first round

(8) No Doubt, “Hella Good”
hella beat
(9) Cher, “Song for the Lonely”
123-72
and will play 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 3/4/24.

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kelly shire on no doubt’s “hella good”

The waves keep on crashing on me, for some reason. 

I didn’t do much research for this essay about the elements that make a song qualify as “dance,” versus any other type of song. Instead, I relied on my own knowledge base, or what my ears understand to be true: Rock songs equal heavy guitars and drums. Country songs feature the same, with additional twang and fiddle and some steel guitar, if you’re lucky. And dance songs, at least those from the last 50 years or so, also equal guitars—especially bass—and drums, but mostly feature a whole lot of synthesizer. Often there are horns, or synths that can sound almost exactly like horns. It’s the synth that makes it a dance song, I decided. 
Then I thought back to all the other songs, and their enthusiastic dancers, that came before. I think of Motown, and the 60s R&B my parents loved: The Temptations, Junior Walker. Not a synth to be heard. My grandparents era: Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller. Young people out there on the floor, swinging, swaying, coming close together and then apart. I think of that dated cliche from the old, original American Bandstand show, and the line the teenage dancers would deliver to Dick Clark, when asked if they liked a new song: it’s got a good beat; you can dance to it. 
No Doubt’s “Hella Good” kicks off with a simple beat, a drum tap-tap-tapping for about half a minute, but then the hook, all synth and guitar, opens it wide up and the song really begins. This groove feels low down, funky. Its electronic, buzzy tone reminds me of the opening notes of Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie on Reggae Woman,” one of the sexiest grooves I can name off the top of my head. A song that never fails to move me to dance, even if it’s just while sitting in my chair. Maybe this similarity is my ears intuiting the dancehall influences of the album, hearing somehow that parts of “Rock Steady” the album that produced Hella Good as a single, were recorded in Jamaica. 

Your love keeps on comin’ like a thunderbolt.

This is an essay about a dance song, but it was also going to be about getting older alongside your celebrity peers, we members of Generation X all snide and snarky as ever about our gray hairs and creaky joints, some of us going stark gray and some of us persisting in hair dye (me) and some persisting in embracing plastic and fillers because it’s our job, or part of our job, to remain ageless (Gwen). But it’s difficult to focus solely on aging, or even merely reminisce about life in the 90s/good old days, when writing about a song that’s so clearly, openly, about sex.

I wanna see you baby, real close up. 

I grew up in a household where it was a given that my parents were good dancers, and I was a terrible one. My mom laughed whenever I tried to do it, mocking – what? My ungainliness, poor rhythm, general lack of grace. I grew up hearing my family’s own creation mythology, of my parent’s initial meeting at a nightclub, how sparks flew between them on the dance floor. Early on I internalized that dancing was part of their world, their private milieu. I wasn’t invited to join them, and was actively discouraged from trying, pretty much. I was an only child for most of my first decade. Needing to keep myself entertained, I instead took up singing. There wasn’t a Disney or musical soundtrack safe from my impassioned warbling. 
Despite all that, I eventually came to enjoy dancing, after tentatively allowing myself to dance, privately, and always looking over my shoulder, should an adult be watching. It was a long evolution that started somewhere in my early teens, when flush with new hormones and images of my latest crush, I felt inspired to cut loose out on my grandmother’s back patio. I turned up the radio, playing the Go-Go’s “Vacation” and jumped along, in that very 80s/Molly Ringwald-esque elbow-and-knee pumping style that passed for dancing. A flutter of curtains, my grandma was watching me from her laundry room. She came outside, scowling, and told me to turn it down.
A few years later, I cranked it up and swayed when “Let’s Get it On,” or “Beast of Burden'' came on the radio while I dried the dishes in my parent’s kitchen. Both of these songs are slow, sexy grinds, not fast, driving beats. Rather than jumping around, I learned to trust my body to find the bass, to seek its own rhythm. 

You got me feeling hella good. 

