round 1

(6) the cranberries, “zombie”
locked up
(11) creed, “my own prison”
600-92
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 3.

“Zombie,” Goats, and Coming Up for Air: maya c. popa on “zombie”

At thirteen, the irrefutably coolest member of my friend group went grunge, and it became necessary for all of life to be inflected through the fact; slowly at first, courtesy of a spiralbound notebook scribbled in Sharpie, and culminating in the purchase of a pair of UFO pants donned in high summer on the beaches of Montauk while eating lemon ice cream served out of a frozen lemon.
As my parents smiled good-naturedly over their matching gazpachos, quietly swallowing their disappointment that their only offspring had the looks of Samara Morgan and the personality of a nursery schoolteacher, I clutched my grenade of porous yellow and relayed the events of that afternoon. I’d been introduced to a new song, the song, a vintage song released a decade prior—maybe my parents had heard of it when they weren’t busy being criminally dull. I plugged a first-generation iPod into primitive portable speakers and played “Zombie” on loop until the battery gave out. It was the sort of song, I reasoned, even they, normal pant-wearing types, could appreciate. So universal was its suffering, and it mentioned 1916, which was more or less their childhoods.
“Zombie” is a protest song by the Irish alternative rock band The Cranberries written during a period of Irish national conflict called, rather literally, The Troubles. Few calamaties carry the sting of civil war which The Troubles, a 30-year low-grade fever of ethno-nationalist struggle and dissent, very narrowly avoided. “Zombie” is a song about violence that, in the way of all good mimetic fallacy, is relentlessly circuitous on its journey back to chorus. It succeeds heartily at that compressed, claustrophobic effect, and is therefore wildly irritating unless you’ve expressly ordered it, like that one time a year you crave the dish you loathed in childhood but would pay $34.99 for a chef to reimagine in a seasonal reduction. It is full of pathos and unapologetically anthemic, made even more so by its message—1916 says it all…sort of. My friends and I spent the eighth grade convinced it was a song about World War I, not the 1916 Irish insurrection known as the Easter Rising which killed thousands over the course of a week, and led to the founding of the Republic of Ireland. We cut Dolores slack on the dates, which according to the principles of eyeliner, could be smudged. And we sustained this conviction without hint of self-scrutiny, which was another delightful part of being young.  
On the subject of things we took for granted—metabolisms that could withstand spectacular quantities of sugar, boys and their comically elaborate advances, the very idea of sleeping in—what strikes me now is how cruel and petty we often were towards one another, this, perhaps among the only forms of naivety one gains with age. How could we be the little shits we were? is more or less the question as we spoke our mercurial, half-baked truths to each other’s faces, mascara steadily running from a string of unnecessary confessions.
Nothing felt quite in balance those years, though nothing felt expressly perilous either. Now, days organized around modalities of health and wellness founder, despite our best efforts, on an undercurrent of demise. If this won’t kill you, that will. And that, perhaps, is the greatest distinction between what runs in the blood at 13 versus at 32; that early, misplaced nihilism before you’ve learned the term for it is the purest form of verve and faith in the world.
“Zombie” draws its devastating charm from the chorus in which O’Riordan—a very fine musician—bleats, for there is no other verb, the word “zombie,” the ending vowel elided so as to sound like “bay” or “baah,” the approximate sound of goat speech. A bold choice, and one that time has rendered apocryphal: no one begins singing “Zombie” for any other reason than that a sudden noise, mechanical or otherwise, has brought the chorus to mind. Suddenly, you’re back in a friend’s basement dying your hair Cream of Raven and looking up GIFs of the anarchist symbol to draw on your wrist.
There is, of course, a goat edition of the song in which the music video has been superimposed with footage of actual goats bleating, because: the internet:

But I would now like to tell you a story about goats.
In 1905, a Scottish physiologist named John Scott Haldane was commissioned by the British Royal Navy to solve a curious problem. English divers were resurfacing with a fatal illness. Autopsies performed revealed bubbles in major organs, as though their very blood had turned effervescent.
And so Haldane, a character to be certain, and one whose family motto was “suffer,” was called to work out a set of principles for safe, staged decompression. The ailment never struck divers who stayed above 33 feet, so it was merely a matter of determining at what rate to acclimate divers to changes of air pressure. Haldane had a penchant for practical experimentation; he once entombed himself in order to record the physiological effects of asphyxiation.
For this particular experiment, however, he used goats.
85 goats were gathered in London. In groups of eight, they were placed inside chambers whose air was compressed then normalized at different rates. They were subsequently released into the yard and observed.
Now, I admit the image of a herd of goats stumbling about on a makeshift pasture while a line of humorless scientists document their symptoms—stiff legs, crossed eyes, weakness on one side of the haunch—is rather droll. A part of me is even tempted by the obvious “zombie goats” joke. It’s there, and a different writer could stick the landing.
Instead, I see white lab coats flapping in the wind. I hear the shallow breaths of young men in decompression chambers, nicknamed “diver’s ovens,” as they await a cure for what usually killed. I think of how the illness is colloquially called the bends because its afflicted bend over as nitrogen wrecks havoc on joints and muscles, leaving the heart frothing.
I think of how only one out of the 85 goats survived to the end of the experiment.
I will never go scuba diving because I would have to tell the young captain how the mechanism of decompression was devised, and he would smile tolerantly, shielded by the vigor of his youth. Or else, he might ask a follow-up question, and I would have to face yet again how pathetic and soft I am, how difficult it is for me to bear even what is meant to be a happy tale of progress when I am still not over mourning the 84 goats sacrificed to this twisted art.
“It’s the same old theme since 1916,” O’Riordan sings, landing a perfect rhyme. It’s the same old theme since the cave paintings, Homer, the Old Testament. What is less obvious is the violence synonymous with progress, the discomfiting reality that those same advancements that allowed a navy to maintain its edge on the brink of catastrophic world wars makes it possible for vacationers to misidentify tropical fish—the scientific violence inseparable from human progress. Is there a distorted electric guitar riff that captures the ways we hurt each other in the name of the future?
Are there any anthems for that?

Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith (Sarabande 2019) winner of the 2020 North American Book Prize. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. Her writing appears in The Paris Review, TLS, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, writing on the literary role of wonder.

Matt Bell on “MY OWN PRISON”

Let's get this out of the way first: there's a good chance you don't think Creed is a good band, or that Scott Stapp is a good singer, or that "My Own Prison" is a good song. If so, you wouldn't be alone. Despite selling millions of copies of their first few albums, despite achieving near-ubiquitous radio and music television presence for years, despite selling out constant live tours for a similar amount of time, Creed has from the very first had more critical detractors than champions. In an infamous cover story for SPIN in 2000, writer Gavin Edwards summed up the band's critical response in a devastating paragraph that, two decades later, my wife and I both still remember:

To wit, some of the phrases critics have used to describe Creed's music: "white-bread, bloated, and monotonous"; "bland and bombastic"; "aimless, formless, charmless bluster"; "Pearl Jam knockoffs." [Apparently tired of the comparisons, [bassist Brian] Marshall recently said that Eddie Vedder "wishes he could write like Scott Stapp." Stapp subsequently apologized on behalf of the band, calling Marshall's comments an example of "arrogance and stupidity."] An Ohio paper called Stapp a "Prince Valiant-Jesus-Jim Morrison cartoon rocker." Shawn Crahan of Slipknot complained to a Canadian newspaper, "If I gotta listen to bands like Creed anymore, I might as well shoot myself, dude."

Similarly, in a brutal 1998 review titled "Grunge Gets Religion, and It's Not Pretty," a New York Times reviewer mocked Creed's lyrics, Stapp's stagecraft, and the band's religion, before finally concluding: "Convictions aside, Creed's weakness is its music."
If Creed wasn't for any of these critics or fellow musicians—and it decidedly was not—then who was Creed for?
Maybe Creed was grunge for people born a little late for grunge, as well as Christian rock for Christians ashamed to admit that's why they liked it, made by a Christian band equally reluctant to admit what it was, if doing so would cost its members their one best shot at fame.

