No. 127 - Violent Femmes’ “Kiss Off” changed my life

In 1989, Christopher Hartley had an unrequited crush on the local undertaker’s daughter

Feb 06, 2026

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• 5 min read •

Just last night, I was reminded of just how bad it had gotten and just how sick I had become.

When I was 15, I fell in love with the local undertaker’s 16-year-old daughter, Jessica. How could I not? A beautiful dark-haired girl who had recently lost her mother — who was, let’s face it, one traffic accident or terminal diagnosis away from being an orphan — and whose father worked with dead people? Please. She was also quiet and mysterious and so much more mature than the one-year gap in our ages would seem to indicate. Although by that time I had already had several short-lived crushes, this was the first time that I was so simultaneously elated and wretched when I thought about a girl. I was sick, with a painful knot in my stomach that felt like something physical, and I was sure that Jessica was the only person in the world who could cure me of this illness.

And she was completely indifferent to me. Oh, she was kind and let me walk her home a couple of times, inviting me in to listen to tapes until kicking me out before her father got home, but there was no sign that she felt the same devotion that I did for her. Without coming right out and saying it, Jessica made clear that there was no way that the two of us were ever going to happen, due to our age difference if nothing else. I was miserable about the cosmic injustice of it all, but I had no words to express what I was feeling, to her or even to myself. All that would soon change, though.

But it could change with this relationship, de-derange, we’ve all been through some shit.

High school, among its other mortifications, brought with it an interminable bus ride every afternoon, time spent commiserating with friends about our miserable suburban existence. One of them was Ted, a punk with an abusive asshole of a stepfather who did everything he could to make the kid’s life a living hell. That day on the bus, Ted was unusually preoccupied with his Sanyo Walkman. When I asked if I could hear what he was listening to, he initially refused, telling me that it wasn’t for me and that I wouldn’t like it.

His protests only made me want to hear it more, of course, so I argued with him for a good five minutes before he finally gave in. “Fine,” he said, and shoved the headphones at me, watching nervously as I put them on and pressed play. Whatever dark metal screamfest I had expected left me unprepared for what I did hear: an urgent acoustic guitar, joined moments later by a plaintive, slightly adenoidal singer who had apparently looked deep into my soul and decided to set what he’d found there to music: “I need someone, a person to talk to / Someone who’d care to love / Could it be you? / Could it be you?”

When we grow old, it is wonderful to think about being young, remembering only the pleasure of pain-free bodies and unwrinkled faces not yet etched by age and worry. It is much less wonderful to actually be young, to feel lonely and afraid much of the time and to have no idea when or even if these feelings will ever go away. A completely self-confident adolescent would be a monster. Thankfully, no matter how convincing a façade we adopted, most of us felt just as alienated and rejected as this singer: “You can all just kiss off into the air / Behind my back, I can see them stare / They’ll hurt me bad, but I won’t mind / They’ll hurt me bad, they do it all the time.”

When I took off the headphones, Ted regarded me nervously, afraid, I think, that I was going to mock him. Instead, I blurted out, “This is awesome!” and we spent the rest of the bus ride trading the headphones back and forth, Ted promising to loan me the tape so I could copy it that night on my brother’s boombox. Weird band name aside, I was hooked. I had never heard anything quite like this before, never heard my own inchoate hopes and fears and insecurities so clearly articulated.

Third verse, same as the first.

The pain I felt over my unrequited crush did not disappear immediately (that took a few weeks), but at least now I had a soundtrack for it, a vocabulary that allowed me to emotionally articulate myself to myself. Yes, I thought, That’s what I’m feeling — that’s exactly what it’s like. Nor was it only a metaphor that the first Violent Femmes album was the soundtrack to my heartache: when I rode my bike past Jessica’s house one dark October evening (hoping to catch a glimpse of her but really just wanting to be near to where she was), I listened to “Kiss Off” on my own knockoff Walkman just to twist the emotional knife a little deeper.

I am no longer the romantic obsessive I was in the fall of 1989. The ardent passion I experienced at 15 could not sustain itself for long — not for me and not even for the Violent Femmes, those peerless chroniclers of adolescent alienation and infatuation, whose next album, Hallowed Ground, led off with a song about a grown man murdering his own child by throwing her down a well. Maybe there’s a 15-year-old out there for whom “Country Death Song” resonates as much as “Kiss Off” did for me, but if so, I sure hope I never meet him.

To this day, whenever I’m tempted to romanticize adolescence, all I have to do is listen to that song to remind myself of a time when everything I was feeling — love, heartbreak, and everything in between — I was feeling for the first time, and to remember just how lonely and excruciating an experience that can be. ◆

About Christopher

Christopher Hartley is an amateur musician and professional writing instructor, teaching social work graduate students in East Harlem. He lives in the suburban wilds of Connecticut with his partner, Ingrid, who is not an undertaker’s daughter but is pretty awesome anyway.

Instagram @hartley1

⭐ Recommended by
Terri C. Smith (No. 116)

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