round 1

(2) Nine Inch Nails, “closer”
got
(15) The Gits, “second skin”
323-164
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 8.

mika taylor on “closer”

I first heard Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” while riding the school bus my junior year. The album had come out the spring before, but this song didn’t get major radio play until the fall of 1994. It was a “power play” through September and topped out at 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October. From the back of the bus, I wouldn’t have heard the opening, that heartbeat rhythm, the bump/gush of a bass drum and what sounds like TV static. The chucklehead talk jocks liked to joke during an initial lull. There would have been no way to make out the faint piano melody, little before that bold first line. “You let me violate you.”
I had friends who were cooler than I was and wore their NIN and Jane’s Addiction t-shirts with Docs and chain wallets, friends whose older sisters had taken them to an abandoned airfield in Rhode Island for the third Lollapalooza (though no one I knew had been to the first). They knew the song well enough not to listen, and so it didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time. Trent Reznor’s desperate rasp was background music to our rural bus route past open fields and tall trees. I wouldn’t really hear it until later.
My friends had probably seen Mark Romanek’s controversial video on MTV when it was released in May. We didn’t have cable at my house, so I wouldn’t get to watch for years, when I found it on the internet, uncensored. It starts with the clicking of a hand cranked camera, a bouncing title card and then a sound sync beep. In the first shot, a human heart nailed to a chair pumps to the drumbeat and releases puffs of steam. Beneath plays a chromatic piano melody, haunting and elemental. The set is a basement museum, a curio collection of the dead and deformed, bones, meat, cobwebs, and decay. The footage, jumpy and sepia, is meant to look found not made, taking the industrial and electronic elements back to the turn of the century or before.
Added to the beat is a techno ticking version of the disco high hat along with a keyboard pattern to round out the melody. Reznor sings into a microphone that could also be a breast. “You let me violate you.” In the video, roaches crawl over dusty glass bottles and beakers. “You let me desecrate you.” Candles drip wax. Behind the singer is a line of human skulls. “You let me penetrate you.” The “you” is a live mannequin in thigh high boots, hairless, as anonymous and interchangeable a partner as they come. Her identity is unimportant. The you is a piece in the collection, an object, not a subject, there to be penetrated, felt from the inside.
“Closer” is a third of the way into The Downward Spiral, a semi-autobiographical concept album that follows a man down the road from depression to suicide with stops for sex and drugs along the way. It is the point in that descent when shit’s falling apart, but there’s still some shred of hope, a chance for him to feel at least something through violent and desperate sex. At age sixteen, when I first heard the single, I’d never even kissed anyone. I didn’t do drugs. I’d never been drunk. “Closer” is as much about self-hatred as it is about sex though. That, I understood.
Now, I have a hard time placing myself in this song. Maybe it’s because I was a teenage girl when it came out and am an adult woman now, but I identify far more with the “you” than the “I”. I still feel the carnal power of the beats, the lush lure of the bass line. There is need, desire, desperation in those vocals. It is a song I would fuck to, for sure. But its lyrics disrupt my subject position, making it clear that mine is not the pleasure that matters here.
In consensual BDSM (alluded to with various gags, blindfolds, and restraints in the video), the submissive partner can find pleasure in being violated, penetrated, desecrated. Objectification is not necessarily objectionable. But I get stuck on the fourth line “I want to complicate you.” As if I, as object, am not complicated enough in my own right, as if I am nothing without that proposed penetration, that animal fucking, as if there is nothing inside me until he feels it there. The most he can imagine is not a distinct subject position, but an object complicated by his desire.
“Help me,” begs an unholy choir, Reznor’s falsetto harmonized with itself. “I broke apart my insides,” he claims in a rougher tone. The object is not just complicated by the singer’s desire, she is also his salvation. “Help me. I have no soul to sell.” Sex is the only thing that works anymore, the only thing that offers relief from the pain of living. “Help me get away from myself.” When he sings about drugs and depression and sex, about that deep and unfulfillable need, physical addiction and psychic desire, Reznor captures a perfectly teenage feeling. He claws the walls of a solipsistic cage.
As a teenager, I bought into all of that shit. I wanted male attention. I wanted to be pursued, maybe even overpowered. Songs like this one made me flush with desire. It was dark and primal in a way that I wasn’t. I wanted to be openly and undeniably sexual even as I feared my own sexuality. I wanted to be the object. I was not. I was tough and average and shy, fairly awkward and mostly alone, and I watched with awe as girls my age lived lives that seemed so far beyond me.

