round 1

(6) temple of the dog, “hunger strike”
struck down
(11) weird al yankovic, “smells like nirvana”
370-268
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 4.

Overfilled: Lydia Pudzianowski on “Hunger Strike”

By the time the world heard Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” Seattle was over grunge and mourning its own losses. Because music and drugs were exploding simultaneously, the scene was memorializing itself before anyone else knew what was happening. Friends were saying goodbye to each other left and right, and the rest of America had no idea.
Chances are, if you were watching MTV in the early ’90s, you saw the second version of the “Hunger Strike” video. It was edited about a year after its initial release to highlight the fact that Temple of the Dog was composed of members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, bands that were rapidly becoming astronomically famous. But the song and the album and the band were a tribute to the frontman of the first wave of grunge: Mother Love Bone’s Andrew Wood, who died of a drug overdose in 1990 at age 24.
Temple of the Dog was made up of Wood’s Mother Love Bone bandmates Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, who were about to co-found Pearl Jam, and Matt Cameron and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, a band already at the height of their Seattle fame. In terms of songwriting, Cornell was Temple of the Dog. All lyrics are credited to him, and he wrote the majority of the music as well, with assists from Gossard and Ament. “Hunger Strike” itself is composed of fewer lyrics than you might remember; it’s really just a single verse repeated, with the last line drawn out into an ostensible chorus. Per the CD booklet, here are all 55 words:

I don’t mind stealing bread
From the mouths of decadence
But I can’t feed on the powerless
When my cup’s already overfilled
But it’s on the table
The fire is cooking
And their [sic] farming babies
While the slaves are working
The blood is on the table
And their mouths are choking
But I’m growing hungry

(Weird that the official line is “growing hungry,” because every performance, including the one on the album, has Vedder and Cornell singing “going hungry.”)
Cornell has said of the song, “I was wanting to express the gratitude for my life but also disdain for people where that's not enough, where they want more. There's no way to really have a whole lot more than you need usually without taking from somebody else that can't really afford to give it to you. It's sort of about taking advantage of a person or people who really don't have anything.” Interestingly, this theme would come up in “Corduroy,” Pearl Jam’s possibly accidental version of the song, with lyrics like “I would rather starve than eat your bread” and “Can’t buy what I want because it’s free.” This was kind of the ethos of the whole scene, though, and bands were judged by the way they responded to major-label interest and how they spent their free time (apparently the guys of Alice in Chains wanted to be famous from the outset and loved a good strip club, while Cornell’s Soundgarden bandmates repeatedly asked him to please stop taking his shirt off onstage because they weren’t about that).
Certain images from the “Hunger Strike” video—filmed at Seattle’s Discovery Park, with views across the water of Bainbridge Island, where Andrew Wood grew up—are in the hall of fame of grunge iconography: Eddie Vedder standing in the grass, intermittent shots of that lighthouse, the band playing their unplugged electric instruments on the beach.
By 1991, when the song came out, major labels had snapped up the established Seattle bands (save Mudhoney, who, along with Nirvana’s debut album, kept hometown label Sub Pop from going out of business around that time) and were engaged in bidding wars over fresh blood. If you were from Seattle, you got signed. Chronologically, if not necessarily on purpose, “Hunger Strike” marks the end of the well-kept secret phase. It’s Grunge 101, a tribute to itself, a bridge from relative obscurity to world domination. It showcases the past, present, and future of a movement all at once, which is quite a feat, and America embraced it fully, equal parts enthusiastic and overdue.
And then I showed up, beyond excited—and holy shit, was I late.

SCENE: Positively Records, Levittown, PA, 2004. I, sixteen years old, am perusing used CDs in a very cool manner.
Me (sidling up to the counter): Hey, so, uh, got anything by Temple of the Dog?
Guy behind the counter: ...you mean the one thing they put out? Yeah, I think we've got some of those.

