first round
(5) Kelis, “Milkshake”
SHOOK
(12) Hercules & Love Affair, “Blind”
257-104
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/7/24.
jessica bell on kelis’s “milkshake”
When I entered the lottery for the March Danceness (00s Edition) Tournament, I must admit that it was only as a half-joking attempt to have bragging rights over Matt Bell if I went further in the tournament than he ever did. Being that I’m not a writer AT ALL, I know that will only happen if people think that Kelis’s “Milkshake” is a better song than whatever song we’re up against. But I also wanted to defend my honor against Matt’s Creed essay that appeared in the March Plaidness Tournament, thinking he shared a secret of mine—that when we met, my computer background was a picture of Scott Stapp sexily slinking across a piano dripping wet. Today I went back to read his essay and found he'd decided to leave this detail out, and now it's me who's shared one of my many college-era embarrassments.
I was excited to be included in this particular version of March Xness because the early 2000s was my prime musical era. This was the music of my college experience. Nights at the club, me expanding my sheltered little corn-fed mind. Music was honestly my life from my early teens on, as I suspect it was for most latch-key kids. I grew up in the era when MTV actually played music videos, and I have vivid memories of being mesmerized by Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and Beck’s “Loser” videos. Thanks to YouTube, I can go back and revisit those memories (and trust me, I do). I was an only child, and I spent tons of time in my room listening to music or playing name-that-tune on the radio with my then-teenage uncle. Fast forward to my sophomore year of college: It was the time of Napster, and my school had a T1 internet connection. I loved downloading and making mixed-CDs of club music. I loved dancing. I thought about being a DJ in my spare time, a fleeting thought that became a reality just once, when I drunkenly scratched some records at my best friend’s wedding reception. (I guess I achieved DJ status?)
When I found out that I had been chosen to write this essay, I was ecstatic. I already had a song picked out, but due to a minor email snafu, it was taken by the time I was notified. I didn’t have any real thoughts about what I was going to write, no brilliant insights. It was just tied to strong memories of one of my best friends from college saying “I love this song” every time it came on while turning it up (It was on ALL. THE. TIME.) She was my up-for-anything friend. She was my club and concert-going friend. As I mentioned, I loved music, and I loved making mixed CDs. I had an extensive CD collection, started when I won 103 CDs from my local alternative rock radio station at sixteen. I amassed more from my mom occasionally letting me use her BMG Music selection and a sporadic trip to the Target over an hour away. Then I added in the Napster content. Hundreds of CDs. I once loaned the entire collection to the same friend who loved my first-choice song. She would go on to lose the entirety of that collection, and I would be heartbroken. I would later go on to lose her to mental health issues and suicide, and I would be heartbroken on a whole different level. (If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org).
So here I am, telling the stories I wanted to tell anyway, all to get to my backup song choice, "Milkshake" by Kelis.
Kelis’s "Milkshake" made it to number 3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in 2003. Its chorus continues to be an earworm more than 20 years later. When "Milkshake" came out, I didn’t give much thought to its meaning, I just danced to the thumping music. Actually listening the lyrics and watching the sultry music video makes it seem pretty self-explanatory, but when you look at interviews with Kelis, she widens its scope, stating that “It means whatever people want it to” and that “a milkshake is the thing that makes women special. It's what gives us our confidence and what makes us exciting.” I suppose the meaning is clearly there in Verse 1—"I know you want it / The thing that makes me / What the guys go crazy for.” Perhaps we’d label it as mojo, or as Dr. Evil would say in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, my favorite movie from around that same Napster era: “the libido, the life force, the essence, the right stuff, what the French call a certain ‘I don’t know what.’”
Growing up, all that I ever heard was, “Be confident.” Confidence is sexy. If you couldn’t be confident in life, then “fake it ‘til you make it.” But when you search, “Do men think confidence is sexy?” you get mixed messages. Be confident, but not so confident that you’re assertive. Be confident, but not so much that you’re arrogant or that you convey hubris (see one of my favorite raunchy episodes of The League, S1:E2). What if your milkshake is amazing but it makes you intimidating? Apparently, men need to be needed and to be the hero in the story. They don’t want to have to compete with their significant other. What’s a girl to do except not be too much?
One of my favorite memories as a child that continued into my teenage years was watching meteor showers with my dad. We’d lie down on the warm hood of his car and talk about the stars, science, and life. Living life as a sporty nerdy girl without a date, let alone a boyfriend, he’d reassure me that someday I would meet a guy who would love me for who I am. It would take several more years before I met that someone. Someone who not only appreciated who I was but challenged me to become even better. I guess you could say my milkshake eventually brought the right boy to the yard.
