round 1

(4) foo fighters, “i’ll stick around”
outlasted
(13) helmet, “unsung”
423-366
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 2.

Some Version of Peace: Jordan Wiklund on “I’ll Stick Around”

First, let me say this—much has been written about what “I’ll Stick Around” is about, or to whom it’s directed, or what it means, and to explore that here would only offer more feedback to the crowd before the show has even started. There are plenty of places to read about Kurt, Courtney, and Dave, and this won’t be one of them.
What a relief. The context may matter, though—“I’ll Stick Around” is one of several singles from Foo Fighters’ first album, which is to say Dave Grohl’s first solo record. He didn’t want fans, critics, and the general public to know it was him, so he chose “Foo Fighters” as a band name because it sounded cool, referring to unknown aerial phenomena witnessed by World War II fighter pilots—UFOs, phantom radar blips, glimpses of metal and machine in the European theater. As Foo Fighters, Grohl recorded every instrument and lick by himself over five days in October 1994 mere months after Kurt Cobain’s death, a bit driftless after the dissolution of Nirvana but too famous, too young, and too talented to do anything else but continue to make music.
Thank goodness for us. He had forty songs in the tank from his days as Nirvana’s drummer and recorded fifteen. Distributed on tapes to friends, Foo Fighters quickly made its way around the industry and into the hands of label reps. Grohl licensed the album to Capitol, assembled a band, shot some videos, and Foo Fighters were on their way.
I was an early fan. In the summer of ‘97, “Everlong” and “My Hero” were staples of 95 KQDS, Duluth’s commercial rock radio station. I first heard them there, saw the videos on MTV, and borrowed a friend’s copy of The Colour and the Shape to get the full experience. From there I backtracked to Foo Fighters, bought There is Nothing Left to Lose a few years later, and went to Luther college in 2003 on the heels of One by One.
I hauled my Philips MC50 three-disc stereo set to college, too, along with a 128-disc black binder of CDs and DVDs. I still have that case, where burned copies of Foo Fighters and The Colour and the Shape still reside, as well as studio copies of There is Nothing Left to Lose and One by One. I blasted One by One when moving in, blasted it at night, blasted it all the time (far better than the constant torrent of Dave Matthews Band, who had recorded Live at Luther College in ‘96 and released it in ‘99, well within the memory of many seniors and older siblings of friends whom we knew).
I’m certain One by One was in one of the three disc trays when I met Brittany within the first few weeks. Brittany was a wispy firebrand, quick to laugh, fluent in Shakespeare, pop culture, and extremely sharp. And then I met Leah, who lived directly below me, Leah who was kinda-sorta-maybe dating my neighbor Andrew. Leah was a little taller, a little more formidable in stature, altogether a little darker, someone who held her friends and thoughts close, at least as I knew her. I dated Brittany almost the entire first year. We were together briefly at the start of sophomore year and went through the same sort of breakup many hanger-on couples do; after a feverish few weeks, we called it quits for good.
Over that summer, though, Leah and I had kept in touch. We’d live in the same building sophomore year, and we’d both be studying in Ireland during J-term. So the scope of the year was set—a common building, an uncommon destination, a couple of untethered friends.
Facebook debuted that year followed by YouTube in 2005. You couldn’t find much in the way of concert footage on it then, but now you can catch entire shows from the pre-digital era if someone had a decent camera, a steady hand, and the audio isn’t too garbled. For fans of the Foos, the ‘96 Tibetan Freedom Concert is really something:

Held on a breezy, sun-shiney day in June at Golden Gate Park on the western tip of San Francisco, the Freedom Concert was one of several fundraisers organized by the Beastie Boys to support Tibetan independence and conceived by the group during the ‘94 Lollapalooza Tour. The band list is a who’s who of the Plaidness—The Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, Sonic Youth. No Doubt. RHCP. Rage. A Tribe Called Quest was also there, along with hip hop breakouts The Fugees, Odelay-era Beck, and more.
Grohl is young, mid-twenties, long black hair soaked with sweat and curling. A massive flag of Tibet backdrops the stage and dwarfs the performers in front of it. “This next song is called ‘I’ll Stick Around,’” he says, and the drums slam in followed by the guitars, crunchy and snarling, and everything is elbows and fists, headbanging ‘n’ hair flying. Grohl is skinny, his arms bare, his shirt tucked. Nothing seethes like normcore. A beach ball flirts with the stage. His gum is a beach ball inside his mouth.
On the first chorus, Grohl stares straight ahead, a literal figurehead of his own making from the scuttled Nirvana, screaming I’ll stick around as the wind swirls around the park. Water bottles fly, the crowd is a blurred frenzy. Pat Smear, his touring bandmate from Nirvana, slings his guitar around like a battle axe, careening across the stage in a blue jumpsuit and what appear to be loafers. Everything is noise.
What must Grohl be thinking, several months removed from Cobain's death and improvising his new band, his new songs, his new life? Is he angry? Sad? Elated to be there at all, howling into the mic? It’s easy to imagine everything as he holds the guitar low and develops that signature screaming, his stature and posture as recognizable then as they are now. I don’t know—maybe there’s simply no other way to sing I don’t owe you anything except with fire.

