Why is The Gits’ Frenching the Bully on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
Mia Zapata’s vocals matched with urgent, raucous, punky Seattle grunge energy.
What does The Gits’ Frenching the Bully mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
I was introduced to The Gits by way of a great live version of “Second Skin” on the Hyped! documentary soundtrack. We’ll be getting to that album down the line, but suffice to say that I was immediately struck by the raw passion of lead singer Mia Zapata’s vocals, the urgent raucous punky Seattle grunge energy of the band, calibrated with legit musical dynamics and sensibilities. The studio version on Frenching the Bully does a great job of capturing the same vibe.
I’m always a sucker for the little arpeggio riff that kicks off “Another Shot of Whiskey,” and the song’s a blast of barroom energy from there.
In case it’s not obvious by now, this is not a G rated album, as evidenced by the wild punk of “Here’s To Your F—” that you could see bands ranging from Guns n’ Roses to L7 covering quite ably.
This album also sounds like
The Gits’ closest cousins would likely be L7, but other fury-filled punk and grunge bands with female lead singers should be mentioned here: The Distillers, Hole, Joan Jett, Babes in Toyland, and perhaps even the Pretenders.
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to The Gits’ Frenching the Bully
Any mention of The Gits warrants the calling out of Mia Zapata’s tragic murder in Seattle in 1993. Stemming from the incident:
…[F]riends created a self-defense group called Home Alive. Home Alive organized benefit concerts and released albums with the participation of many bands, including Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Heart, and the Presidents of the United States of America.[1] Joan Jett also recorded an album with the surviving members of the Gits called Evil Stig (“Gits Live” backwards). The Home Alive group’s instructors offered a range of courses, from anger management and use of pepper spray to the martial arts.[18]
Zapata’s murderer, Jesus Mezquia, was convicted and finally died in prison in Washington state in the spring of 2021.
Personal stuff that’s somehow related to The Gits’ Frenching the Bully
On a summer break from college and several years before I heard of the band The Gits, I didn’t want to wile away my time at my parents’ house on Long Island and so instead made the fateful decision to become a sleepaway camp counselor for the first (and last) time.
It’s one of those experiences that I recall being fairly unhappy much of the time (read = I’m not a super outdoorsy person and this place was rustic on rustic, dig?) but looking back, there are some pretty terrific memories.
The camp was called Surprise Lake Camp, and rumor had it that the original Friday the 13th movie was filmed there. It took me until this writing to do some investigating (read = about 30 solid seconds of googling) and alas, this seems not to be the case.
Many of the camp counselors met each other as toddlers or thereabouts as camp attendees, so their cliques were impenetrable. Luckily, I friended up with a group of new counselors who had for reasons that escape me flown over from England for the summer.
And what really helped my social status was that I had a car. After having zero air conditioning in the humid summer low mountains north of New York City for many days on end, the pure bliss of being able to get to a McDonald’s that was about 15 minutes away is… well, it’s blissful. And it cracked me up to no end that my British friends were in awe of the foreign (to them) concept of free refills.
One Brit I worked with hailed from Manchester and therefore had the characteristic accent from that northern English city. I loved listening to him while playing soccer with the kids: anytime someone lost the ball or had something unfortunate happen, he’d always announce: hard luck, hard luck!
Nearly everything else to him was referred to as a git or, more precisely, a bloody git or bleeding git. There was a lot of talk of gits in states of mortal peril from this bloke is what I’m saying.
I didn’t know him all that well at the time, but one day I got up the courage to ask him exactly what a git is.
He paused a moment and then said decisively, “Something not worth s—.”
Nothing more punk rock than that.
Some stats & info about The Gits – Frenching the Bully
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Punk Rock, Punk, Grunge, Rock, Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Seattle Bands, Hard Rock
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Frenching the Bully originally released? 1992
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #980 out of 1,000
The Gits’ Frenching the Bully on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective take on what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.