Teenage Jesus & the Jerks were an influential New York City No Wave music group of 1976-79 fronted by Lydia Lunch and James Chance, who later left the band after some conflict about their direction. Reputed to play ten-minute sets of thirty-second songs (though "The Closet" and "I woke up dreaming" extended to around three minutes and performances up to twenty), they sought to take music beyond what Lunch saw as the traditionalism of punk rock ("I thought punk was lousy Chuck Berry music amped up to play triple fast", she later commented). Their frenzied playing and Lunch's shrieked vocals gained them a renown quickly matching and even surpassing that of other No Wave bands such as DNA or the older Mars. The group left behind little more than a dozen complete recorded songs, most of the surviving titles being assembled in 1995 into an 18-minute career retrospective CD only slightly incorrectly titled Everything (though other stud

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