Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes (1983)

Ramshackle and rowdy in its sound, rebellious and angry in its vocals, and imaginative and timelessly edgy in lyrics, Add It Up is an excellent example of Femmes’ folk punk sound and Gordon Gano’s timeless songwriting.



Add It Up is track 4 on Violent Femmes’ classic 1983 self-titled debut, one of the best examples of what 80s underground left-of-the-dial American music had to offer. The Wisconsin trio crafted a sound out of simplicity and emotive playing, in the process inventing a genre which would come to be known as folk punk. Quick side note here, the modern folk punk scene over the past decade or so has a lot of excellent music to offer in the vein of Violent Femmes. I highly recommend AJJ’s debut album People Who Can Eat People Are The Luckiest People In The World. Violent Femmes at this time consisted of guitarist and vocalist Gordon Gano, bassist Brian Ritchie, and percussionist Victor DeLorenzo.



Thinking about it now, there are quite a few parallels between Add It Up and Wilco’s Misunderstood, the last song I did a dissection on. Both songs are endlessly addictive while only being made up of two alternating chords, an underrated songwriting skill which exemplifies the ability to build a great song out of very little. Additionally, both songs are incredibly interesting examples of ability to create engaging lyrical characters, making the music endlessly replayable and addictively quirky.



Add It Up opens with Gano’s solo vocal singing a verse which introduces a vocal motif “Day…after day…”. This line and melody are repeated throughout the song, including during the climax of the song, as a countermelody to the repeated chorus line “Add it up”. Once the guitars and percussion come in, the first character is introduced – an angsty virgin teenager, who feels as if he’s being deprived of sex. In these first verses, the character (who also sings the “day after day” refrain) moans about his inability to get just one kiss/screw/fuck, escalating his sexual goal in each verse. This character gets angrier and angrier as time goes on at his sexual inability, his sexual urges intensifying as time goes on as well. The “day after day” refrain is also repeated, this time the teenager saying he gets angrier and angrier as the days go on, until a day when he will “take a bow and say goodnight”, implying perhaps that he has suicidal thoughts.



At this point the second narrator is introduced. The “straight man” in this situation (referring to a comedy trope), this narrator addresses the first character’s mother, revealing that she is a single mother with issues of her own, as well as the fact that the first narrator is “walking around like he’s number one / cause he went downtown and he got him a gun”. Narrator #1 is an example of the modern notion of an “incel”, or involuntary celibate, a group prominent in 21st century internet culture and associated with acts of violence (remember the VA tech shooter? Remember Elliot Rodger?). While the notion of incels was not at all prominent when the song was written, the cultural association of sexually frustrated young men with violence proves that Gano’s character in this song holds true. Following this the second narrator addresses the first narrator with reasonable requests to calm down.



The song’s climax comes when the first narrator, tired of trying to get sexual satisfaction through traditional relationships, decides to hire a sex worker. While never explicitly stated, this much can be inferred from the verse preceding the “Add it up” chorus. This chorus refers to the sex worker adding the money up which was given to her by the first protagonist in return for sex. While I initially thought this was an odd place for the song’s climax, considering the situation from the first protagonist’s perspective, it makes sense as an emotional climax – standing and watching a sex worker count his money, about to finally achieve his goal. The realisation which must come to someone in this situation is emotionally crushing – giving into an illegal institution to receive something you thought you were promised in life, but your social and physical ineptitude has made it so you felt like you could not receive it naturally. I imagine this chorus as the sex worker’s “Wait a minute honey, gonna…add it up” echoing in the narrator’s head, as the situational realization hits him. The full band comes in to sing the add it up chorus very forcefully and emotionally, as the instrumentation reaches its maximum loudness and aggression as well.



Violent Femmes, 1980s

After this chorus the song is pretty much over, save for one more repetition of the “day after day” refrain. Add It Up is probably my favorite song on the Violent Femmes s/t (although Good Feeling and Kiss Off certainly come close), its rugged simplicity, angst, and lyrical playfulness making it stand out on an already great album and its 4:44 runtime, quite a long song in terms of the punk genre, never getting boring or repetitive (despite the fact the song is literally 2 chords repeating). In a lot of ways it feels derivative of the Velvet Underground, as can be said of the rest of the album. Like a heroin or sister ray, instead of following traditional song structure, it builds and builds upon a simple chord change, shifting in intensity through dynamic use of rhythm and volume. More so than on Velvet Underground songs, Gordon Gano’s vocals on this Violent Femmes album also contributes to this dynamic, ranging from beautiful pop melodies on Good Feeling, to whispered takes such as the last verse of Blister In The Sun, to aggressive shouting like on the final chorus of Add It Up. His voice is also very comedic, which works well within the primarily vocal-based genre the band works in. The multiple characters on Add It Up, the depressed junkie on Kiss Off listing his reasons for downing pills, the jealous lover losing his temper on Please Do Not Go, the schizophrenic child murderer on Country Death Song (not on Violent Femmes self-titled but rather on their 2nd release Hallowed Ground) – Gano is an incredible vocalist whose ability to embody characters never ceases to entertain and convey emotion.



Add It Up is, in my opinion, the best example of Violent Femmes’ abilities as songwriters and musicians, working on multiple levels (you can listen to the song as just an angsty teen anthem or in the way I described as an interaction between multiple characters and narrators, the song works perfectly in both contexts) and a timelessly fun song to listen to.



As always thanks for reading, and please leave a comment if I got something wrong. Images both sourced from consequenceofsound.net.