I’ve taken all and I’ve endured

How do we avoid writing ourselves as the heroes of our own stories and songs? That’s the dilemma proffered by Grohl and “I’ll Stick Around.” How do we know the difference between what is true in the moment of writing it, and what will or could or may never be true later? How do we resist the urge to appear more generous, knowing, and reconciliatory than we really were or will be? Saying you’re going to stick around and learn from all that came from it is a tenuous proposition, a sail cast on the promise of wind. The more I listen to “I’ll Stick Around” and watch those early recordings from ‘95 and ‘96, the more convinced I am that its primary takeaway is as much a plea as it is a promise. Grohl wields the past as both bomb and barrier, something and someone to whom he owes nothing yet relies upon for growth. It’s part of the magic and dichotomy of good songs and songwriting—songs that leave you torn in two, burnt up, dried out, but still hungry for more. Songs that force you to cast backwards into the past but throw a line to the future to tether the present, at least for a few minutes.
There’s a reason the repeat button on your old MC50 is two arrows forming a circle—an analog ouroboros—an invitation to pain and pleasure, longing and regret. Punch it once for the whole album, twice for the track. Resist the temptation to close the door on that event, that breakup, that song or kiss or violence as something finished. Crank the volume, pour another drink, then toss some salt in that wound and see what happens.

