round 1

(8) jane’s addiction, “mountain song”
knocked off
(9) dinosaur jr., “feel the pain”
384-311
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 4.

“Jane’s Is”: elana levin on “mountain song”

I first developed an interest in Jane’s Addiction via Sassy Magazine. I can’t remember if Sassy Magazine got me into grunge or the other way around, but for a blessed fleeting moment in the early 90s there was a teen girl magazine with national circulation where you could read stories about Riot Grrl and Dame Darcy’s comics alongside thriftstore fashion pictorals and safer sex tips. This window into Third Wave Feminism and counterculture was delivered to homes nationwide! 

In February 1992 Sassy had a Valentine Day’s fashion spread featuring an edgy but romantic take on rose prints. It used song lyrics, including Jane’s Addiction’s "Summertime Rolls". I was already familiar with “Been Caught Stealing”, which MTV had on heavy rotation, but the fashion spread clued me in that there was more.
Grunge was a significant moment in my coming of age. It changed the range of acceptable aesthetics—ugly and weird was suddenly ok. A radical notion. Maybe it meant that I was ok too. I had always been weird and now it was cool to embrace that. Grunge gave me a lot more friends in Junior High than I’d had prior to it. But grunge aesthetics were never my preferred aesthetics. Weird is not the opposite of beautiful and I didn’t want to have to accept the label of ugly. Because what is more beautiful than weirdness?
I heard “Mountain Song” after I felt the impact of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but Jane’s Addiction is what stuck with me after the novelty of other grunge wore off. Probably because of Jane’s Addiction’s weird and expansive concept of beauty.  

Jane’s Addiction are androgynous  

The first thing anyone notices about Jane’s sound is the eerie and unmistakable voice of Perry Farrell. His voice lives at the intersection of beautiful and weird as fuck. Is this a child? An adult? Perry’s voice is so very high and nasal yet somehow coming from his throat. Sometimes it becomes a squeal. Some radio listeners couldn’t tell the singer’s gender from the audio.
The androgyny of his voice mirrors the cultivated androgyny of the band. Especially Perry, with his penchant for wearing lingerie and makeup, alternating with an almost Iggy Pop-ian devotion to being naked.
I remember a friend in college, a guy who identified as hetero, in my dorm room staring at the photos inside my Classic Girl EP. They are stills from The Gift, an experimental film Farrell co-directed with multimedia artist Casey Nicolli, his girlfriend and frequent artistic collaborator. My friend said, absolutely baffled, “how are they both so hot?!” looking to me as the known bisexual to explain to him how that works.

Jane’s Addiction are making religious art

It’s not Jane’s fault MTV kept showing “Been Caught Stealing”. The video directed by Niccoli was outrageous and funny. Meanwhile, the video they’d made for “Mountain Song” was undermined by censorship. Nothing’s Shocking was indeed too shocking. The beautiful collage and sculpture art on the cover of their next album, Ritual de lo Habitual, was censored as well.
In the “Mountain Song” video Perry Farrell (born Peretz Bernstein in NYC, of course) frenetically dances in fishnet stockings, makeup, and a girdle while the band wails in one of their legendary live performances. Their shows were such a phenomenon that they debuted with a live LP. This footage captures an ecstatic, rapturous energy from performers and audience and go-go dancers in diapers. 

Interspersed with it is footage of Farrell and Niccoli nude, side by side, lying flat on their backs, immobile, surrounded by beds of cut flowers. The effect is like a shrine, or a floral funeral pyre when intercut with glimpses of the sculpture they’d created for the Nothing’s Shocking album cover—papier-mâché conjoined twins of Niccoli with heads literally on fire.  Both remind me of the statues of Catholic Saints paraded around during street festivals. Except they are horizontal, not risen. Perhaps they were waiting for someone to pin some money on them too? 

Cash in now honey, cash in Mrs. Smith

Everybody held their own opinion
Holding it back, it hurts so bad

If that’s not a lyric for teenagers I don’t know what is. “Mountain Song” is sex and death and everyone’s opinion just waiting for release. 

