round 1

(7) better than ezra, “good”
shoved down
(10) soul asylum, “somebody to shove”
371-359
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.

it was good, right? ragini tharoor srinivasan on “good”

Like most things I saw in or around 1995, it blends into everything else. Did I watch this film? Did I hear this song? 

I grew up in the long-1990s, bookended by the falls of the Berlin Wall and the Twin Towers. The rest is mixed-together headlines screaming on newsprint in 108 pt. font—OPERATION DESERT STORM, NOT GUILTY, IMPEACHED—my mother waking me up from sleep in the top bunk of the bunk-bed I shared with my little brother, tears in her eyes over the death of Princess Di.
The ’90s for me were looking forward to the year 2000 when I would be, impossibly, fifteen. The ’90s for me are Rachel Leigh Cook’s face overlaid with Gabbie Hoffman’s and Christina Ricci’s and Anna Chlumsky’s and Macaulay Culkin’s and the Savage brothers and the Olsen twins, scrunchies from the late ’80s in their hair.
The soundtrack to their morphing faces might be Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” or The Cranberries’ “Zombie” or it could be “Good,” from Better Than Ezra’s 1995 album, Deluxe. My dad had that album; it’s the one with heavy, plum-colored velvet curtains on the cover. “In the Blood” is track 1. “Good” is number 2. Those are the only Better Than Ezra songs I know, because that’s where I stopped the CD and switched it out for No Need to Argue (also my father’s).

But I’m not too sure, and I’m not too proud                                           

At the end of the ’90s, at the end of the Grunge Era, I embraced grungier grunge—Nirvana, Silverchair, Alice in Chains—in order to distinguish myself from the Britney Spears fans. But it was, for me, a distinction without a difference.
Now, watching the trailer to the 1995 Babysitter’s Club movie on YouTube, the era returns to me, with those songs. I don’t know if I actually saw the BSC movie. But I did read the books about the friends who started a babysitting service in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, back when there were no cell phones and the height of cool was having your own phone in your room.
I was nobody’s babysitter. I didn’t have diabetes, mono, divorced parents, or even braces, but I learned about those things from Kristy, Mary Ann, Claudia, Stacey, Mallory, Jessi, and Dawn, who, this year, during the suspended time of never-ending pandemic lockdown and virtual school, my seven-year-old with a Kindle and “Buy Now”-trigger-finger has also gotten to know intimately.
The BSC movie trailer starts with the opening chords of Tori Amos’s “Cornflake Girl,” from her 1994 album, Under the Pink. It cuts off before we hear Amos singing about cornflake girls and raisin girls, everyday mean girls and special ones.
“Hi. I’m Kristy. And these are my friends.” A multi-culti group of cute pre-teens at a generic restaurant table with a red and white-checkered tablecloth, straws in their milkshakes.
They’re all raisin girls. “We’re pretty tight. We even have our own club.”
The phone rings; Kristy answers. “Babysitter’s club.” With sing-songy sweetness.
“Everyone knows us. That’s because everybody uses us.” A montage: babysitters playing board games, painting signs, outdoorsy stuff.
Cut to a scene with one of the sitters, who is supposedly 13, but is being played by a 15-year-old actress who looks 18. “I brought a little something for your little cousin,” she says, “where is he?” The “little cousin”, supposedly 17, but being played by an actor who is 23, appears on the stairs with a winking grin. They’re both blondes.
This is when we hear the first bars of “Good.”

When people say, “I’m a 1980s kid” or “I was a child of the late ’70s” or “I grew up in the ’90s”, when are they talking about? Do you grow up over the course of two decades, or one? If a decade, then which? Do you grow up between ages 10 and 20? Between 5 and 15?
I wonder about this because my daughter, M., is in second grade and we’ve had a full, eventful life together these past seven years, but personally I don’t remember all that much from my own first seven years, and I’m realizing that she might not either. I’m realizing that all these days and months and years of happenings (like living in five states and traveling in three continents) might one day mush together for her the way everything before 1995 does for me.
My daughter’s childhood, the one that she will remember, the one that she will recount when she’s in her 30s and 40s in stories that start with the words, “When I was a kid, I” and “Growing up, my parents” and “My brother and I, we always”—has that childhood even begun?
In the trailer, “Good” scores scenes from an idyllic American summer. The music is just instrumental at first, so we don’t hear these words: 

Looking around the house /
Hidden behind the window and the door /
Searching for signs of life but there’s nobody home.

