round 1
(16) local h, “bound for the floor”
upset
(1) pearl jam, “corduroy”
926-517
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 2.
Eddie Vedder & The Porn Star: Veronica Klash on “corduroy”
It’s dark, in the way that only the most seminal moments can be. I’m thirteen years old, sitting in a room with ten other thirteen-year-olds. Behind us are bowls of chips and liter bottles of flat soda. In front of us is the only source of light in the room. The TV. The kids sitting next to me are rendered in blue-grey angles and cuts of yellow light. A Picasso in progress. You’ve heard of Guernica and The Weeping Woman, now I present to you—The Kids Watching Porn.
The man and woman on the screen are doing things to each other, things I won’t describe because you can easily imagine what they are. And in any case, I’m not paying attention to what they’re doing. Not really. What has me riveted is the woman’s voice. It’s high pitched but throaty and seems to undulate with her body. Then it changes. Her moans turn staccato, a stabbing of static increasing in speed, and volume but somehow thinner, not voluptuous or lush like before. Her glossy Starburst-pink lipstick smile sold it. This is how pleasure looks. This is how pleasure sounds.
The first time I heard Eddie Vedder’s voice I was on the school bus, going home. The boy I liked offered one of his earbuds, like a rolled licorice candy, its black tail trailing down to the Discman nestled in his lap. It was 1999 and I didn’t know what Grunge was. I’d never heard of it. I listened to Marylin Manson, The Prodigy, and the Spice Girls. The movie Magnolia had recently come out and my fifteen-year-old heart found solace in the longing so nakedly displayed in Aimee Mann’s crooning. I played the movie soundtrack on repeat.
After a ping pong crescendo of guitars, almost entirely obscured by the bus’s hissing and groaning, Eddie Vedder’s voice came careening into the song. There was no obscuring that. That waiver, that shake. It screamed I have something to say. I have so much to say that it cannot be contained. Not even by human anatomy. His vocals barrel through the song, straining to the limit yet unrelenting in their conviction—I would rather starve than eat your bread. I was being accused of something, but I had no idea of what. I don’t want to limp for them to walk. This is how power sounds.
When the song was over, I returned the earbud (checking for any embarrassing ear wax residue first, luckily it was clean). The boy I liked said, “Well? What did you think?” I didn’t yet have the words, the vocabulary to fully express what I had experienced. So I just said “Wow” and nodded my head. He nodded back and popped the bud back in his ear. He spent the rest of the ride looking out the window and singing along to himself. I spent the rest of the ride staring at the back of his head and thinking of a million more impressive things I could’ve said than “Wow.”
“Corduroy” was famously written after Eddie Vedder saw a $650 price tag on a jacket modeled after something he bought at a thrift store for $12 and wore on stage. Or was it a $500 vest? Or was it the whole outfit, holes and faded shade included, for $1,000? It doesn’t matter, it was capitalism at its worst, man. And he wasn’t going to take it lying down, he was going to reclaim his image the best way he knew how, through a visceral, guttural lyric punch. Looking back at this through a 2021 lens it seems so quaint. So precious. Like Pearl Jam’s infamous battle with Ticketmaster. Like their campaigning for Nader. We know how it all ended, however, you can’t help but admire them for trying.
Though band members Mike McCready and Stone Gossard have spoken about the recording of Vitalogy as a challenging time for the band, a lack of communication, the abrupt ousting of drummer Dave Abbruzzese (and consequent replacement by Jack Irons), there’s a definite sense of unison on “Corduroy.” A sense that is evident to anyone listening without the efforts of a school bus lumbering in the background.
The guitars open the song, not softly, but as if from a distance. They grow louder as they come closer. Drums burst in, pummeling a rhythm. Guitars are showcased here in a similar reverence as other Pearl Jam songs, compelling, hypnotizing. I dare you to listen to “Corduroy” without, at least, nodding your head or tapping your foot. At its climactic peak, all the instruments including Vedder’s voice go silent. Then they build again, from scratch, a feeling that takes hold in your chest. It grows, explodes. Coming back stronger, angrier, more powerful.