“Just A Girl,” was No Doubt’s first big single, off their album Tragic Kingdom. As soon as I heard it, I knew the singer had to be from Southern California (I heard the song before learning the album title, and its play on the Disneyland nickname.) “Just a Girl” lists a lot of standard complaints about being a woman stuck in a man’s world, but it was Stefani’s line “cuz they won’t let me drive late at night” that stood out to me, alerted me that here was a local girl: it was a  familiar warning, the reminders I heard from my own worried parents. I was single, independent, and still their concerns rattled in my head as I zipped down the 5, the 91 freeways in Anaheim and north Orange County, visiting friends, lovers, after midnight.
There was a famous crime around that time, a girl whose face appeared on billboards, gone missing in SoCal after attending a Cure concert. She had a flat tire or car trouble, pulled over on the freeway, and the rest eventually became a feature story on Dateline. Gwen and I came from close-knit families, heard the same warnings. It was a drag, being just a girl. And there was something unseemingly, too, about being out late at night, the Puritanical scold I heard from other, over-30 adults: nothing good happens after midnight, after one, two in the morning. What’s a girl doing out there? Having sex. Looking for sex, tempting it. Or out at a club, which was understood to be the same thing. “Meat market,” they called popular bars. We know what you’re out there doing, was the subtext. 
A great, favorite song with an irresistible beat came over the sound system, and you grabbed your friend’s hand, rushed out of the bathroom maybe, to wiggle out onto the dance floor, your body needed to move, thrust, writhe to the beat pounding all the way through your bones. How good of a song, to be unself-conscious, lost in the groove, unaware. Cuz they often stare with their eyes, as Stefani sang. From the beginning, No Doubt made me want to dance. Even if it was more the jumping/pumping kind, versus a funky, disco groove. Jumping up and down is its own kind of dancing, too. 

You hold me like you should, so I’m gonna keep on dancing. 

If dance is a stand in for sex, then I can assume my parents were good at it. Maybe it’s why I wasn’t allowed to participate in the thing they had in common. When you’re an only child, you learn quickly the ways of adults. You look away from sights not meant for you, learn that your precocious comebacks will land wrong, half the time. It’s true that for much of my childhood I was chubby, near-sighted, unable to follow basic choreography steps required in school plays and talent shows. Maybe my parents had a point. After all, I still can’t follow any steps, or succeed at any of those dance routines that go viral on Tik Tok. My parents, if they could see me, would surely smirk and shake their heads at all my sweaty, spazzy attempts. 

Don’t wake me if I’m dreaming/Cuz I’m in the mood

Despite the grainy, gritty black and white, the video for “Hella Good” looks high budget, artsy and sophisticated. Gwen appears a little older, wiser, one could argue sexier in 2002, than she did eight years prior, in her first videos. Gone is her baby face, the little-girl pout. Gone, at least in this song, is the novelty of the Betty Boop, cartoon character voice. It’s a sexy beat, a dirty, grooving synth, and water, water is everywhere. Gwen, the whole band, is wet, splashing about. Submerged, playful, going under, bobbing up again. 
The song, the second single from No Doubt’s Rock Steady album, debuted 22 years ago, as of this writing. I know that, because I looked it up, and saw that my firstborn was born almost exactly a month before Hella Good was released. I would have been exhausted, covered in baby spit and struggling to breastfeed, and Gwen, well, she was on my late-night, baby-won’t-sleep TV screen, hotter than ever, rocking this funky, confident beat she wrote along with the Neptune Brothers, singing, panting about good sex: 

A performance deserving of standing ovations/And who would’ve thought it’d be the two of us?

22 years ago, Gwen and I were both over 30. Do the math, a little addition: Women over 40, 50, aren’t supposed to groove. We aren’t supposed to yearn, lust for, seek out, desire that certain beat. Dancing, splashing about in all that metaphorical water—that’s for the young. Unless you’re an icon—Tina Turner, Rita Moreno, my mother, maybe—you’re supposed to hang all of it up, right around the time you’re supposed to stop going out to clubs, and instead sport your pricey yoga pants on the school pick-up line.
For years, whenever her name came up, if her voice or face was in the room, I’d offer up this fact about Gwen Stefani: we’re the same age, y’know. It became something of my private punchline, delivered mostly to my husband, and later, my kids. What I believe this proved, I’m not sure. Perhaps I wanted to infer that given different opportunities, different life choices, I too could marry a rock (or country) star, or dress in a sports bra and Dickies, affix a rhinestone bindi between my eyebrows, and present myself this way in mixed company. More recently, as Gwen has crossed over into that portal of celebrity vague-aging, while the years show more plainly on my own face, I might want you to assume that I, too, am just like her: still hip, stylish, relevant. That I too am energetic, cool enough to grab a mic and, like Gwen, hear the beat and start jumping up and down, with maybe even a few hip thrusts in your face, for good measure.