There is much to say, but the short version is this: I cheated on Leah. Or rather, I cheated on the promise of her. On the last night before leaving for Christmas break and Ireland a few days later, Brittany and I slept together mere hours after I had first kissed Leah, when talk of finals and friends and Ireland turned to making good on the increasing amounts of time spent together, our bodies catching up to where our minds had already been. A younger version of me might have written something dripping with fraternal nonchalance, or chalked it up to a little booze that night, or how easy it is slipping into old habits, or some other broey bullshit to communicate how distraught I was that evening, as if that would matter, as if my heart and mind were torn by my actions as they occurred.
I can assure you I wasn’t, and they weren’t. Not then, at least.
By the time we got to Ireland, it didn’t take long for Leah to learn what had transpired the last day we had seen each other. Of course it didn’t, and of course the rest of the class knew, told to me by furtive glances and over-eager greetings. Still, we managed to be civil, hopping from class to pub to pub to pub, to castle and museum and back again. One night in Northern Ireland we joined two friends out moonlighting as “The Angles,” a Pixies cover band dreamed up by a lanky wraith named Jacoby. In denim and black, we emo’d our hair, practiced our pouts and walked the streets of Derry, imagining ourselves as broody and contemptuous rockers. Leah would sing, Jacoby would play keyboards, me on guitar, Jake on drums. Late in the night, we actually met a young record producer and managed to keep up the charade for a while—cue the music and pass The Fresh Fighter.
Near the end of that trip, little sleep, more alcohol, and a perpetual cocktail of Sudafed (bad Irish cold) and Ibuprofen (good Irish booze) coursed through my veins. One morning I awoke to a resting heart rate above 160 beats per minute, bathed in sweat, body shaking, vision blurred, head sore and scared. The professor rushed me to a clinic, where socialized medicine worked to our advantage. We didn’t go alone, however—Leah volunteered to come. We three hailed a taxi and sat in silence as a light rain fell and we veered toward the clinic. She held my hand the entire time.
They spread some cold goo on my chest and asked me to hold the bulb of what looked like a futuristic belt sander between my nipples.
“Shouldn’t you be doing this?” I asked.
“No,” the doctor said, “look.”
He pointed to a monitor where I saw, for the first time in my life, my own beating heart. It was silhouetted in ashes and blacks, vaguely familiar, and enmeshed behind two ghostly outlines identified as my lungs. The staccato rhythm of electrical impulses which power our hearts had become erratic when combined with prolonged exposure to pseudoephedrine and generous amounts of ibuprofen. The doctor told me to lay off the Sudafed, quit drinking for the rest of the trip, and take it easy for a few weeks. When asked if anything in my life may have stressed this organ, I answered “no,” to which Leah remained silent.
Hypertension, dehydration, sleep deprivation. That was all.
That was the last significant time I’d spend with Leah until next fall, just a few months later, when we drove north to St. Paul to see the Foozer tour: Foo Fighters and Weezer, co-headlining In Your Honor and Make Believe. I don’t know why she agreed to the concert but I think I know why I asked her—because she loved the Foos, too, and maybe I could express some version of shame in the form of a concert ticket and a night away from campus to salvage a friendship. We sat in the upper tier of the club section of the Xcel Energy Center directly opposite the stage; pretty good seats, more than enough to see and hear Grohl and Cuomo lead their bands through the night. Weezer covered “Big Me;” the Foos covered “Island in the Sun.”
This was the “Best of You” album, a howler driven by anger, betrayal, and finally redemption for the narrator. We were standing, two more fans amid the tens of thousands there, and at some point during “Best of You” I realized Leah was crying, neither sobbing nor attempting to hide that something had been triggered and something was being released. I didn’t know how to comfort her and wondered if she even wanted that, especially from me. I doubted I was actually capable of such a simple feat.
Only a fool would believe that Leah’s reaction to “Best of You” was a direct condemnation in tears to the memory of how I had hurt her and what that trip came to mean and be for us both—we had hardly spoken in months, and she had other lovers, other problems and joys in her life, and they weren’t for me to know. Maybe she remembered that taxi ride in the rain to the hospital, though, or the moment she learned her trust had been betrayed a thousand miles from home—I just don’t know. But I was a fool and that’s what I believed, up there in the club-level cheap seats of the X as the Foo Fighters ripped through hit after hit, and if discretion is the better part of valor, it’s also the public face of shame, hovering there in the beer-soaked air between us. I said nothing. The song ended. She came around. The bands played a joint encore.
I don’t know why she chose to accompany me to the hospital during our trip and I don’t know why she came to the concert. Tremendous reserves of strength and generosity comes to mind. What I couldn’t have explained then, at twenty years old, was that Leah knew something I hadn’t discovered yet—that one can hold sadness or even the ghosts of grief along with a tenuous friendship all at once. It is possible to wield the past and present—bomb and barrier, systole and diastole, contraction and release—in a single moment and maybe not know the difference nor even care. You can go to a concert and cry next to someone who hurt you. The night won’t collapse. The music won’t stop until it does, and you’ll shuffle out to the car together amid thousands doing the same.
There was never any pretense of a reunion or even an overnight so we drove back to Decorah that night. Leah closed her eyes and told me to rouse her if I needed help staying awake. I didn’t; she slept. South of Rochester, about 50 miles from Decorah, we were forced off the highway onto a meandering route through farms and fields, dirt roads and empty junctures, weaving our way southeast with only the occasional detour sign flashing by for any sense that we were still on the right route. The roads were unlit and the headlights flashed glimpses of silos and farmhouses in the distance, monolithic tractors and combines now quiet, opossums and roadkill as we flashed by at 40, 50, 60 miles per hour, the marbled eyes of startled deer jolting me awake for fear of something leaping from the ditch. As we finally approached the highway, the on-ramp’s streetlights glowed bright above us, strobing the car in sodium-yellow washes that flit across the windshield, there and then gone.

