the final four

(16) local h, “bound for the floor”
outfought
(9) veruca salt, “seether”
1261-661
and will play in the championship

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 27.

JOHN MELILLO ON “BOUND FOR THE FLOOR”

This is an essay about Local H’s most commercially successful song, “Bound for the Floor.” It was the first single from the album As Good As Dead, released in April 1996. Local H, at the time an interracial duo composed of singer-guitarist Scott Lucas and drummer Joe Daniels, was founded in 1990 in Chicago. The band—really Lucas’s project—continues to make music today. Local H are the last grunge band.
But this is an essay, really, about this particular Local H of 1996, of “Bound for the Floor.” Listening to this Local H again makes me wonder about what it means to persist in ruins, what it means to linger in the coming after. Listening to this song and this album again, I realize that this song asks me (and all of us) to reckon with debt and mourning and influence.
Local H in 1996 work in a deeply Nirvana-esque style. I say this as a matter of course: the total internalization of quiet-loud-quiet; of textured guitar distortion; of melodic screamed sickness unto death. Local H kill their idols with the kindness of repetition. This is absolutely a compliment. 
That’s because for Local H in As Good As Dead this mastery and retransmission of Nirvana’s style produces a kind of newness, even in its fidelity to a previous model. Style as knowledge and homage is something I want to dwell in here: it’s what makes the repetition a swerve, a slight difference. It’s what composes Local H’s afterness and lastness: their continuation.
“Bound for the Floor” and the other songs on this album take up grunge as an idiom in a way that is both totally inside of and removed from it. Mastering grunge (Nirvana’s grunge) as musical style—as a duo no less!—means opening up a gap between recognition and rehearsal, between the enraptured first listening and the task of taking apart and making sense of that listening. This gap shows a band giving in to the power of a style, doing it again not because it is an emotional territory to be misread and mined but because one can continue to work in its nuances and possibilities. Local H represent, for me, how the minor swerve works just enough to manifest a concrete feeling, rather than something tired, cliché, and embarrassing. There is a clear contrast between Local H and the insipid irony-free post-grunge masculinist tragicomedy that filled rock radio in the second half of the 90s.
On a purely technical level, they simply sounded better—more interesting sound textures, better drumming—than the many other Nirvana-esque bands. Their transformation of the power trio into a power duo was inspiring. They worked out an even more efficient system for reducing rock to rhythm and noise.
But the afterness and lastness of Local H—their ability to straddle the abyss between grunge’s operative moment in rock and its cultural exhaustion—goes beyond the technical details of their music. On this album—and in this song’s style and delivery—they are aware of their belatedness. That belatedness neither silences nor alienates them. Rather, it grants them voice. “Bound for the Floor” emerges in the wake of a double death: a death that is actual—Kurt Cobain’s—and another kind of dying: a loss and resolution of the vividness and ongoingness of the past into the concluded fact of the object, the photograph, the status update, a conclusion. The end of Nirvana froze grunge into a death mask. Alice Notley describes this feeling in an essay on Frank O’Hara: “I discovered a curious thing: … Frank O’Hara’s poetry had frozen into art for me. It, like my own past, wasn’t my life, a vivid motion-filled thing; it had died into artifact.”
All over As Good As Dead it is hard not to hear this process of grunge dying into artifact. But to be in that process, to demarcate it as it happens: that is the magic of Local H on this album. This happens in both sound and lyrics. Throughout the album, it’s hard not to hear Cobain as the “you” addressed by Lucas. For instance, on “O.K.” he sings:

Drawing a collective breath
I could cry myself to death
And wash this all away
In a flash, you were gone
Leaving me a couple of songs
That I listen to everyday
And I don't even care
That you were so unfair

Or on “Manifest Density (Part 1)” we hear:

You're on to something good
But I can't believe it's all
That matters to you
A fool 

