round 1

(13) fugazi, “waiting room”
waited out
(4) blur, “song 2”
351-263
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

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 5.

HEAVY CATS: roy ivy on “Song 2”

Two minutes. No muss, no fuss...but so mussy and fussy. Struts in, squalls out, leaves you sweaty if you don’t suck. And even if you do suck, it’s drilled into your dry dull skull for eternity and you will never, ever escape it. 
Drum intro. Boom-boom-gank/boom-boomp-gank-boom. You got your shimmy from the jump. What’s next? Brace yourself.
There it is, that ratty jank of a riff.  It’s hook city. It smells musty. It’s got a little of that...teen spirit. So where’s it going? Is this song gonna rock? Is it gonna mock? Is it gonna RAWK? 
Prepare to be hurled backwards into a ugly carpeted wall in three..two...one.

WHOO-HOO

Blur (pronounced “Bluhhhh”) used to be the pulsating nausea of being trapped stuck in a tacky condo with fratty American dorks who don Manchester United shirts on casual Friday and call their crappy condo a flat. They drank Guinness straight outta the can, sniffled non-stop while begrudgingly offering a bump, and they fucking loved Parklife.

Whoo-hoo

Blur (pronounced “Jesus Jones”) were the soundtrack of your first same-sex kiss. You candy-flipped as sweat cascaded from your pits at your first stupid rave.  “Boys and Girls” thhhhh-robbed as you dove into dogpile after dogpile of supple young flesh. You awake on a mattress made of crushed MDMA and the cast of It’s All Gone, Pete Tong and light up a Dunhill. Smoke up, you’re immortal. Put on Parklife. 

WHOO HOO

“BUH-LURR took Britpop to the brink with 1995’s The Great Escape. It’s bloody brilliant, truly just bloody brilliant tip to tail, head to toe; not a stinker in the bunch! They really blew their wad with this one. BURP!”
That’s the (American who calls American soccer “football”) Blur fan cornering you at a party, telling you once again how this record is the epoch of (yawn) and it’ll change your life.
Later on, you give it a listen. And ya know what, Blur does indeed achieve sweeping pop bliss with The Great Escape. Worthy of the swooning. That chode was right. Kinda feel bad about stealing his Xanax. 

WHOO-HOO

The next morning, Blur and Britpop broke up.
Same reason your parents did: dad got into Pavement. 
Damon Albarn was just so fatigued with being adored for his handsomeness by handsome people. Graham Coxon got sick of making music pretty people could enjoy. Their most recent album? Too acclaimed! So they had an affair on their forte.
Like all affairs, Blur didn’t cheat with somebody better looking. They starting scrubbing with the indie American scuzz, finding the peace and release they needed in Stockston’s slacker superheroes. Farewell to the clubbers, the football jersey schlubbers, and wankers who say “you just gotta watch Spaced.” Onto enchantment with slantment!
This did not bode well with one Stephen Malkmus, who took umbrage to sweet Damothan Albert’s confession of copping his indie rock. And one does not want a beef with a master beefer such as Mr. Malkmus, still walking free after slagging Scott Weiland to death at Lollapalooza 1994. 
He chided that Blur, in their reinvention, were trying to be “heavy cats.” Yet this lethal diss did not destroy the boys in Blur as it would with weaker men (RIP: Billy Corgan). They counter-punched with a two minute masterwork of cheeky aggression and uncorked British repression that has saved lives, ended wars, and achieved Stephen Malkmus’s biggest fantasy: the universal embrace of sports fans. 

WHOO-HOO

HOLY SHIT the song just kicked in with that first chorus and now your ass is blown off and never growing back. Bigger than Big Muff distorted guitar dislocates your shoulders, the bass puts the Boss Blues Driver pedal to the metal and mows you down, the “whoo-hoo” gets you by the short and curlies. It sounds ballsy on any stereo, from your Mazda shitbox cd player to your disgusting Airpods. It’s indie rock schtick with an arena rock dick
It. Just. Rips.
And here comes the first verse. You’re never gonna forget it.

Average Listener:

“I blaht blaht blaht blat...blub blub blub blubber...mumble mumble…but nothing is-is...WHOO HOO!” (Pumps fist, spills beer, pees self).

Listener adept in the cockiest cockney:

“I got my head checked.” Hey, happens to all of us!
“By a jumbo jet.” Oof, not that. How’d that happen? Were you on a runway? .
“It wasn’t easy.” Yup, near misses with jumbo jets usually are.
“But nothing ee-is.” Ain’t that the truth. 

Guy Fieri is fond of saying, upon discovering something tasty, that “you could put it on a flip-flop!” When he says that, he means the meat of the matter is just so darn good, it would still give you a first-class ticket to Flavortown, even if you placed it between the gummy rubber of a sandals.
With this riff?  This infectious blast of quiet-to-frenzy with the “whoo”s and the “hoo”s and the two verses, two choruses, and done? Lyrics schmirics. Put it on a flip-flop.
The Anglophile hears the line as “pleased to meet ya.”
While everyone who doesn’t suck hears “It’s a ninja.” 

