round 1

(5) screaming trees, “nearly lost you”
arrested
(12) the refreshments, “banditos”
286-162
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 7.

Back to My Sin(gle): scott nadelson On “Nearly Lost You”

Derrick and I were in love with the same girl. I’ll call her Gwen. She wore ankle-length tie-dye skirts, her feet were always dirty, and we hated her taste in music—nothing but Phish and Widespread Panic—but she had soft curly hair, an uninhibited smile, and a mischievous laugh. We shared our pot with her, and she flirted with both of us relentlessly. “I like having two boyfriends,” she said, though she wouldn’t so much as kiss either of us. Anybody else might have taken steps to undermine a rival, but Derrick rooted for me instead. “The second she chooses you, I’m done,” he said. “Then I can get on with my fucking life.” I wanted her to choose me, too, but said only that there’d be no hard feelings either way. The truth was, if Gwen chose Derrick, I wouldn’t have been done; I would have just bided my time, waiting to see if she’d eventually tire of him and give me a chance in his place.
Derrick was a pointy-faced punk from the mountains—his family lived high up on the Blue Ridge, a few miles outside Boone—and I was a bushy-haired Jew with a heavy New Jersey accent. In Chapel Hill, we were both oddballs. We spent a lot of time in his dorm room—a single, after his roommate dropped out during freshman orientation—studying for a medieval history class we had together, smoking Winstons, playing with his pet rat, Topper, and listening to music. I gravitated toward brooding, elusive lyrics, he liked things loud and fast, and we both agreed that Western culture had peaked with London Calling. Neither of us was drawn to the Seattle bands that had just broken big—this was the fall of 1991, when Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten came out a month apart—not because we didn’t like their songs, but because it was hard to even hear them for what they were when they spilled out of every frat house we passed on our way back from a cheap meal on Franklin Street. We felt the same about the local music scene. How excited could we get about Superchunk and Archers of Loaf when all the shaggy-haired pretty boys sported their shirts and struck a pose in the library smoking lounge? We preferred the weirder Chapel Hill bands—Polvo, the Veldt, Flat Duo Jets—and spent a lot of time at half-empty shows at the old Cat’s Cradle, where the floors were so sticky it was a struggle to peel your soles off at the end of the night.
In general, the Seattle scene didn’t mean much to us, and Derrick especially mocked the fashion. He’d been wearing flannel his whole life, because it was fucking cold in the mountains, he said. If you wore it in the rain, you’d smell like wet sheep, and down here on the Piedmont, you just looked like an idiot. But Screaming Trees he could get behind. For one, they weren’t originally from Seattle. They’d come over their own mountains from some town in the middle of nowhere, so they could wear whatever the fuck they wanted, he said. Also, aside from their baby-faced drummer, they were all ugly, and a couple of them were fat: the Conner brothers—Gary Lee on guitar, Van on bass—both pushed three hundred pounds. They’d look like a joke on the cover of Rolling Stone. Most important, no one else seemed to know about them.
By the middle of freshman year, we had Uncle Anesthesia on heavy rotation while Topper ran on the wheel in her cage or munched cookie crumbs from our palms. It was the Trees’ first major-label release, and it had dropped nine months before Nevermind. While the latter exploded, Uncle Anesthesia hardly sold at all. Derrick and I thought of it as our own secret treasure; we were the only ones in Chapel Hill listening to it, we were sure. And it was far better than anything playing in those frat houses, we decided, the guitar lines moodier, the vocals deep and haunted, the lyrics obscure and allusive and mysterious. It wasn’t “grunge,” whatever the fuck that was—it was dark psychedelic garage rock, with jams as trippy as anything at a Widespread Panic show, though far heavier and faster and tinged with doom. You could listen to it sober or high, you could enjoy it on mushrooms or acid, you could let it console you when the girl you loved started sleeping with a Phish-head named Kurt, who wore fringed leather moccasins to class.
Still, Derrick worried our connection with the Trees wouldn’t last. He heard they were releasing a new album in the fall, and it was going to be huge. All the radio stations wanted to play new stuff from Seattle. Inevitably, we’d start hearing them on our way to Franklin Street. It was only a matter of time before all the frat boys ruined them for good. He pulled nervously on a Winston, blew smoke over his shoulder, and stroked Topper’s head—I wondered then if he thought having a pet rodent understated his own rat-like features—as a quick drum intro gave way to the opening riff of “Alice Said.” Better just enjoy it while we could, he muttered, though there wasn’t much joy left on his face, just resignation, as if he’d already given up on these four strangers from some town in the middle-of-nowhere-Washington, certain they’d soon let him down.

