Violent Femmes
It’s not often that a band simultaneously makes geekdom and busking cool again. Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes did just that in the ’80s with a string of pimple-faced punk-folk hits, including “Blister in the Sun” and “Add It Up.”
The fact that the band hasn’t released a new collection of tunes in seven years (even going so far as to announce a moratorium on penning new material) doesn’t seem to bother the Femmes’ faithful, most of whom probably had dyed hair or were Unitarians at one point. The band travels with a set of multi-instrumentalists, the Horns of Dilemma, to preach to the choir, summoning the same acoustic-bass-and-brushed-drums whoopie that made it a cult favorite in the pre-flannel era.
The Violent Femmes on a 1997 episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch:
