round 1

(9) veruca salt, “seether”
shook
(8) live, “i alone”
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.

we alone: erin mcreynolds on “i alone”

I grew up ping-ponging between very sexual single parents with garbage boundaries, so at 17, I’d become that sort of disapproving virgin girl you might find in marching band or Model UN—or in my case, the theater department: Sassy magazine in hand, Oscar Wilde quote at the ready, pining for aloof musicians like Michael Stipe and Morrissey. If in high school you were tangled frequently around another person, liplocked and cooing to each other, I was the friend sticking her finger down her throat and screaming “get a room!”
I was comfortable being a third wheel (or fifth or seventh), the clownish, asexual art piece in my co-ed group of friends. I was fond of wearing these sunflower-yellow clogs that my dad’s cool girlfriend bought me on Melrose Avenue, and everyone made fun of them, but to me, they symbolized the adulthood I could look forward to after high school in Orange County: sophisticated, but silly—like Natalie Merchant, at the time still in 10,000 Maniacs, twirling in Danish shoes and a big skirt. She wasn’t trying to get up on everyone’s junk, and she got to be friends with Michael Stipe, so she was my hero. Natalie Merchant and Blossom. If the yellow clogs alone didn’t flash “Keep Your Distance,” then my Blossom-inspired floppy velvet hat festooned with plaid flowers did the job.
Later, I would lament that I hadn’t just stepped two degrees to the dark side and claimed Gothhood so I could make out with a sulky, eyelinered boy in a cemetery in the flickering glow of a Yankee Candle he’d stolen from his mother for the occasion. Or better yet, gotten into Bikini Kill and worn shirts with the sleeves cut so as to show a bit of black bra strap, writing small protests on my arm in Sharpie during lunch. I missed riot grrl completely, in fact. But I did see They Might Be Giants in concert three times by graduation.
So when I tell you that the first person I had sex with was a man—like an actual, hairy, six-foot man who looked 30 (but was only 20)—with a tattoo of Wakko Warner from the Animaniacs and a minivan everyone called “The Toybox” because it was filled with action figures, you get why, right? And maybe you can get why, because I had allowed his nuh-uh parts inside my nuh-uh parts, I considered us married now and invited him to come with me to San Francisco, where I’d just been accepted to college.
Let’s call him Puppy.
Short for “Puppyface.”
For that (alas) is what I called him.
I met Puppy when I defected from my high school theater department in senior year to do a community college Molière production in which he played my foppish fiancé. We bonded over Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Douglas Adams, and The Illuminatus! trilogy (“fnord”). He looked like Egon from Ghostbusters, which made me feel deeply secure, and he had a credit card, with which he bought me many late-night Moons Over My Hammies at Denny’s. And it was solid onboarding to sex, I have to say—emotionally stable, fun, capable, and confident. Four out of five stars! Would recommend!
What I’m saying is that Live, at the time its 1994 album Throwing Copper was hitting airwaves, was the perfect band for a deep, smart girl who had just been made a woman by a man considering a second Warner Bros. tattoo. Live seemed like a natural graduation from my high school musical obsession, REM; from my somewhat sheltered teenage years; from virginity; from yellow clogs. Both bands shared in common a tight four-piece config led by an enigmatic, well-read singer with intense eyes and esoteric lyrics (although REM has everyone beat on that score), but Live also offered a descent into the lower chakras, into the sheer gonadic pleasure of a driving rock anthem wailed by a shirtless man swinging his long braid like a warrior bodhisattva. Still nice… still super brainy. But, you know, also willing to scream “motherfucker” into a microphone.
Throwing Copper was Live’s second studio album, produced by the Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison, who’d also produced their first album, Mental Jewelry. Both were solid collections of tracks designed to be belted dramatically in the car, owing perhaps to what Rolling Stone has called their “heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity and big-rock sweep.” A hefty five songs from Copper charted in the US, and sentient beings over 35 will remember its two iconic videos (in frequent rotation back when MTV stood for “music television”): the arthouse epic for “Lightning Crashes” and “I Alone.”
