Union 13

East Los Presents (Epitaph)
by Austin Nash

¡Que ruido! Have you ever flown into Los Angeles? Aside from the mountain that peaks through the clouds to the north (Magic Mountain, I think), it’s pretty Goddamned gray and vast and low. Personally, I thought I was seeing some ancient burned-out ruins of a society gone wrong all the way to their horizon. I was, though not as ancient as I thought. The difficult part was in thinking that somewhere down there, in all of that apparent hell, there were parts where people who didn’t visit the other parts lived. The methods of demographic selectiveness (something Darwin missed) must be insane. I guess I’d rather sit between two piles of off-green dog poop than by a bum with warts. I fuckin’ hate LA. You have to take two expressways to get to Kinkos.

Fortunately, an Epitaph intern stumbled across a fellow and his merry band of men at a backyard party outside of their jurisdiction (their jurisdickshun being the predominantly Hispanic East Side) calling their band Union 13, and soon afterward Tim Armstrong and Lars Frederiksen from Rancid were producing East Los Presents…. The album revolves around the collective injustice of being segregated into the barrios and forced to deal with gang violence, hardcore drug use, and various sorts of unnecessary crime. They started the band calling themselves “Chicano punkers” as a means of identifying themselves as something apart from all of that. For this reason, the material is very socio-political, though it doesn’t quite deal with matters of State. The songs are sung in English and Español intermittently, with `fuck’ being the translation factor. East Los Presents… is a good stab at Hüsker Dü’s Land Speed Record (though that can only be done once) in intensity. It’s more punk than hardcore, and a very refreshing glass of youthful angst on this hot sunny day.