Jane’s Addiction are surfers

In the literal sense—they surfed and lived homeless on the beach for a time. They’re also surfers because if there’s one thing “Mountain Song” can do it’s slowly build from a distance then crash over you like a wave, knocking you breathless.
Their sound is as beachy as grunge can get. There is psychedelic guitar played like it’s heavy metal by an extremely young Dave Navarro. As teens, Navarro and drummer Stephen Perkins bonded over being the only kids they knew who were into both metal and the Grateful Dead. Eric Avery’s funky bass solo intro is immediately recognizable. The layer of acoustic guitar on the B Section is fragile and magical. There is echo and effects as the song builds like a wave then crashes down in an orgasmic crescendo.

Jane’s Addiction are athletes

Each member is relentless. They only know how to play their hearts out. Those dramatic pauses and “2,3,4’s” are so they can gasp for air then get back in it. The band played too hard to wear shirts. Sometimes they played too hard to wear anything.
Jane’s Addiction’s Stephen Perkins is the most interesting percussionist in grunge. Not just because he used bongos and steelpan, but it helps. He also made naturally frizzy hair actually look cool on a white person. This was a revelation to me, a person who always fought against my own frizz. 

Jane’s Addiction can shred

In college I played Mountain Song for a boyfriend. He was into Cibo Matto on the one hand, The Minutemen on the other. When I put on Jane’s he said he never liked them because “the guitars sound like Hair Metal.” I was going through an anti-metal phase at the time and so I told him that was bullshit: just because someone is a guitar virtuoso doesn't mean they’re playing a metal solo. 
Since then I’ve grown to accept my love of metal and listening to this song again-- boyfriend was right! The line between grunge and California metal (of both the Sunset Strip variety, now lambasted as Hair Metal; and the San Francisco variety, now celebrated as Thrash Metal) isn’t as thick as others claim. 

Jane’s Addiction are extremely LA 

As Tom Morello wrote to Billboard making the case for Jane’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame credentials “You can hear the violence, the drugs, the beauty, the ocean, the hope, smog, fear and redemptive power of Los Angeles in Jane’s music.” 
I’ve always associated their music with the magical realist queer punk Young Adult book series by Francesca Lia Block, Dangerous Angels. Together they were the first things that made LA (a city I’ve grown to love) seem appealing to me. I’m still convinced that Jane’s is the band Block was describing in Cherokee Bat and The Goat Guys.
Jane’s Addiction also had connections to the LA Deathrock scene, home to my beloved Christian Death whom I wrote into the March Vladness Semi-Finals. Farrell was a fan of Christian Death founder Rozz Williams in particular. Their music shares a dark beauty and obsession with transgressive sex, death and religion. It makes sense that only singer whose voice even vaguely resembles Farrell’s vocal sound in the slightest is Goth luminary Andi Sex Gang of Sex Gang Children.

Jane’s Addiction are bringing a religious revival tent to your town

Even if Jane’s isn’t standard grunge they should still win this competition for their contributions as catalysts and organizers around grunge. For starters, they founded Lollapalooza. The festival bridged alternative music from Hip-Hop to Goth, and made grunge a brand that was coming to your town. 
It changed what a music festival could be. For example, it included The Jim Rose Circus featuring body modification luminaries like The Lizardman and Amazing Mr Lifto. University Press of Mississippi’s book Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art went overboard when it dedicated multiple chapters to a pre-fame Farrell, interviewing him as though he was a founding figure of modern body modification. I laughed at the time. But as founder of Lollapalooza, Farrell did help bring modifications to the masses. And Perry loves a good transformation. 