Who never seems happy
When things are great
It's too late…

Fidelity—to the call, to those other songs—grants the possibility of speaking to the dead. Your voice both is and is not their voice. The other popular single from As Good As Dead, “Eddie Vedder,” expands on this attitude. It is an angry turn on the one who has left, the one rejecting the singer (and the world): “You go ahead as good as dead / That’s it / I quit / I don’t give a shit.” The one who is dead and gone was always “as good as dead.” The pronounced semblance of death now precedes the actual loss of death.
Such a projection seems to be the power of afterness: the ability to warp time and remake causality.
I should say that this structural atemporality was also part of my lived experience of this music. At the time As Good As Dead and Nevermind were co-emergent in my adolescent brain: my summer ’96 awakening to grunge (brought on by a chance radio listen of Nirvana’s “Drain You”) manifested as a near constant desire to listen to and make these sounds. To hear Local H was to hear the possibility of the reproduction and continuation of not just grunge music but music. Even in the act of repatterning my brain by listening to Nevermind on a nightly basis, I was also hearing other “Nirvana” (i.e. Local H) songs that could distance and somewhat displace the Nirvana-idol-sound-image. That little bit of separation in the music—what at the time I heard (and still hear but less intensely) as distinctions in presentation, in voice, in texture, in attitude, in the sounds of the songs themselves—granted me futurity. The music seemed to be saying: “Can’t go on, must go on.” 
All this time passed and passing. So much repetition and difference. “Bound for the Floor,” with its intensely repeated lines of “You just don’t get it / you keep it copacetic / and you learn to accept it / and oh it’s so pathetic” is on the surface a mantra of alienated self-hatred. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the tone of the hatred here: does the singer hate himself as the one keeping it copasetic, hate others for keeping it copasetic, or hate a particular other for going too far? Is the “you” another way of saying “I”? Is the “you” the quiet seeker of a false normality? Is the “you” the potential suicide who holds back and sustains their dread, until the end?
The mantra becomes a magic spell, simultaneously undoing itself and reveling in its failure to undo a single goddamn thing, to change that “you” it calls to. The song seems to be telling us: “Don’t keep cool! Get the fuck loud! Scream!” while also freezing in place, stuck in its own cycle. The song battles an affectlessness that I can’t but hear as a particularly Midwestern take on grunge. I flash to my sophomore year of high school, the commute with my father across the city of Wichita in the blue Chevy Astro van to the high school where he taught and coached football. What were the effects of hearing this song nearly every morning on the radio? Was I hearing myself hate myself or hearing myself hate my dad? Or hearing myself hate the self that dad, school, football, world were making of me? “What good is confidence.” Or hearing myself hate the very emptiness of a self that would admit to such influence? Or hearing myself hate the afterness of adolescence, the irredeemable fall into desire, responsibility, compromise? “Bound for the floor.” Or hearing myself hate already death? “Born to be down.”
All, none, others.
There is something about minor voices, the voices that are perhaps underrated or forgotten by the mass projections and delusions of immense popularity, that helps answer the question: how do you survive this shit? Debt, mourning, influence. To come after grants the possibility of survival, the grace of keeping things going. To call to Cobain and to recall Nirvana’s sound both freezes and animates the object. It remains there as immovably movable as the stars. We pass into the afterness—which is, at least, still passing.

John Melillo is a professor, writer, and musician who lives in Tucson, Arizona, and St. Joseph du Moine, Cape Breton. His first book, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk, was published by Bloomsbury in the Fall of 2020. Melillo teaches/researches at the University of Arizona and performs under the name Algae & Tentacles. 

danielle evans on “seether”

I have seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in its entirety exactly once, in elementary school, and I am using “seen” loosely here, because I was a squeamish and sensitive child and once I gathered that our class was being shown a horror movie for children, I cradled my head on my desk and peered up only occasionally to see what fresh hell was happening on screen. As best I could follow the plot, we were meant to root for Charlie, a sycophantic boy who passively and complicitly watched his competitors, who are also children, systematically tortured by a wealthy factory owner and was rewarded by becoming the new factory owner.  In the moral world of the movie, the other children deserved their fates because they committed the respective crimes of being fat, unproductive, boastful, and a spoiled girl who demands what she wants.
In the version of the film we watched, after a rather delightful musical number, in which she screams, among other things,  I want the world I want the whole world and I want it now, Veruca Salt is sorted into the trash by the machine used to collect chocolate eggs from  magical  geese. The internet informs me that in the book and the 2005 film, Veruca is torn limb from limb by squirrels who deem her rotten. I remember being horrified enough by the version in which a child disappears into the trash chute.
I was predisposed, then, to love a band called Veruca Salt for their name alone, for embracing a feminine lack of restraint, a willingness to be loud, spoiled, rotten even, if the alternatives were punished or deprived. Their debut album, American Thighs, took its name from an AC/DC lyric She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies/ Knocking me out with those American thighs. The band introduced themselves by invoking a particular cocktail of aggression and desire and girlhood and honest rage.  “Seether”, their first single, was part boast, part apology, part warning, a love letter to the kind of rage that breaks out when you try to hold it back. I can’t see her til I’m foaming at the mouth sang Nina Gordon and Louise Post, the band’s frontwomen. Portions of the video are footage of the band in a Chicago animal shelter, surrounded by cats who are uninterested in the production, but somehow make the song’s tone both more vulnerable and more ominous. I try to keep her on a short leash, the lyrics say, while on screen a tabby cat yowls into the camera, as if to say Yeah, OK, good luck with that leash.
For a song with fairly straightforward lyrics—the seether is a personification of an explosive anger—it generated enough secondary interpretations (the seether was an illness, the seether was a vagina…) that in the song “Volcano Girls” on their second album, the band offered a footnote: “here’s another clue if you please/the seether’s Louise”.  Though “Seether” is a song about anger, the title locates it in the before of anger. What’s most interesting about the seether is not the specific quality of her rage, which is somewhat abstract, but about how long the seether can go dormant, and how hard the fight to keep her in her place is. The seether is rocked in her cradle, the seether is knocked out, the seether is boiled, the seether is swallowed, the seether is subjected to all manner of violence and domesticity, but the seether survives, and there’s some triumph in it. Also, perhaps some prescience— the positive reception to Veruca Salt’s debut thrust the band into the spotlight, and the industry, grueling tours, various personal crises, rejection by some in the indie music community that had helped form them, the difficulty of sustaining an intense friendship under even the best of circumstances, and perhaps Louise’s famously immortalized temper led to the band’s breakup after the second album. For years, Gordon and Post weren’t on speaking terms.