But still: I do hope my March Xness essay beats all of Matt Bell's.
Jessica Bell is not a writer. She’s a scientist with a focus on climate and health. She’s also a gardener, cat wrangler, naturalist, craft beer enthusiast, birder, and nature lover. She is married to three-time March Xness loser Matt Bell. This is her first published essay.
New Year’s Eve, 2009: Raquel Gutiérrez on hercules & love affair’s “blind”
As a child, I knew
That the stars could only get brighter
That we would get closer
Leaving this darkness behind
2008 was a year that felt over the day it began. Celebrating its end with a party, in hindsight, was an empty gesture. It was the third year you worked at a Southern California university as mid-tier departmental administrator. By the end of that Fall semester you were told the position you had ruefully assumed to be secure had to be whittled down to 17 hours a week. It was devastating but you still had your benefits which made it easy to stay and weather whatever storm lay ahead.
At least you had seen Anohni And The Johnsons’ god tier concert at the Walt Disney Hall back in October of that year. It left you and the rest of the audience that night astonished. What had you witnessed? Anohni’s voice accompanied by a 20-piece orchestra was what you hoped to be freeted by when you leave this earthly plane. Hers was probably the closest to a siren call you would ever experience, and you would gladly swim away from shore towards it. Her cover of Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” was spiritual sustenance. And you needed that. You weren’t sure what was coming next but whatever happens you have this feeling, like protection, following you wherever you go.
You got through the holidays dissociating as per your typical yearly script. Your person at the time had marked NYE on the kitchen calendar for your return from her family holiday gathering in the Central Coast of California. There was a new queer club waving its flag and the new year would prompt its inaugural party. It was in a neighborhood on the other side of the river from LA’s Chinatown. It was at a rehabbed warehouse and the floors were polished concrete. All these details you note because rent is going up and your paycheck is reducing thanks to the housing crash and you wonder how people are affording their new art centers in the making, even if it is a good time for art. You couldn’t see where the money was coming from but it was making a dent in Queer Los Angeles. Did academia really pay that well? You kept all of your wondering close to your chest, like you did in grad seminar. Ideas always too scared, too skittish to leap from the diving board of your mind, to exit through your mouth. God forbid you said the wrong thing.
It was an era when drag kings had exited the cultural arena and audiences were finally emboldened to normalize their respective gender performances. Butchas and studs were finally clearing their throats. You could now wear thrifted Brooks Brothers madras shirts and shaved in parts in public now, out of the club and into the classroom. As if a goth phase never existed. As if gender liberation meant we could now be boring bros and it was perfectly acceptable. Welcomed. It was a moment that coincided with everyone you knew had suddenly wanted to go to grad school and be a professor in a big metropole somewhere. And here. In Los Angeles.
And you don’t begrudge anyone for carrying those ambitions. Performance art in Los Angeles was a hot commodity—er, rather, a radical site of inquiry. And it had always been a site of innovation thanks to underground institutions like Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Hollywood. Places you had been involved with, paid to organize and visit with care.
But there was something about the current economic crisis that invited artists in your respective creative ecosystem to think more thoroughly about its radical possibility. Performance had slowly but surely began to lure its interdisciplinary brethren to the City of Angels from the East Coast. You had been back from New York for a few years now, having completed an expensive Master Of Art degree in Performance Studies but somehow didn’t get the Wonka golden ticket to do the PhD program.. No bueno because you had amassed quite a bit of debt trying to keep up with your large cohort cavorting around the West Village and then the East Village watching late night performances at La Mama and drinking through the Avenues, ending up at either The Cock or The Hole, walking home several times a week between 4 and 5am. You wince at the thought of having to pay your loans back so soon. Your advisor urged you to stay in New York another year and try again for a coveted spot. Instead, you took your covetousness (and boy, did you have plenty to spare) back to Los Angeles, missing its sprawl, its sunshine and the default familiarity you had automatically in place. You couldn’t see yourself in New York anymore. You rejected the reinvention of self everyone who came to New York longed for because you were tired of being challenged by a catalog of critical theory that would take years to read let alone understand. And to do so without any real fiscal support made the endeavor that much more untenable. The stack of books stared at you from across the thumbnail living room in the Prospect Heights 2-bedroom you shared with another roommate, a wonderful Hondureña raised in Bronx who took you under her wing (and to her family parties) when you first arrived to New York in the summer of 2003.
You were competing with graduates from the Ivy League and loving language wasn’t enough to power you through anymore. Foucault. Derrida. Weber. Butler. This shit was hard, man. You thought you could handle hard. You liked Los Crudos. And Ornette. And Alice Coltrane. And Vaginal Davis. But, your vinyl collection and pre-Pauline Oliveros deep listening hadn’t prepared you for grad school as well as you had hoped. No one had prepared you. And you couldn’t see how it was all connected.
