round 1

(1) nirvana, “in bloom”
foreclosed on
(16) sunny day real estate, “seven”
402-183
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 5.

he likes to sing along: jas huff on “in bloom”

Nirvana’s Nevermind showed up when he was 10, from one of those CD mail-order clubs offering 10 albums free with the purchase of one. Jason’s mother handed him the CD catalog which he studied for hours, making sure every album was the correct choice before handing the catalog back to her with little blue checkmarks next to what he wanted. He would forget the other albums but would remember opening the brown package and seeing that blue water and that baby. Before, when Nirvana would come on the radio, he’d turn up the driver on his wood-grain mono clock radio as high as he dared and listen to the tinny reproduction of Cobain’s guitar moving between quiet in the verse and loud in the chorus. Or the “In Bloom” video would appear on his 27” Sony Trinitron TV, pouring out of the tiny speaker on the front as Kurt, Krist, and Dave (introduced as “thoroughly all right and decent fellows”) perform in black and white, in bulky suits and clean haircuts that appear to be wigs; cut to the trio in dresses destroying their set as if the suits were a costume and the dresses were their true transgressive selves. Quiet and loud. Back and forth between the two. He remembers the dresses long after the CD falls out of his rotation. I remember the dresses.

But he don’t know what it means

In 2016, Michael Hann wrote in The Guardian about “In Bloom” that Cobain’s lyrics responded to “The great unspoken fact of music…once their image is formed in the public mind it becomes a straitjacket.” The double-edged sword of identity cuts through this thought, with the perception of the public on one side and how Cobain and Novoselic and Grohl saw themselves on the other. The clean-cut pop boy band and the punk band transcending the box people wanted to put them in. Quiet verse and loud chorus.

Bruises on the fruit / Tender age in bloom

Jason was in seventh grade when the new kid ran from his house to catch the bus that’d left him behind because he wasn’t at a designated stop. Kids yelled, “Someone’s chasing the bus,” until the bus driver stopped to let him on. He just moved to our neighborhood, spiky blond hair, spiky collars and bracelets, all black clothing, and a black and green Jansport covered in white writing. The epitome of punk rock on that bus was a freshman. He introduced himself as Kenneth and he squeezed in the back where Jason sat with Josh. Jason didn’t say much to him but couldn’t keep his eyes off the backpack. The writing! Covering the backpack were band names Jason both recognized and didn’t—who is xTc? he thought, I’ve never heard of them—and pot leaves. He didn’t want to be caught staring, so he looked down. He glanced and he glanced and he glanced, discovering something new about himself each time, or something he could create, something he could transfer onto himself.

He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs

Charles R. Cross hypothesized the “he” from “In Bloom” as a “thinly disguised portrait of Cobain’s friend Dylan Carlson.” David Hollerith on American Songwriter writes “The song was, apparently, written to address, or poke fun at, the people outside the underground music scene who started coming to Nirvana shows after their first studio album.” But I think this misses the point. We are all the “he,” all looking in from the outside, singing along, but ultimately unable to understand what it’s like to be on the inside. How could we? If ever a theme ran through the story of Nirvana, it would be we are all ultimately unknowable to each other, especially how the audience relates to the artist. No matter how much of ourselves we transmit, the audience, ultimately, will see what they project.

Spring is here again / Reproductive glands

He gave up basketball jerseys and Reebok Pump high tops for brown leather Doc Martens, a black chain wallet, and plaid flannel long sleeves over t-shirts, a projection of what he understood as grunge style. Jason thought he was the “he” from “In Bloom” who liked to sing along. He never realized the lyrics made fun of him. He never noticed when people would make fun of him. Jason asked his friend Holly, “Have you ever heard of the band ex tee see?” He enunciated each letter. She looked at him for a minute as if trying to figure out if this was a prank. “No, I haven’t.” Then, some stifled laughter and, “Are you serious, Jason?” Holly, Erica, and Jason bonded over their shared love of Nevermind. In their CD cases, they all turned the booklet backward so instead of the blue pool and the baby, there was the distorted image of the band in orangish light and Cobain in that red shirt giving the finger to the camera. Like they were all saying “fuck you” to the world. He kept quiet that Erica inspired his style transition (the Docs, the plaid, the chain), or that he aspired to look like Holly. He didn’t understand why Kurt wearing a dress fascinated him. Instead, he argued “In Bloom” was the best song on the album without reason (“I just like it,” he said) and they would talk about the music and they would sing aloud together.

