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In this time of swabs, the categorization of “cool music” still goes through the self-directed violence of the Femmes, following the path set in 1983-1984.
Three buskers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, three notorious ruffians, reckless and insolent. They are Gordon Gano, guitar played with indifference and carelessness and a nasal, hysterical voice, ready for a donkey bray;
Brian Edward Ritchie, at least a virtuoso double bass player, always ready to improvise providential solos;
Victor De Lorenzo, a bizarre and minimal percussionist, reluctant to use the bass drum, possessed by the drum and drum kits when reduced to the bare essentials.
They forged and authenticated the purest acoustic rock, impetuous and sanguine, aiming to avoid the myths of electricity and volume at all costs, for the full benefit of that always youthful, adolescent, and primordial energy, the primary image of rock itself, facetting it, showing its irreverent and tender beauty at the same time, without stereotypes and without too much candor.
The three little friends were a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, a worker (former librarian), and a theater actor. They formed the band in 1980 to play acoustic folk and revive the roots of American music with eccentric taste, sharp wit, even sadistic, and therapeutic self-irony. Without revivalism. They hated playing in the garage; they liked to play outdoors. The sidewalk was just fine. On a Milwaukee sidewalk, John Honeyman-Scott and Chrissie Hynde heard them before their concert and quickly invited them to open for them. Said, done! Then... Slash!
The first two albums are must-haves, the two horses that pull the chariot on which Our Heroes rose:
- “Violent Femmes”, acoustic, urgent, and irreverent, mixes folky melodies, velvet rock, quirky pop, hypnotic blues, punk thrusts, and deviant rock’n’roll marches; looks to the Modern Lovers, seeks doo-wop and beat counterpoints, strings together lyrics about love pain, sexual failures, raw emotions, and growing frustrations in typically nerdy style. It’s a sensational case of priapism.
- “Hallowed Ground” recomposes the roots music in a grotesque sketch without looking around (neither hardcore nor wave): rediscovering country and bluegrass, with jazzy watercolors, gospel caricatures, velvety balads of Lou Reedian origin, black humor to update teenage irreverence, with a vaguely experimental flair. It’s a new-alt-country experiment. An essay that brings together the well-known Priapus with the figure of Orpheus. In a more adult poetics: visionary, dazed, enigmatic, and mystique. And the instrumentation is more varied: the harmonica, Tony Trischka’s banjo, electric bass, organ, and a brass section with the sax of an then-unknown kid, one John Zorn.
Then a break. The third piece, “The Blind Leading the Naked”, with Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads) at the helm, brings a certain mainstream normalization of the sound, reiterated by the following “3”, which, arriving after the band’s first split, tries to revive the raw punk formula of the folkies’ debut but to sweeten it.
“Why Do Birds Sing?”, the fifth album, dated 1991, has plenty of inspired pieces and tries to curb the nascent regularity with a bit of good old-fashioned disconnection (against a strangely polished image of the trio). Sure, the best things echo the acoustic past, stylizing it, without the wild surge of the livelier playful messing, so that the urgency that was bare and gripping now seems didactic.
The tracks, after all made quite well, flow quickly and are catchy; the unifying ideal is rock collage. The lyrics are sunny while often remaining crude, overall giving back a poor expressionism, its merit, but lacking in surprises, its flaw. A bit of affectation in the emphatic pieces, a playful but more detached look than before, in the best moments. It starts from a swinging declaration of love for “American Music”, a folk-pop song, with a beautiful video of elderly people dancing, which can boast a status of classicity; the Culture Club cover is flavorless; “Look Like That” and “He Likes Me” are amusing and run-of-the-mill scenes, very familiar. The silly “Girl Trouble” declares and inflates a girl’s physiological problems, concentrated imagine where… The mythological paradigm of the album could be Hephaestus betrayed and mocked by Aphrodite.
How little will the subsequent “New Times” (with the defection of De Lorenzo returned to the theater) or, outright, the new millennium say! It is worth holding onto this “Why Do Birds Sing?” quite tightly, with its graceful and smiling vintage cover, quietly sensual, a promise of surprises that never actually materialize.
Close to the Fugs in spirit, but knowing how to play, street musicians, for whom “there is only the street”, sidewalk musicians, at most from dives, from third-rate venues. Take-away coffee musicians, the ones you'd like to meet, perhaps, before stepping onto the trolleybus. The ones who truly have two masterpieces behind them and plenty of rockabilly, blues, and country in their veins. Bodies without a soul or souls without a body. The anonymity of many works against the categorization of the genius in the two forms of a single debut: indeed, their little treasure of songs was ready in the years 1981-82, they chose to exalt their exuberance in the raw and direct formula of the first album and to expand their poetics only with the second, in both cases ahead of all the MTV Unpluggeds to come. After all, nomen omen, you can’t stay still, too long, positioned internally. You enter and exit with music’s grace.
“I cannot tell how the girls in dreams smile
But sometimes they also cry
So I woke up wise
As when I fell asleep”.
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