Well, maybe I’m just too sure /

Then, as the babysitters are talking about “change,” the lyrics return, and Better Than Ezra’s Kevin Griffin ventriloquizes Ann M. Martin’ Kristy Thomas: “Or maybe I’m just too frightened by the sound of it.”
It’s not a subtle trailer.
The girls are frightened about divorce, frightened about older boys, frightened about fighting with their friends, frightened about not being frightened about the right things, frightened about whatever is hidden behind the window and the door.
“Likes her?” Mallory asks Jessi. “Or like likes her?” There’s as much terror as delight in the question.
But it’s good, they know. Life is good. This is the good life.

It was good, ah-wa-aha /
It was good, living with you, aha.

In case we didn’t get the point, watching the girls playing at working, it was, the song reminds us:

good good good good good good

And why wouldn’t it be? Running in the sprinklers, playing baseball, riding bikes, blowing out candles on a birthday cake, riding a Ferris wheel, giggling with friends leaning on a white picket fence, your date ringing the doorbell, a first kiss.
I don’t know if a seven-year-old’s childhood has begun, but M.’s stalled out in 2020, a year without school or friends, without clubs or carnivals, a year spent reading on the couch. Which is to say, a year that will be terribly memorable because nothing happened. Which is also to say that unlike most of childhood, it will be impossible to forget.
We spent most of 2020 in a state of foggy yet acute disbelief, in a mood caught between “Cornflake Girl”—

This is not really happening /
You bet your life it is. 

—and “Good”:

Sitting around the house /
Watching the sun trace shadows on the floor /
Searching for signs of life, but there’s nobody home.

Of course, we were home, we were home all the time, we were sitting around the house, we never left the damn house, and I suspect we will remember every swollen second of it forever and ever and ever. And we’ll miss it, too, this period of life outside life, those of us who had the chance to live it. The year of the never-ending spring break. The year in which every day was a working Saturday. The year that closed with the ninth month of March.
Looking around the house we moved into in 2017 but, thanks to 2020, have lived in for over a decade, I have two thoughts. One: it was good, being here. Sitting around this house, we lived, loved, survived. We were lucky; we were safe. It was good.
But also: we cannot stay here. In this place. In this house. In this time. Pandemic. Abortive childhood. We have been too frightened. We have absorbed too much low-grade terror.
Toward the end of the BSC trailer, the 12 and 13-year-old babysitters look around their club headquarters (one of their bedrooms) and Dawn says, wistfully threading her fingers together, “We’ve spent some of the best years of our life in this place.”
It’s a ridiculous moment, but like the song, “Good”—which is both deeply felt and deeply forgettable (my husband, overhearing it while I was writing these words, mistook it for Semisonic’s “Closing Time”) and which is itself confused about whether it was good or you were good or if it’s even any good (I’m not too sure, Griffin sings more than once)—it is also totally right.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona. She is editor of “From Postcolonial to World Anglophone” (Interventions 2018), co-editor of “1990 at 30” (Post45 Contemporaries 2020), and co-editor of “Thinking with an Accent.” She is working on a book about the itineraries of Indian English literature as ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone. She was eight when this picture was taken and probably thought the outfit was not just good, but great. 

Future Nostalgias: mark neely on “Somebody to Shove”

