leash.
LL: Well, I’m glad whoever owns or runs YouTube exists because I’m happy that people in Taiwan, or Romania, can see some of what I’ve done. I never got into doing what I do thinking that there was going to be a big fucking paycheck. And the people that complain about that are always the richest motherfuckers. Now, I don’t like Spotify because I think they’re a total ripoff—and I don’t know what of my material is on there, but it’s gotta come off. But I think with YouTube, it just seems more like a weekend teenage party to go look at some stuff. But neither of us have had much help. Beth may have gotten more grants because she’s applied for them. I’ve never applied for a grant, and it’s maybe to my detriment, but look, I’m trying to sell my intellectual property rights out of a cultural guilt trip to the people who are paying $150 million for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hi. Really?!
BB: I mean, it’s interesting for me in terms of cinema. It’s really been kind of a roller coaster ride in terms of cinema. Because we know that in the 80s [and] 90s there was some support for independent filmmaking. But a lot of it was coming from Europe. That was where the support was because they were much more open minded, and they see cinema as being an art form. They do not see that here in the United States. There has always been that battle, and I finally got fed up with that fucking battle in the 90s when I finally finished a feature film, TWO SMALL BODIES, and there really was nothing. All the funding in Europe had dried up for American filmmakers, and there was nothing here, and the studios started saying, “Oh! We have an ‘indie’ studio now.” So they, in a sense, usurped the arena that the indie filmmakers had occupied. At that point I was like, “Ok, how do I survive?” I ended up going into television. I produced and directed documentaries in television.
LL: Crime TV!
BB: [Laughs] Yes! Crime TV! It was great!
LL: I live and sleep by crime TV!
BB: It was amazing. Court TV. So I ended up working for about eight years in network television, and I was choosing my own subjects, etc. And in the beginning, which was around the year 2000. But over the course of that, then what happened? The corporatization of everything. And suddenly I had these committees that I had to appeal to started censoring… “Cut this. Cut that.” So I was back in that loop, and I had to get out of there. So I got back into the underground. I said, “Ok. I’m doing it again. My way. That is it.” So in a way I stopped battling. It’s not like I’m making any money, but at least I have the satisfaction of making the films the way I want them, choosing my subjects. I mean, I still choose subjects that are still very underground, edgy—I mean you can’t get edgier than Lydia…
LL: I’m soft around the edges!
BB: [Laughs] You are! And that’s what I wanted to show in the film, a much more comprehensive and complex [laughs] portrait of Lydia. It wasn’t about making a “biography” of her..
LL: A biopsy.
BB: They can go on the internet and see it all. But it was a forensic biopsy, yes. [Laughs]
LL: But as Beth was saying earlier, if it wasn't for Europe I don't know what I would have done for the past 35 years of my career. Because I can bring anything that I do there, and most of it can’t do here. Hence in the documentary quite a few things are from European performances. And also going back to the corporate nonsense… that’s why Beth—I don't know how she managed to do it, but did—managed to raise a lot of the money for this movie on Kickstarter. Which is a democratic format. I’ve never gone and done that. I’m not against doing that. I just think that whoever has the money should give the money. But that's just because I’m what? A communist?
RJM: It’s just so strange that we’ve literally gone back to patronage.
LL: I’m not against it.
CF: Neither am I.
BB: It also reminds me of the reason why I got into making film instead of art. I was like, “Ok. This incorporates all the arts within it.” And I was so sick of specialization. It made me want to vomit. And the preciousness of art. And I thought, “You can get someone on the street to pay $3 to see a movie.” That was in the 70s, 80s. In a way Kickstarter is very similar. People are putting in small amounts of money to be able to have something that is not readily available to them. And in some ways I hate doing the Kickstarters, cause they knock the shit out of you. You have to be doing it 24 hours a day for 30 days, and be completely dedicated to raising that money. But it’s satisfying in that you then have these odd kinds of partnerships with people you do not know, yet they become part of your network.
LL: And they're the ones who really want it. Whether it’s $5, or $50, or $500, it’s amazing. They give to what they feel is a worthy cause.
RJM: I agree. I’ve had some long conversations with people about that when Kickstarter and Indie-A-Go-Go kind of first started appearing on the scene. I used to be the editor for the magazine Maximum Rocknroll years and years ago.
