As Violent Femmes prepare to embark on their 40th anniversary tour celebrating their debut album, I figured it was only right to properly honor the album that shaped my high school experience. That, and I also wanted an excuse to mention how upset I am that the tour doesn’t stop on the East Coast.
Violent Femmes’ are a weird band, but it’s this very funkiness that makes their self-titled debut such a success. The Wisconsin folk punk group got their start busking on street corners in Milwaukee and you can tell: their stripped-down production, consisting of only an acoustic bass, guitar and snare (although they add a marimba for “Gone Daddy Gone”) lends to a uniquely raw, intimate sound. This sound continues to be central to their music today: if you ever have the pleasure of attending one of their concerts, you’ll discover that their drummer often opts for a Weber grill or upside-down wash basin as his instrument of choice, as opposed to a traditional drum set.
Many view the debut album as a 12-song pack of horniness and teenage lust. And yes, there’s definitely a fair amount of lust (I’m lookin’ at you, “Add It Up”), but to reduce the record to that is to ignore the band’s skill at capturing the teenage experience.
When listening to an album, I always take the time to admire the cover art — a habit that was probably instilled in me by my grandfather, who designed album covers for a living — and the image on the cover of “Violent Femmes” is crucial to embracing the themes and core message of the songs. The album cover of “Violent Femmes” features a young girl in a white dress on her tippy toes, peering in through a fogged-up window. It was an impromptu photoshoot: a photographer stopped a girl on the street and asked to take her photo. The girl’s mother consented and bam, the cover art was born. It wasn’t until the late 90s — when Billie Jo, the girl in the photograph, was in college — that she understood who the Violent Femmes were and what her mother had signed her up for over a decade prior. The story is a microcosm of what the album is about being young, confused and peering into a world that you couldn’t possibly understand. It’s about the violent angst, sadness and lust that comes with it. The lead single and first song on the tracklist, “Blister in the Sun”, encapsulates this message perfectly. With a punchy and unforgettable baseline, the tune is an earworm that has solidified its place in many listeners’ hearts.
Featuring song lyrics like “body and beats, I stain my sheets, I don’t even know why,” many listeners jumped to the conclusion that the song is about masturbation before frontman Gordan Gano (how’s that for a supervillain name?) dispelled the theory in a 2020 interview with Rolling Stone. In the interview, Gano recounted one surprising interaction where a fan came up to him and said “everyone knows what the song is about.” Gano was disconcerted. So, if this song isn’t actually about masturbation or men at all, what is it about?
In an essay for The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber writes that good lyrics often work between words, conveying feelings that can’t be written down; illegibility is what makes popular music effective. In transcending the literal meaning of its lyrics, Violent Femmes’ album perfectly encapsulates the ethos of timeless music.
Violent Femmes played together for the first time at their High School’s National Honor Society induction ceremony (although it’s unclear if Gano and Ritchie were members), performing “Gimme The Car”. This song — the final track on the album — perfectly showcases Violent Femmes’ appreciation of all aspects of the teenage experience.
“Gimme The Car” transitions erratically between different themes and messages, beginning with Gano bragging about his intentions to seduce a girl. But, as Gano imagines a life with this nameless girl he grows anxious and angry asking, “How can I explain personal pain? How can I explain, my voice is in vain?” When he returns to his original goal of convincing his dad to lend him the car (a pain I’m sure that many of us can understand), he does so with resentment, applying his nihilism and disdain for the world to his teenage desires. In Gano’s mind, seeing this girl will fix all of his problems. “Gimme The Car” is multifaceted and complex, and Gano puts his unique songwriting abilities on full display.
His disregard for musical conventions and traditional song structure gives the Violent Femmes’ music a sense of honesty and rawness that other music may lack. For example, in my favorite song on the album, “Add It Up,” the initial a capella chorus erupts into three repetitive verses of Gano growing increasingly frustrated over his unsuccessful love life. After nine additional verses of lamenting, the song devolves into a final chorus sung over the repeated phrase “Add it up.” In “Prove My Love,” the band doesn’t even bother to write a third verse, instead announcing: “third verse, same as the first!”
Ninety percent of the time, I care about lyrics and how profound the singer’s words are. I analyze rhyme schemes and it makes my heart flutter when the chord structure resolves to perfect cadences. Violent Femmes do none of that. They don’t care in the slightest about how music is supposed to work and “Kiss Off,” the second track on the album, is sung almost entirely over an E minor chord.
In a 2009 interview with Rolling Stone, Gano describes his songwriting process: “I was in my bedroom — that’s where I wrote it — feeling frustrated. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. It just happened to feel good lyrically … and it still does.” This philosophy is what made the Violent Femmes’ debut such an incredible album, going platinum before it ever appeared on the Billboard chart. They focused on capturing emotion rather than flowery lyrics, music theory or polishing their production to perfection. In doing so, they made an album that remains a staple of folk punk music 40 years after its release. It’s been my most streamed album for the past three years in a row. I’m confident that it will win that title for the fourth year running.
