Creeping Death March of 1984:

Lydia Lunch’s IN LIMBO and Side B of Black Flag’s MY WAR

One of the most counterintuitive things to punk rock would be going slow, but punk rock wasn’t built on just speed and aggression. Look back at one of punk’s main architects, The Stooges, particularly the Fun House album. It’s primarily mid-tempo rockers with a long, slow, bluesy burner that gives way to a B-side full of free-jazz freakouts and proto-punk madness. Or how about the first Velvet Underground album with Nico, which opens with the delicate “Sunday Morning” and proceeds to wind its way through artsy proto-punk and avant-garde dirges. The speed came later, like with the Ramones, and then bands like Bad Brains went faster to show them up. Before long, it was ‘loud fast rules.’

In the early 80s, the hardcore band to beat was Black Flag. The band had been around since 1976 and had quickly burned through three lead singers before recruiting Washington, DC native Henry Rollins. With the lineup of founder/guitarist Greg Ginn, bassist Chuck Dukowski, former lead singer and second guitarist Dez Cadena, and iconic punk drummer Robo, they unleashed in 1981 their debut full-length LP, Damaged, one of the most important and influential hardcore punk albums of all time. The album whipped and snarled and thrashed. But then publicly Black Flag went nearly silent for three years due to a bad business deal with Unicorn Records, and the band wasn’t legally allowed to record. When they finally re-emerged with the first of four albums they would release throughout 1984, things had changed.

On the other side of the country, in New York City, where punk had been thriving since the late 60s, Lydia Lunch had spent years cultivating an aggressive and confrontational body of work; first with her seminal No-Wave band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and later as a solo artist, recording a number of musical projects, as well as doing spoken-word performances, film appearances, and books. From the word go, Lunch was different. In 1977 the New York Dolls were gone, but their guitarist, Johnny Thunders, already had his solo band, The Heartbreakers; Television and Patti Smith were mixing dramatic rock and roll with Arthur Rimbaud-like poetry; Richard Hell had left Television and formed The Voidoids; The Ramones were a Bowery buzzsaw; and Blondie was taking off with an addictive power-pop sound. Then there was Teenage Jesus (along with No-Wave progenitors Mars, DNA, and The Contortions), who used the combo of guitars, bass and drums to turn rock and roll inside out. Johnny Thunders was out there singing “Going Steady,” and wasn’t a million miles from anything the early Rolling Stones had recorded. Teenage Jesus couldn’t have been bothered with chord progressions — it was an attack. The music was like a car in a drive-by shooting — Lydia’s words were the bullets. This was music as revolt. The Sex Pistols may have claimed to want to destroy rock and roll, but compared to Teenage Jesus, they were just Rod Stewart with bad breath.

With every single and EP they released, Black Flag grew, which isn’t something you could say about every punk band. Their debut single/EP, Nervous Breakdown, with original lead singer and future Circle Jerks frontman Keith Morris, is everything good about rock and roll — it’s aggressive, fun, speaks to the outsider, and 100% lacks any bullshit. The sound beefed up with their next EP, Jealous Again, with Ron Reyes on vocals. And then with songs like “Six Pack,” “Damaged I,” “Machine” and “American Waste,” with Dez on vocals, the musicality became a little more complicated, a little more ambitious, and there was a darker, psychological edge. Damaged’s Side A was a perfect amalgamation of everything that Black Flag had done before: short, anthemic hardcore punk, with the added punch of Dez’s additional guitar and the physicality of Rollins’ vocal performances. Side B was pure psychodrama. “Depression,” “Room 13,” “Damaged II,” “Padded Cell,” “No More,” “Life of Pain” and “Damaged I” were scary testaments to loneliness, pain and isolation. Even though Rollins had contributed no lyrics to this album, he embodied every word, singing as if possessed by them. Side A was the past, Side B was the future, and the next stop for Flag was their second LP, My War.

Lunch’s 1980 debut solo LP, Queen of Siam, wasn’t a million miles away from Teenage Jesus, but it added a sort of death jazz to the sound, which made it all the more compelling and dramatic. Following that, 13.13 was a more muscular, denser record, closer to a doom-laden post-punk sound. In 1982 she collaborated with former and current Sonic Youth members Thurston Moore, Richard Edson and Jim Sclavunos, as well as pianist Kristian Hoffman and guitarist Pat Place, to record the lurching, howling In Limbo, her most textured and at times delicate album to date. For whatever reason, the album didn’t come out until 1984, when Doublevision released it.

