The Best Band That Captured Exactly What It Feels Like To Be A Teenager (Even When It's Not Really That Bad)

I'm not a baby boomer, so I'm not the most self-obsessed person in the world. I'm a Generation X-er, making me the second most self-obsessed person in the world. And I am a real Generation X-er. If you turned 18 after 1990, you are not a member of Generation X, so knock it off. Generation X members liked Nirvana but not all that much and we didn't know about them until after they got big. Generation X members owned Duran Duran record albums and cuffed their pants and were the same age, more or less, as Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy and that guy from Sixteen Candles whose name I couldn't remember at first but now I did (It's Anthony Michael Hall), when those movies came out.

Generation Xers, like me, had for the most part decent childhoods. Our families were reasonably well-off. Not rich, but not poor. We had cars we could borrow and sometimes our own car. We had above-ground swimming pools and schools that had good basketball courts and a track team. We were healthy and lived in a time and place where nobody locked the doors.

All of that did not keep us from feeling that our lives sucked, that nobody understood us, that we were put upon and rejected by society and ultimately did not fit in and did not want to fit in because everyone is a loser anyway.

Well, I felt that way, anyway. I had some reason for feeling a little lonely and alienated. I was a kid who liked reading, and liked role-playing games, and was not athletic but was fat, and I wore glasses, and I did well in school, and I wrote sonnets, and despite all of that I really really wanted to fit in, wanted to play football and be on the track team and ran for student government and worked on the student paper and tried to go to parties...

but I never did, quite, fit in, and I never did, quite, understand why. In my mind, I was a cool, funny, smart guy who could talk to girls and shoot pool and be fun. In real life, I tended to read science-fiction novels at lunch.

All of which left me feeling disgruntled and dissatisfied, which is the normal state of affairs for any teenager, but which was somewhat inexplicable given just how good, really, I had it. And the inexplicability played into it: because even I couldn't understand why I felt so alienated and alone and unhappy at times, and because even I understood that I was not, in fact, alienated and alone and had very few real reasons for being unhappy, the feelings deepened.

And feelings are reality, in a way. Ever hear someone say "I think I'm in love?" What a dumb thing to say. What's the difference between "thinking" you're in love, and being in love? Have you ever, for example, heard someone say "I think I'm angry?" "I think I'm happy?" "I think I'm suspicious of you?" No. Because in all cases, when we think we feel something, we feel that thing. (What's really going on, when people say "I think I'm in love" is they're either feeling you out to see whether you think they're dumb for feeling in love, or they're just doing that thing where people throw in random words to fill out their sentence, the way we always say I was practically going nuts.)

So if you think you feel something, you feel it, real or not, and justified or not. So I felt alienated and alone and misunderstood and unhappy, and I was convinced that nobody else understood any of that or ever felt that way.

Then I heard the Violent Femmes' first album.

Wow.

If you've never heard of the Femmes, you are really missing out. The Violent Femmes are a Milwaukee trio that play acoustic-based punkish smart rock and roll. They had a minor hit a few years back with "American Music" and one of their songs was recently in a Burger King commercial, but beyond that they've never, to my knowledge, risen up in the national consciouness, and that's fine with me (although probably not with them) because I kind of like to keep them to myself a little (except when I post an entry about them on The World's Most Popular Blog)

(That's this one. The Best of Everything. World's Most Popular Blog. Note it.)

And if you have never heard their first album -- eponymously titled-- then you are really missing out. Their first album is music stripped down to its musical and emotional core: It's a snare drum, some guitars, and singer Gordon Gano's wavery, crying voice singing about being a teenager and not being understood and how the world looks to a person like that.

A person like I was then.

A person like the one that still kind of hangs around deep inside me.

I won't run through every song. The album was brilliant and disturbing and rocking and catchy and just controversial enough that my mom forbid me to have it because one song had swears and maybe was about incest, so I've bought the album four or five times because she kept throwing it out. The music on the album just rips and tears, pounding and jumping like an emotional rollercoaster, getting quiet, speeding up, shouting, whispering, thrumming... it gets into your head and never leaves.

So I won't go over every song, but I'll hit on the real highlights. Like the song "Please Do Not Go," in which a guy sing-talks about a girl: Tell your mom I'm stuck on this lovely girl, 'cause to me, she means all the world, but then she likes another guy, I fall down dead she never see the tears I cry..." all over a simple, throbbing strum of a guitar that feels like your heart in your throat just before you ask a girl out, and the vein in your head when she says no.



Or the song "Prove My Love," which asks What do I have to do to prove my love to you? ... you've been so good, so very good for me, what do you think tell me honestly," and tears into surf-rock guitar, but surf-rock from the angriest beach ever.

And the real controversial song, "Kiss Off," in which a man tells the singer Don't you know that this will go down on your permanent record," and the singer replies in a bluster of cool, but then goes home and takes pills, counting them up: One 'cause you left me, ... all the way to ten: Ten ten ten ten is for everything... shouting it out: You can all just kiss off into the air...



The Femmes captured, in the music, the singing, and the lyrics, the way teenagers get angry at a world that is not deserving of that anger: a world they don't understand and in which they haven't yet found their role. I think that anger, that dissatisfaction, serves a purpose: it helps teenagers begin to break away, to decide what they want to do, to determine whether they are going to passively settle into the world or try to force the world to change. Even when things are not that bad, teenagers have to feel that they are that bad, or they won't learn to fight and won't learn to forge their way in the world.

As they are fighting-- as I was fighting, it was nice to know, finally, that someone else had gone through that. Someone else wanted to go wild, someone else felt them stare, someone else just wanted a kiss.

And someone else, having found some comfort, wanted the good feelings to stay just a little bit longer:



When you're a teenager, everything always seems like it's leaving. You want to pretend you don't care, but you do.

The Violent Femmes understood that. They are the Best Band That Captured Exactly What It Feels Like To Be A Teenager (Even When It's Not Really That Bad), and they helped make it not really that bad.

True story: I've met two of the three original Violent Femmes, and accidentally insulted one. At Summerfest, I ran into Brian Ritchie, and bought him a beer. I asked him when they were coming out with a new album, and he said maybe a year. "Why so long?" I asked. "Those songs take a long time to write," he said. And, without thinking, I said "Really?"

I didn't mean it that way, I swear!

He thanked me for the beer and left.