round 1

(8) placebo, “running up that hill”
outran
(9) the band, “atlantic city”
275-259
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 3/4/22.

brian oliu on placebo’s “running up that hill”

In March of 2007, Placebo announced that they were crowdsourcing their newest music video, a cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” in the most 2007 way possible: asking fans via Myspace to record a webcam video of them singing the song, and then uploading it to a personal video sharing service called Motionbox, one of what seems to be dozens of likeminded services that popped up during the late aughts in hopes of being the next YouTube, complete with the multimillion dollar Google buy out.  
The call was simple: download the instrumental version of Placebo’s cover, print out the hand-written lyrics to the song, play the song using iTunes (!), RealPlayer (!!) or Windows Media Player (!!!), sing the song directly into your video camera or webcam, and then upload it to the Capital Music Group’s personal Motionbox.
The result was a beautiful time capsule of 2007 internet culture: a stitched together montage of Placebo fans looking forlornly into their Logitech QuickCams solemnly singing the dirge-like version of Kate Bush’s synth bop anthem—a precursor to the collaborative nature of current video-centric social media platforms.
It is very dramatic. The video starts with plenty of black and white shots of heavily shadowed emo-adjacent attractive people doing their best version of an arthouse film from their bedrooms. There is someone singing along while floating in a bathtub. There are a lot of bangs and black eyeliner. There is a lot of looking everywhere but the camera, before a lot of soul-staring directly into the black fish-eye lens. There is always an awareness of self and audience when either ignoring or mouthing along lyrics into the lens; every peek a glance into the very thing that can somehow validate everything one is feeling, yet also powerful enough to capture the moment from you.
The whole video is a pixelated mess. There is somewhat of a universality between the performers & the general mood and aura, but the deviation comes in the varying qualities of the recordings. There are heavy scanlines on some of the performers—blue-ish hues where there should be black—most performers existing in a play between light and shadow, like a poorly digitally rendered chiaroscuro masterpiece.
It is both deeply moving, but deeply silly. Every shot blurs the line between incredibly earnest and wildly performative. It is dated and nostalgic, but also somewhat prescient and welcoming. While it all seems contrived in retrospect, there is a welcome lack of “TikTok Face,”—hyper-aggressive facial expressions and bombastic emoting that seems to be a necessary rite of passage to social media stardom. Instead, it is teenagers and folks in their early 20s trying their best to figure out their relationship to the song, themselves, and the camera.
So, it was definitely surprising to me that upon re-watching the video for the first time since I had a stand-alone webcam, I found myself tearing up a bit.
This isn’t overly surprising—I’m a dude who is, for the most part, rather in touch with my emotions. However, it takes a lot to make me cry, with one exception: a well-placed musical montage using a song that I love, hitting at the exact right time.
I find myself endeared to music as a visual medium, or at the very least, I find that my listening experience is always heightened when paired with something I can bear witness to. I love all music videos and find myself especially excited when a song that I have enjoyed for a few months is getting a new life as a YouTube exclusive upload. 
I could be watching a milquetoast Christmas movie that is going through all the motions, but if we get to a point where the characters are racing across a faux-Manhattan in the snow while “Pogues of New York,” is playing, I will find my eyes welling up. One of my favorite television moments of all time is in the final season of the vastly underrated sci-fi show Fringe, when all hope appears to be lost, John Noble’s Walter sees a yellow daffodil rising from the rubble, while Yaz’s “Only You” plays from a burned out taxi. Then there’s Ted Lasso recovering from a panic attack while Celeste’s “Strange” plays in its entirety over the Liverpool night. Bloc Party through the rain and a blue French horn. Meek Mill through the streets of Philadelphia. Kate Bush’s own “Cloudbusting” after breaking a time loop for love.