I suppose purity meant more to me, too, at nineteen than it does now. Selling out wasn’t the biggest crime I could imagine, but it was pretty close. Maybe fans of underground art always want it to stay underground, even if means the people who make it have to languish in obscurity. But the music coming out of the Pacific Northwest in the late ’80s and early ’90s was never meant to stay obscure. It was made for the masses. Like punk, its impulse was as much nostalgia as innovation. If the Ramones were nostalgic for early rock ’n‘ roll’s straightforward beats and stripped-down sentiments, the kids in Seattle longed for an era when garage bands could break out into stadium acts, when big raw sound and earnest emotion could win over huge crowds, despite A&R departments’ desire for glamour and sheen.
And didn’t they pull it off, for the most part? Five years earlier, no one could have imagined Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and the Singles soundtrack would all share space in the Billboard 200’s top ten, beating out Garth Brooks, Bobby Brown, and Kris Kross.
Still, the A&R people were keeping a close eye on things. It was their job to sell records. And when it didn’t happen on its own, they’d give a little nudge. In 2012, an interviewer with Spin magazine asked members of Screaming Trees—who’d broken up in 2000—about recording Sweet Oblivion, their follow-up to Uncle Anesthesia and their best-selling album (though it didn’t come anywhere close to the five million copies of AIC’s Dirt or the thirteen million of Pearl Jam’s Ten). It was the twentieth anniversary of the album’s release, and the interviewer was especially eager to hear how they’d written their biggest hit, “Nearly Lost You.” In response, Mark Lanegan, the band’s lead singer, irritated or embarrassed or both, replies, “Our A&R guy said, ‘This is good stuff, but we don’t have a single yet.’”
Pressure to release a single led them to use a riff from one of their old demos and throw together lyrics with a catchy chorus. Twenty years later, Lanegan is clearly disgusted by the whole experience. “It’s one of those songs I hope to never hear again,” he says. “Why? Because it was specifically written to be a single. It’s a corny, cheesy tune. But, you know, whatever. It is what it is.” When the interviewer asks whether audiences still request the song at shows he plays now, Lanegan answers, “No. Luckily they have better taste than that.”
In contrast, bassist Van Conner takes obvious pride in the song. He composed the riff and most of the lyrics. “It’s basically about being on acid and how you can lose control of your mind,” he answers when the interviewer asks what he remembers about writing the song. “There’s this place you get, if you do the right kind or the wrong kind or too much, where you really feel like you know what an insane person feels like—where you see demons and hell and just fucking crazy shit. Basically, I was referring to that point where you’ve gone too far and then you make it back somehow.”
Lanegan, on the other hand, says this when asked about the lyrics: “The verses—uh, you gotta say something. Is it about a relationship? Uh. [Laughs] If you say so, that’s cool with me.”
The interview is a fascinating study in dueling perspectives. It took reading it a couple of times for me to realize the interviewer spoke to Lanegan and Conner separately, and that even though their words are set side by side, they aren’t having a real conversation. Conner celebrates the excess of the era as if it were the whole reason for being a rock star, saying, “It was a wild time for the band. We were basically running around, raising mayhem, using the record label’s limo vouchers like they were going out of style,” while Lanegan, whose addictions would leave him homeless for a time, shrugs it off as something better forgotten: “Making that record was just a total blur for me. I recall there was a lot of drinking going on.” About the music video for “Nearly Lost You,” Conner says, “I thought it was pretty good… we all look like we’re in a shampoo commercial … since we’re in slow motion with our hair flowing. And they didn’t try too hard to hide our robust figures, which they usually tried to do in our videos.” And Lanegan: “It was embarrassing. I had to be fairly intoxicated to get it done. Watched it once, made it a point to never see it again. The thought of it still—well, if I wasn’t almost 50 years old—would probably make me cringe.” Likewise, while Conner expresses enthusiasm over the song’s inclusion on the Singles soundtrack—“I’m really happy we were in it, because I got a platinum record on my wall for it”—Lanegan dismisses the film entirely: “I’ve been flipping through the channels once or twice and come across a scene and realized when I saw Matt Dillon with long hair that it was that movie, but I never have watched it.”
In this non-conversation, you can hear the tension between competing desires that fed Derrick’s anxiety when we listened to the Trees in his dorm room. Can you hang onto your ideals while gaining recognition? Does a big audience necessitate compromise? Conner clearly appreciates whatever recognition the band received and would have happily taken more. Lanegan wishes he could have maintained a purer vision, along with his dignity. But then Lanegan has had a serious career since the Trees split up. He sang on several Queens of the Stone Age records, and he’s released twelve solo albums (my favorite is Field Songs from 2001) that showcase his considerable songwriting skills. Last year he published a memoir in which he mostly trashes the Trees as derivative, sloppy, and forgettable.
And Van Conner? For the last two decades he’s fronted the spacey metal band VALIS, which last released an album in 2012. When asked about hearing “Nearly Lost You” on a video game, he tells the interviewer, “I have a 14-year-old kid. None of [his classmates] have any idea about my band, but he came home from school one day and said, ‘Hey, Dad, one of my friends said he heard your music’ on Xbox or Rock Band. Did it give my son any cred at school? He seems like he doesn’t give a crap. My kids don’t think I’m cool.”
Lanegan, asked when he knew the song would be a hit, answers, “I wasn’t really aware that it was a hit. It had some minor success. When I think of a hit, I think of Madonna.”

The summer between freshman and sophomore years, I visited Derrick in Boone. His parents had kicked him out of the house after finding his weed stash, and he was living in a crappy apartment with three or four other kids, right on the highway to Blowing Rock. The place was a wreck. Clothes and dishes everywhere, the funk of smoke and sweat, a dreadlocked girl walking around in her underwear, Topper eating a crust of bread on the couch. It was just the kind of place I wished I were living in that summer, though I’d spent most of it back in New Jersey, sleeping in my childhood room and working as a lab assistant at the giant pharmaceutical firm that employed my father as a research chemist. Derrick’s job was far cooler. Every day at noon he drove a few miles to the Tweetsie Railroad amusement park, where he’d suit up in a racist outfit of leather chaps and feathered headdress, streaking war paint on his cheeks. Then, once every hour, he’d leap out from behind a stack of bales, whooping and firing fake arrows at a passing train, until a conductor with a Smith & Wesson unloaded half a dozen blanks in his direction. Next came his favorite part of the gig: he’d let out a terrible wail, grip his chest, and fall backwards off a six-foot bank onto a thick pile of hay below. Then, until the next train whistle sounded, he’d lie on his back, smoke, listen to tunes on a portable cassette player, and stare at the passing clouds.
During the three days I stayed with him—two of which I spent with him at work, lounging on the hay for six hours at a stretch—we listened to a lot of music, but when I suggested putting on Uncle Anesthesia, he winced and said, “I heard their new song. It’s fuckin-a crap.” Though the movie wouldn’t come out for several months, the Singles soundtrack had just landed, and some of the college radio stations had started to play “Nearly Lost You.” I hadn’t heard it yet, but I didn’t see what it had to do with listening to Uncle Anesthesia. One bad song couldn’t corrupt it instantly, could it? But Derrick stayed firm. He was done with the Trees, he said, but I should check out this new Helmet album: it was fast and heavy and intricate, and no one knew about them.
On his day off, we drove with one of his roommates down the mountain to Wilkes County to score some pot. His roommate was a nervous wiry kid with weird facial hair—lots on his chin and neck, none on the cheeks or upper lip—and he couldn’t sit still for a second, messing with the air conditioning or the radio the whole way. Did I know this was the marijuana capital of the world? he asked. Huge fields of it, hundreds of acres, and the feds left it alone because they were afraid of the hillbilly gangsters who grew it. He insisted on taking Derrick’s car on his own to meet his connection, leaving us at a Taco Bell in Wilkesboro. If he didn’t come back, he said, we’d better just take a bus back to Boone—we’d never find the car or the body.
Derrick and I ate burritos and talked shit about Gwen—we should have known what a fool she was the second she told us her favorite album was Space Wrangler. I’d heard she and Kurt were hiking the Appalachian Trail for a month that summer and speculated about how filthy her feet must be by now, but Derrick just shook his head. “I don’t want to know anything,” he said. “I’m done with her.”
We didn’t have to take the bus back to Boone. After an hour, the roommate showed up with the car. He was even more nervous and sweaty, but I couldn’t smell him because the car stank only of cannabis. When they said they were going to score, I imagined a quarter bag, maybe an ounce. Instead, they’d bought an entire pound. The car’s trunk lid was broken, so the duffel sat on the seat next to me. I’d never seen so much weed at once, and I never have since. The whole drive back I kept looking out for cop cars and picturing my next few years in prison. Derrick and his roommates spent the evening cutting and weighing and separating it into sandwich bags. “Better deal this way,” Derrick said. “If I sell a quarter pound, I end up with an ounce for free.” He sold me half an ounce at cost, because your friends, he said, “the real ones,” mattered more than anything else. I kept the bag stuffed in my underwear when I drove back to New Jersey, shaking with relief when I finally arrived at my parents’ clean house smelling of wood oil and air freshener.

