What follows is an analysis/love note that I wrote about the Generation X song "Kiss Me Deadly," a song that I still think is probably the best punk song of all time. It moves around a bit and might not be my best criticism, but I think parts of it still have legs. I made some minor edits to the post for clarity.
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Post 1 – Kiss Me Deadly
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the topic for the first post. Even though I have already posted once, that was just a general introduction and was just about setting up the context of the blog. This one is the important one, though, because it establishes who I am and what this is going to be about. I thought originally that I would write about my first punk show or my first punk album. I was also very tempted to write about The Clash. I don't think that any of those things are quite right. For this post, I am going to write about just one song. This is my favorite song and it is one that I listen to every day.
The best song I have ever heard is “Kiss Me Deadly” by Generation X. This song has everything: great lyrics, buzzsaw guitar, complex layering of lead, rhythm, and bass guitars, an unostentatious solo that absolutely rocks, Billy Fucking Idol on vocals, and a great hook. It begins with a slow guitar plucking out a descending melody that will repeat throughout the song. Idol sings the first verse and chorus to just the opening theme on guitar and the drums and guitars kick in during the second verse. At this point you really just need to go listen to the song, even if you know it.
Generation X formed around 1975, which puts them before bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Buzzcocks, and The Damned that are typically taken to be the first British punk bands. Many of these bands were assembled by managers rather than forming organically out of groups of friends, which would be the norm later on. Gen X has a big spot in punk rock history because of where the members came from and where they went. Lead singer Billy Idol had previously been in a proto-punk band Chelsea and would go on to his successful solo career. Gen X originally performed “Dancing with Myself” that Idol would go on to re-record and release to become a hit. Bassist Tony James had played with eventual Clash members Mick Jones and Terry Chimes in a band called London SS, and would go on to play in Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the Sisters of Mercy, and eventually with Mick Jones again in Carbon/Silicon.
“Kiss Me Deadly” is a good illustration of the difference between the beginning years of punk rock and what it has become. It is up-tempo but not particularly fast. The music is fairly complex, displaying a level of composition that, with rare exceptions, would not resurface for some time. What I like most about the song, though, is the way that it is heartfelt and uplifting while also being gritty. Each verse describes a short story about growing up and being a punk in London.
The structure of the lyrics is quite poetic and is more complex than most punk songs (which tend to follow the verse/chorus/verse/chorus model but occasionally will also include a bridge). After three verse/chorus exchanges and a solo, the song enters a bridge, which is a musical interlude in a different key than the verse and chorus. Sometimes, but not always, bridges will include different patterns of lyrics: typically they will recall elements from the chorus and will have a different phrasing than in either verse or chorus. What makes “Kiss Me Deadly” more clever than most is that the lyrics for each of the choruses differ slightly and these different parts run together in the bridge. Musically, it is also interesting because the solo is performed in the bridge's key whereas solos are normally performed in the same key as the verse/chorus. If this doesn't make sense, listen to the song again and pay attention to the key change after the third chorus. The change is signaled by Idol's singing the last line of the chorus differently. His voice almost sounds flat in comparison to earlier verses but this is because he has pitched his voice lower to transition into the bridge.
At the end of the bridge, the song moves into an extended version of the chorus that brings different elements from earlier in the song together. Each of the three choruses begin the same: “Having fun/Since I was six,” alter the third line, and end, “Kiss me/Deadly/Tonight.” So the first chorus runs:
Having fun
Since I was six
Hidden flick knife flicks
Kiss me deadly tonight.
The third line for the next choruses are “Discovers teenage sex,” and “Violence for a fix.” These altered lines each relate to the verses preceding them. The extended verse at the end of the song pulls together these lines from each of the choruses:
Having fun
Since I was six
Having fun
Well hidden flick knife flicks
With violence for a fix
Discovers teenage sex
Try shooting up for kicks
Kiss me deadly
Of course I'm not the only one who loves this song. “Kiss Me Deadly” plays in SLC Punk at the end of the movie when Steve-O leaves Heroin Bob's funeral even though Steve-O disdains British punk earlier in the movie. The band Fifteen plays a modified version of the riff from the chorus in the opening to the song “Helter Smelter,” a song about blowing up cars and making everybody ride bikes. Jeff Ott, the singer, comments that it “Sounds like Generation X,” The rest of the song and the lyrics have nothing else to do with “Kiss Me Deadly” or Gen X (this is not an uncommon move for Fifteen, though. In “No tion” (sic), the song after “Helter Smelter” on the album “Buzz,” the song opens with a copy of the opening to Operation Ivy's “Room without a Window” and, likewise, the rest of the song has nothing to do with OpIvy). Green Day has been known to cover this song in concert (you can find videos of this on youtube if you look).
Aaron Cometbus also writes about the song in #54 of his zine Cometbus. In this issue, Cometbus is invited to go on the Asian leg of one of Green Day's tours (for those who don't know, in addition to writing the fantastic zine Cometbus, Aaron Cometbus also plays drums in a lot of other bands. Some of the bands he has been in are Cleveland Bond Death Sentence with Paddy from Dillinger 4, Shotwell, Crimpshrine with the above mentioned Jeff Ott, and Thorns of Life with Blake Schwarzenbacher from Jawbreaker and Jets to Brazil. Cometbus has performed with Billie Joe from Green Day and they have released many albums as Pinhead Gun Powder, so the invitation to travel with the band would not be unusual). At the final party that Cometbus attends on the tour, he describes Mike Dirnt putting “Kiss Me Deadly” on at the end of the party:
“Over the speakers came the notes that never fail to give me goosebumps: the opening chords of the greatest song of all time, 'Kiss Me Deadly' by Generation X.”
In that moment, Cometbus describes the nostalgia that washed over him as he danced with Billie Joe and remembered their friendship over the years, marveling at the idea that, despite Green Day's wild success and his own relative obscurity, this song brought them back together.
This is also what this song does for me. I remember listening to this song with my friend JJ when we first discovered Gen X. We traded the same CD back and forth hundreds of time because it was pretty hard to find at the time. Eventually, when I moved away, I gave him that copy of the CD and went years without hearing that song. I hadn't dubbed the album before I gave it to him. But when I was in college, we talked on the phone and Gen X would come up. More than once I asked him to put the album on while we talked so that I could hear their music in the background. To this day I associate Gen X with one hot summer in Ohio when we drove around smoking cigarettes and listening to music that, twenty years old at the time was brand new to us.
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