This was back before trigger warnings and questions about why you used the D-word became a thing. This was back in an era where our generation reclaimed slurs and repackaged them as the language of radical reclamation. You wore your KICK ME signs proudly.
This was also a moment when sapiosexuality was enacted so openly and thus the cruising was essentially a hodgepodge of academic ranks moving in and out of the dating circle like the hokey-pokey of advanced degrees. In the humanities so it was just strange this soup of big brained eros. It was an orgy of nerd sex. And you knew this because it was also the late dawn of social media so everyone used MySpace as a clarion call for sex and to broadcast their predilections for theory. We all tailored our DIY HTML to signal our attractions for radical affinities, for object fetishists. You had such a boner for obsolescence. Didn’t we all? Your MySpace background was a scrolling landscape of dead cassette tapes in a range of colors.
You went out a lot in your early 30s, more than any other time. More than you did as a high schooler lucky enough to encounter a few all ages clubs where many of our favorite bands would come through Los Angeles to play.
Going out feels like an artifact from an analog past. As a younger person all ages meant paying $5 for a show at Jabberjaw. That was the spot, on Pico Boulevard near Crenshaw. It’s where you picked up a caffeine habit. Back when lattes were served in beer mugs. Back when gas was a $1 a gallon. In Los Angeles. It’s true. It was once possible to traverse the canyons and concrete rivers on another five dollars a week. The Clinton era. Reality Bites. And the Los Angeles Riots. We were all living high, even those of us not riding the hog. Going out feels like an artifact because back then you did it to find expressions of ideas that resonated with your curiosities and desires for a bigger world.
But then sex became a thing and no one told you about it but you knew you had to experience it. You burn down the closet, a feat in 1994. There was no going back. Your 20s were spent chasing dead ends at the club. You searched for ways to express desire. Everyone there knew that you were there to hook up, and that wasn’t so bad because no one had broadcasted their thoughts about your methods the way they do now on their little self-reporting surveillance machines. These places were frequented by mostly gay men and a smattering of lesbians anyway. What harm could they do? This was back when you kept your sneering out of earshot. The usual ooonce-ooonce bouncing off the walls and into your innards. The bass was thick for an era where lesbians felt nothing for house music. Not to suggest queer historical revision—there were plenty of lesbian clubs, if one knew where and how to look. Or rather, there weren’t. Not really—because you weren’t looking. The concentration of lesbian clubs were in West Hollywood and they were okay. Just club remixes of whatever was popular. A soulless top 40 and Lauryn Hill’s “That Thing” on a loop. It kept your sad excuse for desire at a 11% color saturation. It was fine.
A graduate degree in Performance Studies obviously helped you see quickly why and how you had been doing nightlife all wrong. And when the economy crashed just as you settled into your work routine going out was the only thing that helped. Job insecurity gave way to a YOLO mindset that you’re still paying for today. And all because you didn’t know how to want what you wanted, or how to name an economic desire. How could you know how to inhabit economic stability as a young, queer, transmasculine butch dyke? How (and from whom) would you learn to wear down the brick wall of capitalism, one oily fingerprint at a time?
And you tried to bid farewell to 2008 but it should have been an exorcism. And the queer gentry’s art center’s New Year’s Eve party was awash with lighting that would one day be known as bisexual lighting. And you drank too much when you definitely shouldn’t have but it would be years before you realized that your inhibitions would save your life. And those years many lives couldn’t be saved. People with more resources than you took their own lives because the economy tanking shattered everyone’s dreams and delusions. But before the inhibitions took the wheel, before you could see their rightful purpose, there were the DJs that saved your life on the regular. And that night, that last night of 2008 a DJ played your life and the bouncy, untroubled opening beats of Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind,” began and you rushed as coolly as you could to the dancefloor. And sure you still had to share that space with those who were rightly composing their own Le Grain De La Voix essays in their heads as they, too, surrendered to the ethereal allure of Anohni’s voice, interfering with any shred of ability to dance on beat. But, not you. You sure as shit never wrote essays in 2008.
Bradford Nordeen
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator. Gutiérrez's first book Brown Neon (Coffee House Press) was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and listed in The Best Art Books of 2022 by Hyperallergic. Brown Neon was a 2023 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Lesbian Biography/Memoir, a 2023 Finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firework Award in Creative Nonfiction and Recipient of The Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. A 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism, as well as a 2017 recipient of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Gutiérrez is currently the inaugural Writer-In-Residence in the Art department at Whittier College in Southern California and teaches in the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Gutiérrez gets to call Tucson, Arizona home.