I was 13 when Kurt Cobain committed suicide in April 1994, a date I personally count as the end of the grunge era, whether or not that's exactly right. I was a fan of Nirvana and the other grunge bands—at least the most radio-friendly ones I could hear in rural Michigan, the usual suspects like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and so on—but I was young enough I came to their first albums late, only to find much of the music a little over my head, especially given the inscrutability of much of the genre's songwriting. Instead, my favorite CDs in the first half of the nineties were albums like New Miserable Experience by the Gin Blossoms, August And Everything After by Counting Crows, or Throwing Copper by Live—all albums by bands who, like Creed, were frequently mocked then and still are now, even as each had its own rabid fanbases and big hits.
What was it that I responded to so strongly in these albums? Perhaps it was only that, in the famously ironic nineties, Doug Hopkins and Adam Duritz and Ed Kowalczyk were deadly earnest songwriters—just like I was a deadly earnest teenager.
When Creed's post-grunge/grunge-derivative My Own Prison released in 1997, at the start of my senior year of high school, I discovered an album even more perfectly fit to my own particular expression of earnestness, an album whose music was for once immensely popular but also somehow full of secrets, special messages for anyone who understood its references and symbols, anyone special enough to be a Christian like me, like the members of the band.
Maybe you too were a youth group kid like me, or at least recognize the type: from the start, I was compelled to point out every biblical or spiritual reference in their lyrics to anyone who would listen, starting with "My Own Prison" and its opening Judgment Day court convening to consider Stapp's impossible-to-appeal sin, its spiritual warfare-referencing "demons cluttering around" and the beatitudinal nod of "we the meek," plus what I still think is the song's best line, "should have been there on a Sunday morning, banging my head," the rare Creed line that has enough ambiguity to suggest a double meaning. Most notably, the third verse sees Stapp imagining himself witnessing Christ's crucifixion—"I hear a thunder in the distance / See a vision of a cross / I feel the pain that was given / On that sad day of loss"—while the bridge, perhaps the most famous part of the song, repeats: " I cry out to God / seeking only His decision / Gabriel stands and confirms / I've created my own prison."
There's really no way to deny that the song isn't composed almost entirely of Christian reference points, both in symbols and allusions employed in its lyrics and in Stapp's personal expressions of doubt and longing for redemption. But does writing and performing Christianity-influenced songs like "My Own Prison" mean Creed was a Christian band, like groups like DC Talk or Jars of Clay, as so many people like me wanted them to be?

In his aforementioned SPIN article, Gavin Edwards pursued this same line of inquiry, one I remember pondering with friends first in my high school cafeteria and then later in college dorm rooms: "One question follows Creed wherever they go: Are you a Christian band? No, no, no! they insist, though they do realize they have a significant number of Christian fans." Guitarist Mark Tremonti, who grew up in Michigan among Roman Catholics like I did, tried to dodge the question in SPIN, saying, "I think there are a lot of kids in strict families who are allowed to listen to us because we don't have any negative messages in our music, while Stapp objected in his own way on the now-defunct (but very era-appropriately named) creednet.com: "We are not a Christian band. A Christian band has an agenda to lead others to believe in their specific religious beliefs. We have no agenda!"
Fair enough. But what did no agenda and no negative messages mean, to a band whose debut album included a song with righteous pro-life/anti-abortion lines like "we kill the unborn to make ends meet" and Stapp snarling the seemingly homophobic complaint, "only in America, sexuality is democracy," before proudly declaring "my soul sings a different song"?
No negative messages is absolutely a subjective judgment here, and if the band had no agenda of its own, then the viewpoint represented by lyrics like those in "Only America" was still a decidedly Christian one, rooted in a specific era of evangelical religion and politics.
Believing I recognized these evasions for what they were, I felt frustrated by Stapp and Tremont's objections, even as I understood them completely: like the members of Creed, I wouldn't have wanted anyone to make too much of my being a Christian, at least not outside of church. But like the band's members, I was one, and earnestly, fervently so: I'd been raised Roman Catholic, went weekly to a small rural Michigan church with my mother who frequented bible studies and prayer groups, who believed in a personal relationship with God, who I believe thought of angels and other miraculous beings in literal, physical ways. By the time I was seventeen—the year My Own Prison released—I also saw myself as a firm believer and participant in church, having completed my sacraments and progressed from altar boy to lector, frequently reading the liturgies during mass, something I took pride in even as I felt embarrassed if anyone acknowledged it. On my own, I read the Bible cover to cover—unsurprisingly, I especially enjoyed Genesis and Exodus and Revelations, plus all the parts of the Old Testament most like the fantasy novels I loved—and prayed frequently, alone, with my mother, and at church.
I also tried my best to study my faith on my own, in catechism and youth group, in bible studies, and by reading novels written by other Christians. I especially liked unpacking the religious references in the Narnia books and The Lord of the Rings, and I was briefly obsessed with Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness and its sequels, Christian horror novels whose villains were demon-influenced New Age spiritualists and artists, college professors and ACLU lawyers, all people I now recognize as reliable boogeymen of certain kinds of evangelicals (and whose broad types now make up most of my friends). I went to youth conferences, where my church’s Catholic doctrine mixed with other non-denominational faiths in ways I didn't realize weren't part of mainstream Catholicism, introducing me to spiritual warfare, speaking in tongues, and being slain by the spirit. This was also where I first heard that rock music was nothing more than coded Satanism, something I didn't take particularly seriously, although I vividly remember having the sinful sexual content in the lyrics  of AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" passionately decoded by what must have been someone else in the group's mother.
Scott Stapp famously grew up in a strict Pentecostal household, one where rock music was forbidden and all extracurricular activities except sports were prohibited, a situation that Stapp says caused him to attempt to prove his worth to his stepfather and to God through academics and sports. Despite his best attempts, by 2000, Stapp said he didn't feel the same spiritual connection his fellow churchgoers seemed to feel as they spoke in tongues and were otherwise overcome with the Spirit: "I thought something was wrong with me," he said. "I constantly found myself asking God to prove himself to me... I’d lie in bed and say, 'God, if you’re real, just make my light go off so I won’t doubt it. I promise I’ll be the best Christian in the world.'"
I mentioned above that my wife and I both remember reading the 2000 SPIN article, which is why I keep returning to it: I know this last quote is something that resonated with me at the time, because I was in the exact same place Stapp was describing. In my eyes, I'd done my best to be a good Catholic—which isn't to say I wasn't brutally, guiltily aware of my every failing—and to seek the kind of personal relationship with God that my mother and others described. But I never felt that, not once that I can recall. I know all the usual objections to this complaint, because so many other people of faith have pointed them out to me: in his own narrative of this desire for SPIN, Stapp calls the wanting for God's reciprocity "a sin," and anyone I expressed this fear to in my teenage years would have told me it isn't up to God to prove himself to me. I understood all that, but the fact remained that I felt I was doing everything could to earn God's love, a love I never once felt, not in the ways other people around me described it.
There are other, smarter reasons I eventually stopped believing in God, but it's also true that my feelings were hurt. Other people were worthy, and I was not, and whatever was wrong with me wasn't something I could seem to fix.
And so one day I stopped trying.
No more God for me.

