Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were an influential post-punk group from New Yo… Read Full Bio ↴Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were an influential post-punk group from New York City, New York, United States, who formed part of the city's No Wave movement. Founded by one-time CBGBs waitress Lydia Lunch and saxophonist James Chance, the group was active from 1976 to 1979, releasing only a handful of singles.

Chance eventually left to form The Contortions and pursue his own equally abrasive musical direction. Both groups were featured on the seminal "No New York" LP, a showcase of the early No Wave scene compiled and produced by Brian Eno.

Infamous for playing ten-minute sets filled with thirty-second songs, they sought to take music beyond what Lunch saw as the traditionalism of punk rock. The group left behind little more than a dozen complete recorded songs with most of the surviving titles collected on the 18-minute career retrospective CD titled "Everything". However other studio versions of several songs exist alongside a few live recordings.

Lunch and Chance both went on to become cult figures of the New York underground music scene and the group has been cited as a significant influence on subsequent post-punk groups such as Sonic Youth and The Istics.

The band reunited in 2008 for a series of performances, with Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore. The band continued to perform without Moore throughout 2009, including dates in Canada.

Burning Rubber
Teenage Jesus and the Jerks Lyrics

Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴

The leaves are dead
The door is always closed
The garbage screams at my feet
I just wanna be alone

The sand is washed away
The sea it must ate it
The cement glows grey

I begin to like it

The dishes are cracked
Forks are plastic

The food is in cellophane
And I puke elastic

Overall Meaning

The lyrics to Teenage Jesus and the Jerks' "Burning Rubber" are expressive of isolation and disenchantment. The opening lines - "The leaves are dead / The door is always closed" - creates an image of a desolate and uninhabited space. The following line, "The garbage screams at my feet," could be interpreted as a metaphor for the harsh reality facing the singer. The lyrics convey a sense of misery and a desire to be left alone.

The following lines reinforce this sense of detachment and wildness. The sand being washed away by the sea and the grey cement glowing suggests a disenchanted and lifeless world where even nature is corrupted. The line "I begin to like it" may be interpreted as the singer finally accepting the way things are in their life.

The final lines of the verse - "The dishes are cracked / Forks are plastic / The food is in cellophane / And I puke elastic" - are starkly disillusioned. The cheap, disposable nature of the utensils highlights a degraded and disposable world. The final line of the verse, "And I puke elastic," generates a grotesque image that encapsulates the overall mood of "Burning Rubber."

Line by Line Meaning

The leaves are dead
The environment around me is bleak and lifeless.

The door is always closed
I feel shut out and isolated from the world around me.

The garbage screams at my feet
I am surrounded by filth and refuse which adds to my overwhelming feelings of despair.

I just wanna be alone
I crave solitude and detachment from others as a means of coping with my emotional turmoil.

The sand is washed away
The natural beauty of my surroundings is eroding away or disintegrating.

The sea it must ate it
The natural forces of the ocean have taken away the sand, eroding my sense of stability.

The cement glows grey
The artificial and man-made world seeps into my consciousness, creating a sense of lifelessness and bleakness.

I begin to like it
Despite the bleakness of my surroundings, I begin to embrace and even enjoy the emptiness and starkness of it all.

The dishes are cracked
The material possessions in my life are in a state of disrepair or brokenness, reflecting the state of my own emotional well-being.

Forks are plastic
The common and mundane objects around me are cheap and disposable, reflecting a sense of impermanence.

The food is in cellophane
Even the food that sustains me is packaged in synthetic materials, further emphasizing the artificiality of my surroundings.

And I puke elastic
My experiences and emotions are so overwhelming that they manifest themselves physically, resulting in a sense of nausea and discomfort.

Contributed by Christopher T. Suggest a correction in the comments below.

To comment on or correct specific content, highlight it

TRACKS