The chorus in “Closer” is the memorable part: the dirty word, the surge of melody, the fantasy of being held down, fucked like an animal, felt from the inside. This is a song about sex and self-hatred, but the sex is what resonates. No emotional admission of flawed existence can compete.
Tommy Lee, the drummer for Mötley Crüe and contributor to the album (though not this song), called Closer: “the all-time fuck song.”
“Those are pure fuck beats,” he told Blender in 2002. “Trent Reznor knew what he was doing. You can fuck to it, you can dance to it and you can break shit to it.” Tommy Lee’s sex tape was filmed a year after this song came out. In it, Lee looks a little a bit like Reznor—lean and dark haired, but the sex is as straightforward as it comes, the object a bottle blond on the deck of a boat, with manicured nails and enhanced breasts.
“I didn't think it would become a frat-party anthem or a titty-dancer anthem," Reznor told an interviewer for Details who found it “hard to tell whether his principal emotion [was] pride or embarrassment or despair.” It’s fair to say, “all time fuck song” was not what he’d intended. In the EP, the now memorable refrain was looser: “I want to fuck you/ I want to taste you/ I want to feel you/ I want to be you/ Just like an animal.” His sound engineer, Sean Beavan, remembers Reznor worrying that the more iconic line sounded “trite.” Everything in the video fights that simplification. There are animal bodies parted out, flayed and decapitated. Reznor is a mannequin, an awkward body suspended and spinning, a head on a platter surrounded by orchids and roaches on rotting food. He is the submissive, blindfolded, chained, and writhing, even while he sings about domination. The song is meant to mean more, to complicate.
Its legacy may be the consequence of the objectification. No matter how complex or nuanced you mean it to be, no matter how layered the track, anything can be oversimplified, refined down to its catchy chorus.

