Wild music from the torn heart of America

We don't have hits, we have classics

—Brian Ritchie, Violent Femmes

The beginning of the 1980s is the beginning of our end. All hopes that punk and new wave would change something were dashed. Where our heroes lived - in England and America - the aggressive leaders of neoliberalism, Thatcher and Reagan, came to power. In our country, Tito left the scene, and power came creepingly nothing.

The cynicism that won then is successfully reaping its fruits even today.

It was as if suddenly someone started mocking us. There seemed to be no more music worth paying attention to in that world, or so it seemed to me, as after 1982 I hunted down rare records by The Residents and Tuxedomoon as the only releases that seemed to make any sense, however twisted - and catch a summary of John's show I was on BBC World, just to let myself know if there was anything worth paying attention to or if everything had really stopped. It was as if the music was suddenly nowhere to be found. I even stopped listening to it for six months, just to get my act together, which is the only time such a thing has happened. And then, suddenly, Dejan Anastasijević brought him a cassette on which his friend - occasional disc jockey at the Academy - had recorded six songs by a group that we had never heard of before, but my friend really liked it when it was played in the club, so he begged to copy it for him. everything they have.

And so I first listened to the Violent Femmes in the fall of 1983, when the time was right. Namely, their first self-titled album was released that year, four decades ago.

To say that the album is an understatement Violent Women (Slash, April 1983) saved the music. He saved me, as well as many others. Žikica Simić found himself there as an angelic hand of justice, to give his first show at the end of October 1985 The mysterious train opened with their unforgettable anthem of teenage angst Add It Up. With that move, he opened up the whole world behind the Violent Femmes to us, showing that there are similar voices across America.

Not even six months have passed, and I wrote and published my first music text for Student. In question was a guide through the new alternative rock, especially American, English and ours - except that in June 1986, the term "alternative rock" did not yet exist, since that subcultural movement had just been formed.

THE CITY IS RESTLESS, AND SO AM I

The story of the alternative rock in Yugoslavia has never been told properly.

Moreover, it has not been told properly in the world either. This is because non-corporate rock and roll, created outside of major record labels (hence "alternative"), is not really a separate genre but a conglomerate of genres. Rather, it could be said that it is a value system that penetrated "from below". mainstream culture during the eighties, until through grunge - and especially Nirvana and the personality of Kurt Cobain - he became world famous. That system of values ​​spoke in the name of musical freedom, personal authenticity and social tolerance, against the emerging neoliberalism - music was the most important part in it, but not the only one. Inheriting the basic norms from punk and new wave, alternative rock appeared as a movement in which anyone could be what they wanted, as long as they held a musical instrument in their hand, although this was not mandatory either.

It turned out that in the creation of that cultural front in the eighties - created in a wide field of alternative rock music and early hip hop, independent film and comics, as well as graffiti art - the most significant role was played by the appearance of a few groups in the USA

Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, The Gun Club, X, The Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Sonic Youth, REM, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Minutemen and Violent Femmes. Each of them, originally confined in the microcosm of their own part of America and without any chance of success, is today well known as a cultural greatness of their era and a formative influence for many contemporary musicians - because they remained until the end what they were at the beginning, uncompromisingly faithful to his art and attitudes.

The Violent Femmes may have had the least chance of being considered a significant band back then. First of all, because they were the smallest (even physically!) and they came from the smallest city like Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They started as a trio of high school renegades playing on street corners, and it took a rock star walking down their street for them to even be noticed. That star was James Honeyman-Scott, the guitarist of the famous London group The Pretenders, who played in Milwaukee in the summer of 1981, and it was he who recommended them to Chrissy Hynde, the frontwoman, when he found them playing outside the entrance to the hall where their band was to to perform. An American herself, recognizing their humor, Chrissy invited them to, in her acoustic style, briefly open the night of the concert as an opening act - and although the local audience booed them, because nothing from Milwaukee can be good - since then it can be said that "sense" for them.

But, no - it wasn't like that after all. After that cute, heartwarming episode, the Violent Femmes still didn't land a major label deal or a magazine interview. Rolling Stone, and even less someone organized a tour for them - they still played on the street, which was a bummer, because they weren't accepted in the clubs, since their mix of punk and folk was considered a sacrilege that no one would want to listen to. Similar to the revolutionary mix of punk and blues, which was promoted at the same time by The Gun Club in Los Angeles and got beaten up for it (quote: Jeffrey Lee Pierce) - the Violent Femmes appeared practically ahead of time and pushed their way with great difficulty. No one could understand how something as "urban" as punk could be combined with something as "peasant" as folk or blues.

The real truth was that the Violent Femmes, with their punk ferocity and irreverence for canon & template, actually retold the mythology of American life, based on age-old folk and country patterns. They were determined to rewrite them in a manner suitable for the end of the 20th century, in order to describe the state of their hopeless spirits in the authentic language of the suburbs and "white trash". Suddenly we were presented with the image of the real America, where angry teenagers live in small towns, where nothing has ever happened and nothing will ever happen... Far from the paranoia of metropolises like New York or Los Angeles, there was the horror of the roadlessness of small towns, to which no hope ever came. And some children grew up there - brought up on the country and folk of their parents - hardly waiting for punk as a reason to turn it all upside down and use that legacy, describing their own despair, loneliness and existential straits (every similarity with the Balkans seemed intentional!) .