Here’s where I confess that I have squeaked into this tournament in spite of missing the heyday of grunge. I was a few years too young for generation X, and I was a Black kid growing up in the late 80’s and early 90s when music and radio were much more firmly segregated. In our car the radio presets were two R&B stations, two hip hop stations, one oldies station, and one generic pop station. Several years ago, when a friend of mine had a 90’s themed 30th birthday party, most of the guests showed up in plaid flannel; I showed up in glitter makeup and the bright blue wig I’d coveted since Lil Kim’s appearance in “Crush on You”.  Up through middle school, if a white person had made music after 1970 and hadn’t made it to the top 40, odds were high I hadn’t heard of them.  I had heard of grunge as a category, and understood it well enough to tell people some of my classmates were into it, but not well enough to answer my mother’s question when she asked “Grunge? Why would they call it something that sounds dirty?”
Not knowing much about what my classmates were into had become something of a badge of honor for me. In the third grade I’d tested out of my neighborhood school and been moved to a gifted classroom in which I was not just the only Black person but one of only a few kids without blue eyes. It hadn’t been welcoming. When my mother looked for a neighborhood to move to where the gifted class might be more diverse, she discovered I was the only Black child in my grade in the gifted program in whole county.  (I was also in the minority in having been placed in the program by the school’s own tests—most of the gifted students had gotten their placements through tests administered by paid private psychologists, something Black parents in the country weren’t regularly told was an option.) We did move, to a school where I was still the only Black student in my class, but no longer the only person of color, but I clung tight to my sense of identity being in part about what I wasn’t. I didn’t want to become that kind of Black girl, the one people worried didn’t understand she was Black. I assumed I wouldn’t like whatever pop culture my white classmates were into in part because it made the ongoing rejection feel mutual, and in part because I didn’t want to wonder who I’d be if it turned out I loved it.
By the late 90s, MTV and the radio were better integrated, and I, being in high school and having a more fully-formed identity, was less defensive about my own tastes. Plus, it was the birth of streaming music services, and for a few brief years before it all got shut down as the widespread theft system that of course it was, through the magic of Napster and Limewire I could hear all the music I’d heard of but never actually heard. The aesthetics were different, but I recognized in grunge feminism a bravado, a willingness to lack decorum and shun respectability,  that reminded me of the most interesting women in the hip-hop and R&B I’d grown up with, women who also had to navigate a scene run by men, women who developed a way of talking about sex without being reduced to it, women who didn’t have the privilege to grow up spoiled or be treated delicately, but had still found a language for telling the world what they wanted, had found the boldness to make demands, had found, in music, a kind of freedom even if it required relentless performance to maintain.  Some of the music of the alternative early 90’s bewildered me, some it took me years to come around on, but I loved “Seether” from the first time I heard it. I understood “Seether” because it understood how much effort goes into performance, how hard it is to keep yourself in a mold.
Anger—who can express it, who gets punished for it, who gets called angry or hostile and who gets praised for being firm or direct—is of course always political. I was raised alongside a generation of women who were fed slogans like girl power and lean in and have it all, which were meant to be inspiring, but sometimes feel instead like we built a generation of girls who were told it was their fault if they didn’t ask for enough, but didn’t build a world prepared to give them much of what they asked for. I was born into the first full generation of Black Americans raised in a post-civil rights act country, the generation of kids sent into schools people threw rocks at their parents to keep them out of, raised by a generation of Black parents who understood that entering formally segregated spaces and seats of power was the beginning of the work, just as the country was patting itself on the back for having reached the end. I was raised in a generation that was fed a story of endless growth and possibility and a bright tech-led future while we watched the wealth gap explode and the social safety net stripped apart and whole industries that had once been the source of stable jobs and communities vanish altogether or shift into gig work. There are costs—physical and mental—to constantly advising people to ask more of a world that keeps telling them no and judging them greedy for wanting it. No wonder all these years later so many people still love a song about seething.  

