"I Love Livin' in the City" was re-recorded twice: once during the group's unreleased 1979 sessions, and again for its debut album, The Record.

The song exaggeratedly describes a stereotypical, turbulent life one may face in Los Angeles, where blood and corpses litter the street.

University of Southern California film professor David E. James has cited this song as a paradigm of punk's "style that would always be in the process of pushing itself over into self-parody", and he compared its imagery to the work of Charles Bukowski.

[1] Oregon State University film studies professor Jon Lewis said the lyrics exemplified punk's perception of "the aesthetics of ugliness that characterize downtown LA".

[2] A 2001 Spin magazine retrospective about the L.A. punk scene found it to be "a virtual prototype for the reality-of-my-surroundings gangsta rap of the late '80s.