One day it all will fade, I’m sure

We have this idea that a certain concert, a song, a beat through our bodies, music mainlined to our hearts is ours and and ours alone, inimitable, inevitable, as certain as an island in the sun. But the truth is that feeling doesn’t last—the song ends, the house lights glare. At the time, I’m sure I thought Wow, I’ll never forget this, my first Foos concert of several with someone who came to define that part of my life, but the truth is I don’t recall anything except a few vague glimpses of the stage below us, how she looked during “Best of You”—sad, strong, beautiful—and how it felt to have Leah, inexplicably, by my side.
The truth is that every fiber of your being cannot commit to this moment, and to that one, and to that one, moment after moment, lover after lover, concert after concert. Let the learning come later; there is time for that, as Grohl screams in “I’ll Stick Around.” There must be—to learn anything in the immediate is impossible. It’s just a song. You are, as most of us are, just a fan. I wish I could go back and tell myself—tell everyone, really—to not take everything so seriously, especially some imagined future memory refracted through song and lights and spectacle. Don’t make the mistake of believing you’ll never forget this moment, the taste of the sweat in your mouth, or a lover’s mouth from another time, maybe, what it sounds like, the reverb ringing throughout the arena, in your ears, in your mind as you barrel home. It’s already happened, it’s already gone, it’s a blip on the radar—a yellow reflection on the glass—something to wonder long after the show has ended.
“I’ll Stick Around” was written by a young man and offers a young man’s sentiment, half promise, half plea: that the passage of time won’t heal all wounds—won’t even come close—but it may offer some perspective on the whole fucking mess. Maybe next time you’ll be smarter, act or say something sooner, try to remember what you’ve learned from times like these before you punch the repeat button and close your eyes. Maybe you’ll form a band and let the flannel thread of grunge unravel a little more with each subsequent album. And then maybe you’ll write a song and play a show for others like you, and when the music is over they’ll retreat into the night, unsure if they want the road to take them home or for something unknowable to simply swoop down, take them up and take them away. Maybe next time you’ll recognize that rock bottom isn’t on its way but already in the rear view mirror or even asleep beside you having attained some tenuous version of peace. Maybe you’ll learn that somebody in your life needed help. Maybe you’ll even realize, much later, that it was you.

Jordan Wiklund is from St. Paul, Minnesota. His essays have appeared in Pank, Brevity, Hobart, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. He toured Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2005 as guitarist of The Angles. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @JordanWiklund.

unsung no more: michael d. miller on “unsung”

There is an unmistakable distorted electric guitar note that characterizes the grunge era—drop D! You know it when you hear it and there isn’t a guitar-driven band of the era that hasn’t dabbled riffing in the key of drop D. Whether it be Smashing Pumpkins, Mudhoney, Deftones, Fugazi or Polly Jean, the list goes on with only one band, one album, and one song paving the blacktop for the key of D to drive the course of the 90’s. That pole position belongs to Helmet and their defining classic “Unsung.” The song epitomized the sound that launched a thousand garage bands. Of course, there is more to that story and all things Plaidness. In the meantime, strap on your inner drop D for this riff on Helmet, “Unsung” and the “X” in a generation…
If you grew up and lived in the time of grunge the feeling of giving voice to a generation, to take the veneer and pose off rock stardom and what it meant to create that music was the equivalent of what punk music did a decade before. Perhaps that is why the two styles are so connected, if not the same musical continuation after 1980’s excesses. If we weigh the scene on the plaid scale, Helmet were pioneers of this change in attitude and much more. Even in the earliest stages, grunge was not the rebirth and revision of rock-god worship, “making it,” or selling out to embrace common tropes. Grunge had that merde, too.  Plaid flannels, torn jeans, Doc Marten work boots, long hair… If grunge really was about obliterating such stereotypes, Helmet wiped them clean. No one would have imagined upon hearing Helmet’s music at that time short haired metal bashers in plain clothes with an overall dress-to-unimpress attitude for a band. I knew that quite well then. “You don’t look like a guitar player.” (Or a front person for that matter). When you saw Helmet live, or perhaps saw them for the first time on MTV in their video for “Unsung” (accompanied by Beavis and Butthead as many were back then), you watched them wipe away the pretensions.

Butthead: If you saw these guys on the street, ah, huh huh, you’d wouldn’t even know they were cool.

Bevis: Heh heh. They look like normal guys. Heh, heh, heh, like us.