At night, as the world sleeps, I lay (solo) on my side and let gravity pull my gut down so I have hips and I run my hand up and down my smooth hairless side, back and forth across the bridge between what my body is and what I wish it could be.

And I say he’s the one

One weekend, he swiped some white out—you know, with the brush—from his dad and set to drawing on his notebooks, on his binder, on his backpack. How did Kenneth get the lines so perfect? he thought, struggling with the brush, ignoring how it felt wrong, pretending it was always supposed to be that way. Maybe he had finally found himself. The next Monday, Kenneth noticed the appropriation. “You like ecstasy?” He asked, running the letters together like the word, pointing at some writing on new Jason’s backpack. This new Jason gave a nod. But the nod and the writing were just a costume, a bulky and ill-fitting suit on top of a bulky and ill-fitting suit on top of a character, “he,” on a stage. He would play this character for decades, transferring loud and bulky suits, hiding the quiet and translucent self underneath, until a moment when I see myself for the first time—not the projection of the audience—in an image manipulated to make me a woman.

Jas Huff (they/them) works in IT by day and studies for an MA in Creative Writing by other times during the day. By night they read and write and spend time with their family who say they spend too much time reading and writing. Their essays have appeared in Sweet Literary and semicolon lit and CNF Sunday Short Reads.

Numerology: sam martone On “Seven”

At age seven, I was little more than a garbage disposal full of rage. I ate, I shat, I slept, and every afternoon, when I came home from a school where teachers gushed about how remarkably well-behaved I was, my parents never knew what would set me off, turn my small, quiet mouth into a howling vortex of blades: an action figure not power-kicking as expected, an accidental crease in a comic book, or nothing, nothing at all. This flying off the handle happened daily. Floor-pounding tantrums, objects thrown, impulsive self-destructive fits. I remember once trying to topple my brother’s heavy crib down on top of me while he played in another room, oblivious or perhaps cowering, my parents wrenching my little claws off the wooden slats, holding me, holding me down.
I don’t know where all this anger came from. I remember not knowing, even then, recognizing my own irrationality after one explosion and still being powerless to stop the next.
Two and a half years before all this, Sunny Day Real Estate released their debut album, Diary. “Seven” was the first song, named so because it was the seventh song they wrote together. There was no way for the song to make it to me. Music was little more than background noise to me then. I knew what was on the radio, the songs in the animated Yellow Submarine movie, but I wasn’t really listening.

“Seven” begins with a persistent tumble of guitar and drums that soon becomes cacophonous before falling away entirely. Over a lone clean guitar strum, Jeremy Enigk sings Sew it on / Face the fool, the two lines punctuated by the clattering return of the bass and drums and distortion. It is both structured and messy. It is both melodic and discordant. The tension between these elements is—and always has been—a hallmark of the genre.
On long car rides when I was growing up, my parents were very accommodating. They’d let me pass CDs from the backseat to them and play them on the station wagon’s stereo. I tried to pick things I thought they’d like, but every once in a while, I’d slip in what my dad called a designated screamer band, groups with, apparently, one guy whose only job was to yell in the background: Alkaline Trio, Senses Fail, Taking Back Sunday. My dad noted the pattern in all the songs: It’s just quiet-loud-quiet-loud. All goes back to Nirvana.
“Seven” follows that pattern, too—another quiet verse interspersed with loudness before building to the much louder chorus, which consists mostly of one line, repeated over and over again: You’ll taste it / you’ll taste it / in time. I love this line’s ambiguity, the “it” and “in time” shrugging off a precise meaning. Does it mean you’ll taste it eventually? Or just in time, like before it’s too late? Or even perhaps literally, within the literalized concept of time, you’ll taste it? They double-down on the ambiguity with the final line, breaking the repetition: The right words, in time.
The real power of the song for me, and all songs like it really, is the sense of urgency it manages to instill at every turn. The first verse builds to a release it never reaches, instead quieting down for a suspenseful second verse. Before the chorus, an extra two measures of drum fills roll over a guitar squealing ever higher. The result is a heightening effect—think key change in “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”—so each time the chorus returns, I’m convinced Enigk and guitarist Dan Hoerner shout out the vocals louder and louder. It feels like a hook slid into my sternum, pulling me forward, to do something, anything, as soon as possible: fling my body around, scream my throat hoarse, make ill-advised phone calls, go for a long, fast drive. All while the chorus assures me I will taste it in time. A mantra of patience, of waiting, of certain eventuality.