WHOOOO…

Wait. Let’s take a second to savor that title. Whole lotta songs in this tournament. Most of ‘em, yeah, they got the title in the chorus. Whatever. 
“Song 2” ain’t trying to impress you. “Song 2” DGAF.  Real short band meeting:
“Hey Coxy, whadduya wanna call this rippah?”
“Well, Damy-Dames, it’s is the 2nd song on the record.”
Done. Classic British efficiency. They really are better at everything.

...HOO

Blur (pronounced “Winner of March Plaidness”) became the soundtrack of a lotta things. Great things, like youth and drugs and the days before hangovers. Bad things, like life on earth since 1997. 
“Song 2” doesn’t stand a chance in this competition. Especially going up against Fugazi. So what, you never paid more that $8 for their cd or show or shirt or whatever. Blur gave you a goddamn romper room.
One could argue, easily, that is the best “grunge” song of the bunch. It’s grunge distilled. It’s rude. It’s got the ‘tude. It’s got the quiet-loud-quiet stuff you crave. Do you want to mosh to it? Yeah yeah. Can you mosh while wearing a ratty flannel to it? Yeah yeah. Can you, uh, slack to it? Yeah yeah. Is it crusty? Yeah Yeah.
And it’s one of the few songs on this list that rock snobs and Average Bobs alike can thrash to, forever. After this bracket has turned to dust, “Song 2” is the only song that will stay with you, keeping your pulse going until the doctor takes you off life support. 
And when St. Peter calls your name, and them pearly gates swing open, you ain’t gonna be singing no Nirvana or Pacific Northwest trash. 
You’re gonna be shouting...ya know.

Roy Ivy is a lame-o. He once was in the beginning states of The Polyphonic Spree, but quit before they toured with Bowie and St. Vincent joined. What a lame-o. (No, he was not on that episode of Scrubs). Roy Ivy had a band called The Tah-Dahs, and they were pretty great. Hell, they had a blurb in Entertainment Weekly. But the labels never bit and he hung it up to move to Chicago like a lame-o. He became a lame-o singer songwriter, but tries to make it as unlame as he can. After writing for miserable people at a miserable company of monsters called Groupon and being fired for being old, Roy cranked out some gems for Consequence of Sound. He was really good at it, but then just stopped writing, like a lame-o, Now Roy Ivy lives in Montana and works a low-paying job in healthcare for the feds. He dislocated his shoulder 8 times in two years, has a long term girlfriend he can never marry due to student loans, and is regaining the use of his left arm.This essay is the first thing Roy Ivy has written in years, and he's chucking it in past deadline like the lame-o he is. Follow him on Twitter, though he rarely tweets: @royivy

Listen to his legacy at http://royivy.bandcamp.com

brad efford on “waiting room”

“If you ask me what is Fugazi about, I’d say Fugazi is about being a band.” —Ian MacKaye

I am sitting on the couch in my living room. My apartment is small but bigger than the last one. There is room enough for me to spend the day’s working hours working at the kitchen table while my wife spends them working in a small office downstairs. It is the only room downstairs. The previous tenants made it an uninsulated second bedroom. There is room enough in this apartment for our two cats to migrate sleeping positions throughout the day: living room couch, downstairs office, bed. I’d like to change the subject. If I think too much about the confines of the rooms my life now takes the shape of, something in me starts to seize.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am watching a movie. I am scrolling social media. I am listening to the same collection of songs again. I am writing this essay. I am pretending to write this essay. I am not sure what the couch in my living room feels like. It is not particularly comfortable. It is gray, it is stained, the cats have ripped its arms so that the stuffing shows. I don’t see any of this anymore. It is where I sit. I prop my legs up on a small wooden bench we’ve turned into a coffee table. It is not particularly comfortable.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room, thinking. I am thinking about the game I used to play as a kid, the game where two opponents turn a page full of dots into squares, drawing segment after segment until the page of dots becomes a page of boxes. This is the way I’ve become accustomed to seeing my life. I have a hard time telling whether the point is to keep making boxes or stop my opponent from making their own. I have a hard time telling who the opponent is, though I think they look and think like me. 

