round 1

(8) pj harvey, “rid of me”
dethroned
(9) mother love bone, “chloe dancer / crown of thorns”
433-178
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.

lick my legs: Lisa Nikolidakis on “rid of me”

It starts with James Spader. Early on, we Folks of a Certain Age inhale Pretty in Pink and cast our ballots of desire for Team Duckie, Blane, or Steff. I think we’re meant to root for Jon Cryer’s Duckie, the devoted boy who loves unconditionally and croons to our dog when we leave the room, but I could never get past the stalking and his friendship with Andrew Dice Clay. For my money, Andrew McCarthy’s Blane isn’t a real choice either; he’s a milquetoast five out of ten, a wealthy dud, though I like that he has access to horses. And then there’s Steff, played with creepy, understated, feathered glory by Spader: a materialistic shitbag who never runs out of linen suits, the guy who calls the woman who won’t go out with him a bitch, and still: teenage me was full-throttle swoon.
Earlier this year, a friend and I mused how useful it would be to start a six-week summer camp for the younguns that choose Spader. The syllabus writes itself:

Week 1: Emotional Health & You

Week 2: Self-Esteem Workshop

Week 3: Good vs. Bad Attention

Week 4: Sex & Love Are Not the Same Thing

Week 5: HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired

Week 6: You Can’t Make Anyone Love You

Think of the lifetime of hurt we could spare the Spaderites—the bad, bad choices when it comes to men. Hell, I might need a refresher in one or two of those.
Three years short after Spader plays Steff, swilling scotch and hating prom, he’s cast as the adult, impotent Graham in sex, lies, and videotape, and my panties nearly melt. A man broken and obsessed with sex who needs saving? That’s my fucking bat signal, bro. Wherever unhealthy choices lurk in the night, I will be there in my complex and uncomfortable bra to save us all!
Don’t even get me started on Secretary.

But when you choose Spader over Duckie again and again—when your roster of exes is impossible to rank in their terribleness—you might find yourself in South Jersey at nineteen years old, sad and single and queer and very fucking angry. You’ll wonder if you’re worthy of love; you don’t know then that you’ll have to work so very hard in therapy to believe you are. You’ll vacillate between knowing in your guts that you are rotten and believing everyone else is the problem. You will take the force of being pulled between those poles and straddle some weird line between sexy and scary, between vengeance and lust, and that vibe is why people repeatedly (mostly mistakenly) think you’re up for a threesome. You’ve been Spaderized. You are now the bad choice that men make, and if it’s a competition for who’s worse—you or the people who choose you—everyone loses.
It’s there—at the nexus of self-loathing and fishnets—that I get my first copy of Rid of Me. I listen to the title track so many times it becomes muscle memory, a thing my body involuntarily holds, a parasite squirming beneath the skin. My voice is all phone-sex and Camel Lights, and I mimic Harvey like a champion—like my champion—because that’s precisely what she is. I want to scream at strangers: Lick my legs, I’m on fire because it feels truer than anything else I know.

Is this where I mention trauma? Do I have to? Isn’t it obvious that something else has gone wrong with a young woman who actively longs to be treated like junk / like scraps / like humanfuckingwaste? Reader, you know what it is. For once, let’s not name it.

“Rid of Me” is a collection of contradictions; it is I love—hate you and let’s fuck—jk fuck you, and it hit me right when I barely understood the difference. The urgency of the opening directive—Tie yourself to me—grinds against the threatened refrain that follows: you’re not rid of me. And there—right there where we should recognize the creep, where our Spader-senses kick in—Harvey delivers the line Night and day I breathe / Hah hah ay hey with such perfect, come-hither breath that we’re lured back to the sexiness of it, the red flags ignored as they so often are in the beginning of things. We move back to the refrain before switching gears to the pained vulnerability of I beg you my darling / Don't leave me / I'm hurting, but just as soon as we feel that pain, the sex is back in falsetto: Lick my legs I'm on fire / Lick my legs of desire. Was the vulnerability merely performative, the trying on of pain to get what one wants? Is that what the unexamined trauma of our youth is: a way to bond and manipulate? I’ll make you lick my injuries.
“Rid of Me” follows a trajectory that, when mapped out, looks like so many of my early relationships:

Threat —> Oooh, Sexy —> Threat —> My Pain —> Oooh, Sexy —> Threat —> Vengeance is Mine! —> My Pain —> Oooh, Sexy —> Threat —> Vengeance is Mine! —> Oooh, Sexy

It is unnerving to recognize yourself so readily in song.

Though it is long ago now, I can still touch the fire that scorched in me at nineteen; I at once wanted validation from men and to hurt them all more than they’d wounded me. I am not certain that Teenage Me thought of men as complete human beings, replete with the complexities we all carry and try to pull apart—the taffy we spend our lives stretching. Instead, I cast men as hero-villains, as savior-foes. I felt the world at one or ten; I wouldn’t know what a safe five looked like until my late twenties.
Harvey is no five, and in its Albini’d production, “Rid of Me” staggers between whisper and scream. Those fucking poles. Remember the teenage pain of swinging between them, the torment of not knowing what a single day would bring? Remember when, above everything, you steeped in loneliness? That is “Rid of Me,” the entirety of a relationship’s best and worst moments bound in a one song—a song I will never, ever tire of, though one I have to watch out for; it has the power to resurrect the worst of me, my most insecure and vengeful bits. (Yes, I know they were there to protect me; yes, I know we do whatever we must to survive. Yes, yes: trauma.) There is something so raw and private on display in “Rid of Me” that it still makes me want to lean close to a man, tuck my panties into his pocket, and murmur Lick my legs, I’m on fire before leading him to his destruction.
I don’t, of course. But the smallest bit of me wants to, my lip half curled in a smile that, if spotted, is your cue to run.