LL: Oh yeah. [Laughs]
RJM: And that magazine was a very puritanical punk rock thing of, “This is. This is not.” Drawing lines. And there were genuine questions as to whether or not it was appropriate to do that. And I was like, “What’s the difference between getting the money from the people that are going to be buying the album directly, or the movie directly, or getting it from a record label?”
LL: I’ll tell you what the difference is. The difference is that you’re not going to owe those people anything more than the products are already going to make anyway.
RJM: That’s a very good point.
LL: With a record company you might owe them five more years of your life, after they rip you off with ridiculous amounts of expenses. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never had a record deal like that. I don’t deal with those kind of criminals.
RJM: Tying this with the kind of corporate stuff as well… you two are very associated with the Cinema of Transgression and No Wave, obviously, and it’s one of those movements where you get the statement, “It could never happen again.” And that happens with every art movement, where afterwards everyone says, “You couldn’t do that again.”
LL: Ok. Ok. Look. It’s only a movement in retrospect.
BB: Exactly.
LL: And also, there have been movements. The Viennese Actionists, the Surrealists, the Dadaists. That’s what I most closely related to. So to think that it can’t come again? I don’t know. I mean, what exactly is it that can’t come again? Extremity? Weirdness? D.I.M.—do it myself, or D.I.Y.—do it yourself? What is it that can’t come again? I don’t believe that. I believe everything is cyclical. We’ve just been in a really bad phase of music for a while but we’ve been in a great phase for television, because that’s where it seems so much art with music, with lighting, with directing, with dialogue, is right now—as opposed to major motion pictures. When I speak to people in their 20s sometimes they’re like, “Ughh, there’re no visionaries of my generation.” Well, look behind you, kid! And also look to architecture, look to science, look to other things. It’s not always going to be music. It’s not always going to be movies. It’s not always going to be books. Sometimes it’s going to be something else, and you’ve got to expand what might be intriguing and educational to you and what might speak to you.
RJM: How strange is it to you—because I’m sure the questions of No Wave and Cinema of Transgression come to the two of you all the time during interviews—how strange is it to have to constantly reflect on art that you made when you were in your teens or early 20s?
BB: We’re still making it.
LL: Listen, darling, what I made was more than 30 years ahead then. Now they’re catching up. It’s very, very normal to me.
BB: It’s also that, in my mind, It’s still going on. It’s not like I’ve stopped. The forms sometimes change. I work with film, I work with video installations, sculpture installations, all different forms—just as Lydia does. When I talk about my work, even of the 70s or the 80s, it’s not like I’m going back. It’s an ongoing dialogue. And what I find fascinating is looking back at some of the other films and understanding in a way how sometimes they’re very autobiographical, they’re very much of that time. But like we were talking about earlier, they’re not just of that time because these issues do not go away. We have to keep looking at them from different perspectives, put a different lens on—of 2021—in terms of where we are heading, but also being able to reflect back on the history to understand where we have come from.
LL: I also think that when you mention both No Wave and Cinema of Transgression, both of them relating very heavily to New York at a certain period, now I feel that there are people that are scattered around that are still quite No Wave, or are still quite extreme artists, [such as] Slava Mogutin, Weasel Walter, Tim Dahl… there's a variety of people both in music and in literature that are still extreme. It’s just that they're not all gathered in one place. And because even the nature of journalism is very different, it seems like there are a lot more online magazines. But if we even go back to Maximum Rocknroll time, or my teenagehood when there was Creem magazine, Rock Scene, Circus, Rolling Stone—occasionally—Playboy magazine for great interviews even, or Spin—originally—there were at least these kind of publications that we could kind of trust to focus and tell us a few things. Now there are so many culture, fashion, art, music, film, diversified multi-art medium magazines online, but it’s not like when we would actually go out and buy a magazine, hoping to find that one nugget that really spoke to us. I think there are people out there—and this is why I do my own podcast, The Lydian Spin. This week is the two year anniversary, 104 episodes. It’s bringing in people that are doing stuff now, filmmakers, writers, musicians—and who have been doing things—and just trying to continue what I have always done, which is trying to collaborate with people, expose people to other people, and just carrying on with that. So to me it just makes a lot of sense. And Beth was saying originally that this was feeling like it’s full circle? Well, it’s full circle to me, ‘cause this feels like a continuation of this, our documentary, is like the podcast and the documentary I’m working on now which is ARTISTS — DEPRESSION, ANXIETY & RAGE. Which I’m only doing the interviews. And it’s kind of why I started doing and saying what I said in the beginning. It’s ‘cause it isn’t only about me. I was dealing with bigger, universal issues and now I’m turning the microphone on, so far, 35 other musicians and artists so suffer from… fortunately things I do not suffer from, I don’t have depression or anxiety, but most musicians and creatives do for numerous reasons. So again, this all makes sense to me of where Beth and I are right now—and Beth has been on my podcast as well—it just makes sense that this is what’s happening right now in our sphere. It’s important to our times, but then again I’ve always felt important at any time – especially in my own time and my own mind.