After the incident on the bus, I found myself listening to Pearl Jam more and more, scouring stores for their coveted bootleg releases of live shows. I also found myself, months after, in the bed of the boy who introduced me to their music. We’d begun fooling around on Sunday afternoons. Between my family’s weekly lunch outing and my mad evening dash to finish my homework, I’d get dropped off at his house for a couple of hours. We weren’t dating. This was strictly a friends-with-benefits arrangement. I don’t remember how it started, but I can safely assume that I initiated it after realizing that our platonic hangouts would never materialize into a romantic relationship.
When I was finally ready for fooling around to mean something other than hungry hands exploring eager bodies, I knew how I should sound. I knew what my voice should do. I heard it years prior and saved it, like the last piece of Halloween candy, wrapped in lustrous, polychromatic paper. We were in his twin bed, with pale blue cotton sheets and shelves overhead. It felt good. I dragged my fingers down his back hoping to draw blood. Hoping to leave a mark. To be memorable. All while performing the full range as I remembered it. It wasn’t my voice, it was hers. The woman in the movie, a glossy goddess I would never be. I wish I remembered her name. The Porn Star.
By 2003, as a freshman in college, my appreciation for Pearl Jam had become a defining feature of my personality. In the way only the things you love most as a child or teen can. They were (still are) my favorite band. And when they were touring to promote Riot Act I was finally, finally going to see them live. At Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, where I was going to school.
For those of you who may be uninitiated in the ways of Pearl Jam, the live show is the pinnacle of fandom experience. No two shows are alike, the setlist is different every time and combines a select few hit singles, and the occasional cover, with a deep exploration of their catalog. Anything can happen. Any songs can happen.
The Coliseum seats 14,500 and doesn't bother closing off areas that are behind the stage. I watched the show with a mostly obscured view, but I was close. Closer than the pit of people smashing into each other in front of the stage. My heart inflated and threatened to make a quick exit as that opening riff played. That ping pong of guitars. They played “Corduroy” early on and I jumped, bopped, shaking my head and arms. I didn't care if I looked silly. I let my body react to the music however it wanted to. By this point, the lyrics had been tweaked to Can't buy what I want because it's PEACE. Vedder delivered the word peace with gusto, spitting it into the crowd. As George W. Bush was dragging the US into a war with Iraq, Pearl Jam yet again was making their voices heard. Bu$hleaguer, a not so subtle jab at the hapless president, was performed that night. With Vedder, after multiple swigs from a bottle of wine, wearing a Bush mask and swaggering.
If you're a diehard fan, you know what happened next. The Coliseum booed. Loudly. The guy next to me screamed at the stage, “You're a musician, what do you know? Shut up, musician." He delivered the word musician as if it was wet concrete in his mouth, over-enunciating, spilling it out in repulsion. The crowd made their voice heard and the band responded in kind. They cut the setlist and the show short. My cheers for the song and satire were lost.
The last time I saw that boy I liked was 2005. I was older but not wiser. I still enjoyed sex. I still channeled another woman's sounds of pleasure. We were at a party drinking in the Jacuzzi by the pool. It was winter and I submerged everything but my face in the warm water to avoid the cold licking at my skin. He'd had quite a bit to drink and it was starting to affect him. His speech and movements slower. My head buzzed with a sugar high hum, the kind when you've had just the right amount of vodka followed by beer. I asked him about his current girlfriend, how were things going? He said, “She's nice, things are nice.” Then he stared in silence at his hands moving below the waterline. He didn't look up when he said, “You know it hasn't ever been as good.” I knew what he meant but I wanted to hear him say it.
“As good as what?”
“As good as when we would do it. None of the other girls respond to me like you did. They don’t get as wet. They don’t sound like you did.”
When he delivered that last sentence his face drooped, like a child about to cry because Christmas is canceled. Then he threw up. I scrambled out of the Jacuzzi.
I’d love to say that this was another seminal moment. A pivotal point when I realized that I had been so focused on the performance, so focused on pandering that I lost the joy of getting lost in the moment. I gave them what they wanted, what they craved. It didn’t matter that it was at my expense. It didn’t matter that what I gave wasn’t mine. I was limping for them to walk. But that’s not what I felt at nineteen as I walked away from him in a literal pool of his vomit. I felt proud. I felt memorable.