A bit of lore: This song, and most of the album, was recorded in the house where Sharon Tate, her friends, and her unborn child were murdered by members of the Manson family twenty-three years earlier. Reznor set up a recording studio in the living room and named it “Le Pig” or just “Pig,” the word one of the murders wrote in Tate’s blood on the house’s front door. Reznor filmed a music video there. He recorded parts of Marilyn Manson’s 1992 album Portrait of an American Family there too. He paid $11,000 a month in rent. He was the last to occupy the home. When he moved out at the end of 1993, he took the door with him for his studio in New Orleans. The original house was torn down and rebuilt with a different address.
This detail is not at all essential to understanding “Closer,” and yet, it treads the path of objectification and using others in service of an aesthetic. Reznor later told an interviewer at Rolling Stone, that he hadn’t even considered the implications of living and working there until Sharon Tate’s sister confronted him about exploiting her sister’s death. “The whole thing kind of slapped me in the face,” he said. “I realized for the first time, “What if it was my sister?” […] I went home and cried that night. It made me see there's another side to things, you know? It's one thing to go around with your dick swinging in the wind, acting like it doesn't matter. But when you understand the repercussions that are felt... that's what sobered me up.”
Taking is a talent. Reznor’s gift as a musician is in his reuse and distortion of sounds. Everything in the “Closer” track is sampled, distorted, reworked, and run in and through a bevy of mixers and machines which I won’t pretend to understand. The background includes a sample from "Take A Chance With Me" by Roxy Music, reversed and modified. Even the initial kickdrum beat is a heavily processed sample from Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing.” Reznor was meticulous about a song’s sonic qualities, pushing for the new and interesting, the never before heard. According to Beavan, the only sounds Reznor didn’t alter were the vocals and guitar. “He wanted it all to flow together, because everything else was so piecemeal. To his way of thinking, whereas the rhythm should be perfect, the emotion should come from the voice and the guitar.” There is a power to this creative process and beauty in the music it produces, even with the limitations of his lyrics.
The video is likewise a mélange of borrowed imagery. In it, Romanek recreates works of Francis Bacon, Man Ray, Giorgio de Chirico, Joel-Peter Witkin, and James Van Der Zee. Along with the religious iconography and the bondage gear are decontextualized images of race. There’s a page torn from Jean Brunhes’ “Races”, a work of “human geography.” A pair of heavily hennaed twins are attached together by their hair. There is a black man dressed as a porter holding a pig’s foot that could be a penis, styled in the mode of Van Der Zee’s photographs of the Harlem Renaissance. A blond girl in spiral curls sits prone on a velvet chair. The mannequin woman holds a sheep skull in front of her face as she spins. Seven bald white men in suits move towards camera. A Dadaist metronome ticks with a picture of a human eye. There seems little meaning beyond the power of image, an agglomeration of racial and scientific history. It is compelling to watch, but it also feels like erasure. Race, like identity, like female sexuality, is decontextualized rather than explored, valued for its aesthetic as a part of the collection.
I need to pause here and talk about the monkey, a grey capuchin tied to a cross, a nod to Witkin. Of all the imagery aimed to shock, this remains the most disturbing. He looks as if he is panicking or in pain, writhing and baring his teeth. “I want to go on record about the monkey,” Romanek said afterwards. “That monkey was not in any danger even though he appears to be in distress. The monkey was just munching on bits of banana and enjoying himself.” In the version edited for MTV, the cross is blacked out, but the struggling monkey’s face remains. Gone too are the mannequin’s breasts and crotch, the crucifix on her blindfold. Gone is the shot of Reznor gagged and tied to a chair, surrounded by fetish toys. There is no more anatomical drawing of a woman’s splayed vulva. Images of sexual and religious taboo were edited out for the broader audience, but the monkey’s pained face passed the censors. I do believe that he wasn’t hurt, that this is a disturbing image ethically created. But it furthers a theme I cannot ignore: the way a self-involved I (be it the “I” in the song or the eye of the camera) flattens all desire but its own.
This is how the object is used. It is there to give meaning to the subject, to render him more interesting, more dynamic, perhaps profound, to bring him closer to God. “You make me perfect,” Reznor says. “Help me become somebody else.” This is the responsibility of objects, of images, and of girls.