Lisa Nikolidakis’ work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, Los Angeles Review, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Passages North, The Rumpus, New Orleans Review, Gulf Coast Online, and elsewhere. She has recently completed a short-story collection and a memoir based on her Best American essay. She teaches creative writing in the Midwest. You can find her on Twitter @lisanikol or reach her through her website https://www.lisanikolidakis.com/.

natasha padilla on “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns”

Originally released in 1989 as part of Mother Love Bone’s debut EP Shine, “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” is one of many standout songs on the 1992 Singles soundtrack, where I, and many others, first heard the song and the band that spawned Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog. Filmmaker Cameron Crowe also included the song in his 1989 film Say Anything… during a scene with John and Joan Cusack. Concluding Side A, “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” is the centerpiece of the Singles soundtrack, a sprawling grunge power ballad that marries the mellow and heavy vibes of the album.

Beginning with the tried-and-true formula of contemplative, earnest piano and vocals (reminiscent of Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home” and Queen’s “We Are the Champions”), Andrew Wood performs “Chloe Dancer” before the full band joins him for “Crown of Thorns.” The 8:19 song builds slowly, with the chorus kicking in at 3:37, and reaches peak crescendo at 6:33, the “ohhh ohhh” backing vocals escalating the chorus into crowd singalong territory. At 7:12 Wood screams, “I said a c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon to yaaaa,” over a sliding guitar rhythm that later became a grunge hallmark; then continues to adlib the chorus over a blazing guitar solo. It’s an arena rock finish.
All fitting, given “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” is one of five songs from the 1980s featured in March Plaidness: three by bands who influenced the genre (Fugazi, Jane’s Addiction and Pixies) and two by grunge pioneers (Mother Love Bone and Mudhoney). Formed from the ashes of Green River (Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Bruce Fairweather), Malfunkshun (Wood) and 10 Minute Warning (Greg Gilmore), Mother Love Bone were different than the rest because of frontman Andy Wood, a rock star with glam flare who wore his influences loudly and proudly. In what’s believed to be his last interview, Wood told RIP magazine’s Michael Browning, “Queen’s probably my favorite band. Queen, Kiss and Elton John. I’m kind of a hybrid of all those things that influenced me the most when I was growing up.”

While other grunge frontmen dressed in everyday clothes—flannel, t-shirts, sweaters, denim—and acted fame averse and withdrawn, Wood embraced the role with theatricality, wearing make-up, big hats, big glasses and loud prints to match the outsized personality who playfully interacted with fans on stage. In the 1996 grunge documentary Hype!, producer/musician Jack Endino called Wood “the only stand-up comedian frontman in Seattle.” Though Mother Love Bone were gigging around clubs, songs like “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns,” “This is Shangrila” and “Stardog Champion” were big and stadium ready. Wood was not the reluctant rock star stereotype but became the first of the Seattle scene’s heroin-addicted, gone-to-soon, tragic heroes, whose lyrics clearly documented his struggles.

You ever heard the story of mister faded glory, say he who rides the pony must someday fall. Talkin’ to my alter, say life is what you make it, and if you make it death well rest your soul away.

“Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” describes Andy and his fiancé Xana La Fuente’s rocky relationship due to his drug use. La Fuente is Chloe in the song. In that same RIP interview, March 15, 1990, Wood revealed, “‘[Come Bite the] Apple’ and ‘Crown of Thorns’ are probably mostly about me. It’s kind of a synopsis of the whole past year. I’m lucky to be sitting here.” Twenty-six hours later, Xana found Andy in a comatose state from a heroin overdose. He had been clean for 116 days. On March 19, 1990, Wood was taken off life support and died at age 24. Mother Love Bone’s only studio album Apple was released posthumously four months later and included “Crown of Thorns.”
By 1992, the grunge explosion was in full swing and millions of fans discovered Mother Love Bone for the first time through the Singles soundtrack and reissue of the Temple of the Dog album, featuring members of Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden paying tribute to Wood. Singles is still my favorite soundtrack of all time.
September 1992 was my freshman year of high school. I remember seeing Singles in a movie theater opening weekend and being disappointed because I only cared about seeing Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, and the Citizen Dick storyline—Matt Dillon was a grunge hunk in that wig and Jeff Ament’s clothing. The film grew to be one of my favorites in college. Seattle bands were in my regular rotation for many years along with riot grrrls from nearby Olympia who had a lasting impact on my life.
I finally visited both cities in 2015 and took the Stalking Seattle rock & roll sightseeing tour. Charity, a friendly and knowledgeable local music fan, drives you around town in her van, telling stories, playing Seattle bands and visiting famous music landmarks, including the Singles apartment complex and Kerry Park, where Andrew Wood posed for a photo in front of the steel sculpture Changing Form. I highly recommend the tour to all music fans. There is so much rock history in Seattle and I really felt the vibes of greatness. Whether you choose to focus on the awesome tunes departed musicians like Wood, Kurt Cobain, Kristen Pfaff, Layne Staley, Mike Starr, Stefanie Sargent, Mia Zapata, Chris Cornell and Jimi Hendrix left behind, the music that could have been created, or the living legends who remain is up to you. I’m just glad to have the music in my life, “and this is my kinda love…”

Natasha Padilla is a total music geek and posed for a photo in front of Changing Form in Kerry Park in 2015. Her writing has appeared in publications including Metal Maniacs, ROCKRGRL, The Aquarian and MetalInsider.net. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.