Placebo’s “Running Up That Hill” has been used as a soundtrack to a long list of television shows since its official release in 2003, usually to dramatic effect. In many ways, adding music to a television scene allows for the producers to say something that cannot be easily said by the characters—to add an additional layer to what one is watching or supposed to infer from the scene. It relies as both guide and signal to let us know what we are expected to think about what is unfolding—a disclosure of a secret. This is why “Running Up That Hill,” works so well and what works impeccably well about the cover: whereas Bush’s version was famously about wanting to swap places between a man and a woman to learn about each other’s differences to further their love, the Placebo version comes across as bleak, defeated, and a little sinister. It puts the one wishing for a deal with God in a position of powerlessness—pleading to be able to swap places with someone who seems to be struggling. It is a yearning from a place of emptiness: a way to signal to the viewer that everything here is incomplete. It’s Ryan from The O.C. living in Mexico as a cage fighter at the beginning of Season Four ignoring the pleads of America’s Dad, Sandy Cohen, as he attempts to track down the man responsible for killing Marissa Cooper. It’s Stefan in the Vampire Diaries getting scolded for returning to Mystic Falls and killing two of its residents while he pines over a picture of Katherine, who, gasp! looks exactly like Elena, the girl he just met during his first day of high school. It’s Michaela showing Gabriel where the hidden camera is while the news report of the District Attorney’s death plays in the background in How To Get Away With Murder. It’s a crazed Shawn Michaels goading The Undertaker into a rematch at Wrestlemania to end Taker’s undefeated streak by putting his career on the line—alienating his best friend and emerging from underneath the ring during the Elimination Chamber. It’s strangely and hilariously literal as a television promo for The History Channel’s documentary about Gettysburg, playing in the background as soldiers charge through a battlefield while the words “We faced our deadliest enemy yet…OURSELVES,” appear and disappear on screen.
And yet every single time it is incredibly effective. Are you looking for a slightly more obscure and more menacing “Hallelujah,” for your brooding scene? “Running Up That Hill” has got you. It is the “Gonna Fly Now,” of being down bad; of questionable motives. Beloved characters doing something out of character. Underhanded reveals. Penultimate episodes. Sea changes.
This is all to say is that this cover seems to exists to elicit a response within the listener and viewer—this is one of the larger debates we hear about music and its purpose. Often we regard art as something that is created with an audience in mind: a novel about intergenerational heartbreak is meant to make the reader think, or an abstract painting brings upon self-reflection and curiosity. However, there is an equally important debate that what the audience feels is a byproduct of the art, rather than the crafting of the art itself. This raises larger conversations—of control of one’s audience once the work has been released into the world, of corporatization of one’s creations, of the massive weight of it all. The crux of Placebo’s version of the song relies upon the “you” of the song: in Kate Bush’s original, the “you” is smashed into a quickly uttered “d’jou” before getting to the rest of the line; a product of the rolling up-tempo original against the slow tin-can goth downward spiral synth of Placebo’s. When Brian Molko is singing, he is singing directly to you: you want to feel how it feels. You don’t want to hurt me.
The music of a montage is there to tell you how to feel when the images simply aren’t enough—it’s less of an exchanged experience, but a shared one. It’s the illusion of being there in the moment: whether in a storage room in Mexico, or breaking through the plywood and canvas to kick your sworn enemy in the throat. You aren’t there, but you still have the effect of being there: a sugar pill of a down-tuned piano and a synth replaced with a human whisper conjuring up your own feelings of being alone and being misunderstood.
But it’s still all about you. The production team and the paid actors melt away. And in those moments—the mixing of elixirs, the summoning of something real while being presented something entirely scripted, the camera seems to find its way back to you—back in time through upstairs bedrooms and heavily filtered video uploads and broken codecs. It’s where we imagine our own montages—our quaint-footed soundtracks—ourselves existing in the third person as if we are the one filmed; letterboxed and alive; bigger than we’ve ever been. We will not have ourselves pulled and stretched thin the way the piano strings on the opening haunts slide through our computer speakers. We will not be uncompressed to unimaginable sizes: grown bloated and deteriorated because we have grown too large in the moment. We will be stripped down, but no less grandiose. We will be missing a few letters, but remain grandiose. We will be small. You and me. We will steal those moments back.

