(Akashic Books)

www.akashicbooks.com

BY STEPHEN M. DEUSNER

Never trust anybody who proclaims they "just don't give a fuck." Especially if they do so in ALL CAPS. If that declaration were true, they wouldn't actually have to make it. Lydia Lunch does just that in the first piece in her latest book, Will Work for Drugs, which gathers short rants, ravings, polemics, demagogueries, autobiographies, interviews, and fictions published in small journals over the last few years.

Best known as the frontwoman for the No Wave act Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Lunch is one of many self-made women to emerge from the rundown New York of the late 1970s, with a cross-media approach that involves not only singing and writing, but filmmaking, photography, spoken-word, and performance art. For better or worse, she writes prose that shrieks from the page, brutally descriptive and pungently evocative. She's most compelling when tethered to even a loose narrative, as in "1967" and "The Beast," whose elusiveness suggests the haziness of either memory or narcotics. But mostly, Will Work for Drugs is full of rambling quasi-essays about how awesome New York was, how war is a cancer on society, how new mothers are always self-involved, and how Jerry Stahl is a fucking genius, goddammit.

These entries grate, not simply because her riffing becomes repetitive and not simply because her vitriol quickly grows comically hyperbolic (unintentionally so, I'm assuming), but because Lunch writes not to understand the world, but to make sure the world understands her. She really does give a fuck.