Kiss Off / Sad Girls Por Vida (TFS #3)

on singing the things you can’t otherwise say

Violent Femmes - “Kiss Off” (Violent Femmes, Slash Records, 1983)

I first heard the Violent Femmes the same year I first thought about killing myself. When I first heard them, the song I loved most was “American Music.” A couple years later—the year I first tried to commit suicide—“Kiss Off” became my favorite Femmes tune. I loved their whole self-titled album—I still think it’s an almost perfect LP—but no other song on it hit me the way “Kiss Off” did. I was so lonely, felt like no one in my town understood me, and hearing Gordon Gano’s desperate, breathy plea at the beginning of “Kiss Off” helped. I need someone. A person to talk to. Someone to care, to love—could it be you? Could it be you? I got bullied at school, tried not to let it get to me, and there was Gordon Gano, singing: They’ll hurt me bad, but I don’t mind. They’ll hurt me bad—they do it all the time. Whenever the weather was decent enough I wouldn’t get frostbite or slip on a patch of black ice, I’d put a dubbed cassette copy of that album in my Walkman, and ride my bike to the lake or the library. When “Kiss Off” came on, I’d sing along at the top of my lungs. Picture this: tween-me in jeans and flannel, screaming I take one, one, one ‘cause you left me, and two, two, two for my family into the wind, not even worrying if anyone thought I was weird.

Over the next two years, I made friends with some of the other weirdo-misfit kids in my town. I still dealt with bullies and loneliness; problems at home and teenage hormones; and the broken things in my brain that made me want to die. But when I befriended these other kids, I discovered two things: most of them wanted to die sometimes, too—and they all loved the Violent Femmes.

Almost everyone I met in my town at that time loved the Violent Femmes. Partly because they were semi-hometown heroes. The band formed in Milwaukee, which was in the next county north of ours, and hell, Victor DeLorenzo, the drummer, was from our town. And that self-titled album? They recorded it at a studio in Lake Geneva, which was in the next county west of ours. They were local boys, or close enough. Partly because they sounded so good. I mean they were just a three piece, and largely acoustic, but they had all the fury of the best punk bands. (They were folk punk before folk punk existed!) And mostly because, especially on that first album—Gordon Gano got it. He was only eighteen, and still in high school, when he wrote those songs; so the lyrics read like he’d ripped the pages straight out of our teenage diaries.

For the next four years, nights often happened like this: I’d be in a car with my friends, my fellow misfits with fucked brains and fucked lives. We’d drive around, aimless, trying to figure out if there was anything to do. Would we drive north to a record shop, or south to a show, or just drive out to the cabbage fields to get high before winding up at Denny’s, again? And someone would pop Violent Femmes into the tape deck and we’d all sing along to “Blister in the Sun.” We loved that song, too; Gordon Gano’s sleazy whine is perfect on that track. And then “Kiss Off” would come on, and we’d really sing. We’d all take different parts of the vocals during the conversational bits, trading off saying: “I hope you know that this will go down our your permanent record.” “Oh yeah?” “Well don’t look so distressed.” “Did I happen to mention that I’m impressed?” And we’d dance in our seats to the sloppy-manic guitar-and-bass jam in the middle, and then came the best part—the litany of all the reasons kids like us might want to die. I take one, one, one ‘cause you left me. And two, two, two for my family. And three, three, three for my heartache. And four, four, four for my headaches. And five, five, five for my lonely. And six, six, six for my sorrow. And seven, seven, n-n-no tomorrow. (God, that stutter!) And eight, eight—I forget what eight was for. But nine, nine, nine for a lost god. And then we’d scream: And ten, ten, ten, ten for EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING.

In the Crimpshrine episode of Jughead’s Basement, while talking about the song “Over the Years,” Aaron Cometbus says: “I mean, this is what you’re supposed to do in a punk band, is get up and talk about stuff that you can’t talk to your friends about, and you can’t say at a party, but you can get on stage and yell.” I think that certain songs also give the fans/listeners a way to communicate things they wouldn’t be able to speak of (or at least would be very uncomfortable speaking of) otherwise. My teenage friends and I singing along to “Kiss Off” is a prime example of that. A lot of us were only casual friends, and even for those of us that were closer, there were certain things we didn’t know how to discuss. We didn’t have the courage to sit down together and say: “Sometimes I wanna die, and here’s why.” But we could scream along with Gordon Gano in someone’s car, and it was our way of saying: “Yeah, shit’s fucked up and bullshit for me, too. We all wanna die sometimes. We’re not alone.”

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Pretty Girls Make Graves - “Sad Girls Por Vida” (Good Health, Lookout Records, 2002)

Pretty Girls Make Graves were a post-hardcore band named after The Smiths’ song of the same name. (Which was itself named after a quote from Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums—ooh, do I love layers of cultural references). I first heard them right after Good Health (their first LP) came out, in April 2002. I’m not even sure how or why I first discovered them; though it’s likely because I was still in my “must listen to every Lookout Records release ever” phase. In any case, I liked their sound immediately, furious drums mixed with angular guitar, and even some keyboard thrown in. They had a sound that nodded towards emotional hardcore, without falling into the cliche formula of much early aughts emo, and Andrea Zollo’s voice was by turns powerful and sweet. There was one song from that album which became an instant anthem for me—“Sad Girls Por Vida.” The overlapping voices, the way the instruments and vocals come back even louder after the musical interlude, and, yes, the lyrics.

In June 2002, Pretty Girls Make Graves played at the Fireside Bowl, and I went to see them. When they played “Sad Girls Por Vida” that night, Andrea pumped her first in the air as she shouted the words: Sad! Girls! For! Life! And I, standing among the crowd in that hot, dirty, smoky room, thought about how most of the girls I’d ever loved, and myself, were sad girls for life, too. So I pumped my fist in the air and shouted along: Sad! Girls! For! Life! It was another moment of taking something I couldn’t say to my friends, and singing it. It was a way of turning the worst things about myself into badges of honor.

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So much has changed in my life since I first heard those songs. I mostly don’t want to die anymore, and when I do think about suicide it’s in an intrusive yet idle way. I’ll be doing whatever, and the thought will pop into my head: “I should just fucking kill myself.” But then the response comes back louder: “Oh, shut up, no I won’t.” Still, I get depressed, and fed up with everything; and I still sometimes need songs which let me shout out all the things I’m fed up with. I’m not a girl anymore, but I’m still a sad girl for life; I still, sometimes, need the space to say that, loud and clear. If you’re anything like me, you need these sorts of songs sometimes, too. If the worst things we’ve done go down on our permanent records, well, don’t get so distressed. We’re not alone. We’ll sing our darkest secrets together; make our wounds into badges and pin them on our battle vests.