Truly they were just about the music. If that was the aim of punk, grunge, thrash, hardcore, and all other movements, Helmet did that incarnate with the least of pretensions.  DIY as yourself…
In Pretend It’s a City (2021), a Netflix documentary series by Martin Scorsese about New York City through the eyes of Fran Lebowitz, she had this to say about reading (and by rote, writing): “[Reading] is a taste. It makes the world feel bigger. That’s what reading used to be. Now it’s not. ‘I don’t see any books about me…’ A book isn’t supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door. It never occurred to me to see myself in a book.” In a filmed conversation with Toni Morrison she also asserted that the ‘common reader’ has been replaced by the ‘common writer’ because, more or less, people look for replicas of their own lives. They went on to discuss this by contrasting YOU (to the reader) vs. WE (for the reader). Morrison preferring the inviting “we.” Lebowitz responding: “Don’t be a hostess!” My point is this is the struggle of writing an essay once you dive into it, and just how many essays are “about me” and serving as “mirrors” and not doorways. These are the thoughts you contend with after you take an assignment and consider writing about a song or a band or a time and then of course the “you” that permeates it. I became aware of this dichotomy writing my first essay for March Vladness, trying to hold true to my inner Lebowitz and fight commonality, but this time, after self-torturing debate, nearly abandoning the task, I opt for the middle. So, to bookend this little tangent, pretend it’s an essay!
Here’s the mirror… Writing on “Unsung” is no mere lottery for me. There is a connection that threads my 90’s journey in this band. My alternates were some of the more popular and higher seeded hipster classics, but “Unsung’s” underdog standing in the tournament didn’t matter. There wasn’t a story in the others. I first beheld the era changing assault of Helmet live in Kalamazoo, Michigan at WMU. This was 1989 to 1991, the beginning of the Grunge era, where you felt something, a spirit of the age, and that independence and alternatives might win. In those days Kalamazoo boasted its own equivalent to “the Seattle scene” with bands like Blue Dhalia, Naked Lunch, Vatican, the Vervepipe, and others, making Rick’s American Café a venue for outsider touring bands, including Helmet, who threw down a wall of sound that must have been like seeing Black Sabbath at their first gigs. We (ha ha) all know where we were when we first heard Nevermind (I was driving down Eastern avenue in Grand Rapids after picking up some comics from Tardy’s Collector’s Corner), and I know where I was when I first heard Meantime. August ’92, opening senior year at WMU and the first week back to campus, driving around one day, WIDR-FM the old college radio staple is playing the first track “In The Meantime” and follows with the whole album—and I drive through campus streets to every track. Later that semester I catch the band on tour with Faith No More at Club Eastbrook in Grand Rapids, Page Hamilton shouting out “thank you” to any old Kalamazoo fans that made it up here (and that 50 mile trip cost me a late penalty on my Medieval Philosophy paper due that very day).
As you progressed through the 90’s, Helmet was ubiquitous, now in movies, The Jerky Boys (covering Sabbath’s “Symptom of the Universe”), Judgment Night (with House of Pain) and a feature track in the 90’s era classic The Crow. As a writer for The Western Herald I reviewed the follow-up album Betty (1994) and when I made my own foray into film in 1995 at The New York Film Academy, I used a track for the closing credit song—“The Silver Hawaiian” (more on this later). I followed up a stint in LA getting my Master’s Degree at USC, as Helmet released their last album of the era, “Aftertaste,” which seemed as much a departure as my being in LA. The last time I saw them play live was on a double-bill with Primus. The end, my friend, or so it seemed. Now get this. I returned to NYC in 1998, rooming with my sound engineer, Chris S., from the NYFA days only to discover he was working for artist Frank Stella, with… Henry Bogdan (always referred to as “Henry”), the former bass player in Helmet! The band was broken up, the era was over, but I still recall the surreal moment of standing in Stella’s warehouse under an undulating piece of installation art sharing a few Helmet anecdotes with Henry who I had first seen nearly ten years prior in Kalamazoo, MI. To end… later that year, another Stella associate and roommate, Andrew D. (who landed the gig for director of photography on Dog The Bounty Hunter realty show) got married. Henry’s new “steel Hawaiian” band played the music… As a chaser, when I switched offices back to LA in 2002, and trained my NYC replacement, Greg P., we shared we were both drop D guitar players. Who was Greg’s favorite guitarist and band? Page Hamilton and Helmet…
Here’s the door… the path to “Unsung” started with the Amphetamine Reptile label and Helmet’s debut Strap It On! The label was a pioneering grunge-era staple for noise rock with a roster of bands from the God Bullies, The Jesus Lizard, The Melvins, Unsane, and more. Yet Helmet’s debut established and saved the label in beginning, and we can thank them for all the music born thereafter. Helmet’s sound and the label’s vision began the conversation on just how to classify the band and much of the grunge-era repertoire. Noisy as Immortan Joe’s apocalyptic caravan lead by Steve Albini would be an understatement. Noise, metal, hardcore, industrial, alternative, rock, experimental, jazz, it was all a mix up of music that was the recipe for the best of the 90’s. The “Rude” drum track could be mistaken for a drum machine pounding out rhythms in a Einsturzende Neubaten warehouse but it was the human hand of John Stainer. Hamilton’s voice on “Bad Mood” screams from the edge of severed vocal chords. Anger and energy the will be heard. “Sinatra” could challenge the low-end throw down of The Melvins, “Blacktop” cleared the way for a new Sabbath boom. All in all, a 30-minute assault ready for the decade ahead…
Rumors of “the Interscope deal” became well known—a one million dollar signing bonus for the next Nirvana (not true). Another story was they were looking to sign the next U2. That was the stage set between 1991 When Punk Broke, Nevermind, and the summer of Meantime. While like most classics of that time, several tracks often hit for bands, there was always THE big-hit, and that brings us to “Unsung.” In the video that brought Helmet to the attention of most of the world, we find it painted with trappings that would define the flip-side to the era—destruction and waste yet something new rising from the rubble.  We are “post” something… Rock? Industrial? Metal? Set in a demolished warehouse (a sort of Dystopian Frank Stella environment now that I think of it), strobe lights and stark colors (not unlike the post-punk stage of Joy Division) light the stage. The video re-imagines Smells Like Teen Spirit as an aftermath. Visual imagery of locomotives wheeling down a track like the drop D force of the “Unsung” lead guitar riff. We also wash in the metal industry itself, smolt ore flowing in a melted stream to reforge a powerful sound. Empty of fans, there are no people in the video but the band. Watching it made you—yeah you—want to jump right into the screen and mosh in the demolished concrete…
The lyrics to “Unsung” offer a further glimpse into an era reaching out to the world and challenging the singular you and collective we seen through the personal I.