How did this skin-peeling cringefest come to be? Well, despite being born in 1987, putting me at a solid four years old when Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in September of 1991, I spent my teen years obsessed with grunge.
Musically, what I recall from the actual ’90s—my childhood—is unremarkable. I started listening to the radio obsessively around 1996, when I was eight or nine, so we’re talking Bush, Collective Soul, Live, Alanis Morrisette. The black boom box in my room was tuned to 97.5 WPST, Real Music Variety, out of Trenton, NJ (I grew up directly across the river in Bucks County, PA, where Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas 1776—ye olde punk rock). My elementary-school BFF lived down the street with her mom, grandma, aunt, and cousin, who had a giant Alice in Chains poster in his room. We were terrified of it. Every time I walked to her house for a sleepover, pillow in tow, I knew I was about to do stuff I couldn’t do at my house: eat a bunch of Gushers, play King’s Quest on the computer, and hope her cousin wasn’t home so we could sneak into his room, stare at his poster, and dance to his Presidents of the United States of America CD. That’s how I spent the 1990s.
In 2001, I was a freshman in high school, and my wheelhouse was classic rock. The Beatles, on whom I was raised, were always number one. Then came the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Doors. I was obsessed with Jim Morrison. I printed out a photo of him and taped it to the wall next to my bed. He was later joined by James Dean and Brandon Lee, and my parents, probably using humor to deal with their growing concern and unease, christened this corner the Wall of Dead Men. But I was ready for something new—er, something else old that was also new.
In combing through the rest of my dad’s CD collection for fresh meat, I came across Nirvana’s Nevermind. I recognized this as an album I should know, I knew who Dave Grohl was because of the Foo Fighters, and I knew that Kurt Cobain was dead, so my interest was piqued. I absconded with the CD to the backyard, where I listened to it on an endless loop in my metallic blue Sony Walkman in our family’s hammock as noticeably morosely as possible. My best friend Megan got me a copy of Rock: The Rough Guide, a Bible-sized encyclopedia of bands and their essential releases, and I treated it like scripture, sticking it full of Post-Its as I learned more about grunge: Green River begat Mudhoney, Malfunkshun begat Mother Love Bone, let there be light, etc. I purchased a QUIT WORK MAKE MUSIC decal from Hot Topic with my parents’ money and adhered it to my bedroom window in their house, which was in an excellent school district clearly for their own health.
All of this culminated in an exclusive VIP vigil on the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death in 2004. It took place in my bedroom. I lit candles, carefully arranged my collected issues of Rolling Stone with the honoree’s face on the cover, and cried the most dramatic tears I could muster. The reluctant attendees were my sister from down the hall and my high-school boyfriend, who walked into my room and started laughing uncontrollably.
Not that I need to say so, but this was all deeply uncool. By the time I stumbled into grunge, it had just happened. It wasn’t old enough to be cool again. The radio was busy playing its skid marks, like Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd and Staind, so no one was particularly nostalgic for the vocal stylings of Eddie Vedder. As I go through my old CD collection now, the evidence is as clear as the price stickers on the cases: $1.99 for a used copy of Vs. from the Princeton Record Exchange, $2.99 for Sweet Oblivion by the Screaming Trees, $4.99 for Alice in Chains’ Unplugged, the BEST VALUE sticker on the Singles soundtrack. But guess what? Couldn’t have worked out better for me in 2004, after Jim Shearer told me which grunge albums were the best during the Nirvana special on MTV2. Let me at that bargain bin. I’m here for the glut.
When I had transportation and a credit card, I saw as many of these bands as I could. Whoever the ’90s left behind, if they were touring, I was there: Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soul Asylum. I wasn’t seeing these guys on their world tours in 1992, because that was the year I turned five years old. I was seeing them on their I-need-some-cash tours in 2006 to support the my-kid-needs-a-college-fund comeback album, the I-mismanaged-my-money solo tours booked in smaller rock clubs as opposed to stadiums.
I’ve seen Pearl Jam the most, but that’s by default. Nirvana ended in 1994. I have little interest in Alice in Chains without Layne Staley, who died in 2002. Soundgarden broke up in 1997 and then again for good when Chris Cornell died in 2017. Last man standing? Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder, a surfer from San Diego who showed up in Seattle to record “Hunger Strike” as a tribute to a man he’d never met. This was the first time his vocals were featured. It was his first music video. In 1993, Time Magazine would put Vedder’s face on its cover accompanying the headline “All The Rage.” Now, he and his band are forced to work even more of their late friends’ songs into their setlists, and I, a person who changed her Gmail address to a Pearl Jam reference in the year of our lord 2005, wouldn’t miss any of it.
When I finally made it to Seattle at age 27 (this timing was, somehow, not on purpose), I cried when I saw the Space Needle. Then I got to work. I had a to-do list a decade-plus in the making. I needed to force myself to cry at Brandon Lee’s grave, which proved to be a challenge; the site he shares with his father, Bruce, was beset by tourists. I suppose it can’t rain all the time. I needed to visit Bad Animals, the recording studio formerly owned by Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, a Seattle institution. I needed to visit the apartment complex that served as the center of the action in Singles—where Chris Cornell watched Matt Dillon crank TAD’s “Jinx” so loud on the apology sound system he installed in Bridget Fonda’s car that all the windows exploded; where Dillon’s band Citizen Dick (hit single: “Touch Me I’m Dick”), AKA Pearl Jam, held practice sessions; where Kyra Sedgwick checked out Campbell Scott’s record collection after meeting him at an Alice in Chains show.
And I needed to go to Kurt Cobain’s last place of residence. I had built this up so incredibly in my mind, but it turns out that all you need is a car and Google Maps to get to his quiet, hilly, rich neighborhood. I got as close to the house as I could on foot, which was shockingly close, not exactly sure what I was hoping to see. I sat on the bench in Viretta Park, the square of green space next door, on which other worshippers scrawled Kurt’s words back to him. I wrote something with the Sharpie I brought for the occasion. My offering was a lyric from “Drain You”: “One baby to another said, I’m lucky to have met you.”
Could I pretend that I didn’t spend the early aughts, my formative years, listening to the greatest hits of 1993? Could I reminisce about being obsessed with Julian Casablancas instead of Kurt Cobain? Sure, but four years of my online journal would disprove that in two or three entries chosen at random, as would my constitution as an adult. (Late in my 20s, I saw L7 at Riot Fest in Chicago, and Kat Bjelland from Babes in Toyland was watching from the wings. Guess what? I cried.) Was I the only person in my high school who knew about Andrew Wood? Probably, but that’s because everyone was listening to Interpol and Amnesiac by Radiohead. Is it cool that I was obsessed with Singles? No. The fact that a major studio released a grunge movie was the opposite of cool, even though it was directed by Cameron Crowe, who was Mr. Nancy Wilson at the time. Is it cool that I thought Temple of the Dog, by their powers combined, was the zenith of music in 2002? No.
But the heart is a lonely hunter. When your only chance to see an approximation of Kurt Cobain is to go to a Weird Al show and watch him perform “Smells Like Nirvana” in a crunchy blond wig, you grab it. When Chris Cornell is scheduled to play the Electric Factory in Philly in 2007, even though it’s to promote a mediocre solo album—the one with the James Bond song—you go, because he’s going to sing “Spoonman.” When Pearl Jam rolls through town and stops at the Tweeter Center in Camden, New Jersey, you are there, because it is now your church, and for one night only, God—er, Dog—is in the house.

