(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . IVH: Violent Femmes [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-06 Violent Femmes LP cover Forty years ago this month, Violent Femmes unleashed their self-titled debut album on the world. Perhaps unleashed isn’t the right word; it was not an immediate success. Violent Femmes (the album) only appeared on the Billboard Top 200 list 8 years after it was released (which incidentally, is when the album reached Platinum status). The album revolves around the themes of teenage angst and teenage lust. For a large percentage of GenXers, these songs were passed along like secret knowledge. Your friend’s brother’s girlfriend dubbed the album on tape for him. Your friend copied it from his brother. You copied it from your friend. You made a copy for the girl or guy you secretly liked. Their friends made copies. Once in a while, someone would buy the real LP or cassette and begin the cycle anew. I hear Blister in the Sun pop up in strange places. Sure it’s catchy riff though I’m still surprised when I’m watching a baseball game and hear the Dodgers or Diamondbacks organ player bust it out. Don’t think I’ve heard it in a grocery store, yet. Maybe someday. Picture this, you’re standing in the freezer aisle deciding which flavor of ice cream to buy then that riff hits followed by “When I’m out walking I strut my stuff and I’m so strung out...” Now that’s what I’m talking about. . Blister in the Sun . Back in the early '80s, just as my infatuation with Talking Heads, Television, Eno, and even Patti Smith were waning, the Violent Femmes came along and renewed my faith in music. The Femmes' stripped down, mostly unplugged rock and roll sounded like a new version of the real thing. Sure, it was easy to tell that vocalist/guitarist Gordon Gano had clearly listened to a lot of Velvet Underground records, but his delivery wasn't by any stretch Reed-ian deadpan, no he teetered between nasalily innocent Jonathan Richman and a full David Byrne yelp. The Femmes had stood at some Milwaukee crossroad and somehow morphed jazz, blues, rock, country, and gospel into their very own emotionally naked white boy music. "Blister in the Sun" kicks off the record in fine fashion with Brian Ritchie's acoustic bass guitar thrashings and Victor DeLorenzo's kinetic minimalist drumkit punctuating Gano's sputtering vocals. Keen-eyed readers may have noticed the Femmes are in fact an all-male trio, but lets just say the band's unadulterated teenage angst mindset and wry humor are reflected in their name. Gano's urgent pleas about heartache, headaches, sorrows, love & death and, EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING established his trajectory for the group's first few, and best albums. OK, his fractured electric fretwork on "To the Kill" would surely send Clapton out of the room screaming, or weeping, but hell, Gano was 18 years old when they laid down these tracks in July of '82. The band didn't have a record deal, so they paid for those first sessions tachine to qualify for a lower than standard hourly rate. The Femmes' unique sound, captured sans studio trickery, only adds to the vitality of the music -- it wouldn't have clicked if they smoothed over the many rough spots. My favorite track has always been "Gone Daddy Gone" if only for Ritchie's bizarro xylophone solo. — Enjoy The Music . Kiss Off . Violent Femmes are perhaps the greatest mixtape band of its era—they were to Maxell what Drake now is to Spotify playlists. Long after the Femmes’ initial wave of underground fame came and went in the mid-’80s, choice cuts from their first album kept popping up on countless tapes dispensed throughout teenage suburbia. For those that encountered the Femmes in this manner, the band’s songs were akin to outsider art—found musical data that offered bracingly unfiltered takes on lust and alienation and the yearning to belong, written on an acoustic guitar by a misfit kid who sang in an untrained pubescent whine. Mixtapes gave Violent Femmes renewed life divorced from the context of their own up-and-down career, infusing songs from their first and most successful record with the adolescent angst of each subsequent generation of middle-schoolers in search of a spokesman. — Pitchfork . Gone Daddy Gone . Violent Femmes remain a band out of time. They are rarely mentioned with the “canon” bands of ’80s American post-punk—lacking the sales and accolades of R.E.M., the Replacements, and the Pixies, the Femmes don’t signify an era so much as a time of life. Violent Femmes is children’s music for teenagers—uber-elementary sing-alongs that have their time and place, and then are set aside as facile once they’re outgrown. But Violent Femmes deserves better. If the blues survived because of the oral tradition of passing down songs from one singer to another, Violent Femmes endured because the tunes were shared via word of mouth at dorm parties and high school keggers. (Even the girl on the cover learned about Violent Femmes that way.) And don’t discount those precious mixtapes, a primitive form of social media that worked exponentially slower than the internet but were ultimately no less effective at creating a lasting legacy. — Pitchfork . Add It Up . “College rock” has lost just about any use it once had as a genre signifier, now mostly just a descriptor for broad, alternative rock of an ill-defined era (‘80s through the ‘90s). That said, if there was ever an album to live up to the college rock tag it was eventually slapped with, it would be Violent Femmes’ 1983 eponymous debut. Violent Femmes is an album defined by the literal and artistic voice of its principal architect, Gordon Gano, the band’s vocalist, guitarist, and primary songwriter. Gano was 20 years old by the time of the album’s release, and while he already had an excellent understanding of how to compose a pop melody, there is little on this album, lyrically, that doesn’t betray his age. None of that is to say that the success of the Femmes was a mistake, or without intention — but that this was the key to their success and essential to their longevity. Gano and his cohorts would go on to dabble in christian music and pop music more explicitly aimed at radio play, but their initial offering has the best grip on their strengths. It’s all there in the band name/album title, really. — In Review Online . Prove My Love . WHO’S TALKING TO WHO? Jimmy Kimmel: Chris Pine, Dave Burd, The War and Treaty, comedy with the cast of "Succession" (R 3/27/23) Jimmy Fallon: Molly Shannon, Ramón Rodríguez, Sophie Buddle Stephen Colbert: Hugh Grant, Sean Hayes (R 3/27/23) Seth Meyers: Kristin Chenoweth, Brann Dailor James Corden: Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Lauren Spencer-Smith (R 2/14/23) Daily Show: Jerry Craft, guest host Roy Wood Jr. SPOILER WARNING A late night gathering for non serious palaver that does not speak of that night’s show. Posting a spoiler will get you brollywhacked. You don’t want that to happen to you. It's a fate worse than a fate worse than death. LAST WEEK'S POLL: WHO WILL WIN THE NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT? 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