I am super excited to announce that in Spring 2016, The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Female Punk Band, a memoir about my days in Spitboy will be published. The book contains about eighteen separate pieces (a few you may have already read here on this blog). What follows is an exploration of Spitboy lyrics, an effort to explore the most important aspect of the band, what we actually stood for. I hope to write a few other brief pieces like this one — let me know what you think, as they won’t likely be as narrative as the previous Spitboy pieces.
Everyone in Spitboy wrote lyrics, but Adrienne and I wrote the bulk of them. After Spitboy was together for a couple of years, we realized that Adrienne tended to write songs that made the personal political, and that I wrote the overtly political ones. I wrote the lyrics for songs like “Motivated by Fear,” “Seriously,” “In Your Face,” “Ultimate Violations,” and “Wizened.”
To date, I believe “In Your Face” to be one of my best lyrics because I was able to able to use the structure of the lines to help me say what I wanted to say, and in very few words, about how the words people choose tend to illustrate the way they think, and how the way that they think is often powerfully influenced by media images, including the widespread acceptance of (an enthusiasm for) using women’s bodies to sell products.
I think that I wrote the guitar riff too, though I could never play bar chords. Karin would take any riffs that I wrote at home on my acoustic guitar and turn them into searing power chords.
In Your Face
(chorus)
It’s in you face.
It’s on your mind.
Out of your mouth
It’s what you say
The words you choose
The way you think
On television
On your mind
On billboards
On your mind
In magazines
On your mind
(chorus)
It’s in you face.
It’s on your mind.
Out of your mouth
It’s what you say
The words you choose
The way you think
The images
The pretty faces
Sell sex
The sexual connotations
Sell sex
The sexual objectification
Sell sex
The sexual exploitation
Who’s to blame?
Who do you point the finger at?
Who’s to blame?
Who do you point the finger at?
Sell sex
The sexual connotations
Sell sex
The sexual objectification
The images
The pretty faces
Sell sex
Don’t buy it!
I’ve never been a fan of rhyming lyrics, but I did use a lot of repetition and parallel structure. The rhyming that does take place here was not on purpose, but it was convenient, and Adrienne’s vocal on “In Your Face” on the True Self Revealed LP is brilliant.
I was only like twenty-one or twenty-two when I wrote this song.