Keep on, keep on…

Stefani and No Doubt are reuniting to play at least one of the weekends at Coachella this year. I live a couple of hours from the Empire Polo Field where the annual music festival takes place; I’ve never been. I hope Stefani and the band can get the crowd…moving? Jumping? Do people even dance at Coachella, or do they merely vibe? Did Stefani, like me, like a lot of Gen X friends I know, squint at the full line up across the April weekends and scratch her head with one of her manicured fingernails over the majority of the acts? Who even ARE these people? Regardless, it’s her job to paint her face, pull her hair into that high, tight ponytail, and put on a show. 
The artists, the musicians will age, my generation and our music will also eventually fade into obscurity. Still, the music itself will be there, hopefully always as easy to listen and dance to, as searching for the Glenn Miller band’s “In the Mood,” on my Spotify.

Keep on, keep on dancing. 

And also: What I succumb to is making me numb.

Kelly Shire has participated in several March Xness tournaments, most recently writing about Motley Crue’s cover of “Helter Skelter” for March Faxness in 2022. Her essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Catamaran journal, Brevity, and Quarterly West, among others, and her fiction is included in the crime anthology Palm Spring Noir. Born and raised in Southern California, she works as a school librarian by day and is finishing a memoir of music, road trips, and family.

drew krewer on cher’s “song for the lonely”

A few short weeks after leaving rural Georgia to start college in New York City, I looked out a window on the 14th story of my dorm to watch the towers collapse a mile away. My eighteen year-old brain tried to explain away the danger, that fires would be extinguished, that a city as big as New York had an infrastructure in place to take care of this before the nightly news would air. Seeing the first tower collapse quickly changed the way my brain felt and completely silenced my thoughts. It was an experience that I would later come to characterize as "numinous."
Rudolf Otto, a German Lutheran theologian, posited that all great religions are an attempt to experience the "numinous." This concept forever changed the way I would view religion and has woven its lessons throughout my life. If we are to simplify things, the numinous is said to be "wholly other," something not experienced in ordinary life, something beyond ourselves, beyond language.  It is experienced as a stupor, an overwhelming power, a terror that illuminates how nothing we are. But even for all its horror and bluster, it is merciful, gracious, alluring.
As the glass buckled on top of glass and sparkled in the sun, as the sparkle gave way to smoke, as the force of the fallout had no defined trajectory, I was caught in a moment of not knowing if I was in immediate danger, but I couldn't look away.  My body and consciousness were suspended somewhere between panic and mercy.

*

When you are a rural, teenage queer, with self-hatred of the femme, with no sense of fashion, with no context for your desirability, trust the city gays to guide the way. The small group of quick friends I had made were comprised of theater queers, and they were incredibly welcoming, even though most of my clothes came from a now-defunct chain of Southern department stores, appropriately called Gayfers.
"If you don't have your first kiss from a man by the time this year is over, we will line up and each of us will kiss you."
Me, later that night: upstairs at the Limelight, necking some blond dude who looked vaguely like an XY-model, candy kid, probably on ecstasy?

*

Seeing a community face an event like the towers in real-time was a striking lesson on how trauma is processed in wildly different ways. I saw dorm-mates and orientation buddies shift their behavior in a matter of hours. A photographer acquaintance asked me to follow her to document the evening of the 11th. She talked for hours about giving blood. Things took an uncomfortable turn when we entered a bar and she started jabbering at a rescue worker, who was buried in a drink. He had left his station out of self-preservation, and he kept crying and expressing that he just couldn't do the work. My acquaintance asked him if she could take his photo. He was processing at the bar, she was roaming feverishly with a camera, and I was numb. 

*

Shortly after the first dude kiss, I faded away into school work, leaving new queer friends behind, and attempting at all hours to avoid my roommate, who was evidence campus life roommate questionnaires often turn into failures of self-reporting. Any conversation became an act of emotional labor, and I turned to online journaling as a cheap (and satisfying) alternative to therapy. I spent most of my time in the library basement, a jungle of public computers and study cubicles. I often slept on the floor. I only stopped by my room to shower, change clothes, and occasionally sleep.
Late at night in the library basement, an older woman would appear, slightly disheveled, almost ghostly, but with the spirit of an academic. She was there most nights, sitting at a large table, mumbling to herself and either reading or staring at the New York Times. The building had security, and entry was restricted to those with university ID. Seeing her there frequently made me wonder if she saw me as a regular basement-dweller and called into question the decisions I was making for myself.