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias. ― Vikram Seth

TIME FLIES BY LIKE A VULTURE IN THE SKY

Before I started working on this essay, it had been a long time since I thought much about Soul Asylum. Bands like Hüsker Dü and the Replacements (who also emerged from the early eighties Minneapolis punk/hardcore scene) were much more likely to show up on Spotify or Sirius radio, and my Soul Asylum albums had long since disappeared—casualties of the many haphazard relocations of my young adulthood. After a quick stint as MTV darlings in the mid-nineties, the band’s stardom faded, and they fell under my radar long before the turn of the millennium. Partly because of this long absence, when I queued up Grave Dancer’s Union and the giddy opening riff of “Somebody to Shove” pumped through my headphones, I found myself drowning in a Proustian wave of nostalgia.
Music has a particular power to evoke this haziest of emotions, a fact well-documented in both psychology journals and viral videos. Pair this with the theory of the “reminiscence bump,” which suggests we retain and return most to memories formed in our late teens and early twenties, and it makes sense that “Somebody to Shove,” released when I was a music-obsessed twenty-year-old, would have me brooding over those long gone days.
Which brings us back to 1989, my freshman year at the University of Illinois. I remember sitting in my dorm room, picking out the riff to “Never Really Been” on my Alvarez acoustic, singing, “Where will you be in 1993? / Still sitting in the same chair,” back when ’93, my graduation year, still seemed impossibly far in the future. When I think of today’s college students, many of them taking online classes from their childhood bedrooms, it strikes me how little the courses I took figure in my memories of those years. I scraped by academically, but my main priorities then were music, recreational drugs, and unattainable women, pretty much in that order.
Early nineties Champaign-Urbana was a kind of gritty paradise for a young indie rocker. The town was packed with musicians, had a first-rate music store (R.I.P. First National Guitar), and enough small venues that between the thriving local scene and touring bands passing through on their way north to Chicago, you were guaranteed a couple of good shows a week. Many a night I stood on the sticky floors of Mabel’s (R.I.P.), the Blind Pig, Trenos (R.I.P.), or Tritos Uptown (R.I.P.), drinking pints of Leinenkugel (having washed off the underage stamp), and nodding along to Love Cup, Lonely Trailer, Corndolly, Hot Glue Gun, or Titanic Love Affair.
There were also bigger shows hosted by the university, and smaller ones at high school gyms, epic house parties, and really anywhere you could cram a couple dozen people. You might catch De La Soul in a hollow-sounding auditorium one night, and the next be packed into the exceedingly sweaty basement of a Unitarian church while a disgruntled Ian MacKaye clomped around the stage. Inspired by all this beguiling noise, I bought an electric guitar and started writing songs, recording them on my friend Matt’s 4-track, and playing them for whoever would listen.

SUDDENLY HE BREAKS INTO SONG

The summer after my sophomore year, some friends and I drove up to see Soul Asylum at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago, cranking Hang Time or Made to Be Broken as we flew up I-57 watching corridors of ripening corn give way to El stops and high-rises. We arrived in time to catch the opening act, a band who had been together for less than a year, and had until recently been known as Mookie Blaylock. Chicago indie fans were a notoriously jaded bunch—a few years later I saw the Smashing Pumpkins get booed off this very stage—but this band whipped the crowd into a frenzy. They had heavy riffs, hair for days, and a dynamic energy that crashed over the audience in booming waves. The lead singer wore ratty shorts, several layers of plaid, and combat boots, and stalked the stage with an almost terrifying charisma. I thought their name—Pearl Jam—was kind of corny, but there was no doubt that these dudes rocked. After the set, Matt turned to me and said, “Those guys are gonna be big.”
As mesmerizing as Pearl Jam was that night, Soul Asylum had been called “the best live band in America,” and they weren’t about to be upstaged. At a time when outfits like Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth had turned ear-splitting decibel levels into an ethos, Soul Asylum was known as one of the loudest bands around. Years of exposure to dimed amps had taken its toll on frontman Dave Pirner, who suffered from tinnitus and was losing his hearing at the ripe old age of twenty-seven. That night he played in front of a plexiglass screen designed to shield him from the drum kit and wall of amps blaring behind him.
A more sensible person might have pondered the wisdom of attending a show that required such protective measures, but I didn’t think about what all that noise was doing to my ears any more than I considered what the Camel filters I lit up throughout the night were doing to my lungs. Which explains why I now find myself yelling “What?” in that irritated old man voice when my kids call out from another room. I don’t recall many details from the show, but do have a clear image of Pirner prancing through a cover of “Rhinestone Cowboy.” I also remember milling around outside afterwards with that buzzing feeling of having been a part of something great.