RJM: How has the pause in the past year that COVID created affected all the stuff that both of you have been doing?
LL: To me? Nothing. ‘Cause I wasn’t planning on touring. I was planning on going out with this film. So I had one show that was canceled because I had just toured with Retrovirus to the west coast, Australia, and did the last show in New York. And now I just did one of the first shows in New York last Friday. I was working on promoting THE WAR IS NEVER OVER, working on my podcast, working on my documentary, and teaching workshops. So it was very psychically creative. I still did two albums in the meantime—no reason to release them yet. So it was fine timing for me. Beth was a bit disappointed, but now whatever slack we faced, it’s racing forward.
BB: What I find fascinating is that I felt that year was an extraordinary time for me to be able to reflect on what I have been doing, what I want to be doing. So I think that things like that, at least for me, I could take it and actually use that time to be productive in other ways. So in some ways it relieved that pressure of, “We’ve got to get the film out now!” So I actually was able to mentor my daughter, who at that time was 17 [and] was writing a feature length script. I think that in the same way that Lydia was looking outside of herself at other people, and what they were experiencing, I felt that I was, in a way, doing the same thing with my daughter. What her story is is very different than my story. Where she’s coming from, very different. And it’s a story that really needed to be told, and she felt like she wanted to do that. So the idea of being able to mentor somebody who was very young, to be able to bring out… again, it’s what’s not seen and not heard. And that’s always been what my work has been about, bringing voice that are on the outside into a form that can be communicated to others. So it was extremely gratifying to be able to do that, and also prepare everything for the movie. In some ways we were so prepared for this moment, I mean, I was getting really impatient, but again, the situation ended up coming full circle because Kino Lorber, during this time, actually asked me if they could start to restore and distribute my catalog of films. And as they started to do that they said, “Oh! And of course we want to distribute your new film.” So they took it upon themselves to restore everything that I’ve done and using Lydia’s movie as the catapult to start a movement towards re-examining the early films and my entire oeuvre. So that opportunity would not have been here without the pandemic. How odd.
LL: I’m never impatient by the way. Like one of my philosophical heroes, the Marquis de Sade. 300 years later people still don’t get what the fuck he was talking about. And it wasn’t only the sex, let me tell ya. So I’m not impatient at all.
BB: I’m glad you weren’t, Lydia. [Laughs]
LL: “Calm down.” The thing I don’t want anybody to tell me. “Calm down.”
RJM: I had one last question. In THE WAR IS NEVER OVER you had a quote that stuck out to me where you said, “Trauma is greedy.” And I remember reading in an interview years ago a similar quote that said “pain attracts pain.” Talking about this year where basically the world paused because of mass trauma and mass death, what do you think is going to be the response to that if trauma attracts trauma, pain attracts pain? Collectively as a world there’s no denying that we’ve been watching people drop dead in numbers we can’t even imagine.
LL: Well, I mean, in a horrible way I have to say…. not that I wanted 600,000 people to die ‘cause Trump’s a fucking idiot, not that I don’t think the whole world should have shut down for a month instead of a year and a half because he couldn’t get it together. I think that when people are finally coming of the horror—’cause a lot of people were suffering, obviously, either with COVID, the fear of COVID, people dying, being locked down— and I hope that as they start coming out, and things start opening up, that we’re still extremely fucking careful, that they’re going to have a better appreciation of what really matters. And how important it is to have joy, beauty, humor, fun, laughter, friends, community, art—sex. I hope it just makes people appreciate more, because I feel that not only is trauma and pain greedy, but this fucking country is greedy. And we need to roll back some of what we expect to just land on our doorstep. And that’s really important—it’s a lesson that I had to teach myself. When you are such a glutton for whatever it is, food, sex, drugs, all the above, alcohol, or in my case adrenaline, you have to reel it back at one point and go, “To fill the void within only the self will suffice.” So learn to love yourself peeps, like I love myself, and then you’ll all be a little more like me, Lydia Lunch. And the war, it never fucking ends.