But I had hard time explaining why I loved “Seether” in the way that I love songs that have given me a vocabulary for a part of myself I didn’t know I needed to name. I don’t generally seethe at people. I rarely yell. I am almost never angry when people think that I am. I am a Black woman with an expressive face, and a person raised by New Yorkers who spent nearly a decade of her adult life in the upper Midwest, and so I eventually learned to anticipate that people would often interpret all manner of emotions— hurt, mild dissatisfaction, indifference, confusion, enthusiasm about an opportunity for change, directness when making a neutral statement of fact — as anger, and that it wouldn’t do me any good to protest. But if I am talking to you, I am almost never angry. I am at best, tired or exasperated or very sad. Well before I’m angry enough to scream, I’ve usually decided the person I’m angry at isn’t worth the effort.
I have two modes of truly angry: I am never going to acknowledge you again unless it will cost me money not to, and I am never going to acknowledge you again, but first I am going to tell you why, calmly but at great length and in specific detail, so that I never have to say a word or worry about hearing from you in the future. My purest rage is not so much an explosive anger as a cold one, a calculation. You win a fight with someone who is screaming at you or trying to hurt you by being indifferent or refusing to hear them out. You win a fight with a person who is careless by caring even less about them than they do about you. You win a fight with a narcissist by ignoring them.  Of course, this strategy only works when you have the power to walk away.
It costs something to build a life where you almost always have the power to walk away. It costs something to understand that most of time when someone is cruel or careless, it’s not because you misunderstood them or are lacking a secret exculpatory piece of information known perhaps only to them or because you did something to deserve it and can still undo whatever the thing was, to understand that a person who treated you that way probably did so because they believe you’re a person with whom they can afford to be cruel and uncareful, either because they don’t value you much or they didn’t expect you to value yourself enough to object. It costs something to object. It costs something to know that you can, in your heart, forgive people for how they let you know they didn’t value you, but you cannot in your heart unknow it, you cannot, in your life, hold space for people who don’t value you, or pretend that you’ll be open to them again.  It costs something to believe that you deserve more than people you care about often believe they should give you.
After I have walked away from someone or someplace that treated me badly, I still remember what it cost, even when I’m not sorry, even once I’m as close to forgiveness as I’ll come. If forgiveness means I’ve stopped saying a hex for you at night before I go to bed, well then sure, I’ve forgiven a lot of people. If forgiveness means I have to be friendly… well then. I don’t seethe before I’ve reached a breaking point, but I often seethe after, when the cord has been cut and there’s nowhere for the anger to go. It can’t be directed at a person or institution I’ve already cut off. When I rock and soothe and fight and swallow and boil my anger, I’m not trying to keep it away from someone else before it hurts them. I’m trying to get rid of it before it hurts me to hold onto it. It’s hard though, to let go of something you know has saved your life more than once.

But letting go of anger apparently has its virtues. It would have been a depressing end for one of the best known grunge bands fronted by women to emerge from the era as another cautionary tale about the cost of feminist rage and desire, another story with the message that you can want the whole world and want it now if you must, but the machine will eat you alive or the world will tear you to pieces, and no one will blame it: you were a bad egg, a bad nut.  But that’s not, after all, how the story ends. After years of open hostility, Gordon and Post met up to sit down and talk things out. The full original band got back together. In 2015, they released a long-awaited new Veruca Salt album, appropriately titled Ghost Notes. It’s moody and playful and sharp and delightful and sounds both like the third album they might have made together in the 90s and also like an album that needed another decade of adult life to get made. NPR’s review says “A group of friends and musicians who have overcome internal turmoil and external pressures that caused them to part ways in the '90s would sound this invincible. Embracing a throwback sound isn't stagnation for Veruca Salt. It's celebration.” I wanted to live so I pretended to die, opens the first song on the album “The Gospel According to Saint Me”, a tongue in cheek song about resurrection and coming back from the dead. The song concludes Surprise surprise it’s gonna be bright.

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her work has won awards and honors including the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction. She is a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a 2021 finalist for The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, and The Sewanee Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.