Jordan N. Mamone

Lydia Lunch is a renaissance woman from hell. In her nearly 40 years as a professional provocateur, she’s evolved from a punk-era enfant terrible into an acid-tongued cultural critic, a postfeminist darling and the world’s least-expected cookbook author. En route, she starred in smutty underground films, wrote plays with Nick Cave and imbued everything from spoken-word workshops to Sonic Youth with her inimitable amalgam of sex and snarl. It’s easy to forget she’s also a ferociously precise, wholly unconventional slide guitarist. That’s the side you’ll see when Lunch revives Teenage Jesus and the Jerks this week. In the late ’70s, her No Wave trio announced its arrival by caterwauling all over Brian Eno’s scene-christening No New York compilation and specialized in 10-minute gigs full of tight, minimalist severity: Bradley Field monotonously pounded a single drum and one cymbal, while Lunch wrenched treble shrieks from her instrument and wailed about orphans running through bloody snow. Now she and a pair of recent recruits, bassist Weasel Walter and percussionist Tim Dahl, return to herald Live 1977–1979, an expertly curated retrospective LP for electronic musician Nicolas Jaar’s label, Other People. From her provisional home in Barcelona, the East Village demigoddess recalls her sordid yet storied adolescence. Why did you play such short sets back then?How long do you need to punch somebody in the face? What inspired all the misery and degradation in the lyrics?The distress