Good evening Rawkers. Because i try to honor the requests of family, friends and fans, tonight's very brief post is on another band that helps define suckage in our troubled times..... The Violent Femmes.
Because i know others have strong opinions on the subject, i will defer to their erudite observations and conclusions. But the whiny stuff coming out of these guys -- with singer Gordon Gano trying so desperately to write and sound like Lou Reed -- helps add to the criticism of the 80s and is enough to cause the God of Thunder to hurl a lightening bolt or two their way. Suffice to say, the God of Thunder frowns upon the suckage of the VF's.... Not cool.
Go in peace....
G.O.T.
G.O.T. is only scratching the surface of why this band sucks. First, this band does not have the musical chops commensurate with their commercial success. There’s only room for one punk that can play four chords and still be great and the Ramones took that slot.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, the song writing is the most simplistic, self-indulgent crap EVER! If they had just done one song with that repetitive motif they so regularly employ I could forgive it but COME ON. IheartherainIheartherainIheartheraingottakillthepain?!?! The one redeeming lyric to this song is when Gano expresses the desire to be buried out on a lone prairie, which he then repeats ad nausea. Well, if it's what he wants I'll bring a shovel.
Then there's the ever popular "All I Want" in which Gano repeatedly asks why he can't get various forms of affection from the opposite sex. I'm going to assume for one moment that the questions are not rhetorical and answer them for him. "IT'S BECASUE YOU SUCK"!
Thirdly, their fans drive me nuts. I have yet to meet a VF fan that wasn't some hippie suburban kid with very few real problems but seemed to think that this band was speaking directly to their inner pain. What about the pain this band caused me? Who's going to write song about all the poor bastards out there that had a college roommate blare this crap out of a boom box at 6 o'clock in the morning.
I want a personal apology from the Pretenders for discovering this band and a vow that they will never ingest/inhale/inject whatever chemical substance had altered their brain chemistry they were under the influence of when they thought these people should have been signed to a label.
I don't think I have ever heard this band. I thought by their name they were a chick band.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I don't think the word "sucks" is sufficient. Blues Traveler sucks, Poison Sucks, Carly Simon sucks... We need a new pejorative for VF's, something that goes beyond a generic label indicating that they are not good musicians or enjoyable to listen to. Or we need to find a way to make "suck" scalable so that there is a baseline "suck" followed by a ranking system. It may take me some time to come up with the propers langauge and mathmatical system to describe how horrible the VF's really are.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of scalable suckage.... We need to work on that. Thanks Scott. You're the best.
ReplyDeleteI would think that a bass player would at least acknowledge that the groups' lead instrument is bass and that Brian Richie does have some skill with his instrument even if Gano can't really play the guitar and his voice and songwriting leave some people cold.
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