Still Burning

Lydia Lunch has spent forty-five years being exactly herself — confrontational, articulate, furious. Emerging from the No Wave scene in New York in the late 1970s, she has worked as musician, poet, spoken word artist, filmmaker, and author, always returning to the same concerns: power, violation, survival, and the body as political territory.

Still Burning, from 1997, is characteristic Lunch: spare blues over which she delivers text that operates simultaneously as autobiography, manifesto, and indictment. The music serves the words, and the words are unsparing.

Lunch remains active, touring and recording. Her early work with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks remains foundational to the No Wave canon.