Your contribution left unnoticed some
Association with an image
Just credit time for showing up again
Attention wandered, I'm left with it

Gone by sin too slowly
Can't pass it up
Then I thought nothing is right
I turned it off

To die unsung would really bring you down
Although wet eyes would never suit you
Walk through, no archetypal suicide to
Die young is far too boring these days

Your will to speak clearly
Exposed too much
Unsung once too often
Could not rub off

Short and simple, this song pushed a 90’s song structure further. The Pixies then Nirvana revived the trend of loud-to-soft / slow-to-fast song dynamics. “Unsung” altered it further as loud to louder. Fast to faster. These days dying young was too boring. Better to not be sung. Nothing is right. Turn it off. If you search out the lyrics today you get varied reactions. On genius.com: “How are there no annotations to this? One of the best songs of the 90s. This song is about the darkness, you can wash it away if its already part of you only left live life… tears and begging don’t suit your character anymore just push it too [sic] the limit and let the hero claim your dead.” On lyrics.com you might read this: “This is one of the few Helmet songs that have true lyrical meaning to me. It's about being underappreciated and walked over, then cast aside upon speaking out. I've been there before. This is one of the best Helmet songs ever, I was so pumped to hear it in GTA: San Andreas. I guess this song is just telling people to speak their mind and stand up for themselves before it's too late.” That last reference to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) is just one of many ways this song has lived beyond the grunge era. Unsung to sung. To end, “Unsung” was first released in a demo form by Amphetamine in 1991, making it a 30-year run.  Contribution noticed. Association with a drop D chord. Unsung until now…
Page Hamilton revived Helmet in 2004 and has been steadily creating music ever since, writing soundtracks, teaching guitar lessons, continuing on with the way of things… Helmet’s most recent album (2016) Dead To The World is an apt title for what many might think of the band, or any band, from that era. But they’re not. You’re not. We’re not. The band continues with a loyal following to this day and active Facebook Fan page connecting Helmet heads in ways never imagined in the 90’s. There Ian Keith Rogers shared some chapters and insights from a yet unsung book proposal on Helmet. One passage in particular points out the idea of contradiction in music, bands, and Helmet in particular, applicable to the whole scene. “We remain amused by contradictions to this day. They’re everywhere. This is why reality television is entertaining and tiresome. This is why politicians shake your hand. This is why so many of us look to our music and film heroes for humility, for autographs and kind words and small talk. This stuff is all infinitely entertaining, worth repeating to others, because deep down we assume these people are wildly different from us. The contradiction is everything.” It strikes back at the heart of Helmet’s imagery —everyday people. Ordinary lives.
On The Pillars of the 90’s interview series delivered on MachineMusic.net Hamilton recently (10/14/20) reflected on the question, is there something you’re especially proud of when you think back at Meantime? A moment, a song, the whole thing? “You have to live with this thing for the rest of your life, you have to do something that you feel proud about, that you’re excited to play. You can’t think about those things. No musician worth his salt should be worrying about the response or the effect of what they’re doing—you do it, and you live with it. That’s true with any art, whether you’re Lenny Bruce or Van Gouge or James Joyce—you do what you know to be right. Be honest, it has to be that way.”  Rogers proposed Helmet book also opens in New York City where this essay also ends. Even today as it suffers under the Covid pandemic there is a certain honest truth urban origins have for so many scenes of the 90’s era. “This is the type of view of New York that French philosopher Michel de Certeau had in 1984 as he stood, sadly enough, on the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre. He looked down and noted that New York was a city that never ‘learned the art of growing old.’ It was, to him, a place that invents and reinvents itself daily. It was from this constant, sometimes brutal, churn that Helmet emerged. Their sound—so often compared by journalists to the mean streets and oppressive skyscrapers—is more shaped by what Certeau was really getting at as he gazed down from above: the passage of ordinary people along the sidewalks, between the skyscrapers.” Growing old. Reinvention. And Ordinary people…
