#spitboy

a red panda; ink and watercolor

last six day’s listening:

sun urchins - personal shell ep

spitboy - body of work 1990-1995

stricken for catherine - on the dark

pearl jam - ten

boogie down productions - by all means necessary

steve earle - jeffey jeff

defiance, ohio - the great depression

Every Record I Own - Day 740: Los Crudos / Spitboy Viviendo Asperamente - Roughly Living

Pardon the gap between posts, but I was on tour in Europe for the last six weeks, and though I always intend to keep up with this blog while I’m traveling, it’s hard to find a quiet moment to listen to revisit these records, let alone come up with anything meaningful to say about them. 

It’s especially difficult to find words for a record like Viviendo Asperamente - Roughly Living, a split LP by two bands that loomed large in the DIY hardcore scene of the early/mid-’90s. While the release of this album felt like a major event in my preferred corner of the underground, it isn’t a record that I’ve revisited much in the last twenty-something years. 

Los Crudos were---and continue to be---legends of hardcore. Their music was fast and furious, but what truly set them apart was that they sang entirely in Spanish, and their lyrics focused on issues faced by the Latinx community in the United States. Their records were hard to come by back in the early ‘90s, and this relatively high profile release by Ebullition Records was one of the rare offerings by the band that was widely distributed outside of the band’s base of Chicago. 

Spitboy were revered participants in the anarcho-punk scene---a Bay Area institution of fiery feminism and distinct voices in a realm that was disproportionately male. While their earlier material veered towards scrappy four-chord barked anthems, their tracks on Roughly Living had a noisier, more dynamic, and less traditionally “punk” approach. Abetted by the recording expertise of Steve Albini, Spitboy’s half of the LP was easily my favorite material  of their discography---an emotionally turbulent and sonically invigorating swan song for the quartet. 

I have a lot of feelings about this record, though very few of those feelings are bound up in the actual music. I remember ordering this LP my freshman year of college. The album felt like a big deal at the time, and I distinctly remember having this moment of realization as an 18-year-old living on my own that I didn’t need to go through my parents to order records through the mail, like I’d had to do in high school. I had my own bank account and my own checkbook. Granted, I didn’t have much money, but Ebullition releases were cheap. I put an order in from one of their advertisements in the label’s HeartattaCk zine, waited patiently for three weeks, and got a box delivered to my dorm room. It was such a distinct period in my life: that first frivolous purchase made as an adult. And it was a distinct period in the world of hardcore: the last year or two of the pre-internet world where if you wanted to order a record, you still had to do it through snail mail with an enclosed check. 

In the liner notes, Billie Joe recounts a time he saw Spitboy dedicate a song "to all the sexist fucking assholes in the room." Hostility ensued, but as Billie Joe says, "I reckon it takes hostility to create change. That’s what Spitboy’s music represents, four women in their twenties, fueled by their passion and ethics to deliver a mission statement for change not only in the scene but also the world at large."

"They were one of those bands that were a prequel to what the future was becoming," he adds. "Feminism, human rights, animal rights, environmental protection, gender issues... Spitboy was singing about these issues 30 fucking years ago. I’m so grateful to have witnessed it."

Spitboy, Isolation Burns from the Spitboy CD (1994).