I don’t tell my daughter about most of the stupid things I did when I was young—not yet, anyway—but I do play her a lot of the music I love. She’s ten now and has good taste. She agrees that London Calling is a great album, listens to The Cranberries’ “Zombie” on repeat, and knows all the lyrics to both “I Wanna Be Sedated” and Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song.” She’s also learning to play the sitar. But whenever I put Uncle Anesthesia on in the car, she gets this look, tolerant but weary, that suggests she understands my desire to hear the album is less about the music than my indulgence of the past. Here goes Dad, her look says, back into his dumb college days.
Today I play her “Nearly Lost You.” She knows I’m writing about the Trees’ best known song, and she wants to be helpful. She gives it a serious listen, an expression of deep concentration on her face as she watches Lanegan’s and the Conner brothers’ long hair billowing in the shampoo-commercial video on my tiny phone screen. I can’t help singing along with the chorus until she elbows me in the ribs. She bobs her head along with the beat, goes still during the guitar solo, wrinkles her forehead at the close. “It’s okay,” she says, handing back my phone. “Not as good as what you played in the car.”
And right there, Derrick is in front of me, his pointy rat face and red eyes and backwards baseball cap, his uncompromising scowl as he waves off the Trees for good. I’m forty-seven years old. Why is it all still so fucking present?

Even while I was in the middle of it, the feeling that dogged me most during my time in Chapel Hill was nostalgia, as if I were longing for something I’d lost or never actually had: an era that had ended by the time I was born, maybe, or a life someone else was living. I finally heard “Nearly Lost You” for the first time about a month after I visited Derrick, just before returning for fall semester. I expected to hate it as much as he did. In fact, I tried to dismiss it right off the bat. It was no “Beyond This Horizon,” or “Bed of Roses,” or “Alice Said.” But it wasn’t a bad song, either, and it didn’t abandon the Trees’ core attributes. It had a heavy opening, a surprising lead guitar hook, a big epic chorus full of longing, regret, and renewal. Even if I didn’t know what they were about—an acid trip? a relationship?—the lyrics were evocative, with “a fallen rider” in a burning landscape, voices calling the speaker “back to my sin.” There was a journey riddled with obstacles, a descent into darkness and fire, and a return, followed by a call to rest. Whether it was about drugs or love, it took you somewhere, and maybe you weren’t in quite the same place afterward. Sure, it might have been more straightforward, a little easier to consume than the Trees songs I loved best, but it was still better than most music out there, and it stuck in my head for days after I heard it. It functioned in the way singles were always meant to, a bit of honey to lure people in to the more substantial meal in the rest of the record.
Sweet Oblivion came out a month into the semester, right around the same time Singles showed up in the local art house theater. The movie was a farce, but despite Derrick’s disdain, the album held up well. The opening riff of the first track, “Shadow of the Season,” was as fierce as anything on Uncle Anesthesia. The baby-faced drummer had left the band, replaced by someone uglier though no less adept, and Lanegan’s vocals were even more haunted, as if he’d spent a few nights in an open grave, just to see how it would feel. Even “Dollar Bill”—as close as the Trees ever got to a power ballad—got under my skin with its despair-filled lament. It was genuine, sincere rock ’n‘ roll, only slightly corrupted, perhaps, by a hint of commercial appeal.
Still, I kept my thoughts about it to myself. I’d listen to it only on headphones, and only when I was alone. I kept expecting to hear “Nearly Lost You” coming from the frat house windows but never did. A few times I caught it on WUNC, the student-run radio station, but it was too straight-ahead rock for most of the DJs there, who prided themselves on odd and surprising sets, playing Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” followed by Indonesian gamelan. Once I thought I heard the opening acoustic strum of “Dollar Bill” coming from behind Phish-head Kurt’s door, though most likely it was something else. I waited for the Trees to break big, waited for the music I loved to get spoiled by too much attention and saturation, but it never happened. After a while I realized they weren’t going to be Nirvana’d or Pearl Jammed, and at least in Chapel Hill they stayed mostly obscure. Every time Lanegan sang, “I nearly lost you there,” I had the feeling he was talking directly to me. He’d nearly lost me but hadn’t. I was sticking around.
Derrick, meanwhile had moved into an apartment five miles from campus, with a similar collection of smelly boys with weird facial hair. Topper was no longer with him; one of his high roommates had accidentally sat on her while she slept on the couch. “Probably for the best,” he said, choking down any sadness he might have felt deep enough that I couldn’t hear it in his voice. “She would have ended up with lung cancer otherwise. Nicotine’s really bad for rats.” In November, he got hooked on Rage Against the Machine’s first album, which had just dropped and wasn’t yet getting much play. “These guys don’t give a shit,” he said. “Doesn’t matter to them if they never sell a record.” It was the only thing he wanted to listen to, and though I appreciated its political sentiments, mostly it gave me a headache. He’d also started taking a an ephedrine supplement, legal though sketchy, that kept him up all night, and though it meant he got his homework done, he started missing most of his classes.
Around the same time, Gwen and Phish-head Kurt broke up, and I quickly fell back into her flirtatious tractor beam, in which she kept me firmly at arm’s length. We’d walk around campus together at night, smoking weed in the arboretum and talking about sex. That is, Gwen talked about how much she missed sex with Kurt, even though she hated the fact that he didn’t bathe with soap, only a block of sandalwood, but still the feeling of him inside her was something that would take a long time for her to get over, and she didn’t think she’d try to replace it any time soon.
One night we spotted Derrick leaving the library, and she ran up to give him a hug. I’ve never seen anyone flinch with so much contempt. He jumped back, put both arms up, and said, “No fuckin way.” Then he glanced at me, with a look I’ve never quite gotten over—of disappointment, of betrayal, of confirmation that you could never count on anything or anyone. I knew he’d drop me as quickly and completely as he had Screaming Trees. Gwen cried after he walked away from us, and I did my best to comfort her, holding her and stroking her soft hair. Later, I made a move to kiss her. She turned her face away.