*

As my life shifted to being documented online, and as I was stranded in Georgia over the holiday break, I discovered the now defunct Gay.com, complete with chat rooms and dating profiles. I was taught early on to explore quick fixes first, so it seemed natural to deal with the rural fairytale of my undesirability by flirting carelessly with strangers in a huge city, where both my successes and failures would remain secret.
One of the first guys I dated came in second place to Leonardo DiCaprio for the lead role in The Basketball Diaries and he gave me a hard cover copy of The Prophet on our first date. We also ended up sitting behind Kurt Loder, eating popcorn, while watching In the Bedroom starring Sissy Spacek––which turned out to be one of the most depressing movies I've ever seen to this day; totally inappropriate for an early date. He was maybe 33, and I was 18, and he was extremely shaken after the movie; it was hard for him to speak. My distance from the emotional component of the film left me questioning my own responses (or lack-thereof)––is this my disposition, a result of PTSD, or the miracle of antidepressants?

*

That winter I emerged from the library basement, studying an appropriate amount, and filling my life with strangers. Kurfew, an 18+ club night coining itself as "America's Largest Young Gay Dance Party," had recently relocated to a bar in Chelsea; when one of my orientation queers canceled on me one Friday, I decided to go by myself, which became a frequent occurrence.
Over the loud soundscapes of Jonathan Peters remixes and dimmed lighting, I saw a man approaching me. Definitely a bad-boy vibe—a cross between Hot Topic and the Snow Queen, someone I might have seen in a young gay magazine at the time. He called me beautiful and asked me intellectual questions and stuck his tongue down my throat. He was an intern at MTV, so he gave me swag, burned me Belle and Sebastian CDs, and told me that I needed new clothes.
I became his three week Eliza Doolittle, and with very little money at the time, I was guided through buying some of the nicest jeans and shoes I had ever owned. He took me thrifting along St. Mark's place to find fitted vintage shirts. He taught me how to appropriately use lime and salt for a tequila shot, and he culture-jammed me with queer favorites, like Grey Gardens. He was 21 and obsessively called himself (and anyone over 20) "old," and he lived in an empty condo his father owned on the upper east side, which meant nothing to me at the time. He was an asshole, treated people like napkins, and consistently had the worst breath I've ever smelled in my life. But for a brief moment, he thought I was attractive, and collecting brief moments seemed to be where I was at.

*

For extra money, I signed up to participate in a psychological study that asked students within a certain radius of Ground Zero to read statements and to rate their emotional response on a Likert scale. It offered quite a bit of cash, as it involved an initial in-person session and subsequent phone calls spaced out over the year. Filling out the inventories was challenging, and emotionally distressing, as I often found it difficult to measure how I felt. Was I supposed to be anxious about the future? Do I not care? Should I be ashamed of riding the serotonin wave of eliciting desire while others are struggling?

*

Even with the light drizzle that March evening, the air continued to have an ongoing odd metallic quality. I was holding an umbrella and waiting for a DJ acquaintance of mine to pick me up in a taxi to head to the Roxy––he had heard that Cher was going to perform, and I was fresh off the MTV intern. I was in front of my dorm, donning one of my "outfits," when I saw a man in the distance walking from the park across the street, through the slow traffic, to ask me if he could stand under my umbrella for a moment. The volume of traffic was heavy enough––anything was very visible––so, I hesitantly obliged.
"You looking for some money tonight?" he whispered.
It took me a few Georgia moments to get this.
"I think you have the wrong idea."
He nodded, turned around, and left the umbrella's cover to weave his way slowly back through traffic, into the darkness of the park.
The Roxy was overheated and uncomfortably packed, and my earlier encounter had left me uneasy and throwing retinal caution to the wind, staring directly into the club lighting for long stretches of time.
At the Roxy, at Kurfew, at Twirl, it was almost guaranteed that the final song of the night was going to be Cher's "Song for the Lonely," with some of its final lyrics of the evening loudly insisting over and over that things would be alright. Being surrounded by community, by lights, by Cher––a warm queer cocoon––enriches, supports, distracts. When we encounter something that is larger than ourselves, we can't fight our experience, but we can be careful observers. How do we glow in the lights without living in them? How do we teach ourselves to dance through territories of enchantment and nothingness to mastery?
I had hopes Cher was going to perform at least a tiny set of songs, if she performed at all. Showing up near closing time, and singing the one song I knew she would sing, Cher was small and beautiful, blocked by the crowd.

Drew Krewer is author of the chapbook Ars Warholica (Spork Press) and co-editor of The Destroyer. His work has appeared in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, DIAGRAM, Afternoon Visitor, and Dream Pop, among other publications. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and lives in the desert.