I knew a girl in the nineties who did taxidermy and claimed to be a vampire, “not for blood, for love.” I knew a girl who dressed in velvet and dyed new streaks in her hair every week. Boys trailed behind her. I knew a girl who lived in a lean-to in the woods across from our high school. She moved in there with her boyfriend so her parents couldn’t tell her what to do.
I was none of those girls. I was not cool enough to layer my clothes or line my eyes. I had no older sister to take me to shows or paint my nails black. I did not know to differentiate between commercial music and art. I did not understand what it was to sell out. So, I watched and envied girls who seemed to know so much more than I did—girls I wanted to be.
I knew a girl who went on Trent Reznor’s yacht in the late nineties for a sex vacation. His girlfriend invited her, and she said yes. It was neither violent nor violating. She had a good time.
I knew a girl who showed up with a friend on Perry Ferrell’s doorstep in LA.
     He said, “Come in,” but she didn’t.
“Why not?” I asked later.
     “What was I going to do,” she said, “sleep with him? What kind of asshole sleeps with teenagers who knock on his door? I’m not a groupie.”
These were girls who knew themselves. One gave and the other held back, and both of them retained powerful subject positions well beyond the singers’ desires.
I was not that girl. I dreamt of being desired, assumed it would validate me, but I was never the target of this type of obsession. I did not go on sex vacations or get invited in by rock stars. I was a virgin in the nineties and remained one up until right before my twenty-third birthday. I had kissed three maybe four people before that. I slept with a friend of the coolest girl I knew, just so I could get it over with. She had Betty Page bangs and knew every lyric to every song. He was a shitty bassist from Venice Beach. We were going to do it a second time, but he drunkenly called me by her name.
Even as Reznor begs for help and salvation, the “you” in “Closer” could be anyone. Objects are interchangeable.
I know a girl who purged what she ate. I know a girl who didn’t eat at all. I know a girl who cut herself in thin lines on the insides of her thighs, back before that was a thing girls did.
“Closer” ends in a crescendo of music. It has been an unsatisfying climb, layer upon layer of sound, ever upward with no relief. Reznor whispers into the microphone, almost inaudibly, “Through every forest/ Above the trees/ Within my stomach/ Scraped off my knees/ I drink the honey/ Inside your hive/ You are the reason/ I stay alive.” And then it is just music for the rest of the song, two minutes shorter than the album cut, but still long for radio play.
I know a girl started a band, who put out two albums and went on tour. I know a girl who left her parents’ house at seventeen and lived with a prostitute in a third-floor walkup. I know a girl who made up so much of her life that it was hard to keep track of what was real.
In the video there are insects, eels, human faces, slabs of beef, white men, a pig’s head spinning, the heart, the monkey on his crucifix. In silhouette, Reznor licks the microphone/breast. An eel, a vulva, a blindfolded man, the porter, the heart. Reznor’s face, distorted by an air compressor, skips and jumps and then the film burns in the projector.
I know a girl who drank her way into the hospital. I know a girl who snuck out of the ER after she OD’d. I know a girl who was too drunk to say no. I know a girl who said no but it didn’t matter. I know a girl who said yes when she wasn’t sure. I know a girl who said nothing at all.
The porter blows a puff of dust off of his top hat and the screen goes white. We are now watching through a 60’s era tube television. Most of the sonic elements that have built up over the course of the song are stripped away all at once.
I know a girl who was held at knifepoint on a date, whose rape was her first experience of sex. I know a girl whose mother’s boyfriend came into her room at night. I know a girl who dreamt of hypodermic needles in her vagina. I know a girl who took too many pills—luckily, they found her in time. I knew a girl who was alone when she died. I know a girl who announced with pride that she’d still never had an abortion. She miscarried a day before her appointment and we all got drunk to celebrate.
Reznor floats up to a disemboweled piano mounted on the wall and I wonder about who I’ve objectified along the way. What was I doing, collecting these girls? Listening to their stories on the back of the bus, sampling and distorting their details, imitating their musical tastes, sleeping with their friends. In idolizing these girls, I surely oversimplified their motivations, romanticized their pain. I envied the purity of their rage, but of course they suffered. I wanted the outlets they had in sex and drugs. Their taboo acts seemed revolutionary. I’m sure, in some, I mistook pain for pleasure, self-loathing for bravery. It’s hard to know which self-medications hurt and which heal. Still, these were not girls I wanted to use or exploit, they were girls I wanted to be. Theirs were exciting subject positions I imagined occupying. I valued them because they were complicated and dynamic in their own rights—I never thought my wanting made them so.
In the last measure, Reznor plinks out the final melody as its echo moves across the soundscape. There is no satisfaction or resolution here, no redemptive coda, only the last vibrations of what came before.

Mika Taylor was a Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, Ninth Letter, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Guernica, Diagram, and others. You can read most of them at mikataylor.com.

Que Viva Zapata: Consider The Gits: Raquel Gutiérrez on “second skin”

When The Gits launched into their set the night of June 27, 1993 opening with “Slaughter of Bruce,” the fourth track off of their 1992 release Frenching The Bully, I didn’t realize then standing in front of the stage that it would become a plainly spoken anthem of anti-careerism for me here in 2021.

I was working in a shithole one day
Some fool came up to me and said
"you'd make a star with that band, "
I said, "it's not why we're doing this,
Why can't you fucking get it?"