LET’S GO OUT AND PAINT THE TOWN

After some time playing together, Matt and I decided it was time to get serious. We recruited a drummer and bass player and started a band, Sidecar Racers, named for an obscure Australian motorcycle movie. Our first real gig was at the Blind Pig, opening for Tommy Keene. After sound check, we sat in the front room of the bar and watched the crowd file in. I hadn’t been on a stage since my high school senior debate, and when I stood up my legs were shaking so badly I could barely stay on my feet. I steadied myself with another pint and when the time came, skipped up the stairs to the stage feigning as much confidence as I could muster.
Before the show I had borrowed a friend’s guitar—a cheap Explorer knockoff—to play on a couple of songs. “It’s kind of shitty,” he warned, and boy was he right. As soon as I raked my pick across the strings, it went so wildly out of tune that I had to turn down my volume knob and Mili Vanilli my guitar part. It says something about my playing that no one, not even my band mates, seemed to notice. From then on I stuck with my trusty black Telecaster, which still sounds great almost thirty years later. After our set, we were hanging around the bar waiting for Keene to go on, and the lead singer from Corndolly came over and complimented us on the show, saying we were her new favorite C-U band. I realize now she probably said that to all the boys, but at the time it was the coolest thing that had ever happened. That might have been the moment I realized that, shy as I was, I had secretly been yearning for an audience.
Sidecar Racers played a handful of shows close to home, and released a 7’’ on the Bus Stop Label (R.I.P.), recorded at Windy City Recorders (R.I.P.) with producer Matt Allison, who got his start mixing C-U bands on an old 8-track, which at the time was the fanciest rig in town. But by the time the single came out, the band had pretty much dissolved as we drifted towards various post-college commitments.
Matt and I decided to move to Seattle and start fresh, but when we browsed apartment listings, we found that the popularity of Singles, Nirvana, Soundgarden, et al. had priced us out of the market. We decided instead to move down the road to Cincinnati (because we liked the Afghan Whigs I guess?). The plan was to start a new band, but we found the music scene there unwelcoming. I whiled away a year bussing and waiting tables at a brunch joint near the university, waiting for something to happen. Soon after, I got together with a woman I’d been pining for and moved to Chicago, leaving my Telecaster in my mother’s basement. I worked as a waiter and bartender, took advantage of Chicago’s ample night life, and started writing more seriously. Just like that my “career” in music was over.
A professor of mine once said that if you write poems when you’re eighteen, it’s because you’re eighteen. If you’re still writing them at thirty, that’s a different story. I suppose the same could be said of aspiring indie rockers, especially those raised in a scene as fertile as early-nineties Champaign-Urbana. When Dan Murphy, longtime lead guitarist for Soul Asylum, announced in 2012 that he was quitting the band, he said, “To survive in the game of music. . . it occurs to me that one needs an unhealthy and combustible internal combination of two seemingly distant attributes—naivety and swagger. I no longer have either.” Reading this I realize that one reason my musical aspirations died on the vine (beyond the fact that I wasn’t any good), was that, though I had naivety in spades, I didn’t have nearly enough swagger.

THESE HANG UPS ARE GETTING ME DOWN

The night I squeezed toward the stage at the Metro, trying to inch closer to Pirner and company, Soul Asylum was at something of a crossroads. They had recently been dropped by their label—A&M Records—after their previous two albums failed to generate the kind of sales a corporate behemoth like A&M demanded. They signed a new deal with Columbia, but were under tremendous pressure to produce a hit. One more commercial failure and it was likely SA would join the long list of 80s alternative bands who faded into music history as the West Coast grunge sound gobbled up the airwaves. Things were tense when the band went into the studio, and grew considerably more so when producer Michael Beinhorn replaced drummer Grant Young with a session musician, a move that would ultimately lead to Young’s departure.
Out of this turmoil came Grave Dancer’s Union, with “Somebody to Shove” as its first track. The song starts with a verse that touches on one of Pirner’s favorite subjects—the fear of wasting time, of not fully pursuing one’s dreams and desires. “Time flies by like a vulture in the sky,” he tells us, so you better get on with it. The song’s title puts a punk rock twist on Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” and at first it seems Pirner is looking for a kind of mosh pit catharsis. Then the last line of the chorus completes the thought: “I want somebody to shove…me.” As he says in Loud Fast Words, a book of SAs collected lyrics, the song is not about violence, but “motivation.” While other white boy alternative bands of the era mostly concerned themselves with bitter love songs, slacker manifestos, and disillusioned anthems, Pirner returned again and again to this theme. “Where will you be in 1993?” is an earlier, more jaded version of the same sentiment.  
Those familiar with “Somebody to Shove” will remember that the chorus, though memorable, is not the song’s hook, which comes in the pre-chorus. “I’m waiting by the phone, / Waiting for you to call me up and tell me I’m not alone,” Pirner wails, as a pair of distorted guitars walk up the G-major scale. Like the old notion that a few hours in front of the TV might rot our brains, the idea of waiting by the phone now seems impossibly quaint. It brings back memories of sitting on the basement steps, talking to my high school girlfriend, the coiled cord from the pale green telephone mounted to the kitchen wall stretched to its limit.
“Somebody to Shove” got a fair amount of attention, but it was another song from the album, “Runaway Train,” that transformed Soul Asylum from a successful touring band into Grammy winners with millions of fans. “Runaway Train” got massive airplay on both radio and MTV (its video featuring milk carton stills of actual missing teens), and in a few short months, Dave Pirner went from crashing on couches to attending Hollywood premieres on the arm of Wynona Ryder. I would argue that “Runaway Train” is a decent pop song, but nothing close to SA’s best. If the guys from Poison had written “Runaway Train,” it would have been their crowning achievement, but Pirner, who came out of Minneapolis in the era of Prince, Bob Mould, and Paul Westerberg, had always aspired to something better. “Runaway Train” was the moment when Soul Asylum, who had always been delightfully ragged, sanded away their rough edges and achieved the polish necessary to break into the bigtime.
That kind of success can be hard to weather for bands that start out in the punk/alternative scene, as it tends to turn off their most devoted listeners. The indie rock fanboy’s greatest fear, after all, is that his favorite band will be discovered. Pirner seems to acknowledge all this when, before SA’s performance of “Never Really Been” on MTV Unplugged, he mumbles, “This is a song I wrote way before things got so complicated.” But without the bump in confidence (and income) that “Runaway Train” provided, it’s unlikely Soul Asylum would have lasted as long as they have. Of the song, Dan Murphy once said, “As the years go by, you’re kind of glad to have it in your pocket. Like when you’re in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at a fucking rib-fest in a parking lot, it’s kind of nice, like ‘Oh, there’s one I know!’”

