“Kiss Off” (1983) – Violent Femmes * Written by Gordon Gano * Produced by Mark Van Hecke * LP: Violent Femmes * Label: Slash
Violent Femmes came on like the American Buzzcocks, with lead singer Gordon Gano sneering like, looking like, and writing like Pete Shelley. Sexual frustration powered every sound and word, and in the case of the Femmes’ first album, the music rang with potent emotional truth because of their mimalistic instrumentation—acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, and snare drum. Their sound signified desperate self-expression through limited means, and what adolescent can’t relate to that? Gano’s hormonal lyrics, of course, were crucial, giving concise articulation to the underdeveloped frontal lobe generation, hardly impressed over things going down on their “permanent record,” yet any one of them who’s listened to Violent Femmes just a few times can recite portions of it from memory. On the universal theme exercise “Kiss Off,” Gano does the “go away! come back!” routine that emotional people do, but then, during the pill-count climax, he uncovers a deeper issue: “nine, nine, nine for a lost god.” That’s Gano the Baptist preacher’s son speaking, nodding toward Mark 15:34, where Christ, at the 9th hour, says “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Maybe as a result of this breakthrough, the group’s next album would wax more overtly Bible-ish, and by 1987 Gano would be on the road with a new gospel band called the Mercy Seat.