I don’t think there was an actual pivotal point. No light bulb epiphany. It happened over time. Maybe I got tired. Maybe I found a real partner. Maybe I found myself. Now, at 36, I listen to “Corduroy” while driving, no bus noise in the background, screaming along while doing a reasonable 75 on the highway. Now, at 36, I don’t pay attention anymore to the sounds that climb out of my mouth during sex. I let my body react to the music however it wants to. I’m free to be in the moment. This is pleasure. This is power.
Veronica Klash loves living in Las Vegas and writing in her living room. Her work has appeared in Cheap Pop, Ellipsis Zine, and X-Ray Lit, among others. She has edited flash fiction for Witness Magazine and is a regular contributor to NPR publication, Desert Companion. You can find her on Twitter @veronicaklash.
john melillo on “bound for the floor”
This is an essay about Local H’s most commercially successful song, “Bound for the Floor.” It was the first single from the album As Good As Dead, released in April 1996. Local H, at the time an interracial duo composed of singer-guitarist Scott Lucas and drummer Joe Daniels, was founded in 1990 in Chicago. The band—really Lucas’s project—continues to make music today. Local H are the last grunge band.
But this is an essay, really, about this particular Local H of 1996, of “Bound for the Floor.” Listening to this Local H again makes me wonder about what it means to persist in ruins, what it means to linger in the coming after. Listening to this song and this album again, I realize that this song asks me (and all of us) to reckon with debt and mourning and influence.
Local H in 1996 work in a deeply Nirvana-esque style. I say this as a matter of course: the total internalization of quiet-loud-quiet; of textured guitar distortion; of melodic screamed sickness unto death. Local H kill their idols with the kindness of repetition. This is absolutely a compliment.
That’s because for Local H in As Good As Dead this mastery and retransmission of Nirvana’s style produces a kind of newness, even in its fidelity to a previous model. Style as knowledge and homage is something I want to dwell in here: it’s what makes the repetition a swerve, a slight difference. It’s what composes Local H’s afterness and lastness: their continuation.
“Bound for the Floor” and the other songs on this album take up grunge as an idiom in a way that is both totally inside of and removed from it. Mastering grunge (Nirvana’s grunge) as musical style—as a duo no less!—means opening up a gap between recognition and rehearsal, between the enraptured first listening and the task of taking apart and making sense of that listening. This gap shows a band giving in to the power of a style, doing it again not because it is an emotional territory to be misread and mined but because one can continue to work in its nuances and possibilities. Local H represent, for me, how the minor swerve works just enough to manifest a concrete feeling, rather than something tired, cliché, and embarrassing. There is a clear contrast between Local H and the insipid irony-free post-grunge masculinist tragicomedy that filled rock radio in the second half of the 90s.
On a purely technical level, they simply sounded better—more interesting sound textures, better drumming—than the many other Nirvana-esque bands. Their transformation of the power trio into a power duo was inspiring. They worked out an even more efficient system for reducing rock to rhythm and noise.
But the afterness and lastness of Local H—their ability to straddle the abyss between grunge’s operative moment in rock and its cultural exhaustion—goes beyond the technical details of their music. On this album—and in this song’s style and delivery—they are aware of their belatedness. That belatedness neither silences nor alienates them. Rather, it grants them voice. “Bound for the Floor” emerges in the wake of a double death: a death that is actual—Kurt Cobain’s—and another kind of dying: a loss and resolution of the vividness and ongoingness of the past into the concluded fact of the object, the photograph, the status update, a conclusion. The end of Nirvana froze grunge into a death mask. Alice Notley describes this feeling in an essay on Frank O’Hara: “I discovered a curious thing: … Frank O’Hara’s poetry had frozen into art for me. It, like my own past, wasn’t my life, a vivid motion-filled thing; it had died into artifact.”
