Violent Femmes' Violent Femmes

Through rare access to the Violent Femmes and their archives, this book investigates the creation of such iconic songs as "Blister in the Sun", "Kiss Off", "Add it Up" and "Prove My Love", as well as the album's recording process.The self-titled debut from Milwaukee post-punk acoustic trio the Violent Femmes is one of those rare albums that seems to have altered the course of popular music and influenced just about everyone who heard it while also managing to operate almost entirely outside of the mainstream. Released in 1983 to little sales or attention, the band was so iconoclastic that it couldn’t even engender support from Milwaukee’s anti-establishment punk scene. Over the ensuing years, though, Violent Femmes managed to exert itself as an unstoppable cultural force, ascending the college radio charts and spreading through word-of-mouth.Violent Femmes didn’t sound like anything else when it was made, and it still doesn’t sound like anything else. The album somehow exists both outside of time and as one of the most evocative and enduring artifacts of the alternative ‘80’s.

Nic Brown is a writer, musician, and professor at Clemson University, USA. He is the author of the memoir Bang Bang Crash (2023) as well as the novels In Every Way (2015), Doubles (2010), and Floodmarkers (2009), which was selected as an Editors' Choice by The New York Times Book Review. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, and the Harvard Review, among many other publications.