Recently I overheard an analogy that made me think about age and just how old Generation X is these days. It went something like, “The Wonder Years was released in 1988 about a time twenty years earlier—1968. If such a series were released today under the same premise, it would be set in 2001.” The sobering reality of that is it skips right over Gen X. Sure maybe we get some mentions, Stranger Things comes to mind, but in all honestly Gen X has been “X’d” right out of public resonance. We still hear about the lingering wars between Boomers and Millennials (“Okay , Boomer”), and media and commerce has shifted not only to Millennials, but Gen Z, while many Boomers are still here, contributing, refusing to retire. Where are we in that shuffle? Where are you? Are we relics of the 90’s, cheap movie tickets, MTV, Kurt and Courtney, tossed into Blockbuster dustbins? The grunge era is wholly our era, our time, and our songs. We looked at all the music of the past, took all of it in like a sponge, paid tribute while making it our own with independent spirit. A generation where music was of the highest import and it lives in every song in this tournament.  Every one of them an anthem. Yes, we have a few Gen X stalwarts persevering, Tarantino, Duane Johnson, Ice Cube, Gwen, even Tanya Harding and others, but we’ve lost many too, Kurt, Lane, Chris Cornell, Elizabeth Wurtzel, I could go on. As a generation, if we are “X’d” out and forgotten, we did sing. These songs are reminders we are not unsung. And I thank Helmet for that…  
In Whit Stillman’s 1998 film The Last Days of Disco (ironically released during the last years of grunge) captures perfectly the “spirit of an age” and its eventual end.  In the final scene of the film, the four principal characters walk down a Manhattan street realizing that they have lived through an era.  Whatever it was, over and done. You can almost substitute any era for Disco in this film and the result will be the same. It could be the Woodstock Era, The Punk Era, The Renaissance, even the Harry Potter Era (2001-2011 if you lived vicariously though the books and films). Eras are often tied to a generation, although you often don’t realize it until it’s gone. The final mini-monologue of the film delivers the message clearly. Substitute disco or any cultural reference below with grunge iconography and you’ll get it:

Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and our hearts. Something like this that was this big, and this important, and this great will never die. For a few years, maybe many years, it will be considered passe and ridiculous, it will be misrepresented and sneered at and caricatured, or worse, completely ignored. People will laugh at John Travolta, Olivia Newton John, and white platform shows and going ‘like this’. But we had nothing to do with those things and still loved disco. Those who didn’t understand will never understand. Disco was more and better than that. Disco was too great and too much fun to be gone forever. It’s got to come back someday. I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes.

Times have changed. Everyone is in the cloud. I’d like to think that some of us still like “stuff.” I do. Vinyl, CD’s, and books. Though the collection’s been down-sized between all the moves, there’s enough to keep me going. Even my original CD of Meantime. Stuff has a purpose. The March Plaidness tournament is the comeback. We are unsung no more.

Michael D. Miller is a disparate writer of disparate things. His work has appeared in Lovecraft Annual, Spectral Realms, Dead Reckonings, Penumbra, Alien Buddha Press, March Vladness, and the now defunct Crackpot Press. Currently eking out a writing existence through teaching as adjunct faculty at GRCC, KCAD, and Aquinas College. Also wrote the Realms of Fantasy RPG for Mythopoeia Games Publications. He dedicates this to Lynne Miller (1946-2021) the aunt of aunts who passed away just before it was completed.