Girls gone wild

What a sad state of affairs that now tales of girls going wild tend to be about drunk college juniors baring their perma-tanned flesh during spring break. Let's go back instead to the darker times of the 1980s and 90s…

Coincidentally I just read back to back books by Lydia Lunch (Paradoxia—A Predator's Diary) and Lisa Crystal Carver (Drugs Are Nice—A Post-Punk Memoir), in which they describe what it really means to go wild when you're a creative girl who's had a pretty screwed-up childhood. Lunch's book is mostly about her sexual adventures, which disappointed me a bit because I wanted more about her musical adventures. But the writing is extraordinary, sucking you up in a churning vortex of sex and violence, limned with New York nights in abandoned Tribeca buildings, pick-ups of horny Puerto Rican teenagers on the 6 train, tricks with frustrated men and morning shifts in titty bars.

Carver's book does deal with the music she recorded as Suckdog and her creating the influential zine Rollerderby, along with her misadventures with the two pretty unstable guys she had long relationships with—which shouldn't come as a surprise from someone who had a teenage crush on GG Allin. First, there was French performance artist (for lack of a better word) Jean-Louis Costes; then, all-American extremist and 60s pop revisionist Boyd Rice—also, as it turns out, a kinda pathetic, alcoholic mama's boy, which puts a bit of a damper on his carefully constructed image as a natty provocateur and author of such albums as Music Martinis and Misanthropy.

Both Lunch and Carver come across as completely idiosyncratic and remarkably strong-willed. It's really hard not to think that if they had been guys, their rollercoaster adventures would be legendary and they'd be invited to do readings and happenings at the Guggenheim. As it is, Lunch has earned some respect but remains a relatively marginal artist, and Carver is seen as a bit of a joke, even though her influence on a certain white-trash-aesthetic revivalism, the birth of confessional zine-writing and no-limit rock & roll performance is, for better or for worse, beyond question.