In seventh grade, I was the most miserable I’d been since the daily rages of second grade. I felt alienated from the friends I’d made in elementary school. I ditched the sweatpants and graphic tees of sixth grade for the unspoken male uniform of polos and khakis, yet still felt deeply uncool, secretly mocked, and completely ignored. There were days I woke and wouldn’t get up. My parents removed my doorknob so I’d stop locking them out of my room in the morning.
Once, when my mom was dropping me off for a bass lesson at the local guitar shop, we crossed paths with two boys from school. They were boys I was friendly with, if not friends. Hey Sam, they both said. Hey Conner, Hey Brody, I said. What I thought was a normal interaction. Later, my mom asked me what that was about. She said the way we’d all greeted each other sounded so sarcastic, almost mean. I hadn’t noticed a thing.
Much later in life I recognized in that interaction one of the roots of my unhappiness—part of being in middle school, particularly part of being a boy in middle school, meant a shunning of sincerity. It wasn’t cool to get excited or care about things, it wasn’t cool to betray your own emotions. Even anger, commonly thought to be an acceptably masculine emotion, was only okay in very specific contexts. I hated this performance, even as I was unaware I was performing it. How strange for my mom to have seen her kid don this sneering outfit of a voice, so different from the boy she thought she knew.

“Emo” has become a pretty accepted term for a diverse slew of punk-adjacent music released in the past thirty years, but growing up, there was incessant discourse about what exactly emo was. I’d always been obsessed with cataloguing my obsessions, so I fixated on these conversations, reading books about the genre, trawling music blogs, following message board replies with laser-focus. Emo, at the time, was most often used as a pejorative to describe bands that people perceived as mopey, whiny. Bands who wore eyeliner. Bands with “romance” in their name (Matchbook, My Chemical, etc.).
But purists insisted those bands, in fact, were not emo. Those bands were pop-punk, or even simply—said with strong intent to demean—pop-rock. To them, emo referred to a branch of hardcore punk where the lyrics were personal, rather than sociopolitical, but otherwise identical in sound. Bands like Rites of Spring, Jawbreaker, and one that kept coming up again and again in my reading: Sunny Day Real Estate.
I don’t remember listening to Sunny Day Real Estate for the first time. In high school, all I cared about were lyrics I then thought were clever, incisive. It’s possible I looked up the words to “Seven” and decided not to listen based on that alone, its oblique and imagistic words uninteresting to a teenager looking only for tongue-in-cheek one-liners and blunt metaphor. It’s possible I downloaded it from Limewire and listened once before deleting.
It wasn’t until college, or maybe even later, that “Seven” really struck me, though now it seems impossible that it didn’t snag me sooner. For one thing, the song could’ve come out yesterday—it might have been called nostalgic and lo-fi­, but it still feels contemporary (a 2009 remaster enhances that effect). It certainly could’ve released in the height of my adolescence and not been out of a place. They were a huge influence on the genre, of course, and Diary—decades later—was the seventh-best selling album on Sub-Pop. But unlike Nirvana, fellow Seattleites and labelmates, they never quite embedded in the greater cultural consciousness. You won’t hear “Seven” play at the climax of a Marvel movie, for example.
The ultimate effect is that “Seven” has resisted the corrosive effect the passage of time has on music. It’s hard for me to listen to Nirvana now and not hear all the years coursing through their songs—the endless stream of terrible bands they inspired, the commodification of the songs, the fashion and celebrity and tragedy that consumed them, that we continue to consume. “Seven,” meanwhile, is at once a time capsule and utterly timeless. Rather than being emblematic of a particular year or even a decade, it feels representative of a whole era—my era—and yet only accomplishes this by being somewhat unsung, unknown. In order for a song symbolize something more, it must remain only a song.