Scott Nadelson’s most recent book is the story collection One of Us. He teaches at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Amy Long on “banditos”

Every nowhere town has at least one rock station. Destin, Florida, has 99 Rock out of Pensacola and 97X from Panama City. MTV used to host its annual, seemingly month-long spring-break festivities at the latter town's Club LaVila, where my triplet sisters, our friends Rebecca and Whitney, and I went to Warped Tour when we were 15 (our mom had to drive us, and when Rebecca had a heatstroke, she borrowed a cell phone from one of the guys in Hot Water Music. She called our house since no one had cell phones then; on our caller ID, the number came up as "Hot Water Music" as if—probably because—the whole band shared one phone). But Pensacola and 99X loomed larger somehow. Pensacola held our favorite venues—Sluggo's, End of the Line—and the radio station is more established. The mom listed to it when she was a high-school teacher in her early 20s. One of her old students runs Innerlight, the surf shop where my sisters bought wetsuits and boards and wax. In Innerlight, on the speakers that broadcast the radio throughout our house, and in the mom's car, the radio was always tuned to 99Rock. 
When my sisters and I were in second or third grade, our family moved into a new house. The house was bigger than any we'd had before, and we'd watched carpenters and electricians and painters and contractors turn the vacant lot into the two-story dwelling the mom had all but designed herself. We grieved when trees got cut or celebrated when the mom saved one, insisting the landscapers work around it. Our friend Taylor, my sisters Beth and Chelsea, and I slid down dirt piles as if sledding and met in the bathroom at Burger King to clean up. We built forts and a tire swing on vacant lots with "No Trespassing" signs we ignored. When the house was done, we were almost disappointed. But the neighborhood featured a wetlands, a tiny stream that led to the bay, hidden trails to our friend Adam's apartment building, and acres of tree-stuffed lots not yet bought or built upon. Now that we lived in it, we felt more entitled to trespass in more ways. We stole wood from the dumpsters in front of other in-progress homes and hammered it into tree limbs, never deterred no matter how many times the lot's owner removed our work. We shuffled our feet in the bay to scare off stingrays and horseshoe crabs; sometime we found their dried shells on the small sandpatch between the water and our seawall. The areas flooded during hurricanes. We'd see dolphins out our bedroom windows and run down the dock for closer looks. Our dog Mindy followed us. She terrorized the neighborhood with her friend Fozzie, who'd come to our door in the afternoons as if to say Can Mindy come out and play? They roamed the neighborhood off leash, shitting in people's yards or running literal circles around someone's bulldog. They felt as entitled to the place as we did. 
The house felt different. Smaller somehow. Less mine. The house smelled too new. Like sawdust and just-dried paint. The mom filled it with junkshop antiques and overstuffed couches, a TV always on, but still I felt out of place in it. I had everything I wanted (except a balcony—my sisters and I all three wanted balconies, but the mom foresaw our sneaking out in high school, and we settled for white-wood windowseats); Beth and Chelsea's rooms connected through a bathroom, but mine had its own. I slept off to the side of my sisters in the bedroom I picked exactly because I didn't want anyone to enter if I couldn't hear their feet on the stairs or shuffling against the hard berber carpet. But I felt most at home in the new house when I was in it alone. I used to turn on the living room TV, which no one used, and watch VH1, waiting for Fiona Apple's "Criminal" video or on of the singles off Tori Amos' from the choirgirl hotel. I hoped for Garbage or Jewel's "Foolish Games." Only alone could I sing along, and when I sang along alone, I liked to sing to women. But when I listened to 99 Rock, almost every voice I heard belonged to a man.
The station played the same songs, essentially, that it plays now. Nirvana. Smashing Pumpkins. Alice in Chains. Soundgarden. Guns 'n Roses. Led Zeppelin. Korn. Metallica. The Gin Blossoms or Tom Petty if you're lucky. In the last few years, they've added the Killers, the Black Keys, Hozier—the same sounds in different songs. in But, around the time I turned 13, there was this other song. Our new house had surround-sound speakers in every room. I could tune the radio connected to the hub in the living room to 99 Rock and turn up the volume in my bedroom without disturbing anyone else. I'd hear this song sometimes. I couldn't really understand what the singer was saying. "Meet me at the mission at midnight / We'll dooby up there"? The subject eluded me. I mean, "Yeah, your alias says you're Captain Jean Luc Picard / of the United Federation of Planets / but he won't speak English anyway." Who won't speak English? Jean-Luc Picard? Or the guy at the border crossing to whom "you" give your "alias"? Both? And why do we need guns if we're just smoking weed? 
When I heard the song, and it was always a treat to hear it, I pictured a desert border town, a beaten-down guard station. The officer in the booth wearing a drab sheriff's uniform and barely looking at the name on the ID card. The mission I imagined as a water tower, and I imagined the characters meeting on its landing. The representative "stupid [person]" of whom, the narrator tells us, "everybody knows that the world is full" looks dull and slow. The shadow of a body stiffens when the singer declares "Well, I got the pistol / so I'll keep the pesos / Yeah, that seems fair." And, in the world of the song, the line felt triumphant. Singing it felt like holding up a celebratory fist: fuck that guy, us against the world; we're taking those pesos, and we're not sure how you're getting down from here. 
The song sounded like everything I heard on the radio and also nothing. The DJ never announced its title before he played it (all the DJs were men), and he never told me the band's name when he returned from a break. I couldn't buy the CD or call in to request it. I didn't know the band or the title. The title, "Banditos," isn't in the song. Once, I called and said "You know, the 'I'll keep the pesos' song;" the DJ had no idea what I meant. I had no other way to describe it. What was I supposed to say? "It's got guitars. They're not really sludgy but not super bright, either"? "The guy sings with a kind of sneer, but it's not a punk sneer, and there's humor to it but also this tough-guyness, and I'm never sure which I'm supposed to take seriously"? "It feels like driving at night with the windows down when you just won the lottery"? With the exception of maybe the latter, all the songs 99 Rock played in 1997 had sludgy guitars that also weren't super bright. All the singers had non-punk sneers and mixed ultra-masculine signifiers with the dresses or eyeliner they wore onstage and delivered their lyrics with at least a hint of the sarcasm with which they spoke in interviews; no one was entirely serious, and everyone was dead serious. The song could have been any song by any band. And there were so many songs and so many bands and no real internet yet; I gave up the search.