If you have never seen the video for “I Alone,” I recommend watching it, then following up immediately with the Beavis & Butthead clip. Never has an art critic nailed the collective impression of anything like Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead nailed the “I Alone” video, whose melodramatic wackiness is just so quintessentially ’90s. Front man Ed Kowalczyk was recently discussing the video with Bush’s Gavin Rossdale, explaining director Tim Pope wanted the bandmembers to play their instruments in double time so that when the film was slowed down, it would produce this dreamlike visual effect—and it does, it’s perfect. But there was no way Chad, the drummer, could play that fast, so he had little choice but to flail about empty-handed while everyone else had a visible purpose. “He could never live it down,” Ed quipped. In truth, I thought Chad’s dance was a little heroic, his gentle moshing the sort of unselfconscious improv that we aimed for in acting class. And I confess it was kind of adorable when the set turned dark for the bridge, and he gave that knowing little squint into our souls, brandishing a candle like: We are the mysterious minstrels of the wood. To Butthead’s point though, he did kind of look like “some jackass that wandered on the set.”
But watch the video and it’s Ed you can’t peel your eyes off of; Ed who can’t seem to peel his eyes off us, either, brown eyes lit to a possessed cinnamon and framed by dark, animated eyebrows. He flares his nostrils and rubs his face and swings that braid and does this nipple-cradling karate-chop hand dance reminiscent of Michael Stipe’s postmodernist arm jerking. No wonder I found them both appealing, these defiant weirdos being unapologetically themselves; so riddled with complicated feelings that they frequently had to look off-camera in disbelief.
After driving me the eight hours north to college, Puppy went back to Southern California to take care of loose ends. That week, I got to have my first and only normal freshman experience: I met the other people on my dorm floor, fast-tracked friendships, learned who was flirtable, and joined an improv troupe. But before any of these nascent bonds could crystallize, Puppy came back. Even though he lived off campus, in a room he rented in a Victorian filled with other twentysomething stoners, he was in my dorm room almost nightly (my roommate, fortunately, spent most nights in someone else’s room). He had a part-time office job elsewhere in the Bay Area, giving me a brief window during the weekdays where, after class, I could socialize like any student. Then when Puppy showed up, I’d stay by his side, focusing mainly on him. Him, this person I already felt suffocated by and frequently annoyed with, but so desperately in need of, too. It would be years before I’d learn the word “codependent;” years before I’d come to understand that with Puppy, what I was most in love with (after an unsafe, painful childhood) was being loved by someone who, for the first time in my life, wasn’t going anywhere. Literally. He went nowhere without me. He came to dorm parties with me, he joined my improv troupe, he got to know everyone in my acting class. Driving around San Francisco at night in The Toybox, stoned and singing “I Alone” with the radio at the tops of our lungs, it felt like our anthem. I alone love you/I alone tempt you.
Only he alone didn’t tempt me. No longer playing my old dork role, I now noticed the way guys flirted with me, even the ones who saw me pretzeled with Puppy around campus, and it was as thrilling as anything else I’d been learning in college. At first I hungered, then starved for new experiences, more exciting experiences. Then one night, parked beneath a streetlight, confined inside bars of pouring rain, I told Puppy I thought we should break up. “It’s like, I already caught the big fish,” I tried to explain, “and now what? I stop fishing? What do I have to look forward to now?”
Puppy looked at me with his sad brown eyes leaking in the sulfuric light, and begged me not to. “Please don’t,” he cried. And because I didn’t know where he ended and I began, I thought his pain was my pain and flinched with my whole body, taking it all back. Shortly after, something went wrong with my financial aid, and I was forced to move out of the dorms for inability to pay. So, midway through my first semester, I packed up my REM and Tori Amos posters, my paper lanterns, stuffed animals, and any hope of being a normal, exploring, self-actualizing college student, and moved in with Puppy. Now alone together, our codependency intensified, and with it, my ability to self-delude until I was moving around in a cozy, only vaguely agitated sort of trance.
