Sounds From The Junkshop #58 - Lit

 

"It's no surprise to me, I am my own worst enemy, 'cos every now and then I kick the living shit outta me..." - Lit - My Own Worst Enemy

You may have noticed this from the recent Worst Albums feature but it's safe to say that I really didn't have a lot of time for most of the second wave of frat punk that started slithering across the Atlantic as the millennium approached. I mean, don't get me wrong, I used to like Green Day (before they decided that trying to become a punk U2 was a viable career option) and the Offspring were good for the odd belly laugh here and there but as groups like Blink 182, Sum 41, New Found Glory, the Bloodhound Gang et al started to make inroads into the charts, essentially peddling tenth rate clones of Dookie or Smash, the whole thing just started to get incredibly tiresome. To be honest, I never had any time for that sort of puerile grossout humour anyway...call me an old sourpuss if you really must but I just like my jokes in music to be...y'know...funny.

Los Angeles (where else?) residents Lit though were the exception to the rule. Similar to Buckcherry, they'd started up as a glam metal band in the early '90s before cutting their hair and going a bit more goofball. However, when their My Own Worst Enemy single crashed into the Top 20 in the summer of '99 it quickly became one of my go-to songs for the next few months. Let me put it this way - I was 20 years old at the time, had finally started to get my head into the fact that I was now a student and the utter headfuck of having to be responsible for myself in an environment where I could potentially be as irresponsible as I wanted and was trying to counter my shyness and insomnia with copious amounts of alcohol. Those two years were a bit of a rollercoaster ride of drunkenness to put it mildly and involved a fair bit of having to apologise to people I'd pissed off the night before after a few too many jars or waking up to discover I'd trashed my flat in a drunken stupor the night before. So...yeah, to say the line "Can we forget about the things I said when I was drunk? I didn't mean to call you that..." definitely resonated a fair bit with me back then.

I bought Lit's A Place In The Sun album shortly after getting the single and although it's got a few other good moments (Miserable's chorus of "You make me com...you make me complete...you make me completely miserable" always made me chuckle a bit), it was the obvious track that I kept coming back to and I think that was ultimately what kind of derailed their career afterwards as they just didn't really have other tunes that were anywhere near as good as that. I remember getting the second album Atomic and while it was pleasant enough (and gave them another minor hit over here with Over My Head), it kind of proved that the well was running dry a bit and sure enough when the frat-punk bandwagon crashed soon afterwards, the group were on a fast track back to obscurity.

To their credit, Lit have carried on plugging away ever since even surviving the tragic passing of drummer Allan Shellenberger from brain cancer in 2009. I remember reviewing their 2014 album The View From The Bottom and it was pretty much exactly what you'd want a Lit album to be - sunny harmonies, big riffs and cheerfulness without relying on the tawdry frat-punk humour that hobbled a lot of their counterparts in that scene at the time even if it was obvious it wasn't gonna change anyone's world apart from the die-hards who'd stuck with them throughout.

Similar to Bowling For Soup a year or two later, Lit were one of those rare goofball US punk bands who actually had decent enough tunes to make sure that they weren't characterised by just trying to be a musical version of South Park and they probably deserve commending for that. Although I was never what you'd call a rabid fan, My Own Worst Enemy will always perfectly capture a certain moment in my life for better or worse - the days of too much Jack Daniels and Newcastle Brown, trying (and mostly failing) to chat up stunning goth girls at rock clubs, getting drunk and trying to start up moshpits with your mates, it was all fun. Though if I'm honest, I'm kind of glad that it's two decades ago these days...

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