Rotations

-- Bob Weinberg

Lydia Lunch and Exene Cervenka
Rude Hieroglyphics
(Ryko)

Allen Tate, the distinguished poet and scholar, is credited with the following wise dictum: "Out of arguments with ourselves we make poetry. Out of arguments with others we make rhetoric."

By this standard, Exene Cervenka and Lydia Lunch are plainly not poets. Over the course of this hourlong spoken-word rant, recorded just up the road in Orlando, these two grumpy punkettes say precious little about their own foibles while spewing scads of scalding invective at the bogeymen of our epoch: big bidness, the CIA, the Vatican, lawyers, doctors, and, lest we forget, O.J. Simpson. The targets may be predictable and the tone relentlessly strident, but the actual verse on this disc is quite accomplished. Both Cervenka and Lunch are exuberant storytellers, able to couch their complaints in surprisingly eloquent outbursts.

One can hardly quibble with Cervenka's assessment of the current cultural vibe: "We're really lazy and we're all in denial," she mutters. "We're watching everyone else's trial and pretending they won't ever come for us." Her take on Catholicism's historical legacy is equally deft: "They took all their statues, all their religion, they took everything that meant something and burnt it or buried it or stuck it down in the basement of the Vatican."

Lunch favors a more in-your-face style. She fantasizes, for instance, about stalking O.J., physically abusing him, forcing him to get breast implants, then slashing these to ribbons. One of the bright spots of the evening is Lunch's vicious response to a would-be heckler. "If you got something to say, wait till we're done, you big-mouth-small-dick-no-brain motherfucker," she barks, to wild applause.

It's doubtful the tandem's liberal agenda would go over quite as well in Miami. See, they seem to have this thing for Fidel Castro. "He's way too fucking cool for the CIA," Cervenka gushes at one point. "I love that man!" Not exactly deeply researched commentary. But then the joy of spoken word lies in its linguistic vibrance, and on this count Lunch and Cervenka rarely disappoint. You may not agree with what they're saying, but you'll be compelled to listen.

-- Steven Almond