Jane’s Addiction was the Acid Test for the development of grunge as a genre

Formative grunge pioneers Green River should thank Jane’s for breaking them up. Without them, the twin strains of grunge (the agony and ecstasy) would never have reached their peak. As grunge historian Mark Yarm told it to me, Green River’s reactions to seeing Jane's Addiction play catalysed the break-up of the band. Their responses split them off into Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone, and then Pearl Jam. 
In the Jane’s Addiction oral biography Whores, Jeff Ahmet observed Jane’s performance while splitting a bill with them in LA. “Stone and I were on the side of the stage when Jane’s was playing, totally mesmerized by the interaction between the band and the crowd… It was the first time I had seen an alternative music show where it was like the most reverential hard-rock crowd. That night Jane’s addiction showed us that you could do something totally different and make it work, which basically caused Green River to break up since the other guys didn’t dig it as much as Stone and I did. Our drummer hated them. When we got back to Seattle we just knew we wanted to do something else, something with less limitations, something that had endless possibilities…” 
Vocalist/guitarist Mark Arm dismissed Jane’s as being too high pitched and hair metal. That sounds like something the guy who would go on to found Mudhoney would say. I mean that with no disrespect. Mudhoney is just a completely different aesthetic. Perhaps without that Jane’s Addiction show Pearl Jam would never have existed. Certainly Evenflow (their best song) was influenced by Jane’s. 

Jane’s Addiction Bridged the 80s and the 90s

I remember someone telling me Jane’s Addiction broke up when I was in class. I was heartbroken. I was one year too young to have gone to see Jane’s live. But I have no excuse for never seeing Porno for Pyros live, Perkins and Farrell’s post Jane’s band. I have this tendency to fall the hardest for music that’s before my own time. E.g. I was a Goth in the 90s, but I prefered 80s Goth to what was current. Jane’s was right on the borderline of before my time and my time. Porno for Pyros just seemed like a lesser option and Jane’s a moment I’d just barely missed. I regret that choice. 
Jane’s Addiction was clearly meant for me. I knew most of the bands in these brackets but Jane’s is far and away my first choice as one of a handful of acts from this time period that never stopped being in my regular rotation. They are entirely unique. You can hear the beach and the city, the heavy metal and the ethereal trip. And I’ll take my rock stars in fishnets over plaid any day. 

Elana Levin podcasts at the intersection of comics, geek culture and politics as Graphic Policy Radio and Deep Space Dive: a Star Trek Deep Space Nine Podcast. Elana has written about comics and politics for sites including The Daily Beast, Wired Magazine, Graphic Policy and Comics Beat and would love to have the opportunity to write about music more often. Elana is on twitter a little too much @Elana_Brooklyn and teaches digital strategy for progressive campaigns and nonprofits. 

diana hurlburt on “feel the pain”