Ed Kowalczyk has said that “I Alone,” though often interpreted as a romantic anthem, was really about universal love. But I’m not totally convinced. I don’t think he is, either, because sorting through his explanations of the lyrics in interviews, he seems to demur, focusing instead on the spontaneity of the songwriting, describing the sort of mystical state creatives enter when intention and intentionlessness meet. It doesn’t matter so much what he intended, in other words, but what we as listeners take away. 
At the time, I was one of those many listeners who worked backwards from a place of assuming the “I” in “I alone love/tempt you” referred to the singer, but this required interpreting the singer as a possessive lover; that the opening verse It’s easier not to be wise was a warning, as was The greatest of teachers won’t hesitate/to leave you there by yourself chained to fate. I was falling ever deeper into a denial of self (I sank into Eden with you), replacing that self with Puppy’s self (Your anchor is up/you’ve been swept away)—which meant his opinions had become my opinions, his likes and dislikes my likes and dislikes. What he found funny. The music he liked singing along with. Ditto and ditto. You can see it in the photos of me from when we first got together, when I was 17 and wearing vintage dresses covered in giant daisies, to age 19 when I’m exclusively clad in his flannel shirts, even bagged out in his jeans. I donned a tattered army jacket over his Charlie Brown t-shirt, sported a chain wallet like his. We dyed our hair matching colors from Manic Panic jars procured at Hot Topic, our favorite store. Dim was becoming the odd little spark who had met Puppy—the one who envisioned her college years in the dank coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest (or adjacent), sipping elephantine mugs of coffee and discussing Shakespeare with other students, blowing her mind open with French films and art history—that light now obfuscated by a working knowledge of Cartoon Network’s most prolific voice actors, Magic: The Gathering, and the lyrics to 2 Live Jews As Kosher as They Wanna Be. Not that this wasn’t still my kind of knowledge—that wasn’t the problem. It was the enormous square footage that knowledge took up in my still-forming brain, my still-forming life. There was little left of what I alone loved.
Puppy ended up joining me at school my second semester, and due to our habit of steeping ourselves in weed before, during, and after class, my GPA dropped more than a point. I started having panic attacks, too. A few weeks into our third semester, we dropped out and moved back to the warmth and familiarity of Southern California, where I would, another year and a half later, break up with him. But before all that happened—before we left San Francisco—we saw Live in concert with PJ Harvey. I only knew her from her single, “Down By the Water,” which was all over the radio, but that night I watched her strutting on the stage in a hot pink bodysuit adorned with feathers, black hair flying, slamming a tambourine and howling like Brigid into the microphone. My jaw slackened and my pupils dilated. I’d been stoned and had profound musical experiences before, sure, but this was different. This was being seen. This was feeling myself.
When she finished, Live came out and Ed said, “Didn’t PJ Harvey rock your fucking world?!” I don’t remember a single moment of the concert after that. I bought To Bring You My Love from the merch table and played the hell out of it, then the album before it, and the one before that, and every album since. She became one of my desert-island artists, and a beacon to guide me as I grew more into myself, claiming more of the real estate in my mind.
Would I have discovered her without Live, without their concert? I don’t know. Probably yes, but later. Do I wish sometimes I could go back and not take Puppy to school with me, to allow myself the freedom to explore and follow my interests and my heart and not lose three crucial years of self-development to a codependent relationship? I used to. I used to turn away from this part of my life in shame, couldn’t stand to speak of it. But recently I’ve come to appreciate that it all unfolded in a way that might well have been the only way. Puppy was good to me when my parents weren’t. Puppy was reliable in a way I’d never known before. Puppy was safe, when I’d never felt safe, so perhaps taking him with me was not to be pathologized as evidence of damage, but a subconscious act of self-preservation and care. Ed Kowalczyk seems like someone who would understand this complexity: that a thing can be both regrettable and serendipitous. That a first love can be so wrong for you, and still right. A song doesn’t have to be your favorite forever; it’s enough that it held you for a while (to cradle the baby in space) and gave you words to express what was inexpressible. That it got you where you needed to go. That whenever you hear it now, you feel a sweet sting for that jackass wandering, lost in the woods. 