I quit listening to the radio in high school. Instead, I made mixtapes out of my CDs—Bright Eyes next to Neutral Milk Hotel, Saves the Day into Alkaline Trio, Jets to Brazil with At the Drive-In, Rainer Maria after The Get Up Kids—and listened to them when I drove. No one used the speakers in the house anymore. They broke, or I got a CD player I didn't have to walk down stairs to situate. I don't remember. But the house wasn't new anymore. It had lost its romantic aura. We didn't play in the woods anymore. My balcony-replacement window seat was still hard wood—no cushion—and I'd covered it in baskets of stickers and 7"s and blank CDRs. I had an older boyfriend who had an opioid use disorder, and I spent a lot of time hiding it from the parents or avoiding them so we didn't have to talk about it. But every now and then, like if I had a rental car when David, the boyfriend, wrecked my Intrepid or my tape got stuck in the player; if I rode in someone else's car or no one wanted to pick any music, we listened to the radio. I listened and listened but heard the song only when I was alone, as if Clear Channel wanted to hide its snarled joy from everyone but me.  
I didn't think of the song for years. In 2008, I moved from Gainesville, Florida, where I got my BA in English and a Master's in Women's Studies, to Santa Cruz, California, to work for the ACLU's now-defunct Drug Law Reform Project. The ACLU lost money in the Madoff scheme, and the Great Recession was well under way. Hit by the organization's first-ever economically motivated layoffs, I took a job in Washington, D.C. that lasted two months. I moved back to Florida and pretended I wanted to take the LSAT because I knew it made the dad happy. But, before the test date came, I left for New York. For three years, I advocated for the free expression rights of booksellers; video game, music, movie, and book-publishing trade associations; and librarians. In New York, I started writing again, and my pain problem took over my life. I heard the song again on the radio while I was in Destin tapering off opioids with Suboxone only to get back on them a year later, during my second fall semester in Virginia Tech's Creative Writing MFA program.
When I finished my MFA and left its tiny college town—I could walk from one end of its main thoroughfare to the other in half an hour—I moved to Austin, Texas. I was sick of freezing all winter, and friends told me I'd love it; they couldn't wait to hang out. The rent ranged from ridiculous to city-reasonable. I found a $750 studio and invited a sort-of boyfriend to reverse-engineer a relationship with me. I'd visited him on my way home from a cousin's wedding, and I was as lonely as I'd ever been. I didn't want to live alone. When I live alone, I'm messy and tend toward hermetic wallowing. But Scott was in recovery for a life-long heroin addiction. He posed a threat to my painkillers, and my painkillers threatened his sobriety. We brainstormed ways to mitigate the issue: I'd have a safe installed so that, if anything happened to my pills, I'd know he'd had nothing to do with it, and he couldn't pick up the safe and leave; we'd go to meetings together. I visited him on my way back to Destin after a cousin's wedding, and the day after I left, his roommate Adam called to tell me he'd found Scott dead in his bed that morning. "No," I said. I shut down as though my legs had crumpled. I was getting dressed for my grandfather's 95th birthday party. My floor-length cotton dress billowed around my lap as I counted my pills to make sure that what killed Scott hadn't originated with me. 
I moved to Austin anyway. I didn't know I could have canceled the lease, and I knew that, if I stayed in Florida to get my bearings and decide what I wanted to do, I'd be a loser. That everyone told me that wasn't true had no impact on me. That moving home meant failure had burrowed itself into my brain, and I couldn't banish the feeling. I got to Texas so depressed I couldn't even unpack. I lived there for a year, and I never unpacked. I lay on an inflatable mattress and did the heroin a friend had given me before I left in case I couldn't find a doctor to write my opioids. I wrote two-chord dirges on the pawn-shop guitar my sister Beth sent me $200 to buy. She was sad that I was sad, and I said a guitar might make me feel better; Scott and I had played around with his during the five days I'd spent at his house. "You've got good rhythm instincts," he said, a statement with which no one else who knows me would agree. He'd meant to send me home with one of his acoustics, but when the mom came to pick me up, we got distracted by our goodbyes and new plans. 
I meant to stay at Scott's for one night only, but I totaled my car on a Friday night and had to be towed two hours to the house he shared with his best friend Tyler and their landlord. Scott, who worked as an electrician, lived in the attic he renovated himself, and Tyler slept in the basement. I stayed in Scott's attic for five days, waiting for a mechanic to tell me that the car was totaled. The insurance company paid me more than the car's Blue Book value, and I bought a 2004 Toyota Corolla with that $7,000 check. I listened to the radio when I drove to work; the Corolla was 13 years old with no frills and didn't offer a way to plug in my iPod. I couldn't find Austin's rock station. I kept the radio tuned to KEXP, which plays the same artists I uploaded to my Apple devices. But getting an album onto my 2009 iPod from my computer—so old I couldn't update my operating system or hook up to printers or get on my own WiFi—required three devices (computer, phone, iPod) and took at least an hour. One day, as I contemplated buying PJ Harvey's Let England Shake, I acceded the streaming revolution and subscribed to Apple Music. I could listen to anything I wanted for a few dollars more than a single album cost me.
Browsing through Apple Music's selections and playlists provided the only real joy I'd felt since I dragged in my last labeled box. I hadn't heard the song in half a decade or more, but in the intervening years, I'd collected details about it. I thought the band's name started with a the and an R, so I combed the Replacements' discography and came up empty but for a new band I liked. I heard snippets of lyrics in my head but couldn't hold onto them long enough to Google the words. But I started adding to my music library the albums whose singles I'd listened to on 99 Rock: Siamese Dream and Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Nevermind and In Utero and the MTV Unplugged record, Dookie, Automatic for the People, Live Through This and Pretty on the Inside and Celebrity Skin, the Foo Fighters' eponymous debut and The Colour and the Shape. I added Veruca Salt, Soul Asylum, Live, the Toadies album with "Possum Kingdom" on it (at her wedding reception, my sister Chelsea got on drums and banged out the song's beat with the band she'd hired, exuding the same energy with which we'd danced to their Friday-night sets, drunk and shameless and still in our 20s). I added artists and albums I barely cared about: No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom, Matchbox 20's debut, a few from Pearl Jam; I wanted Apple to recommend the song to me, and I was trying to game the algorithm. I spent my first few days as an Apple Music subscriber clicking "Add" on my phone with the kind of hopeful desperation you see at craps tables. I kept rolling sevens.