I was seven years old when “Feel the Pain” slunk onto American airwaves as the lead single off Dinosaur Jr.’s 1994 album Without a Sound. Ten years later I’d read Our Band Could Be Your Life, passively digest Dino’s reputed spot within the American punk canon, and set aside sweater-boy J Mascis in favor of imaginary love affairs with Steve Albini and Mike Watt. If, as Texas sludge-mongers Chat Pile suggest, one can select a band from Azerrad’s bible to represent their core self for eternity, what does it mean to have your sun in Dinosaur Jr.
“Cool, but not an elevating experience” was one friend’s assessment of seeing Dino play in Troy, New York (sadly, not at the Dinosaur BBQ)—J Mascis absolutely approved this message. The cruelest Converge fan I know “can listen to [Dino] without having a problem most times, for about 20 minutes.” It should go without saying that people my age often first encounter “Feel the Pain” and by extension its band while watching someone else play Guitar Hero. The notion of ultimate 90s ambassadors Beavis and Butthead viewing the Spike Jonze-directed music video for “Feel the Pain” seems like par for the course: post-post-ironic consumption and regurgitation. What would’ve felt like 70s dad rock by the late 80s and early 90s was reinterpreted, fresh in a time of 3-chord punk stalwarts and experimental New York art-fucks. There’s nothing experimental about “Feel the Pain.” It’s just good.
When I drew this song for March Plaidness, I couldn’t call it to mind. I knew I’d heard it; I’d done my due diligence in high school after that first venture into Azerrad, searching out his favorite tracks for each group featured in Our Band Could Be Your Life and downloading them from KaZaa to the family desktop. But “Feel the Pain” wouldn’t have been among his Dino selections, since the book ends immediately before punk breaks in 1994, leaving the reader with the impression all rock critics wish to convey: that time has crystallized around their preferred era, that neither music nor listening ears have moved on. It’s not hard to believe that Mascis, certainly a visionary of some sort, knew Nirvana would go supernova in ‘94 and planned accordingly, except he’d never expend the energy. The second of Dino’s mainstream albums, Without a Sound is grunge distilled—but only in hindsight. Insouciant and then explosive, virtuosity tempered by self-deprecation, “Feel the Pain” is instantly recognizable and requires no greater context. Its deceptive simplicity speaks to the difficulty of creating new music in the grunge tradition without falling back on basic mimicry. Its sensational guitar power is matched only by a lack of lyrical commitment, a sort of real-time crystallizing of punk into grunge: punk feels the pain of everyone, and grunge feels nothing. In contrast to grunge’s petering-out, watering-down, and general dissipation post-Nirvana, the song snaps off sharply, ending without finishing. 
Dig, if you will, a picture: J Mascis leisurely tricycling through the streets of Athens, Georgia prior to a gig. Fact or fabrication, the image is weapons-grade Dino folklore. Portrait of the artist who does not give a shit. Codified cool.
Some geniuses really want to talk about their genius, and some geniuses are J Mascis. The living embodiment of the notion that if you have to explain your art, you failed at making it, Dino’s frontman comes off as perturbed and unimpressed by his own brilliance. Within the provenance of early Dinosaur Jr., J’s projected apathy postures starkly against his peers—with hardcore as the prevalent strain of Gen X American punk, earnest political stances, emotive vocal performances, and histrionic lyrics were the norm. By the time “Feel the Pain” teed off, a more detached discontent was the name of the game. Having accepted Azerrad’s classification of Dino as a formative American punk band, I was initially surprised to find “Feel the Pain” on the March Plaidness roster. What I recalled of my early foray into You’re Living All Over Me was a bizarrely timeless guitar sound, the best of J’s 70s influences masticated into metallic chunks (a metalhead’s ears will always search for the kvlt in any lick); punk and grunge lived in separate timelines inside my skull, removed as I was, a full generation, from either sound’s origins. Despite Azerrad’s framework—his foreword is all about Nirvana—and in spite of the book’s relatively subgenre-agnostic lineup, Our Band Could Be Your Life elides nitty-gritty classification. Most readers come away with a sense of Beat Happening, Mudhoney, and Dinosaur Jr. as “punk bands.” In that light, and in contrast to songs like “Sludgefeast,”  “Feel the Pain” sounds like it was machine-extruded from the alt factory. It calls to mind nothing so much as the big reveal of Ben Stiller’s betrayal in Reality Bites (although another Dino song, “Turnip Farm,” featured on that soundtrack). The near-total lack of affect in early Dinosaur Jr. prophesied grunge’s self-reflexive and ultimately stylized disaffection. Sonically, “Feel the Pain” is light-years away from J and company’s Amherst cradle. Emotionally, Dinosaur Jr. has always been Dinosaur Jr. 
I heard “Feel the Pain” clunked out on plastic by one of my college dudebro friends in a skanky Tampa apartment circa 2009 and promptly forgot it. I heard it again a few years later while watching Young Adult; it’s undoubtedly provided the backdrop for any number of indie bookstore excursions, possibly even a nostalgia trip into Hot Topic. I have no concrete memories of these instances, only a void where “Feel the Pain” fits. 
J approved that message, too. 

Diana Hurlburt’s favorite dinosaur is Pegomastax. Tell her about yours on Twitter @menshevixen