All over As Good As Dead it is hard not to hear this process of grunge dying into artifact. But to be in that process, to demarcate it as it happens: that is the magic of Local H on this album. This happens in both sound and lyrics. Throughout the album, it’s hard not to hear Cobain as the “you” addressed by Lucas. For instance, on “O.K.” he sings:
Drawing a collective breath
I could cry myself to death
And wash this all away
In a flash, you were gone
Leaving me a couple of songs
That I listen to everyday
And I don't even care
That you were so unfair
Or on “Manifest Density (Part 1)” we hear:
You're on to something good
But I can't believe it's all
That matters to you
A foolWho never seems happy
When things are great
It's too late…
Fidelity—to the call, to those other songs—grants the possibility of speaking to the dead. Your voice both is and is not their voice. The other popular single from As Good As Dead, “Eddie Vedder,” expands on this attitude. It is an angry turn on the one who has left, the one rejecting the singer (and the world): “You go ahead as good as dead / That’s it / I quit / I don’t give a shit.” The one who is dead and gone was always “as good as dead.” The pronounced semblance of death now precedes the actual loss of death.
Such a projection seems to be the power of afterness: the ability to warp time and remake causality.
I should say that this structural atemporality was also part of my lived experience of this music. At the time As Good As Dead and Nevermind were co-emergent in my adolescent brain: my summer ’96 awakening to grunge (brought on by a chance radio listen of Nirvana’s “Drain You”) manifested as a near constant desire to listen to and make these sounds. To hear Local H was to hear the possibility of the reproduction and continuation of not just grunge music but music. Even in the act of repatterning my brain by listening to Nevermind on a nightly basis, I was also hearing other “Nirvana” (i.e. Local H) songs that could distance and somewhat displace the Nirvana-idol-sound-image. That little bit of separation in the music—what at the time I heard (and still hear but less intensely) as distinctions in presentation, in voice, in texture, in attitude, in the sounds of the songs themselves—granted me futurity. The music seemed to be saying: “Can’t go on, must go on.”
All this time passed and passing. So much repetition and difference. “Bound for the Floor,” with its intensely repeated lines of “You just don’t get it / you keep it copacetic / and you learn to accept it / and oh it’s so pathetic” is on the surface a mantra of alienated self-hatred. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the tone of the hatred here: does the singer hate himself as the one keeping it copasetic, hate others for keeping it copasetic, or hate a particular other for going too far? Is the “you” another way of saying “I”? Is the “you” the quiet seeker of a false normality? Is the “you” the potential suicide who holds back and sustains their dread, until the end?
The mantra becomes a magic spell, simultaneously undoing itself and reveling in its failure to undo a single goddamn thing, to change that “you” it calls to. The song seems to be telling us: “Don’t keep cool! Get the fuck loud! Scream!” while also freezing in place, stuck in its own cycle. The song battles an affectlessness that I can’t but hear as a particularly Midwestern take on grunge. I flash to my sophomore year of high school, the commute with my father across the city of Wichita in the blue Chevy Astro van to the high school where he taught and coached football. What were the effects of hearing this song nearly every morning on the radio? Was I hearing myself hate myself or hearing myself hate my dad? Or hearing myself hate the self that dad, school, football, world were making of me? “What good is confidence.” Or hearing myself hate the very emptiness of a self that would admit to such influence? Or hearing myself hate the afterness of adolescence, the irredeemable fall into desire, responsibility, compromise? “Bound for the floor.” Or hearing myself hate already death? “Born to be down.”
All, none, others.
There is something about minor voices, the voices that are perhaps underrated or forgotten by the mass projections and delusions of immense popularity, that helps answer the question: how do you survive this shit? Debt, mourning, influence. To come after grants the possibility of survival, the grace of keeping things going. To call to Cobain and to recall Nirvana’s sound both freezes and animates the object. It remains there as immovably movable as the stars. We pass into the afterness—which is, at least, still passing.
John Melillo is a professor, writer, and musician who lives in Tucson, Arizona, and St. Joseph du Moine, Cape Breton. His first book, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk, was published by Bloomsbury in the Fall of 2020. Melillo teaches/researches at the University of Arizona and performs under the name Algae & Tentacles.