In R.O. Kwon's fantastic novel The Incendiaries, the protagonist Will abandons his faith, then struggles with the loss, in one of the only literary depictions that matches my own experience of the same. Early in the novel, Will says:

In time, they’d all want me to explain how I lost my faith… Scripture indicates there’s no hope for the apostates, like me: having known His love, then repudiated Him, I’m believed to be past saving. I exist beyond His grace. But I tried: will that count for anything, Lord? In the final lists You won’t compile, allotting a life that You can’t give because, in failing to exist, You’ve left us behind.

But I tried: will that count for anything, Lord? That was how I felt, exactly as Will does—beseeching a God you no longer believe in, by the end—in the years when I was trying to fulfill my faith, and in the first years when I lost it, a time that corresponds almost exactly to the years in which Creed was a major part of my life. The end of my faith was a long and messy affair, some of it emotional, some of it intellectual: studying in an attempt to bolster my faith, I accidentally read my way out of it. After Catholicism, I went through a series of experiments in replacement religions—a little self-taught Buddhism, some suburban Ann Arbor sweat lodges, a dabbling in psychedelics and so much New Age-inflected environmentalism—before finally coming out the other side entirely, into what was for many years an angry atheism, logically sure, emotionally furious.
Mostly that anger and hurt has faded now, thankfully. (After all, how long was I supposed to stay mad at someone I didn’t believe was real?) If religion comes up at all these days, I might jokingly refer to myself as an "expatriate Catholic," because even though I haven't been a believer in two decades, it's obvious I've been permanently altered by my early fervent religious earnestness. I still have the potential to be just as zealot-like as I once was—I like to think of it as obsessiveness, but sometimes it's better to call it what it is—and the stories, symbols, and mysteries of the Catholicism I was brought up in have settled deep in my imagination and my thinking. My novels are, for better or worse, obviously written by someone who spent a lot of time with biblical imagery and with Catholic modes of thought: in them are retellings of the Garden of Eden, debates about sin (which I wish I could call anything else) and about guilt and redemption, as well as a continuing thinking through of the Genesis ideas of stewardship and dominion.
Even now, twenty years later, I rarely give a reading from my books without someone in the audience asking me if I'm a Catholic.
I was, I answer. I'm not anymore, I demur. I will be forever, I often admit.

