The Violent Femmes--whose 1983 revenge-of-the-nerds DIY debut album sold a million copies without ever charting or receiving a lick of promotion--re-emerged on a pair of soundtracks: South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and Mystery Men, on which the band plays a stellar cover of the Stranglers' 'No More Heroes.' 'We're a group that plays all the time and goes all around the world,' explained Violent Femmes singer/guitarist/songwriter Gordon Gano, during a phone interview from his New York home, 'but about once a week I run into somebody who asks, 'Yeah, so what's up with you guys? Do you play anymore ever?' 'The answer is, 'Yeah, that's what I do.'
' To say that the Violent Femmes--who blend choppy guitars and bare-bones arrangements, punchy riffs, and self-effacing lyrics with often Captain Beefheartesque experimentalism--have had an up-and-down career is an understatement. Gano, the son of a preacher, has flirted with Christian messages in such tunes as 'Country Death Song' and 'Jesus Walking on the Water,' a seeming contradiction to his penchant for penning teen anthems dealing with masturbation, rebellion, and chicks ('36-24-36'). Critics often scratched their heads in confusion over the band's musical direction and issued some quite unkind assessments of Gano's religious inclinations. 'A lot of people have a hard time with different viewpoints or different ideas coming from the same writer,' says Gano, chronicler of a twisted Americana--like Aaron Copland on acid. 'In rock, songwriters are supposed to be speaking to you from their heart, meaning what they truly believe.
Critics like artists to be simple and straightforward. 'That's a problem we constantly have with this business.' Still, the Violent Femmes have had their share of success. Their eponymous 1983 debut LP on Slash/Warner stands as one of the first and most successful alternative rock releases. Its 1984 follow-up, Hallowed Ground, while critically panned, is a post-punk classic.
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Producer Jerry Harris of the Talking Heads produced the band's third and most commercially successful album, 1986's The Blind Leading the Naked, before the band split temporarily, with Gano and bassist Brian Ritchie releasing a series of solo projects. The band regrouped three years later only to crash and burn with 1989's stylistically jumbled 3and 1991's nostalgia-fueled Why Do Birds Sing?, which included an insipid cover of Culture Club's insipid 'Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?'
A 1993 greatest hits and live rarities compilation, Add it Up (1981-1993), is a strong representation of the band's most creative output. Adobe cc keygen xforce. At Elektra Records, the band gained more artistic freedom, releasing a pair of darker discs that died on the racks. A subsequent deal with Interscope Records--home to Primus and Limp Bizkit--looked promising, but for four years the label declined to release any of the band's tapes. The Violent Femmes languished in rock-'n'-roll oblivion. 'We got away from there,' Gano explains.