1984 feels like such a significant year for a number of reasons. First and foremost, there’s the dystopian ‘Big Brother is watching’ hellscape of George Orwell’s novel. It’s also the year that hack actor and moral majority puppet Ronald Reagan won re-election, marking the second half of eight years that would have hideous ramifications for America and the world, to this day. In pop music, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Prince all released landmark albums; while in the alternative/punk world, Husker Du and Minutemen released dueling double albums (Zen Arcade and Double Nickels on the Dime respectively), The Replacements released Let It Be, and REM released Reckoning. None of those albums hold a candle to Black Flag’s My War, though. Opening with the title track, a powerhouse anthem of paranoid distrust, the A-Side barrels through six tracks of Stooges-esque hardcore with touches of heavy metal guitar. The band was down to three members, having lost Cadena and Robo and fired Dukowski. Ginn played both guitar and bass, while Bill Stevenson, from Descendants, took over on drums. Rollins was left to record the vocals in many overnight sessions with producer Spot, where the two experimented with pushing Rollins’ performance in punishing hours-long sessions. This really pays off on the B-Side, where the psychodrama of Damaged’s flipside blooms into a full-on trilogy of inward terror with the songs “Nothing Left Inside,” “Three Nights” and “Scream.” Musically, the band tipped its hat towards the slow “doom metal” of early Black Sabbath and Flag contemporaries Saint Vitus, who doubled as SST labelmates and touring partners. My War was certainly a catalyst and inspiration for later doom, sludge and grunge bands, so the faster, louder crowd could go pound sand.

Anyone who loves the B-Side of My War should hear In Limbo. As performers and as writers, Henry Rollins and Lydia Lunch often paralleled one another in psychological deep dives into existential horror. Not horror like with The Misfits; more Abel Ferrara, as opposed to Friday the 13th — streetwise and grounded. The horror didn’t have to come from beneath the sea or outer space, because there was more than enough to go around from within or from humanity itself. Strangers and lovers alike were the monsters, the enemy.

There is an inconsistency within My War stemming from the fact that these were songs written for a five-piece band, not a four-piece; and the fact that there are three dramatic moods to the album that butt up against one another, and would have perhaps been easier to hear had the sequence of the album been altered. The first five tracks, “My War,” “Can’t Decide,” “Beat My Head Against the Wall,” “I Love You” and “Forever Time”, are prototypical Black Flag tracks. The only things separating them from the Damaged tracks are their length and their solos. The structures are a little fuller, but there’s no mistaking that it’s the same band. Then comes track six, “Swinging Man,” which closes Side A. It stands as the first Black Flag psych-freakout/poetry track. (The band would return to this experimentation with “Armageddon Man,” which closes Side A of Family Man, later that same year.) Then Side B is the third mood: three excruciatingly slow, long tracks. I’ve written at length (check out my book Thirsty and Miserable: A Critical Analysis of the Music of Black Flag, St Rooster Books, 2020) about how much My War means to me and how much I enjoy and admire Side B, but I can acknowledge the frustration of the casual listener or the average punk fan that simply finds that block of disillusioned sludge impenetrable. Perhaps if those three tracks had been spread out between the faster songs, there would have been less of a backlash against the album? There are moments across Flag’s entire history where they could have made more palatable decisions, more commercial decisions; but without Ginn’s uncompromising vision, would Black Flag even be any good? I think their willingness to stretch beyond the conventions of punk and rock in general, and reach for heights that may have been out of reach — always leaning into the new, willing themselves into evolution — is one of the things that make them such a special band. For better or worse, nothing Flag recorded/released post My War compares, and that includes the spoken-word and instrumental albums. They never outwardly challenged or lashed out at the listener, the way Side B does, again.

In Limbo lacks any inconsistencies that would make anyone question track sequencing. It arrives as a fully formed piece of art, a singular statement. Lunch wrote nearly all the lyrics and Thurston Moore wrote nearly all the music, save for one composition by Rowland S Howard (“Still Burning”), who worked with Lunch on other projects (notably their collaborative album Shotgun Wedding, which features amazing covers of Jeremy Gluck and Mick Taylor’s “Burning Skulls” and Alice Cooper’s “Black JuJu”). In Limbo is a spooky album of urban love and loss, hot anger and passion in a cold, disparate cityscape. The rhythms are a lumbering drunk on a winter night, while guitars and saxophone are the voices of demons, real or imagined. Lunch is a noire heroine, putting the fatal in femme fatale, tearing doors off their hinges. In Limbo is a whole aural horror movie of emotion, barely more than half an hour long, but still feeling like a complete LP rather than a mere EP.

Whatever these two albums meant in 1984, they influenced my personal writing when I got my hands on them in the mid 90s. They came to me during a period when I was still tearing through the Beats, and to me, Black Flag, Henry Rollins and Lydia Lunch were the true inheritors and perfectionists of Kerouac’s Be-Bop-influenced stream-of-consciousness writing. Black Flag and Lydia Lunch recorded the best Jazz music outside of John Zorn in the 80s. They created music for me to blast all night in a sparse, lonely apartment, while I banged out short vignettes and poetry on an old word processor. My punk rock, my existential dread, and aggression against depression. My little psychodramas.

In 1995, Atavistic re-released In Limbo on CD with Lunch’s follow up instrumental album, The Drowning of Lucy Hamilton, as Drowning in Limbo. I don’t prefer this set. Drowning is a fine album, but I think putting them together dilutes the purity and individuality of each project. But, then again, finding Lunch’s older albums on physical media these days isn’t easy, and can get pricey on the secondary market. So I highly recommend following her on Bandcamp, as it’s the only streaming platform where you can legally get all her albums. While you’re there, check out her spoken-word set, Crimes Against Nature, which originally came out as a 3-CD set, and was my first exposure to Lunch, after Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ’69.” That album is a masterclass in transgressive writing. There are moments that really make me squirm and lean away from the speakers, because of the rawness of the material and the visceral delivery.