The Gits, Frenching the Bully
I first heard of Mia Zapata and The Gits a little more than a month ago, when National Public Radio’s Morning Edition used the singer’s 1993 rape and murder as the peg for a story on DNA evidence being the key to solving long-cold cases. (A man was arrested for her killing in January.)
It’s a strange way to come to music – you know you’re getting old when you’re spurred to buy records by NPR – but in this case, I’m grateful. The Gits only released one album before Zapata was killed, Frenching the Bully, but it’s quite amazing. The record is good – debuts are rarely great, and this has all the typical trappings – but it’s valuable as a document of how good Zapata was.
The band itself is a competent post-punk outfit with good hooks but nothing that stands out musically, and the other Gits suffer mostly by comparison to Zapata, a fiery force whose voice and manner would be well-suited to Seattle contemporary L7. She grabs each track and refuses to let go, singing with such conviction, ferocity, and expressiveness that the lyrics become irrelevant. The band becomes irrelevant.
I had a revelatory moment listening to “It All Dies Anyway” when the bass, drums, and guitar receded and all that was left was Zapata. That’s what I heard, anyway. The singer had elbowed her bandmates off the record, and that’s not something I’d ever heard before.