Erin McReynolds is a writer and editor living in Austin, TX. Her writing has appeared in literary journals like The Sun, Kenyon Review Online, and North American Review, and elsewhere. She is the web editor at American Short Fiction and is working on a memoir and should this essay be in it, Y/N (circle one).

danielle evans on “seether”

I have seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in its entirety exactly once, in elementary school, and I am using “seen” loosely here, because I was a squeamish and sensitive child and once I gathered that our class was being shown a horror movie for children, I cradled my head on my desk and peered up only occasionally to see what fresh hell was happening on screen. As best I could follow the plot, we were meant to root for Charlie, a sycophantic boy who passively and complicitly watched his competitors, who are also children, systematically tortured by a wealthy factory owner and was rewarded by becoming the new factory owner.  In the moral world of the movie, the other children deserved their fates because they committed the respective crimes of being fat, unproductive, boastful, and a spoiled girl who demands what she wants.
In the version of the film we watched, after a rather delightful musical number, in which she screams, among other things,  I want the world I want the whole world and I want it now, Veruca Salt is sorted into the trash by the machine used to collect chocolate eggs from  magical  geese. The internet informs me that in the book and the 2005 film, Veruca is torn limb from limb by squirrels who deem her rotten. I remember being horrified enough by the version in which a child disappears into the trash chute.
I was predisposed, then, to love a band called Veruca Salt for their name alone, for embracing a feminine lack of restraint, a willingness to be loud, spoiled, rotten even, if the alternatives were punished or deprived. Their debut album, American Thighs, took its name from an AC/DC lyric She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies/ Knocking me out with those American thighs. The band introduced themselves by invoking a particular cocktail of aggression and desire and girlhood and honest rage.  “Seether”, their first single, was part boast, part apology, part warning, a love letter to the kind of rage that breaks out when you try to hold it back. I can’t see her til I’m foaming at the mouth sang Nina Gordon and Louise Post, the band’s frontwomen. Portions of the video are footage of the band in a Chicago animal shelter, surrounded by cats who are uninterested in the production, but somehow make the song’s tone both more vulnerable and more ominous. I try to keep her on a short leash, the lyrics say, while on screen a tabby cat yowls into the camera, as if to say Yeah, OK, good luck with that leash.
For a song with fairly straightforward lyrics—the seether is a personification of an explosive anger—it generated enough secondary interpretations (the seether was an illness, the seether was a vagina…) that in the song “Volcano Girls” on their second album, the band offered a footnote: “here’s another clue if you please/the seether’s Louise”.  Though “Seether” is a song about anger, the title locates it in the before of anger. What’s most interesting about the seether is not the specific quality of her rage, which is somewhat abstract, but about how long the seether can go dormant, and how hard the fight to keep her in her place is. The seether is rocked in her cradle, the seether is knocked out, the seether is boiled, the seether is swallowed, the seether is subjected to all manner of violence and domesticity, but the seether survives, and there’s some triumph in it. Also, perhaps some prescience— the positive reception to Veruca Salt’s debut thrust the band into the spotlight, and the industry, grueling tours, various personal crises, rejection by some in the indie music community that had helped form them, the difficulty of sustaining an intense friendship under even the best of circumstances, and perhaps Louise’s famously immortalized temper led to the band’s breakup after the second album. For years, Gordon and Post weren’t on speaking terms.