My time in Austin blurs. I can only remember events in reference to Mark, a guy I dated for—as he made sure to clarify when he dumped me—four-and-a-half months ("Give me the goddamn two weeks," I said. "Like you're a fucking hostage scratching days into the wall."). I wasn't ready to date anyone after Scott died, but I couldn't help it. Mark was a PhD in Musicology and had a Master's in Library Science. He had a Jawbreaker tattoo. He went to AA five times a week and had for nearly half a decade; he seemed comfortable in his sobriety. He wasn't interested in my pills, and I felt safe leaving them on his bedside table when I slept over. I always slept at Mark's house. My apartment was a wreck. We didn't go to it, and when Mark called and said he was in the neighborhood, I said I'd meet him at his car, where we made out like teenagers; we even fogged up the windows. He bombarded me in the parking lot one night and convinced me that he could handle whatever goblin mess lurked in the 450 square feet I rented. I didn't want him to see my place; I knew his opinion of me would change when my put-together outfits gave way to trash in piles on the floor and half-emptied Coke cans left all over the tile mosaic I'd grouted on top of my coffee table in college. He'd see the wadded-up paper towels on the couch, my panties strewn around my tiny bedroom, my cat's hair in tumbleweed balls; he'd watch me maneuver around the book stacks and half-opened boxes like a practiced tightrope walker and decide that I'd lied to him. I was a dirty junkie who lived in a dirty junkie squat I could barely afford, and he was a sober adjunct professor and assistant to a famous presidential historian, his cute little craftsman house so neat that sometimes I doubted he lived there. 
After someone in AA mentioned it, my drug use obsessed Mark. "How can you take an opioid every day and not call yourself an addict?" he asked, voice casual and turned up as though he were pretending he hadn't planned the question. "Because I'm not addicted," I said. "Addiction interferes with functioning. My pills help me function. I'm dependent. Like, I'd go through withdrawal if I didn't have them, but I wouldn't crave a high. I can't even get high. I'd crave pain relief." I spread out in an overstuffed mid-century chair, my knees hanging over its arm. Mark nodded as if considering what I'd said. "And, anyway, I make the pills last exactly as long as they're supposed to. If I were addicted," I reasoned, "I'd take them all in two weeks and have to buy heroin or something." Mark noted that he'd done some reading. My jaw went slack, or I felt it move in some way that must have registered to Mark as disgust or betrayal; I can't control my facial expressions, and I'm sure he saw every feeling I had in the movement of my mouth. Mark said the articles he read called dependence "a distinction without a difference." I rolled my eyes. "I'd see stuff like that and think 'Amy wouldn't agree with that,' but I don't know," he said. He told me he needed some time to think about whether I was sober enough to be his girlfriend. "I know it feels like I'm holding a guillotine over your head," he said. "But it's just a few days. Nothing is different." 
I stood in his living room dumbfounded. I'd told Mark all about my pain and my pills and even Scott on our first date. He told me he usually waited to mention his alcoholism but decided to tell me then since I'd been honest with him. I didn't smoke weed around him, but he knew I did it, and he didn't like talking to me on the phone after work because, if I didn't go over to his place, I was stoned; if I drove from the bookstore to his house, I didn't smoke, and when Mark got tired, I pretended I was tired, too, and hoped he wasn't too tired to have sex. Sex was the only time Mark touched me. Every now and then, he'd hold my hand while we walked to Mother's, a vegan cafe on the other side of his block; when we watched Taylor Swift videos at an event Alamo Drafthouse billed as a dance party. When I danced, Mark held my waist from his seat as if he expected me to fall and moved like a balloon animal to tease me. But, mostly, Mark didn't show affection. When we watched TV, he sat on his couch with his fingers laced behind his head as if warding my head off his shoulder, my hands outside of his. I told my therapist I needed more affection. "It's not asking a lot for your boyfriend to hold your hand sometimes," he said. But when I asked Mark—and Mark had told me to ask for what I needed—he interpreted my request for his hand on my thigh or placed over mine to mean something I still don't understand: something bigger than he could provide. "I don't know if I can meet all your needs," Mark snapped one night when I brought up the lack of affection in bed. In bed, Mark wrapped his childhood blanket around his head and covered his face with Fuzzy, a worn teddy bear he'd had forever and kept on his perpetually made bed. I had to ask him to cuddle with me after sex. Sleeping beside him felt worse than sleeping alone. At least alone, I didn't worry about whether Mark loved me.
Mark was unlike anyone else I'd dated. He was not like David, the emotionally abusive, chaotic polydrug user I'd dated at 18 and 19, or Tom, the emotionally abusive anthropology student to whom I'd lost my virginity and dated off or on for over a decade. The men I'd dated fit a type: in some stage of drug use or recovery, narcissistic, dishonest, crammed with need and prone to cruelty if I had and expressed my own. And I gave them everything—a call at 3am, a pickup from jail, six months spent listening to Tom hang himself over the phone. But Mark was different. Mark was educated and serious about his AA praxis. He remembered to buy me Cheerios and Cokes and Haagen Dazs green tea ice cream when he went to the grocery store. He bought me a pair of pajamas to wear at his house and washed them once or twice a week. He didn't unfreeze the migraine icepacks I kept in his freezer. When I walked through his door at the end of an 11pm closing shift, Mark offered me a Coke and some cereal; he paid attention to my routine and spoke in anger so rarely that the edge in his voice made me cry if he did. Mark was clear about his intentions. "I'm looking for the person I'll spend the rest of my life with," he'd said one morning when I told him I didn't want to date him if we weren't serious. He bought me little presents when he went to visit his family in the Midwest. The men I'd dated before had been Kurt Cobains. Mark was the guy from Bad Religion with the biology PhD. He didn't need me. He wanted me. My other boyfriends had needed me. I didn't know how to deal with want.