I am sitting on the couch in my living room again. I am listening to Fugazi; Fugazi is happening to me. I am thinking about how the Fugazi song “Waiting Room” is like the song “When Will My Life Begin” from the Disney movie Tangled. I am thinking about the ways I’ve wasted my life noticing parallels like this and trying hard to forget them again. I don’t believe in “wasting” time, though, not really. Time will waste itself, and we will spend the waste however we are moved to spend it. I do not feel guilty about spending time that is wasting itself. I try to create, I try to do good, I try to give to others who need it, but I do not feel guilty about time. Waste is a concept we built when we built the systems that drive us. The music is good and my thoughts are fleeting and mean nothing and you might call this “vibes.”
I am sitting on the couch in my living room watching the Disney movie Tangled. It’s about Rapunzel, whose best friend is a chameleon, which must be a part of the fable that I missed as a kid. Rapunzel sounds like Mandy Moore, who sang “Candy,” a song that came out at the end of the summer I was eleven years old. “Candy” is about someone waiting for someone else to notice them, come to them, and give them release. “This vibe has got a hold on me,” Mandy Moore sings. “Show me who you are.” The desperation is invigorating. The waiting’s the entire game. In Tangled, Rapunzel lives with some degree of Stockholm syndrome at the top of a very tall tower, trapped there by a woman pretending to be her mother—an admittedly unusual situation. In “When Will My Life Begin,” here are all of the activities Rapunzel participates in while waiting for her life to begin:

• sweeping the floor

• waxing the floor

• doing the laundry

• mopping the floor

• reading 1-3 books

• painting multiple paintings

• painting the wall

• playing guitar

• knitting

• cooking

• doing a puzzle

• playing darts

• baking

• making papier-mâché

• ballet

• chess

• making pottery

• ventriloquy

• candle-making

• stretching

• sketching

• climbing

• sewing a dress

• brushing her hair

Punzy isn’t getting paid to do any of these activities, obviously, and even if this were real life and not an animated Disney movie, chances are still slim that she would be getting paid to do them. They are simply ways to pass the time. She is waiting for her life to begin. All of this nonsense—the games, the art, the tailoring, the reading—is only white noise. Nothing but hold music on the phone call that is her life. This song depresses me.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room and reading back through all the time I just spent on a song from the Disney movie Tangled. I am preferring to understand it as something time spent doing to itself while I went along for the ride. I am choosing to see this writing as meditation, as holy, as worthwhile. “I am a patient boy,” Ian MacKaye says in “Waiting Room.” “My time’s like water down a drain.” I don’t think he is frightened, or complaining. He sounds content, almost defiant. He sounds like someone who is waiting not for something to happen, but for the event of waiting itself. He is planning a big surprise. He’s gonna fight for what he wants to be.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am wondering what I want to be. I am considering what to fight for. In Instrument, Jem Cohen’s Fugazi documentary, Cohen asks a fan waiting in line for a Fugazi show what the band means to them. “What do they mean to me? Well they don’t mean anything to me. They’re just music.” The fan laughs derisively. This moment is a triumph. It feels like a perfectly succinct distillation of everything the band has been trying to achieve in its tenure. “Fugazi is about being a band,” Ian MacKaye says earlier in the movie, making a point about purpose in as few words as possible. Choosing to use time as a medium to make art, form community, be together. This sounds like a dream come true.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room, listening to “Candy” by Mandy Moore. I like the song, and I am enjoying myself tremendously as it plays on repeat. Show me who you are. I am trying not to analyze the lyrics, as there isn’t much to analyze. I am happy that Mandy Moore made the song, and happy it afforded her a lifetime of unlimited monetary options and me a lifetime of one great option: listening to “Candy” whenever I want to. I think what she has done with time is as rewarding as what I have done, and I have done practically nothing. I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait. I am showing you who I am.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am wondering when will my life begin. I am manifesting control over time; I am letting time roll through me. I am fighting for what I want to be; I am being.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room. Guy Picciotto, guitarist and singer for Fugazi, is explaining why global celebrity is flawed. The band would rather create a community that is choosing them at every turn, following the invitation the band has sent rather than finding them unavoidable, in their faces, on their screens, unasked-for, undesired. This is why there is no fighting at Fugazi shows, no meanies allowed: community is key. It’s the entire enchilada. It is what everyone in the room is fighting for. It’s who they want to be. I think this is so beautiful it almost seems unattainable, more vision than reality, though I know it existed, I know that it happened. I know it like I know an ancient legend, like I know all the words to a song no one cares about, and right now just the knowing is fulfilling, just the ethos is enough.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room, uncomfortably considering all the things I have not done. I am giving myself official Pandemic Permission not to grieve this as a loss, but translate it forward into the future, to take the feeling of serenity with me as I go. I am sitting on the couch in my living room, and this is my life, it is beginning every moment. The beginning is the moment, the waiting a warm, inviting void. I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait, until my waiting turns to mantra. I cook, I sweep, I puzzle, I paint, I read, my every moment a new way to show me who I am. I am a patient boy. I am sugar to my heart.

I am sitting on the couch in my living room playing the dot game, making boxes with myself. Against myself. I’ve decided it doesn’t make a difference. We are connecting the dots to make boxes. We are counting each box as a win. Time and me, in tandem. We are playing the same game, on the same couch, in the same living room, together. We are doing it together. Another line, another box, another win. Waiting, but waiting for each other, waiting for our turn. No. The lie is that there are turns. There are no turns. We are simply waiting, here, together.

Brad Efford is the founding editor of The RS 500 and wig-wag, a journal of personal essays on film. He lives in Berkeley, California.