OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

They were really popular in the UK for their first couple of albums! Big venues. Full concert on the TV. Lots of radio play. Continually played in the prefects common room at my high school. This was 83-84 so up there with the Cramps, Ramones etc. Sorry no idea why you guys are debating this but they were. After the third album they broke up and disappeared and the non-chart music scene changed so they got sidelined permanently. Things moved faster then. Add It Up, Gone Daddy Gone, Ugly, Blister in the Sun etc were mainstays of student discos till the end of the 80s though.

i apologize for inadvertently starting a blighty kerfuffle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUbFtHr3vCE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJXDEynfgR0

^ remember it well!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gproa6vzgws

this song is so great. i imagine it sounded very refreshing in 1983. probably went to #1 i'm assuming.

Sorry no idea why you guys are debating this but they were

One guy.

Thank you, everything! (xps)

i was sure that was right but i didn't start going to lolternative clubs until the late 80s so could only vouch for "Add It Up" getting played every week then. oh and knowing a bunch of peeps who had those albums.

The Violent Femmes were huge among teens in Oslo circa late eighties. They played festivals here and I heard drunk people singing their songs well into the late nineties.

i came of age in the early 90s and remember the 4 big songs from the first Violent Femmes album being in WHFS rotation for the entire decade (plus "American Music" and "Breakin' Up" were pretty big).

in fact i remember it being big news in the early 90s that the first VF album finally went platinum, nearly a decade after its release.

in high school in the early '90s "Blister in the Sun" was like "Rock Lobster" -- slotted with whatever big pop/dance hits got played at parties.

oh god I just remembered they covered "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me"

It was supposed to be funny, right? ugh. violent femmes near the top of my (very) short list of surly, smug, uncooperative interview subjects

I don't think it was meant to be funny.

One of the violent femmes has become an honorary Australian, owns a tea shop in Tasmania and plays improvised lute jams in it or something like that

Flute! http://www.fastcompany.com/1682132/brian-ritchie-violent-femmes-bassist-turned-tasmanian-tea-slinger-japanese-bamboo-flutist

He always dressed like an Antipodean tea shop owner anyway.

Brian Ritchie is a really nice guy who is very into using his band as a way to deliver avant-garde stylings to unsuspecting audiences. saw the Femmes in the late 90's with their anarchistic horn section "Horns Of Dilemma" and although they were past their commercial peak (which, echoing other posts, was HUGE in the 80's), they totally killed it. I mean, they had a dude from Boy Dirt Car playing trumpet! I remember a well-dressed college gal holding her hands to her ears during one of their mid-song free jazz freakouts, but she was still staring, fascinated, at the stage.

(sorry for continued derail)

i'm learning a lot about the femmes here.

owns a tea shop in Tasmania and plays improvised lute jams in it or something like that

he used to own a second one in Sydney - back before the Femmes split up the second time, their website's list of tour dates and ticketing links would be like nine weeks of European clubs, three folk festivals in the US, one shakuhachi recital by Brian in his Surry Hills tea shop, five weeks of US clubs.

as a (non-honorary) Australian, he's also in an instrumental surf band with the Australian musicians of Midnight Oil, and curates this music and arts festival for an art museum, MONA, every year

the reason the guy from the Dresden Dolls has now Spinal Tapped into the re-re-formed* Violent Femmes' drum stool is that someone dropped out of the festival, and on three days notice the Dresden Dolls, Ritchie, Mick Harvey and John Parish covered the Femmes first album as a fill-in act


*they split a second time after Brian sued Gordon, in the middle of a nine-month-or-so tour, for selling Blister In The Sun for a commercial. possibly the one that was the only time anyone had ever heard of them in any country in the world, 26 years after it was released. the next reunion, six years later, lasted three shows before the original drummer - who'd first left c. 1985 - quit due to being screwed over money by the other two.

sorry, update: dude from Dresden Dolls quit this year because it's too hard being in a trio with two guys who hate each other and literally won't speak to each other

(this is probably the reason that m coleman found them near the top of my (very) short list of surly, smug, uncooperative interview subjects)

I'm finding the repeated assertion that Violent Femmes were a big band in the UK hilarious at this point, quite frankly. I don't care if you knew 2 people that owned the record - more cold, hard numbers as opposed to anecdotal evidence and maybe I'll begin to be convinced.

Who are you, the President of the Anti-Violent Femmes League?

x-post:

But yeah, I'm aware that they were a thing in Aus.

first album was absolutely massive in the US iyrc

I still like them a lot. III is really underrated as coked-out weirdo pop record. Also you can still hear their influence in lots of herky-jerky, neurotic-sounding, nasally-voiced songwriters (like, say, Ezra Furman, who I don't think was alive when the s/t Femmes album was released)

i heard the 2nd album first. college radio station i listened to played country death song a lot. i played that album a ton in 1984. quickly bought the first album after that. played that a ton. then never really listened to them again.

they were a band

https://medium.com/@sfj/why-i-liked-david-turners-de-la-soul-piece-9d69360ee66e#.3n70h3fu2

wtf is this horseshit

is this piece what was in those trucks

recent events aside, strip-fiend jones is basically right, there's more than a little "you will agree with critical consensus or SHUT THE FUCK UP FOREVER" to this protracted-beyond-its-hours discussion, and if an editor forced me to listen to, I don't know, [insert critically acclaimed canonical rock record that I hate] then I would likely react the same way.

which is something that shouldn't happen, because the role of an editor is in part to make their writers' (and publication's) prose look as good as possible -- and is something that won't happen, because it's me and I have no #personal #brand to #leverage, and no one's invested in the bag of sweet potato chips on my desk ("desk") right now -- but something that happens.

Really liked the SFJ piece tbh

he's right that people reacting negatively to this piece bc "it's a classic record!" are wrong but idk that seems an obvious point that is now a 10 minute read

as opposed to the 60-minute read of the past week in this thread

I enjoyed those 10 minutes?

well my issues were about the form it took rather than dude's opinion on the record

but i really enjoyed the violent femmes tangent

Each of those 60 minutes started a band.

sfj's prose style has evolved into rock critic mark kozelek lately and it especially bugs me here

I genuinely don't understand why editors don't routinely ask themselves, if not during line edits then during commissioning, "will this piece make my writer and/or publication look bad unnecessarily? if so, what can I do to prevent or at least mitigate that?"

feel like it's more that editors are routinely asking themselves "will this piece get people all riled up?" and if the answer is yes, hit publish!

so much of that piece seemed intended to make people cry millennial

There's a short-termism at work at bad outlets, where "will we look bad?" is subservient to "will this get lots of clicks and go viral?". Also this piece is not really going to hurt MTV's brand. Also there is no real investment beyond time when clicking on a weblink - it's not like someone's goung to say, "I got burned there, never going to pay to read something like that again". xps

I understand how it works. What I don't understand is how little cognitive dissonance people register in simultaneously thinking "I want to support/promote/mentor this writer so they can be successful" and "I am either actively undermining this writer or undermining them via inaction."

I am guessing those undertaking the latter either aren't really interested in the former or are kind of dense.