Lydia Pudzianowski is a writer living in Bucks County, PA, with her husband and cat. She would move to Seattle, but Positively Records is right down the street.

j. robert lennon on “smells like nirvana”

In order to prove to you that the greatest achievement of the grunge era was a parody of the grunge era, I must first explain that there were no grunge bands, and there was no grunge. Just ask the bands. They existed—some of them still do—but they will disavow the association. The term itself was a joke that metastasized into a marketing ploy; its first known use in reference to Seattle music was as a fake denunciation of a nonexistent group. Grunge’s sound—muddled, monotonous, indistinct—was defined by what it wasn’t: not punk, not metal, not indie, not alternative. The way you danced to it was by flinging yourself randomly around. Its uniform was what you were already wearing; its haircut was not getting one. The genre’s entire lexicon—harsh realm, cob nobbler, lamestain—was a hoax, and its standard bearer died because too many people paid attention to him.
The one definitive trait that you could reasonably apply to grunge culture was self-mockery. And so its pinnacle, its unimpeachable masterpiece, could only have been a mockery—both of the things grunge was mocking, and of the mockery itself. Weird Al Yankovic’s “Smells Like Nirvana” is that masterpiece. It is the most grunge thing possible.
Here I guess I am supposed to do a riff on Weird Al. It is hard to imagine a task more pointless, or futile: the man is unsummarizable, yet universally recognized and understood. His baseline shtick could not be more simple: he records song parodies that are sonically indistinguishable from their antecedents, then copies their videos shot by shot, with comical alterations. Often, for several measures, you don’t know which one you’re watching or listening to; the penny doesn’t drop until you hear Al’s surprisingly versatile nasal bleat, or catch the first of many sight gags: a farm animal, a goofy pair of shoes, somebody’s head popping off.
(The Weird Al fan community—Close Personal Friends of Al is their actual, perfect name—will cancel me if I don’t mention his original tunes, which are not the subject of this essay. But they constitute more than half of his discography and, taken together, are perhaps the greatest novelty songbook in American musical history. That they are overshadowed by his brilliance as a parodist is perhaps tragic, but serves as a convenient way to distinguish the casual listener from the true fan; e.g., if you can’t sing “One More Minute” from memory, I’ve got nothing to say to you.)
“Smells Like Nirvana” is now almost thirty years old, yet I think of it as “late” Yankovic, because it came after the Weird Al hits of my youth: “My Bologna,” “Another One Rides the Bus,” “I Love Rocky Road,” “Like A Surgeon,” “Stop Dragging My Car Around.” These, anyway, are the songs that inspired my friends’ fifth-grade lunch table imitations, which we truly believed to be as funny as Al’s, and were confident would be equally beloved if only we could get the news to Dr. Demento. (In retrospect, I don’t think “99 dead baboons float by” was quite as hilarious a punch line as we thought, nor its zoo-mismanagement back story as compelling.)
Of course there have been dozens of stellar Yankovic jams since then, songs everybody knows, that in some cases are remembered more fondly than their originals. That’s because Weird Al never sounds dated: styles may come and go, but making fun of things is forever. As each earnest hit song fades away into quaintness, Weird Al’s parodies sharpen, seem prescient in their identification of the vanities of the moment. In 1996 we watched “Amish Paradise” and laughed at the beards, the hats, the black suits. 25 years later, it’s Coolio’s posturing that feels silly, and Al whose aim was true.
That isn’t to say that Weird Al’s parodies aren’t acts of love. You can’t copy anything so precisely without appreciating how it’s made; you can’t roast a thing you don’t adore. Most of Yankovic’s marks regard his work as flattery: Pharrell declared himself honored, Chamillionaire credited Al with his Grammy, and Madonna, starstruck, preemptively requested the creation of “Like A Surgeon.” The Yankovic aura is so powerful that Prince’s refusal to give permission now feels like self-parody in itself, a better joke than the resulting track might have been. (Although I could be wrong; in 2016 Yankovic told Billboard he was prepared to record a version of “Let’s Go Crazy” that was about The Beverly Hillbillies. Alas.)
Yankovic’s manager had a hard time reaching Nirvana to get permission to rework “Teen Spirit.” Knowing the band was about to appear on Saturday Night Live, Yankovic called 30 Rock and asked to talk to Kurt directly. “Is it going to be about food?” Cobain wanted to know. “No,” Al told him, “it’s going to be about how no one can understand your lyrics.” He ended up taking the idea a step further: Al’s Kurt, let’s call him Yancobain, doesn’t know what he’s saying either.