Finally, sometime during the four-and-a-half months, the song stuck in my head, and I could make out the words to the chorus. I Googled "the world is full of stupid people mission at midnight," and the full lyrics to "Banditos" appeared. It was the first result. I don't know what crept into my memory and gave me those extra seven words. Maybe it was the song name and the pesos in the lyrics and their easy fit with North Austin's orange-dirt landscape and Spanish-speaking neighbors. What reminded me didn't matter. I had the song. I pulled up Apple Music on my phone, added the full album to my library, listened only to "Banditos;" I've never even heard another Refreshments song. If the rest of their songs aren't as good as "Banditos," I don't want to know.

"Banditos" opens with frontman Roger Clyne's sinister yet somehow boyish growl. "So just how far down do you wanna go? / We could talk it out over a cup of joe / and you could look deep into my eyes / like I was a supermodel, uh-huh" he speak-sings over palm-muted rhythm guitar that thickens as the verse progresses. On Clyne's "uh-huh," the band stops for a beat—only Clyne's voice remains—and starts up again, the musicians going all in on rhythmic guitar chords; long, smooth riffs; and simple, four-on-the-floor percussion. With that silence after "uh-huh," the Refreshments employ the quiet/loud dynamic that characterizes the grunge and proto-grunge soundscapes populated by bands such as Nirvana and the Pixies. "Banditos" covers subject matter—rebellion against authority, cynicism in personal relationships, betrayal, self-abnegation—familiar to anyone who paid attention to pop culture in 1996. The lyrics depict danger as romantic, an iconic rock trope that mirrors figures such as the "hooker with a heart of gold," the "urban cowboy," and the romanticized "bad boy" that teenage girls hide from their parents. Rhetorical flourishes such as Clyne's ironic, darkly seductive delivery or the band's chunky guitars and cynical solos position "Banditos" firmly inside the grunge genre. Indeed, "Banditos" is so generic that, when I heard it, I heard nothing that distinguished it from any other song on late-90s rock radio.
The song's narrative involves two characters, the narrator and a literal partner in crime. That the partner can "look deep into [the narrator's] eyes / like [he] was a supermodel" and that the narrator calls the other character "baby" in the second verse's opening line ("Well, it's you and me, baby / no one else we can trust...") suggest that the partner in crime is a girlfriend, but the the speaker never refers to the other person by name or a gendered pronoun; however, when the characters arrive at the Mexican border, the narrator tells his partner to "give your ID card to the borderguard" and notes that "your alias says you're Captain Jean-Luc Picard / of the United Federation of Planets / but he won't speak English anyway." It's unclear whether the "he" refers to the borderguard or the partner since, based on the little I know about Star Trek, Picard wouldn't speak English any better than the borderguard. Presumably, though, the "he" is the borderguard since the reference to a checkpoint here and pesos in the chorus tell the listener that the crime takes place in Mexico. 
The pair plan their heist over coffee, and while the narrator carries out the robbery, the partner "put[s] the sugar in the tank of of the sheriff's car / and slash[es] the deputy's tires" so the police "won't get very far / when they finally get the word / that there's been a holdup, uh-huh." But the listener knows before the partner that, when the pair meet "at the mission at midnight" to "divvy up" the money, the narrator will hold up the partner, as well. The first time Clyne croons "Everybody knows that the world is full of stupid people," the "stupid people" don't necessarily include the partner; in the first instance, "stupid people" refers to the robbery's victims. But when Clyne sings "And everybody knows that the world is full of stupid people / Well, I got the pistol, so I'll keep the pesos / Yeah, that seems fair," the partner realizes that the narrator rates them, too, among the "stupid people" of which the world is full. 

"Banditos" thus plays on the anti-hero trope that contemporaries such as Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, and Trent Reznor embody not only with their songs but their personas, too. For example, around the same time "Banditos" was serviced to radio, Reznor was recording in Sharon Tate's former home, and Kurt Cobain had died from a combination of drug use and pistol wound three years earlier. The Refreshments' reference criminality and personal betrayal in "Banditos" makes the narrator difficult to root for, and that's the point. The band punctuates the chorus with staccato-like guitar chords and short silences, and Clyne's vocals get louder and gruffer in the outro. His last "That seems fair" becomes a strained "Well, that seems fai-eee-yeah-eee-yeah-eee-yeah-eeer." In short, the song's themes, vocal delivery, and instrumentation make "Banditos" an exemplary and underrated entry into the grunge pantheon.

I divide my time in Austin the way Christians do with the Gregorian calendar: Before Mark (BM), During Mark (DM), and After Mark (AM). I know I found "Banditos" DM because I remember wondering if I should tell him. Mark is a musicologist. In our first month together, Mark and I communicated almost entirely in Taylor Swift GIFS. He bought me a Swift calendar in the airport on his way back to Austin after Christmas. We went to Alamo Drafthouse's non-dance Taylor Swift dance party. But Mark had only heard 1989, and when he listened to RED, he told me that, in his "professional opinion," the latter is the better album. If I told Mark about "Banditos," he'd listen to it, judge it, tell me things about its chord changes or time signature, and it wouldn't be mine anymore. 
After I found it, I listened to "Banditos" less often than I'd have guessed after it, but I put it on nonstop after Mark dumped me (I refuse to say that "Mark and I broke up;" he didn't consult me). Purportedly, he was leaving to take a new job in a new city, and we hadn't been together long enough for me to move with him. We'd known about the job since January, and Mark broke up with me in May. We said that, after he did or didn't get the job, we would talk about what we wanted to do. But we didn't talk about it. Mark offered me a Coke and my box of Cheerios, sat on the couch as far from me as he could get, and said he couldn't handle the stress of moving a relatively new relationship to a new city. But I knew he meant that I was too stressful to bring. He'd have to load up and carry over his pristine new threshold my sullied suitcases crammed with trauma, insecurity, anger, pain, and need; he might have brought another girlfriend, someone calmer and happier who needed less from him. But he didn't want to bring me.
Still, even four years later, I can feel myself about to cry when I imagine what our relationship could have been. In the AM period, I feel perpetually lied to; I couldn't trust what he'd told me in those first two months. My relationship with Mark felt adult and serious. We respected each other. He could listen without needing to fix whatever bothered me. He took my feelings seriously until he didn't. I told my friends that our 18 weeks together constituted the first healthy, normal relationship I've had. Other men had treated me poorly, but none of it hurt as much as Mark and his silence and weird sleeping positions and inability to tell me how he felt or discuss his own emotions outside the rooms where his AA home group met. 
We hadn't always been that way. In late December and all of January, the first two months DM, Mark was so effusive and affectionate, that when he said he loved me, he meant that he loved the idea of me, the self I constructed when I spent nights at his house. The self I showed Mark was blurry in places, had significant gaps in others, was perpetually bleeding from some scrape or bruise or fall. I worried, too, that he'd fallen too hard, that I couldn't climb up onto the pedestal he'd built for me. What if he always obsessed over his girlfriends and dropped us after a few weeks? He could fall out of love with me as easily as he'd gotten himself into it; I drove into Austin so depressed that I could have fallen for anyone, and by early March, I might as well have. That Mark pulled away after two months of constant, almost grating affection made what he called a "normal cooling-off period" feel especially cold. 
Later, I told Mark to "just hurt my fucking feelings" and tell me why he actually dumped me. "I never had conversations like this in any other relationship." He meant the conversations about my insecurities. About my needs and his inability to meet them with a simple touch. Something in his voice made me suspicious. "Are you dating someone ?" I asked. I was back in Florida. Without Mark or proper pain management, Austin felt too sad, too painful; I was miserable there. I cited medical reasons and got out of my lease with no fees or penalties. Sometimes Mark and I talked on the phone. I thought he might change his mind if only I were charming enough. "Yes, I am seeing someone. Why?" he asked. I said I could hear it in his voice, his pauses and cadence. "Just a vibe," I said. 
He told me he'd started dating a woman he met at a goth club in Austin before he moved; they'd tried long-distance, but he realized he didn't really like her that much, and now he had to break up with her. He said the last bit as though I should feel sorry for him. "Oh, god, what a horrible position you're in," I said, my voice like a rolled eye. "I thought we couldn't keep dating because you were moving," I said. "Is she going to Oklahoma with you?" My hands shook as he spoke, and nothing I did could settle them. I held up one as though Mark could see it through the phone lines. He said moving her out of Austin had never been part of the plan, but he wouldn't tell me when they met, which meant he'd started dating her too soon after me; we might even have overlapped. The next morning, I created a "Vengeance" playlist in Apple Music. "Banditos" was the third track. 
To get over that five-month relationship took me more than a year. I felt as though I were grieving not only Mark but Scott, too. But, in some ways, Mark hurt more. He is and isn't my type, and I hoped that venturing a few steps away from the kind of guy I usually dated might make for a better relationship. Mark wouldn't hurt me, I thought, because he wasn't like those other guys; he had his shit together. He cleaned, cooked, used a lint brush. But Mark's words confirmed my fear that the rest of my age cohort had lapped me romantically, that no one wants a 35-year-old girlfriend they have to break like a wild horse (or, if they do, their definition of "break" includes bones). That he'd started dating someone else before my side of his bed got cold made me question everything Mark had told me. Did he not need time to grieve the loss of us? Did it register as loss to him? Had he been unhappy the whole time? And why didn't he talk to me instead of making all the decisions alone. How little did I mean to him if he could move on to another girl—she was more than a decade younger than Mark—before I even left town? Questions to which I'd never get answers stuck in my head like all the ghosts of all the songs I've loved and lost. 

