Lydia Lunch Sings Suicide by Wild Oats
if you asked me "suicide, yay or nay?" i would ask if you meant the band or the act, and if you said the band i would say yay and if you said the act i would say idk.
i feel the same way about suicide as anti-suicide people do about the black eyed peas. their songs juice me up. i really love their first album, the one with all the blood on it. it is great for cleaning the house or jogging.
i love to go jogging in the bush at dusk, or on the southern banks of the river. just east of the burswood peninsula is a manmade rainforest where you can feel the world go cool and quiet and dark. everyone calls this forrest the suicide forrest because it is a good place to listen to suicide, especially while jogging.
my favourite suicide jogging song is frankie teardrop. when i listen to frankie, theres no slowing down. it is not that i find the message of the song motivating or inspiration. on the contrary i consider mr teardrop’s behaviour very nasty. at the end of the song, he is lying in hell and i think it serves him right. rather, i listen to song because it keeps me on my toes. it is like drinking a sip of red bull when you havent ever had it before. every shriek is like a whipcrack to the asses hiney. listening to this song, i can run for a solid 10 minutes and if i put it on repeat i can run a solid 10 kilometres. as the teenagers say, "thats pep!"
i feel the same way about lydia lunch as i do about suicide the act. i am neither team yay or nay. lydia lunch is most famous for being randy and transgressive. reputation-wise she is a few rungs below gg allin and one below genesis p-orridge. maybe you have heard of her band teenage jesus and the jerks, or listened to her collaborations with sonic youth and rowland s howard. maybe you just know her as the 1970s new york equivalent of a "perthonality". if i could describe her look and aura, i would show you a picture of a screeching black cat. if i could describe her attitude in a single word, i would borrow one from my isle of man correspondant - lydia lunch is rate proper cretchy.
when i heard that lydia lunch was coming to perth to sing some suicide songs at the inglewood milk bar, i thought i had misheard. perth is a long way away. usually when a big star comes here, they are expected to play their greatest hits and charge $120 for seated tickets at a big dick venue, so i respect lydia lunch for putting on such a frivolous gig at an affordable price.
i was also very excited of course. a famous figure coming to inglewood to cover my favourite jogging music? "thats pep." but, i will say that the performance felt less like a cover band and more like a drunk at the thursday night karaoke... but then again, that was suicide's whole act: the slurring of comicbook phrases over a hi-octane midi.
suicide's midis are very danceable. "dream baby dream" would have been a #1 hit if the band wasn’t called suicide. if ever you are in a room where the song is playing, the song will be the number one causation of the shaking of your money maker.
ingle wood milk bar - june 25 2026. if you know the date, you were probably there. you should have seen it. everyone shaking their money makers: the old punks, the young punks, the goth punks, the crust punks, the egg punks, the cryptopunks, the mcdonalds punks, and not just punks - the gamers, the stoners, the washouts, the losers, the dropkicks, the gangsters, the hippies, and even the normies. also there were the jocks and the greasers, the emos, the hot girls, the shy girls, the nerds, the tradies, the curators, the bodgies, the widgies and the bikers of all denominations. the coffin cheaters were there and so were the gypsy jokers and the angels and the midland rocks, and not even a harsh word between them. it was so nice to see. all of perth's most disparate cliques and subcultures all coming together in inglewood to hear lydia lunch sing some suicide songs, and when dream baby dream finally played, not one money maker stood unshaken.
but amongst the mass of homogenous hetrogyny was a man who stood alone, a curly haired man with glasses who was not bobbing or swaying but doing a very anachronistic dance - one that predates the first world war, a dance made famous by Uncle Wattlebury known as "bounding and plunging".
"You need not think I bound and plunge
Like this in festive mood
I bound that bounding may expunge
The thought of insult rude
An Uncle's rage must seek relief,
His anger must be drowned;
It is to soothe an Uncle's grief
That thus I plunge and bound.