What is this song all about?
Can't figure any lyrics out
How do the words to it go
I wish you'd tell me, I don't know

Now I'm mumbling, and I'm screaming
And I don't know what I’m singing
Crank the volume, ears are bleeding
I still don't know what I’m singing

Self-referentiality is a reliable Weird Al bit; this tune reads to me like an extension and refinement of 1988’s “(This Song's Just) Six Words Long.” But the real poignance of “Sounds Like Nirvana” derives from Al’s understanding that the original video is already a send-up of youth culture and the marketing of youth culture. It features a smoky, claustrophobic high school gymnasium populated by depressed cheerleaders, self-destructive revelers, and a creepy janitor, who indulge in a sort of louche bacchanalia with the band.
I don’t think it’s been adequately acknowledged that “Teen Spirit”—the song, the video—is funny. It’s typically assumed to be self-serious in some way, as though it were punk; “defiant call to arms” and “buzzing with authenticity” are typical descriptors in the press. This is nonsense—“Teen Spirit” is goofy, ironic, and borderline meaningless; its lyrics are a mixture of scrambled teenage platitudes (“Our little group has always been / And always will until the end”) and vaguely suggestive doggerel (“A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido”). The video is little more than a thrilling pop eyeroll.
Weird Al’s video is an astoundingly accurate recreation of the original. It was filmed on the same soundstage and features some of the same actors, most notably the janitor. Sight gags include a sheep, a rubber guitar, girl scouts, and Dick Van Patten. The best joke in the video, and in the song, is also its most knowing tribute to the band’s style: Al approximates Cobain’s signature distortion-through-chorus guitar solo by gargling a glass of water, nailing the sound almost perfectly. (The gargle solo is a staple of Yankovic’s live shows to this day.) 

It's unintelligible
I just can't get it through my skull
It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss
With all these marbles in my mouth

The gargling is only one bit of grossout body humor in the video—there’s belching on the downbeat, sweaty tufts of underarm hair on the cheerleaders. The janitor draws a donut from his mop bucket and bites into it. A couple of man-sized rag dolls flop through the air above the mosh pit. Dick Van Patten’s hamburger is knocked from his fist, a cow moos, a basketball team runs by, and some dude in the background catches fire.
In other words, “Smells Like Nirvana” is grungier than “Teen Spirit.” And if “Teen Spirit” is the iconic grunge song, Nirvana the iconic grunge act, well, this song and video must be more iconic still. You don’t smell anything watching Nirvana’s video, as the title would seem to promise, but you can’t help but curl your nose up at Al’s.
I could rest there, with the pungent scent of armpit and barnyard still tickling at your orbitofrontal cortex; I think I’ve more than made my case. But given that the essay series prompting this thought experiment is itself a parody of competition—one whose subjects are determined by an arbitrary and capricious limiting exercise and whose writers are chosen at random—this perfect artifact must not merely be declared winner of this year’s bracket. It can only the champion of all brackets, the ultimate Xness, a parody of a mockery nested inside a jest within a lampoon. Vote for this, the ultimate musical ouroboros. Make it the king.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of two story collections, Pieces For The Left Hand and See You in Paradise, and eight novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Broken River. A new novel and story collection are due out from Graywolf in April.