ALL THE DIFFERENCE

The nostalgia I felt listening to Soul Asylum again was all about thinking back to a time when life was mostly possibility, when “O the places you’ll go” included pretty much everywhere. Living through a pandemic has also made the idea of being young and indestructible even more appealing, not to mention the thought of hanging out in a packed bar without having a massive panic attack.
When I think about the various paths my life might have taken, it’s clear that the slow and often solitary work of the writer suits me better than the hustle and grind of band life, but sometimes I long for the energy of a rambunctious crowd. I toil for a different audience now, small as it is. (John Berryman said if you have eight readers that’s enough, and I think I’m nearly there). And I’m grateful that the writing life allows one to age somewhat gracefully, to keep exploring, even improving, into middle age and beyond.
Artists, I think, are prone to these nostalgic reveries. “I remember when we were driving,” says one. “Those days are gone forever,” answers another. “I should just let ‘em go, but…” In “Meditation at Lagunitas,” the poet Robert Hass writes, “Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.” These distances of time and space can make our younger selves look tiny, like sails going over the horizon. But then something catches our senses—a song, a taste, an odor—and memory floods in. Then our old selves loom over us like vast container ships and cast broad shadows over our current lives.

A WORLD FROZEN OVER

When I started writing this essay, I thought the story it would tell would be a familiar one—that of a band who rises to fame, flies too close to the sun, then comes crashing back to earth. Instead, I found that the story of Soul Asylum, and Dave Pirner in particular, is the one he’s been shouting into microphones all these years. One of perseverance. Looking back at the band’s forty-year run, Pirner says, “It’s a funny thing, where if you can get through it, you end up hanging out with the survivors. Those are the people who really love it, who have put up with so much B.S. to be playing music.”

            Soul Asylum is still kicking, though of the original members, only Pirner remains. Bassist Karl Mueller died in 2005, drummers came and went (as drummers do), and Dan Murphy lives a quiet life in Minneapolis, where he runs an art gallery. It’s worth noting that SA is no longer strictly a white boy band—their current lineup includes bass player Winston Roye, and Michael Bland (former drummer for Prince’s New Power Generation), who are both Black. The band released their 12th EP in early 2020, and still toured regularly until the pandemic put an end to all that. During the lockdown, Pirner and lead guitarist Ryan Smith recorded acoustic versions of 100 songs from the band’s vast catalogue, posting the videos to the band’s website. 
Quarantine Dave is bloated, cranky, disheveled. It’s possible he hasn’t showered or changed clothes for several days. (After months stuck at home I can relate). He groans and grumbles as he struggles to set up the camera or leafs through messy stacks of lyrics. But when he starts to play, the old joy leaks out, the infectious energy that has drawn so many people to Soul Asylum over the years. One of my favorite moments in the Quarantine Sessions is Pirner and Smith’s rousing version of “Moonshine” from Change of Fortune (2016). After the last chord rings out, Dave lets out a big breath, shoots Ryan a grin, and says, “Well that could have been worse.” He has an endearing humility I’m tempted to say comes from decades of riding out the vicissitudes of the music business, but the truth is, it’s always been there, beneath the swagger. I can see it in his bemused expression in SA’s Unplugged appearance, which seems to say, “How the hell did we get up here?” And then there’s his sly smile, which tells us that as long as he has our attention, he’s damn well going to enjoy it.

Mark Neely is a former member of Sidecar Racers and a current member of the faculty at Ball State University. He is the author of the poetry collections Beasts of the Hill, Dirty Bomb, and Ticker, and a senior editor at River Teeth: a Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.