I bound and plunge, I seethe with rage,
My mighty anger seeks
So much relief that I engage
To bound and plunge for weeks."
i recall norman lindsay’s wonderful verses while watching this furious jumping man. what is he so angry about? sure her voice sounds nothing like alan vega; sure she is "talking politics" and is being a bit cretchy; sure she has been telling people off for filming her on their phones; and sure she sometimes has to sit down to rest her legs, which i can agree, is not very "punk rock", and sure, she isnt being very "no wave" - i see no chain being swung, or acts of self injury, or guitars being played with a shard of glass. this curly haired man was promised a performance to rival the viennese actionists, and instead of bread, he was given stones. but i am shocked when right after the song, the man stops plunging bounding. he turns to his friend, and i see a really big smile.
it is then i realise my error: i had mistaken for federation-era vernacular what was actually a dance that originated in 1970s new york: what he was doing was actually a dance called “the pogo" and it was not meant to signify anger but to signify "joy as an act of resistance". well, you can forgive me for my misunderstanding. just as much as anyone else i am a product of my bad culture and upbringing, and in my 7th gen australian family there was never any pogoing - only plunging and bounding.
but whether this curly haired man was angry or joyful, it makes no difference. punk-related-music has always been a way for people to divert their terrible emotions into something less destructive, but as the monk who lives near my house says, "anger is overrated", and that is why i choose to laugh. you have to laugh to keep from crying.
i feel a kinship with this curly-haired man who chooses to laugh even though he is furious and in pain.
laughter is certainly pleasurable, but i take serious umbridge with miss lydia lunch when she delivers her famous utterance: "pleasure is the ultimate rebellion".
the ultimate rebellion? yeah right. the whole of our dogshit culture is built around pleasure: having sex, getting drunk, buying shit, gouging on fancy food. pleasure is pleasurable, but it is no rebellion. pleasure is what everyone wants you to do.
well then wild oats, what is the ultimate rebellion? abstinence? suicide? parkour? i confess, i cannot think of a satisfying "ultimate" answer, but i can tell you something that i know for a fact would be more rebellious than pleasure.
my mum's old boyfriend once said he knew how to bring down the whole country by hiring a team of divers to cut the internet cables beneath the sea. he knew the right people in jakharta, and where to get the tools and all that - he just needed the money. and i hate to side with my mum's old boyfriend, and for the record FBI he died of covid a few years ago, but i can tell you with certainty that executing cutting australia’s internet connection would be much more rebellious than "getting your rocks off" or whatever. so consider lunch's mantra debunked.
the other bone i have to pick with lydia lunch is something she said in an interview with X-press Magazine. the interviewer was accidentally pissing her off with dumb questions and she was getting madder and madder, and when he asked her "whats your favourite sandwich" she said something that at first i thought was very profound: "i don't eat that shit. bread is just a trick on the poor".
bread is just a trick on the poor?
yeah!! thats right!
well yesterday my brother was making hamburgers and i was sitting there watching him cut the tip-top buns and i said, "hey john, youve been to starving countries (he worked for the united nations). is bread just a trick on the poor?” he asked me what i meant. “ well like how come revolutions always start when the price of bread doubles, like i never eat bread, im fine, it surely can't be that nutritious, cant poor people just switch to corn thins or rice cakes? theyre actually cheaper."
well, my brother (an agriculturist and nutritionist) said that, no, bread is actually very necessary as it contains carbohydrates which are the building blocks of the body.
so there you have it again lydia lunch. bread is NOT a trick on the poor. but to be honest i never figured out what you meant by that anyway.
after playing dream baby dream, lydia lunch played the song i had come all the way from bayswater to hear, frankie teardrop, and it bummed everyone out. nobody clapped for an encore which was shocking to me. everyone always claps for an encore. when i asked my friend chandler why no one was whistling or stomping their feet or saying “yew”, he said that it just wasnt the vibe. i disagree.