There are probably some people who will never be able to get down with a song called "Shit on Me." Their loss.In the 1980s, when Austin, Texas was not yet the East Coast's collective crush object, and its "weirdness" was in no danger, it was home to America's #1 and #2 best gay hardcore bands: The Dicks and The Big Boys (with MDC occupying an ambiguous third-place, not only because they were not as gay, but also because MDC is kind of bad). The Big Boys had a sunny outlook on life, exemplified in songs like "Fun Fun Fun," "We're Not in it to Lose," and "I Do Care;" The Dicks, on the other hand, were… seedy, dank, and given to the kind of raunchy, fecal spectacle featured on "Shit on Me." Stylistically, The Big Boys were funky and versatile and could rhythmically turn on a dime, whereas The Dicks sounded like they had never mastered the faster tempos of hardcore, and were at their best and scariest when they could jam out on a strutting, bluesy groove.
"Shit on Me" is one of the highlights of Live at Raul's, a live split album between these two bands(that was subsequently reissued in the worst possible vinyl format, the double 7"). Raw, ineptly bashed-out, and drowned in bar-band guitar noodling, "Shit on Me" is ridiculously catchy, dirty, and quintessentially punk. As far away from the morbid ecological musings of Tragedy and the weight-lifting anthems of Youth of Today as one can get, here,The Dicks speak for the damnés de la terre—the utterly degraded—and sing the unconquerable human spirit. But am I making too much of this? As the song lurches into the slow, chunky ranting at which The Dicks so excel, the lyric "shit on me" changes imperceptibly from a descriptive lament into a defiant, Caliban-esque gesture of embracing the filth with which society identifies you. Not that singer Gary Floyd needed to prove to anyone that he "knows how to curse."Finally, this is a great song because it returns subversiveness to several things that have long since "lost their edge": the recent Republican-friendly gay marriage bill in New York probably would not have taken as its anthem any song with the shouted lyrics "I'm a child of sodomy!" But the song and band must have stuck out even within their subcultural enclave. In the midst of 1980s hardcore's maxim that "loud fast rules," there is something especially unnerving and bitingly aggressive about (what is, at essence) such an unabashed, tuneful pop song being the medium for all of this blasphemous filth. The Dicks make the hyper-aggressive clamor and indecipherable (but predictable) rage of suburban thrash seem positively tame and family-friendly by comparison.Read more of Ben's smarty-pants punk reviews at his blog.