Here’s where I confess that I have squeaked into this tournament in spite of missing the heyday of grunge. I was a few years too young for generation X, and I was a Black kid growing up in the late 80’s and early 90s when music and radio were much more firmly segregated. In our car the radio presets were two R&B stations, two hip hop stations, one oldies station, and one generic pop station. Several years ago, when a friend of mine had a 90’s themed 30th birthday party, most of the guests showed up in plaid flannel; I showed up in glitter makeup and the bright blue wig I’d coveted since Lil Kim’s appearance in “Crush on You”.  Up through middle school, if a white person had made music after 1970 and hadn’t made it to the top 40, odds were high I hadn’t heard of them.  I had heard of grunge as a category, and understood it well enough to tell people some of my classmates were into it, but not well enough to answer my mother’s question when she asked “Grunge? Why would they call it something that sounds dirty?”
Not knowing much about what my classmates were into had become something of a badge of honor for me. In the third grade I’d tested out of my neighborhood school and been moved to a gifted classroom in which I was not just the only Black person but one of only a few kids without blue eyes. It hadn’t been welcoming. When my mother looked for a neighborhood to move to where the gifted class might be more diverse, she discovered I was the only Black child in my grade in the gifted program in whole county.  (I was also in the minority in having been placed in the program by the school’s own tests—most of the gifted students had gotten their placements through tests administered by paid private psychologists, something Black parents in the country weren’t regularly told was an option.) We did move, to a school where I was still the only Black student in my class, but no longer the only person of color, but I clung tight to my sense of identity being in part about what I wasn’t. I didn’t want to become that kind of Black girl, the one people worried didn’t understand she was Black. I assumed I wouldn’t like whatever pop culture my white classmates were into in part because it made the ongoing rejection feel mutual, and in part because I didn’t want to wonder who I’d be if it turned out I loved it.
By the late 90s, MTV and the radio were better integrated, and I, being in high school and having a more fully-formed identity, was less defensive about my own tastes. Plus, it was the birth of streaming music services, and for a few brief years before it all got shut down as the widespread theft system that of course it was, through the magic of Napster and Limewire I could hear all the music I’d heard of but never actually heard. The aesthetics were different, but I recognized in grunge feminism a bravado, a willingness to lack decorum and shun respectability,  that reminded me of the most interesting women in the hip-hop and R&B I’d grown up with, women who also had to navigate a scene run by men, women who developed a way of talking about sex without being reduced to it, women who didn’t have the privilege to grow up spoiled or be treated delicately, but had still found a language for telling the world what they wanted, had found the boldness to make demands, had found, in music, a kind of freedom even if it required relentless performance to maintain.  Some of the music of the alternative early 90’s bewildered me, some it took me years to come around on, but I loved “Seether” from the first time I heard it. I understood “Seether” because it understood how much effort goes into performance, how hard it is to keep yourself in a mold.
Anger—who can express it, who gets punished for it, who gets called angry or hostile and who gets praised for being firm or direct—is of course always political. I was raised alongside a generation of women who were fed slogans like girl power and lean in and have it all, which were meant to be inspiring, but sometimes feel instead like we built a generation of girls who were told it was their fault if they didn’t ask for enough, but didn’t build a world prepared to give them much of what they asked for. I was born into the first full generation of Black Americans raised in a post-civil rights act country, the generation of kids sent into schools people threw rocks at their parents to keep them out of, raised by a generation of Black parents who understood that entering formally segregated spaces and seats of power was the beginning of the work, just as the country was patting itself on the back for having reached the end. I was raised in a generation that was fed a story of endless growth and possibility and a bright tech-led future while we watched the wealth gap explode and the social safety net stripped apart and whole industries that had once been the source of stable jobs and communities vanish altogether or shift into gig work. There are costs—physical and mental—to constantly advising people to ask more of a world that keeps telling them no and judging them greedy for wanting it. No wonder all these years later so many people still love a song about seething.  