The Violent Femmes' debut album was therefore the punk it couldn't be and the country-folk it couldn't be either: wild music coming from the torn heart of America. It is a manifesto of teenagers anytime and anywhere, a classic of youth literature, such as "The Catcher in the Rye", "Special Education" or "My So-called Life".

TEENAGE WILDLIFE

No other classic album from the 1980s contained so compressed the entire future history of American alternative rock: its musical free-spiritedness, married to the mythological power to interpret the eternal apostate destiny of someone who feels different.

Above all, it was the cry of a young man who simply wanted to be. No wonder: at the time he wrote these songs, Gordon Gano was really in high school and only 15 years old; slightly older and already proven musicians, Brian Ritchie and Victor DeLorenzo, discovered him as a high school talent, and with him his poetic diary of school days, which could be ours too - there we can simply hear the sounds of a big vacation, dragging around the corridors and the courtyard of the gymnasium before finally going to class, the atmosphere of empty birthday parties where we have nothing to do, the hopelessness of aimlessly wandering the streets and fooling around in the corners and entrances of buildings, all in anticipation of how we will finally meet someone. When listened to today, the record Violent Women it still sounds like an explosion of well-known resentment, which we hid between the benches.

The Violent Femmes have faithfully captured, as it is, the all-too-familiar true drama of being a teenager – that whole sense of fatal failure that pervades it, all those dilemmas and fears of making a mistake and coming off as stupid. A teenager is always bitter, because he doesn't manage to get what he wants - dissatisfied because he only dreams, and little of it really happens, torn because he has no possibility to achieve almost anything, without knowing exactly what he is doing wrong - and always in dilemmas which is the right way? Adults also repeat that question to themselves every day, but never with the fear that teenagers have, and maybe they should.

At the same time, the band lived in harmony with its music. I met the Violent Femmes when I did their concert in the garden of SKC in 2004. It is an understatement to say that the local audience welcomed them as their own - two decades after they were first played by an unknown disc jockey at the Academy, they have become a part of our culture and upbringing. But the biggest surprise for me was what I had in front of me - well, a group of adult teenagers, who behaved as if they were still in school, and that they would play something for us after class. They freely expressed their disagreements in front of the promoter, because "being in a group is like being in a long marriage" (quote: Brian Ritchie), they slept as far away from each other as possible in a rather large hotel, they did not eat at the same time in the restaurant, everyone was with arrived on stage for their part - but they seemed perfectly coordinated on it, blowing away the rain clouds from which the drops were dripping until the very beginning of the concert, never to return. The moment they played in unison, and the audience started singing along with them, it was a gathering with partners who, well, have just arrived to visit us, and in some fantastic parallel world, Belgrade was once again the Belgrade it was for two hours. could and still can be - a free, world city. The Violent Femmes have become an element of his identity that enables him to do so. We knew each other from somewhere. As much as they belonged to us, we belonged to them.

THE THIRD STRUCTURE, IT GOES THE SAME AS THE FIRST ONE

Debut album Violent Women today it is a permanent record phenomenon: although it almost never charted, it sold enough copies to go platinum, which means that in the meantime it was "discovered" by each new generation of listeners. To mark four decades since its release, Craft Recordings recently released a commemorative edition, featuring remastered original tracks, alongside a collection of artifacts, demos, B-side singles and live performances, titled Violent Women (Deluxe Edition). It is particularly interesting to note how the concert performance of these tracks hints that the interaction with the audience decisively contributed to the evolution of their unpredictable, organic sound, revealing Gordon Gunn as a talkative, talented narrator and presenter. All this is accompanied by an accompanying booklet with many photographs, which contains an essay by the famous critic Rolling Stone David Fricke. But the story of the recording of the Violent Femmes' first album is one of those exciting, partisan episodes in rock 'n' roll history, saying a lot about how alternative rock was emerging in do it yourself to the spirit.

Interviews left notes that reveal how Gano mostly wrote songs to get through the weekend until Monday, when hellish school classes would start again. He had nothing to hope for, and this motivated him to take notes, overcome by his anxiety, waiting for the work week to begin. His inspirations were numerous, but his most important extracurricular activity was music. Then, staying with his older brother in New York gave him the opportunity to feel a bit of the atmosphere of the punk clubs there. He particularly liked Johnny Thunders, as well as Patti Smith, James Chance and the Ramones, with a special appreciation for the cult following of The Velvet Underground. Apart from them, he also loved classical singers such as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. On the other hand, as soon as they met Gordon as a little local freak with a bunch of lyrics in a notebook under his arm, Brian and Victor took him to see jazz great Sun Ra perform to explain what they wanted from him - and those improvisational prodigies definitely impressed him. All this formed the development path of the Violent Femmes and was found on their first album, chewed and crushed as something completely new and unheard of.