Brian Oliu lives, teaches, writes, and spreads the gospel of Kate Bush in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His newest book, "Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling" was released in September 2021 by The University of North Carolina Press. A chapbook with the poet Jason McCall, "What Shot Did You Ever Take," was released by The Hunger Press in June 2021. Find him on Twitter talking about running, football, wrestling, and pedagogy @BrianOliu.

There are many Atlantic Cities, and one belongs to Levon Helm: erin keane on the band’s “atlantic city”

My father, a liar and a son of New Jersey, believed so deeply in his own powers of resurrection he made judges believe, court-appointed lawyers believe, rehab doctors believe, my mother believe—for a while—and especially me believe, long after his death. He saw himself as a man who should have been one of life’s winners—even when he found himself ever south of that line, his time was surely just around the corner. I know too much now to buy this story anymore, but old prayers die hard. What is a fitting hymn for a man who wished a mythological version of himself into existence? He died in 1982, and I wasn’t there to sing “Amazing Grace” at his funeral, so now I light my candles to “Atlantic City” instead.
Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” off his 1982 brooding solo album Nebraska, is a desperate man’s ballad. I have always heard him as an underworld wannabe caught up in the gang war who would not make it out in one piece. Our guy is not a player, not really, but the game is deathly serious to him. He has money troubles, girl troubles, and now he’s in a cursed town intent on turning his luck, and if you’ve been around any block at all you know how this probably ends. Here is a man who has told himself a story he needs to believe in. If he can just do this one errand for this one important man, he’ll earn his second chance. The old him can die, and all of his mistakes too, and he’ll be a new man, a better man. You’ll want to stick around for the big miracle, baby. You just watch him turn this burned coffee into wine.
But we’re not with him for the magic trick at the end; it’s earlier in the day, maybe nearing dusk, in the phone booth outside the diner where he left the newspaper folded on the counter for the next guy as he fumbles for change in the pocket of his inadequate jacket, when he opens the call to his girl with the news of the day, the headline digest and the word on the street: the mob boss murdered in his Philadelphia home, the cops up in arms, the crime families gone to war over the casinos and all they can offer. The opportunity he senses for his own fortunes.
When I drop the needle on this record, I am the girl worrying a bus ticket in her worn-out gloved hand, wondering if I should bother putting my face on this time. Because he believes what he’s saying, every word of it, I have to work not to fall for it, to be the one who knows better. His attempt to bridge that distance between us, the tension of the wire he must cross, the yearning for redemption that may or may not be granted, that’s what makes the song work.
Because the first rule of the cover song is do no harm, “Atlantic City” can only work in the hands of a believer. The second rule of the cover song is the artist has to make it their own. Otherwise, it’s karaoke, which is a different kind of sacrament. A cover must be willing to tear down what we think the song must be, to plant a revised version of the truth in its ashes and let it grow into something else. Not better, necessarily, but different. It’s dangerous alchemy; if you follow the second rule, you always run the risk of breaking the first. For me, with “Atlantic City,” the stakes are high. I am putting a broken hymn to my father in your hands. What will you do with it?
When The Band covered “Atlantic City,” Levon Helm transformed Springsteen’s aching solemnity into an anthem for a living wake. Their cover was recorded for Jericho, released in 1993, when I was seventeen years old. (I was born right before their 1976 farewell concert, which Martin Scorsese immortalized in The Last Waltz.) The Band had reunited the year after Springsteen’s Nebraska came out without Robbie Robertson, and began recording in 1985, but the next year vocalist/pianist Richard Manuel died by suicide while on tour. The comeback album would wait. We can hear Richard sing lead in “Country Boy” on Jericho. All of this is to say that Jericho is a fitting vehicle for a song that contemplates what it means to die and to return.
The first time I heard Levon sing this song I didn’t suddenly start believing in the resurrection or anything, but I swear I could feel myself levitate about a quarter-inch off the ground.
Levon, son of the Mississippi Delta, the low flat water that keeps secrets as well as any ocean swell, which is to say, it’s always only a matter of time before the truth washes up, no matter the shore. As soon as Levon starts singing this Jersey song in his Arkansas accent, we recognize his character as an outsider, this country boy a long way from home, here where the sands are not quite turning gold—a promise he knew better than to believe in the first place, coming as he does from a land of old lies.
An outsider can see things clearly that a man who has spent his whole life with his nose pressed up against the glass cannot. Levon’s man is not, perhaps, especially reverent of this South Jersey mythology and its various gods and spoilers. Cops are the same in every town, more or less. Crooks, too. A smile teases his lips as he delivers the news from this strange land to his girl on the other end of the line: the Chicken Man, baby! And his house too! It’s as foreign to him as the night cryptid said to be dragging its forked tail through the Pine Barrens sugar sands, but what patch of dirt on this earth doesn’t have its own monster?
I hear my father’s longing to be a bigger man in Bruce Springsteen’s haunted vocals, his dazzling harmonica. Levon’s mandolin changes the tone, turning a boardwalk séance into a barn jamboree. The expansive lift when Levon sings, “put your makeup on,” makes it hard to sing along without a hopeful smile. The Band’s version strips the song of just enough of its despair and balances it with a modest allotment of acceptance—self-forgiveness, even. There wasn’t any other way to play it, Levon’s vocals convey. If I’m a dead man walking, we’d better party on the way to the grave.
Which is not to say his “Atlantic City” is a joyful place. The resurrection chorus is still as menacing as it is hopeful. Everything dies, and it could be someone’s turn tonight. There’s no moving on from what’s to come. Or it’s an apology for what happens next, or doesn’t. Bruce makes maybe do an awful lot of work in this song. In Levon’s performance I also hear twinges of Hank Senior, singing praise with one breath, only to stop Minnie with the next, telling her no, in fact, there ain’t no light. It doesn’t pay, our man making this phone call to his girl seems to know, on some level, to believe your own best lines. Nobody ever got my father to believe that.
I don’t know if I believe in much, in this world or beyond, but I believe in the truth as Levon and Bruce tell it. The more desperate we are for transformation, the more the stories we tell ourselves can keep us fixed. Some nights you’re going to hear a ghost laugh on the line. There’s not always much distance between a promise and a threat. Grace is where you find it—sometimes that’s the harmonica wail, and sometimes it’s sheer mandolin pluck.
When throat cancer took Levon’s voice, he nursed it back to strength and won three Grammys. Thirty years to the day of my father’s death, Levon died. The cancer came back. “Atlantic City” is my reminder that second chances are what we make of them. Grab hold of the waning light. Someone tune the mandolin. Play us a song for our comeback hearts. Let’s get to dancing while we still have moving feet.

Erin Keane was born in New Jersey and lives in Kentucky and knows both places are misunderstood. She’s the author of three collections of poems, including Demolition of the Promised Land, inspired by Bruce Springsteen. Her memoir in essays, Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing in September. She works at Salon, where she’s Editor in Chief, and teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.