But I had hard time explaining why I loved “Seether” in the way that I love songs that have given me a vocabulary for a part of myself I didn’t know I needed to name. I don’t generally seethe at people. I rarely yell. I am almost never angry when people think that I am. I am a Black woman with an expressive face, and a person raised by New Yorkers who spent nearly a decade of her adult life in the upper Midwest, and so I eventually learned to anticipate that people would often interpret all manner of emotions— hurt, mild dissatisfaction, indifference, confusion, enthusiasm about an opportunity for change, directness when making a neutral statement of fact — as anger, and that it wouldn’t do me any good to protest. But if I am talking to you, I am almost never angry. I am at best, tired or exasperated or very sad. Well before I’m angry enough to scream, I’ve usually decided the person I’m angry at isn’t worth the effort.
I have two modes of truly angry: I am never going to acknowledge you again unless it will cost me money not to, and I am never going to acknowledge you again, but first I am going to tell you why, calmly but at great length and in specific detail, so that I never have to say a word or worry about hearing from you in the future. My purest rage is not so much an explosive anger as a cold one, a calculation.  You win a fight with someone who is screaming at you or trying to hurt you by being indifferent or refusing to hear them out. You win a fight with a person who is careless by caring even less about them than they do about you. You win a fight with a narcissist by ignoring them.  Of course, this strategy only works when you have the power to walk away.         It costs something to build a life where you almost always have the power to walk away. It costs something to understand that most of time when someone is cruel or careless, it’s not because you misunderstood them or are lacking a secret exculpatory piece of information known perhaps only to them or because you did something to deserve it and can still undo whatever the thing was, to understand that a person who treated you that way probably did so because they believe you’re a person with whom they can afford to be cruel and uncareful, either because they don’t value you much or they didn’t expect you to value yourself enough to object. It costs something to object. It costs something to know that you can, in your heart, forgive people for how they let you know they didn’t value you, but you cannot in your heart unknow it, you cannot, in your life, hold space for people who don’t value you, or pretend that you’ll be open to them again.  It costs something to believe that you deserve more than people you care about often believe they should give you.
After I have walked away from someone or someplace that treated me badly, I still remember what it cost, even when I’m not sorry, even once I’m as close to forgiveness as I’ll come. If forgiveness means I’ve stopped saying a hex for you at night before I go to bed, well then sure, I’ve forgiven a lot of people. If forgiveness means I have to be friendly… well then. I don’t seethe before I’ve reached a breaking point, but I often seethe after, when the cord has been cut and there’s nowhere for the anger to go. It can’t be directed at a person or institution I’ve already cut off. When I rock and soothe and fight and swallow and boil my anger, I’m not trying to keep it away from someone else before it hurts them. I’m trying to get rid of it before it hurts me to hold onto it. It’s hard though, to let go of something you know has saved your life more than once.

But letting go of anger apparently has its virtues. It would have been a depressing end for one of the best known grunge bands fronted by women to emerge from the era as another cautionary tale about the cost of feminist rage and desire, another story with the message that you can want the whole world and want it now if you must, but the machine will eat you alive or the world will tear you to pieces, and no one will blame it: you were a bad egg, a bad nut.  But that’s not, after all, how the story ends. After years of open hostility, Gordon and Post met up to sit down and talk things out. The full original band got back together. In 2015, they released a long-awaited new Veruca Salt album, appropriately titled Ghost Notes. It’s moody and playful and sharp and delightful and sounds both like the third album they might have made together in the 90s and also like an album that needed another decade of adult life to get made. NPR’s review says “A group of friends and musicians who have overcome internal turmoil and external pressures that caused them to part ways in the '90s would sound this invincible. Embracing a throwback sound isn't stagnation for Veruca Salt. It's celebration.” I wanted to live so I pretended to die, opens the first song on the album “The Gospel According to Saint Me”, a tongue in cheek song about resurrection and coming back from the dead. The song concludes Surprise surprise it’s gonna be bright.

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her work has won awards and honors including the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction. She is a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a 2021 finalist for The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, and The Sewanee Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.