Brian and Victor had decided not to go to Minneapolis, where a much richer musical life took place. Instead, they decided, as three strong personalities, to stay with Gordon's visions and develop them to the end, each adding something of their own, freely improvising within the compositions - similar to the model of our Charles Acrobat. Mark Van Hecke, with whom the band's bassist Brian Ritchie had worked on soundtracks for the stage shows, was asked to handle the production, although he had not done it before, but he did it brilliantly, keeping true to their original acoustic punk sound. Glenn Lorbicki was actually the custodian of the studio where the Violent Femmes recorded, and although he had never worked as a cameraman before or since, he learned enough by looking over the shoulders of serious professionals to capture it all perfectly. When they ran out of an initial investor to put down a deposit for studio time, Victor DeLorenzo's father stepped in to lend $10.000 to keep filming going. It took them another year of sending out demos before they even got a chance at one of the era's major independent labels, Los Angeles-based Slash Records, where they were told they would release the record only if they didn't have to put up anything more than the duplication costs. vinyl and covers... And that's only because the owner realized that all his employees in the office listen to unreleased Violent Femmes all day long.

I NEED SOMEONE TO TALK TO

The Violent Femmes' self-titled first album starts out unusually brisk, which is, of course, a Mangup con. He opens it Blister in the Sun with a choppy opening guitar riff as recognizable as Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit (no wonder they led Nirvana as a support group at first, and later they also led them). Almost all the songs then revolve around the rhythm: fast-paced, as if they want to jump out of themselves. There are no boring guitar solo parts, but there are points on the bass or drums, as well as vocal bravura, which emphasize the rhythmic character of the music that springs in one breath. But two famous songs summarize this record into a frenetic generational epic about hellebore: Kiss Off i Add It Up. In the first, we find Gan standing at the door of a volcano of pain and disorientation, which is opened by the professor's name-calling, which then turns into that legendary look into himself, followed by a puzzle where, with a lump in his throat, he furiously mentions what is missing in his life: " Number one is that you left me, number two is for my family, number three is for heartache, number four is for headache, number five is for loneliness, number six is ​​for sadness, number seven is for no future, number eight – I forgot what the number eight is for, the number nine for the absence of God and the number ten for everything, everything, everything, everything, everything”. The second, in which Gordon is already standing in the middle of burning pain and cannot get out of it, while with the ultimate fatalism he asks the whole world: "why can't I get one kiss, why can't I get one bonfire", and then continues with his misfortunes which fall upon him and pile up, as if they are all laughing at him, until finally he tells himself under his breath that one day he will end all this - which everyone used to say in his youth.

Every exceptional album has a carefully worded dramaturgy, so it is the same here: after one bitter, there is a nervous, then a sweet song, illustrating the ups and downs of mood, as it is when you are still a mere adolescent - To the Kill i Confessions are completely dark in their impossibility, while Promise i Prove My Love full of swirling emotions because of a tiny glimmer of hope that the offer of love will be answered, so that Please Do Not Go floating around like some quasi-reggae drunk, at the end of a party where no one had a good time. Euphoric makes a special point Gone Daddy Gone, carried by an unexpected xylophone, in which the protagonist dives at the speed of an express train into the sadness of the fact that "She is gone" and will never return. Therefore, even that bit of happiness and love is gone. There is only the bottom, to which we always return.

When it comes to the last song, comforting Good Feeling, you already know that the previous nine hellish songs are the only truth, and that the last one is just wishful thinking. This makes this record more than ordinary and turns into an unanswered prayer for salvation from the valley of weeping in which we live. Black humor and street-tested soulfulness are the hallmarks of Violent Femmes' debut, thanks as much to Gordon Gunn's religious upbringing as Brian Ritchie and Victor DeLorenz's anarcho-atheistic one.

In this way, the Violent Femmes fulfilled the primal mission of rock and roll to speak for those without a voice, both the misunderstood teenager and everyone else. That's why they went down in history and that's why they still perform this album wherever they happen to be - because it's a monument not only to the hopes of a time, but to all the hopes of young people ever.

THE SONG KNOWS YOU

There are great albums whose songs you feel like you've heard them somewhere before - they're so close to you and describe your experience so well. But when I first heard the Violent Femmes' debut album, I had the feeling that the songs somehow really knew me.

It was a higher level of recognition that you experience maybe only a few times in your life - like when someone reveals to you a movie you're starring in without you knowing it. The signer had already had that experience with punk and Neil Young, so it was no stranger to him, but this seemed to be their match. Then he met so many people who told him that they had a similar experience with the Violent Femmes when they discovered them, so he remained convinced that this is one of those most special albums that capture something about ourselves, which no one else could.

And then he remembered. This record is a masterpiece because it keeps the basic myth of pop culture alive forever - the eternal teenager in us.