"Add It Up" (Violent Femmes)

I inherited a cassette tape of the Violent Femmes' compilation Add It Up (1981-1993) from my friend Kerri after high school.  I still have it in a crate of 90s curios that I browse through every so often.
We were hanging out at her house one afternoon not long after graduation, reminiscing about stuff—laughing at the good, cringing at the bad—when she had that moment I'm pretty sure every 18-year-old has (I know I did), where you look around your bedroom one day and go, "What the hell was I thinking the past 4 years?"  
I remember her picking up a pile of clothing that she'd just gotten from a mail-order catalog for grunge grrrrrls, and she shook her head.
"I can't even look at this stuff anymore.  Maybe I'll give these to my step-sister.  Think she'd wear this?"
She decided that a good, cathartic purge of her closet was in order.  We filled a couple of Hefty bags with clothing: one to donate, one to ditch.  And then there was the pile of tapes.  She told me to look through the small mountain of cassettes to see if anything caught my eye.  It didn't take long for me to realize that our collections were nearly identical.  After all, I'd pretty much bought all the music I owned while hanging out with her and vice versa, so it made sense.  (If either of us ever wondered, "How did I end up with a copy of 'Gypsy Woman' by Crystal Waters again?" one of us was able to fill in the details.)
But then I spotted something I didn't own in the "expunge" pile: Add It Up (1981-1993).
"You're getting rid of this?  I thought you loved Violent Femmes?"
The look on her face was all the explanation I needed.  It wasn't the Femmes that she wanted to get rid of; it was the emotional baggage that went with the album.  She couldn't even look at the album cover without wanting to take a blowtorch to it.  So I took it off her hands.
Strangely enough, as I listened to it afterward, the song sequencing actually brought to mind stuff she'd told me about her breakup (we told each other everything in our Clarissa and Sam friendship).  I'd find myself listening to the live version of "Add It Up" in my car, and I'd start feeling my temper rise.  
"That idiot really thought she would believe that he was just 'hanging out' with his ex-girlfriend?!"
After awhile, I couldn't take hearing those songs in that context either.  So I sought out the Femmes' self-titled debut from 1983.  (Funny, Violent Femmes contains many of the same songs as the Add It Up compilation, but it's amazing how different the scenery looks with the furniture rearranged.  I still love the entire Violent Femmes album; I still can't listen to the Add It Up compilation the whole way through.)
Anyway, the studio version of the song "Add It Up" is still one of my favorite tracks by the Milwaukee-based band.  It's such a perfect specimen of teenage frustration and nervous energy.  (Probably because frontman Gordon Gano wrote it when he was a frustrated, nervous teenager.)  
Every time I hear the song's anxious, unvarnished folk-punk and Gano's pleading warble, it instantly transports me back to my teen years, for better or worse.  

"American Music" (Violent Femmes)

I was in high school the first time I heard Violent Femmes.
A bunch of us were on a school trip to Boone, NC, for some sort of music workshop at Appalachian State University.  Somewhere along the way, one of the guys in our group popped a copy of Add It Up (1981-1993), the band's 1993 retrospective compilation, into the boombox* we brought with us.  (*For those born after 1990, a boombox [n. bōōm•bäks] was a clunky plastic box powered by D batteries that played cassette tapes.  We'll have to save our discussion about cassettes for another day, though.)  
As we cycled through a few quirky songs about tossing children down wells and racial stereotypes, a bunch of us began to wonder what the hell we were listening to.  After ten minutes, the grumbles and jeers began to grow louder.  After twenty, people started shouting for him to play something else, and our normally unflappable director/bus driver finally ordered him to turn it off and put on the rehearsal tape for that afternoon's workshop.
It was strictly Brahms and Handel for the rest of the trip.
Hate to admit it, but I was one of the people making snide comments.  At the time, I guess I just didn't know what to make of Gordon Gano's adenoidal warbling and the angular, acoustic punk-fury of Gano's then-cohorts, Victor DeLorenzo and Brian Ritchie.
So a couple of weeks later, the same classmate and a buddy of his were noodling around on their acoustic guitars after lunch, when they fell into this rocking little song.  The lyrics were witty, poking fun at pop clichés (e.g. musicians taking too many drugs), and the hook, which kept inquiring if we liked American music, was insanely catchy.  Although it got cut short by the bell, it was a great impromptu performance, and I commented on how good I thought the song was, thinking it was something new they had written for their band.
Without missing a beat, he said, "It's Violent Femmes.  It's the stuff you were making fun of on the bus."
It was just an offhand comment, but it really made me stop and think about how much interesting music I might be missing.  It made me wonder what else I'd written off as "weird" that might be really creative and unusual.  Even worse, whom had I written off?
Might sound hokey, but it was kind of a turning point for how I listened to music and looked at the world from that point forward.
So I credit not only "American Music" and that entire Add It Up album by Violent Femmes for opening me up to stuff like Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, The Velvet Underground, and Ornette Coleman, but also I credit my classmate for the needed reality check.  Thanks, Dylan.