I didn’t get it in that moment of grunge’s star rising uncomfortably over the masses. The Gits could’ve been but didn’t care to be the next anything—not Nirvana nor Pearl Jam. Bands I had seen a few months later that year open for the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers. 
The night of The Gits show I didn’t know I was already unambitious—a product of my generation’s pride and constraint. I was one day from turning 17 that night where I saw the band at the venue that would become an old haunt for me in the next few years. 3711 Pico Boulevard was the address to Jabberjaw, an all-ages venue that hosted the who’s who of post-punk, sludge, grunge, emo, hellbilly surf-rock, and garage punk throughout the 1990s. New genres and their gatekeepers were born every week here. Y2K would not be kind to this venue, located a block away from famed Black gay disco heaven called Jewel’s Catch One. I would start going there in my mid-20s. But, as a teenager I remember waiting for Jabberjaw to open and sulkily staring at the limousine that spirited Madonna to Jewel’s to celebrate the release of Vogue. Grunge would enter the height of the zeitgeist a year later.
The Gits rocked that late June evening, still balmy from the end of June Gloom, a Los Angeles invention but real nonetheless. But, the band rocked in that turbulent nihilistic way of the unbathed mercenary. It was unsettling for me nearing the end of my middle-teens and getting a whiff of what my own nascent adulthood would look like very soon. It was the summer before my senior year in high school and the death of my best friend earlier that year made imagining a future feel almost blasphemous to our bond. The only thing that felt good was the loud music, big amps, and frenetic energies spaces like Jabberjaw provided. And to think they got by on $3 a head. They didn’t serve alcohol. They did serve nerve-fraying cups of coffee and espresso along with Pop-Tarts in a not entirely unironic way.
Jabberjaw was located across the street from a halfway house—this was what we called them in that era intensified by the crack epidemic and gang injunctions. Addicts moved through the neighborhood like ghosts waiting for hapless UCLA students and local KXLU college station DJ types and their friends to pay their attentions elsewhere. Jabberjaw was a predominantly white space in a Black neighborhood and I didn’t know white folks were coming in from the San Fernando Valley to set up shop for the art school set. I didn’t know any better other than the burned out buildings dotting the corners on my way there from my Southeast Los Angeles neighborhood. I didn’t have a cell phone. I didn’t have a pager. The riots happened the year before and I watched the city burn from my sick bed as I recovered all week from a case of chickenpox. A year later as I drove myself to these neighborhoods I knew well enough to do my part to share cigarettes and head nods to the various street philosophers that held court at the payphone next to Jabberjaw’s entrance. I made sure they knew by the sight of my pullout tape-deck in my hand that I wasn’t holding anything of interest in my ‘86 Civic. That night was my experiment with going to shows alone—the first of many similar birthday gifts I would give myself. I was tired of begging friends or negotiating our tastes in music to do with the burden of company. The peace of mind that came from social responsibilities. This was balanced out with mental anguish that came from occasionally running to and from my car and the venue. I did whatever it took to quell my teenage paranoia. 
There was much to warrant that paranoia—then and now. Girls and women know this paranoia well. 
A week after that Los Angeles show and two more gigs wrapped under their tour belt, Mia Zapata, singer of The Gits, was found raped and murdered a few blocks away from her basement apartment in the central Seattle neighborhood, Capitol Hill. She was only supposed to be home for a few days before The Gits took off to do their European tour and another leg in the U.S. to support the new album. The band was on the brink of ascension to the next level of not just notoriety but that they could subsist on their art. Zapata was strangled with the drawstring from her own hooded sweatshirt bearing the name of her band. She had stayed out late, seeing bands and friends, and reveling in the fact that people wanted more of what she had—the furious presence as lead singer for a band that had feminist principles without dipping into the riot grrl controversies of the day. Mia Zapata had her headphones on, the old kind, the bulky headset that would make it difficult to hear footsteps behind her.
A week later Gary Dent, Jabberjaw’s co-owner, mentioned in passing as he stamped my hand that Zapata had died.  