Sometimes, when I think about the men I've dated, they blur together. I'll use one's name when I think about another or assign some arbitrary detail to the wrong one. But Mark doesn't blend in with the others. He straddles the line between "good" and "bad," "healthy" and "unhealthy," complicates the ways I think about myself as a person in a relationship. BM, I could blame the relationship's demise on the guy: he got too high or too drunk too often, he was too chaotic or always in trouble, he didn't read, whatever. Mark and Scott were more complicated. I heard that his ex in Portland still sent him nudes, that maybe she wasn't an ex at all. He'd lied about details that didn't matter. But Scott was dead. I'd never get answers to the questions I wanted to ask him. And, as much as I wanted to blame Mark for our collapse, I couldn't; he'd dumped me, but our demise was my fault. I asked too much of him, needed too much from him, was too much for him. 
Mark doesn't blur. He stood out among Austin's mass of assured, relaxed tech bros and their cute girlfriends with arts-sector jobs. He stands out in my head when I make mental lists of my exes; he ticks the substance-use-disorder box but leaves the boxes my other boyfriends could check—active drug use, manipulative narcissism, emotionally abusive, liar—gloriously blank. I'd never seen Mark drink, and since I don't drink either (it triggers migraines), I could forget that alcohol even existed, that he abstained for reasons that differed from mine. His sobriety wasn't tentative the way Scott's had been. Mark stands out among the men I've dated the way truly great grunge songs—"Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Creep," "Black Hole Sun," "Everlong"—stood out on 99 Rock. He stood out the way "Banditos" did to me at 13. Something intangible, maybe inarticulable, exists within both; they look one way on paper but feel another way inside you. When Mark and I went out in public together, I walked with pride I could feel on my face—cool and dry, a little rusted, lived in like an old sweatshirt or the cozy apartment where I'd lived in grad school.
I watched myself with Mark as if I were outside my body, like my eyes were cameras mounted on cranes. That he'd chosen to be with me instead of the million other women in Austin made me feel special, and the one thing I'd always wanted in a relationship was to feel special. I'm a triplet; I've shared my entire life. I wanted one person to love me more than they loved anyone else not because they were obligated but because they wanted to. And with Mark, I did feel special. But I knew, too, that our relationship was delicate. It could break under the slightest pressure. And yet I kept adding, adding, adding.
I can't argue that "Banditos" is the best song the grunge era produced or even that it's truly great. I love the song, but other grunge-era bands produced better ones. "Banditos" isn't original; it contains no interesting structural innovations, little musical or instrumental engenuity; and Clayne's voice, while distinct, differs little from the gravel-voiced men whose songs abutted the Refreshments' on the radio. The song is generic in the term's most literal sense: it conforms to the genre's expecations, giving listeners what they already know they like rather than introducing them to new or surprising sonic elements. But that doesn't mean "Banditos" isn't special. "Banditos" is special—at least in part—because it isn't special. 
Rather, "Banditos" stands among the most emblematic or representative grunge songs. It is exemplary: a good model. The song is somehow truer for its grunge-by-numbers style. It doesn't try to be more. It doesn't tell you it only does heroin sometimes when it has a $600-a-day habit or say it slept at its friend's house last night when, really, it was with its mistress. Its sonic palate consists of traditional rock instrumentation with some punk and power-pop elements sprinkled in. It tells a story of disaffected renegades, illicit thrills, and personal betrayal meted out as impersonally as humanly possible; employs a traditionally masculine gender script; and invites the passive or implied-feminine listener into a treacherous romance that will kill her or land her in prison. But won't it be fun while it lasts?
I recognize that attitude. Perhaps it's why I identified with it so strongly as an adolescent despite never having crossed the United States' Southern border or threatened my coconspirator with a pistol. I've done drugs just to see how they'd make me feel, stolen from stores because I could; I've dated men I knew were bad for me just to see what would happen or, later, because they felt familiar. And isn't that why rock radio sounds stuck in a perpetual 1999? 
Still, "Banditos" can't stand in for Scott. For a song to compare to Scott, the lyrics would need to touch on darker subjects, and the instruments would need to match their muddy depth. Scott is a Nirvana song. You could pick him out of a lineup even if you'd only heard stories about him. Looking at Mark, you wouldn't know he shared a compulsion with Scott or David. Mark wears a tie every day; he even wears one when he works at home. He seemed so different from my other boyfriends, but when I scratched his surface, I found the same traits that had always attracted me to someone. In the end, Mark revealed himself as a liar hiding behind 12-Step honesty, a coward in a leather jacket, a man who runs from the discomfitting feminine just as would any other man. And the same applies to "Banditos." The song stood out to me on the radio, but in its full context—the grunge genre—there is nothing special about it; it's even a little boring. As with Mark's waxing-and-waning affection, "Banditos" tricks you. It's so catchy, so propulsive, feels so freeing, that you think you've discovered a hidden gem. Listen more closely, and it's just another song on the radio.

Amy Long is the author of Codependence (2019), chosen by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2018 Essay Collection Competition. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, including as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2019.