When I was fourteen, my friend and I attended a miniature music festival in a repurposed industrial furnace. Furnace Fest, it was called. His mom dropped us off. The headliner was Taking Back Sunday, a band I’d only just heard of on the college radio station. I knew the words to the chorus of one of their songs, but that was about it.
Still, I found something during Taking Back Sunday’s set, hearing the intertwining voices of Adam Lazzara and Fred Mascherino, seeing fans singing—and screaming—along in earnest, unrestrained, people lifted up and tumbling over the crowd to the stage. The whole concert coalescing into a living, unified organism.
We all have a concert like that. This was that for me. It unlocked something for me, expressing what I’d never been able to. I bought Taking Back Sunday’s debut album, which was angry, snarky, joyful, and sad in equal measure. I learned all the words. I went to concert after concert, worming my way toward the front, where I’d sing the whole time, often with the second or third layer of backing vocals, melodies that felt secret, unknown, buried beneath fuzz.
My friend and I eventually formed a band where we attempted to ape the call-and-response songwriting of those early Taking Back Sunday albums. We practiced in his attic. We played shows at a hole-in-the-wall all-ages venue downtown. Taking Back Sunday led me to other Long Island emo bands, to Chicago punk bands, to the church basement screamo scene local to Alabama. They led, eventually, to Sunny Day Real Estate.
This map of music is one we all have, although the starting points and routes people take to get to the same destinations vary wildly. People who listened to Sunny Day Real Estate at the start of their careers, people who only just heard them for the first time, maybe they hear them different than I do. But I like to imagine all the teenagers like the one I was who’ve yet to arrive at “Seven,” but who someday, somehow, will.

Conventional wisdom says scent is the sense most tied to memory, but for me, it’s sound. Music has always been my closest approximation to a method of time travel. There are songs that immediately bring me back to first dates and breakups, parties and funerals. But most of what I remember is all the times I listened before: I can remember tearing the plastic off the jewel case, driving home listening for the first time, or placing the song into a meticulously crafted playlist that I’d burn onto a CD for someone else, or putting on headphones and putting the song on repeat, lying on the floor in my childhood bedroom, in my college dorm room, in my first apartment, in all the apartments after.
There is great power in those songs, but paradoxically, the immense power of “Seven” for me is that it’s not anchored to any particular moment, that finding it later in life meant it spread throughout my past, touching every corner and crease, like liquid poured into a mold. Listening to the song now constructs a menagerie of memory—I can observe all these animal versions of me and feel what they feel. I can remember all the times I felt trapped—by institutions, by expectations, by my own distorted vision of masculinity—as I sit here trapped in the apartment I live in now, waiting for the world outside to become safe again.
I want to tell these selves everything I know—that I can ditch the polos and khakis, that I will find friends and be in a band and leave town for college and enjoy coming back when I do. That my eighth birthday will be my last day before moving to a new school, at which point my daily rages will almost instantaneously stop. Near as anyone could tell, they were a result of that initial school’s repressive discipline. I was afraid to speak at lunch because of a noise-detecting traffic light looming on the cafeteria wall. I once witnessed my teacher drag a classmate out of the room for some innocuous infraction.
I want to play “Seven” for all these mes—the seven-year-old mid-rage, the seventh grader unable to rise from bed, the fourteen-year-old on the verge of such discovery, listening and finding the right words to sing along. I want to play it for them, loud and long, on repeat, and I want to reassure them: if you don’t feel it yet, don’t worry, you will. You will, in time.

Sam Martone lives and writes in New York City. He was the original bass player and designated screamer for Alabama-based band Dwight's New Face. Their debut EP, Let's Talk About the Egg, had an extremely limited pressing, making it highly sought after by collectors of mid-aughts emo-punk.