It may not be obvious from the way I'm writing about Scott Stapp, but I really am trying my best not to project my issues onto him, or to map too much of my psychology onto his. I can't know for sure where Scott Stapp was in his spiritual journey when he wrote the lyrics to "My Own Prison," can't know if I'm right that in those days his faith was present in everything he wrote even as he was afraid to let anyone see its full power over him, especially if it might let others mock him for it or somehow cost him the popularity his band was seeking. After my own uber-fandom, after the general ambivalence that followed and the decades of his ambient celebrity, where the only time I thought about Stapp was when the news covered his arrests, his drug addictions, a sex tape, and his felony domestic violence arrest, how can I avoid making up my own myths about who he is and why he did and said the things he did?
I won't make any excuses for any of Stapp's well-documented personal problems or alleged criminal behaviors. But I will say that I wonder what it cost him to live those early years of his explosive music career in opposition to his upbringing's strictures (here no rock music is a rule broken, not bent), especially when the saving grace of his music's earnest spirituality—its deep roots in Christianity, its sincere wrestling with doubt and sin and judgment, its detectable values broadly in line with the mainstream Christianity of its time—could be seen as diminished by the band's constant denial of their music as Christian music, which always felt less like the honest truth and more like a public relations calculation.
The members of Creed didn't believe they could be megastars if they were defined as a Christian rock band, so they never admitted that's what they were, even if all the evidence suggested it was so. But what does it cost you to deny what is you've made and who it is you are, even if by doing so you reap all the worldly rewards anyone could want?
Twenty-plus years after "My Own Prison," Scott Stapp seems to have come to terms with whatever the cost was of his dueling faith and his personal demons, embracing his own imaginative and emotional landscape to make new music outside the scrutiny of the early Creed years. His last solo album came out in 2019, and even a cursory listen finds Stapp openly embracing themes he once denied, with clearly spiritual songs like "Purpose for Pain," "Heaven in Me," "Mary's Crying," and "Last Hallelujah," the last of which is full of direct biblical imagery, desert temptations and walking on water and crowns of thorns.
Through most of the intervening years between "My Own Prison" and now, the person I thought Scott Stapp was and the music he made felt increasingly far away, buried in both our pasts. But I sense there's still two sides of him—a 2019 Billboard interview doesn't mention Christianity, Pentecostalism, or faith, while another recent interview in the evangelical magazine Charisma mentions almost nothing else—but also that there's more harmony between the two halves than in the past. As he told Charisma:

I’ve finally gotten to a place where there’s resolution… There aren't any conflicts anymore… Internal frustration and angst that all those unresolved conflicts can cause you as human being really separate you from finding any resolution internally and spiritually. No longer having to deal with those things brought me to a place of clarity where I could finally turn that into the content of the songs… The depth of the music that I was creating reflected the new inner peace that was going on inside of me. It set the table for the melodies and lyrics to come out and actually deliver exactly what I feel I was supposed to do, my purpose in life.

Good for him, I think, as I read this—but isn't there some part of me that resents his newfound peace, his bringing together of his disparate selves?
Of course there is. There always will be resentment in me, aimed at anyone whose faith passes through doubt and comes out intact.

I saw Creed play live only once, in the spring of 2000, at the Saginaw Civic Center with Sevendust and Three Doors Down opening. I went with other employees of the restaurant where I bartended in the years after I dropped out of college, and now, twenty years later, I remember just two things about that show: first, how a woman I worked with bragged about her ability to get backstage returned to our group with a member of one of the opening bands on her arm; and second, that after Creed finally took the stage, Scott Stapp's performance so quickly became such an over-the-top attention-seeking parody of a rock star that it burst the last spiritual mystique he still held for me. He was just a normal guy in an ordinary rock band, I decided, not worth the amount of importance I'd given him, his story, the myth I'd made of how our struggles with faith were alike. In an instant, whatever connection I'd once felt was broken. I'd still listen to Creed after that night, but it was never the same, and it wasn't long before I stopped.
A third thing about that concert, not a memory but something I didn't know at the time: my future wife was in the audience that night too.
Maybe it's a cheat to try to leave this essay here, to flee through this escape hatch I'm about to make without explaining the intervening steps between that night and my meeting my wife. So be it. Because here's the truth: once I thought God would save me, that my faith would set me free from all that was wrong with me. Later I thought it might be music or books, drugs or alcohol or meditation. But what finally let me rescue me from myself wasn't faith or art or inebriation; it was my one person, a fellow Creed fan I wouldn't meet for another two years but who was there with me in that crowd, in the biggest arena in our small city.
That night, at my one and only Creed concert, I had two more years of being lost ahead of me, two more years of being lost ahead of me, two more years alone with the doubts and hurt feelings my faith had become.
They were, as I recall, hard hard years.
But they did not last an eternity. Nothing does.
If those years were a prison at all—my own or someone else's—I did at last escape.

Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. (This photo, the first of him and his wife Jessica, was taken in 2002.)