What? But we just saw her here last week!

I couldn’t believe someone so ferociously vibrant had suddenly left us. And when Gary elaborated further I was dumbstruck. And scared. If someone so avowedly confident could be taken that very violent way that nightmares are made of, why not every single one of us? I felt ill at the lack of reason for her death. I felt terrible. And I felt guilty. I wasn’t even there to see The Gits that night the week before. They were the opening band for Bratmobile, the darlings of the Riot Grrrl movement that had captured my heart. I was more twee in my 3rd wave feminism than I cared to admit, wearing high water work pants on purpose, and a lime green golf jacket with my friends’ band Seesaw screened on the back in bright blue ink. I collected 7-inch records from the holy Olympia trinity: Kill Rock Stars, K Records, and Yo-Yo Recordings. And I stopped going to shows for a while because I couldn’t muster the bravery to do them alone. And my best friend had stricter parents than I did—or rather, she didn’t lie to them to the degree that I did when my favorite bands were in town. But, I shook it off and drowned my sorrows in playing music and seeing shows and finding new rad girls to be friends with and be supported by in a scene that eschewed Hollywood endings. I know now something had knotted up inside me after Mia’s death because I would go to self-defense workshops for kids like me before 3rd wave-y grrrl rock shows but I wouldn’t participate. I didn’t realize then the flood of cortisol as a sign that I was affected deeper than I could ever articulate. But Zapata’s death would often get invoked in these spaces, in Los Angeles scenes from the Valley to the Hills, the suburbs and deep beyond the East Los Angeles freeway interchange. 7 Year Bitch’s homage to their friend came out the following year. Viva Zapata! I was familiar with that doubling, a revolutionary cry in honor of fallen warriors. Mia and Emiliano were two very different Zapatas however but both respectively mourned by many and whose stories would be constantly revisited over the years.
Fifteen years after Mia Zapata’s death I see The Gits on the Clinton Street theater marquee on a trip with my ex-girlfriend to Portland, Oregon. It’s the documentary by Kerrie O’Kane and I can’t think of a better place to see it than with a bunch of PDX punks and dykes, the lot of us as worn as our Doc Martens and thick gauged face jewelry. I am with my people and for a moment I wonder if this viewing with IPAs poured freely from the concession stand might help save my floundering relationship in the way traumatic nostalgias are prone to do so. But the filmic chronicle is astonishing—Mia Zapata is the bad ass in black denim cut-offs and ratty ponytail, finding her way in the world after graduating from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a liberal arts college that found fame in the 1990s for its verbal consent policy. It was the place where sexual consent culture was born and often a target of ridicule by those affronted by the depth of sensitivity those young people demonstrated in wanting to create a world free of gender and intimate violence. It made sense now why a band that was 75% male would be so popular with Pacific Northwest feminist crowds and why Zapata would call these men—guitarist Joe Spleen (born Andy Kessler), bassist Matt Dresdner and drummer Steve Moriarty—members of her sacred brethren. It made sense why the careful rejection of labels that felt false in an era that reduced art-making and musicianship to flannel plaid that kept people warm in a locale that rained more than 50% of the year. 
I was there I loud-whispered when the documentary focused on the band’s Jabberjaw show, a successful attempt at passing myself off as a genuine fan in that sticky-floored theater. But, I took a sip of beer and quietly lamented the lateness of my appreciation. 
Que viva Zapata.

Raquel Gutiérrez works as a poet and arts writer working through ekphrasis as one way to reflect upon queer brown life in the arts in the Southwest borderlands. They work in a range of topics that have continued to inform their writing and teaching, including critical race theory, Queer and Latinx aesthetics, and performance art in the Americas. Their poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in NPR Music, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, FENCE, Huizache, The Georgia Review, The Texas Review, and Places Journal. Raquel’s first book of prose, Brown Neon, will be published by Coffee House Press in 2022.