the second round
(1) alice in chains, “would?”
GOT RID OF (barely)
(8) pj harvey, “rid of me”
493-486
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SWEET 16
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 14.
lick my legs: Lisa Nikolidakis on “rid of me”
It starts with James Spader. Early on, we Folks of a Certain Age inhale Pretty in Pink and cast our ballots of desire for Team Duckie, Blane, or Steff. I think we’re meant to root for Jon Cryer’s Duckie, the devoted boy who loves unconditionally and croons to our dog when we leave the room, but I could never get past the stalking and his friendship with Andrew Dice Clay. For my money, Andrew McCarthy’s Blane isn’t a real choice either; he’s a milquetoast five out of ten, a wealthy dud, though I like that he has access to horses. And then there’s Steff, played with creepy, understated, feathered glory by Spader: a materialistic shitbag who never runs out of linen suits, the guy who calls the woman who won’t go out with him a bitch, and still: teenage me was full-throttle swoon.
Earlier this year, a friend and I mused how useful it would be to start a six-week summer camp for the younguns that choose Spader. The syllabus writes itself:
Week 1: Emotional Health & You
Week 2: Self-Esteem Workshop
Week 3: Good vs. Bad Attention
Week 4: Sex & Love Are Not the Same Thing
Week 5: HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired
Week 6: You Can’t Make Anyone Love You
Think of the lifetime of hurt we could spare the Spaderites—the bad, bad choices when it comes to men. Hell, I might need a refresher in one or two of those.
Three short years after Spader plays Steff, swilling scotch and hating prom, he’s cast as the adult, impotent Graham in sex, lies, and videotape, and my panties nearly melt. A man broken and obsessed with sex who needs saving? That’s my fucking bat signal, bro. Wherever unhealthy choices lurk in the night, I will be there in my complex and uncomfortable bra to save us all!
Don’t even get me started on Secretary.
But when you choose Spader over Duckie again and again—when your roster of exes is impossible to rank in their terribleness—you might find yourself in South Jersey at nineteen years old, sad and single and queer and very fucking angry. You’ll wonder if you’re worthy of love; you don’t know then that you’ll have to work so very hard in therapy to believe you are. You’ll vacillate between knowing in your guts that you are rotten and believing everyone else is the problem. You will take the force of being pulled between those poles and straddle some weird line between sexy and scary, between vengeance and lust, and that vibe is why people repeatedly (mostly mistakenly) think you’re up for a threesome. You’ve been Spaderized. You are now the bad choice that men make, and if it’s a competition for who’s worse—you or the people who choose you—everyone loses.
It’s there—at the nexus of self-loathing and fishnets—that I get my first copy of Rid of Me. I listen to the title track so many times it becomes muscle memory, a thing my body involuntarily holds, a parasite squirming beneath the skin. My voice is all phone-sex and Camel Lights, and I mimic Harvey like a champion—like my champion—because that’s precisely what she is. I want to scream at strangers: Lick my legs, I’m on fire because it feels truer than anything else I know.
Is this where I mention trauma? Do I have to? Isn’t it obvious that something else has gone wrong with a young woman who actively longs to be treated like junk / like scraps / like humanfuckingwaste? Reader, you know what it is. For once, let’s not name it.
“Rid of Me” is a collection of contradictions; it is I love—hate you and let’s fuck—jk fuck you, and it hit me right when I barely understood the difference. The urgency of the opening directive—Tie yourself to me—grinds against the threatened refrain that follows: you’re not rid of me. And there—right there where we should recognize the creep, where our Spader-senses kick in—Harvey delivers the line Night and day I breathe / Hah hah ay hey with such perfect, come-hither breath that we’re lured back to the sexiness of it, the red flags ignored as they so often are in the beginning of things. We move back to the refrain before switching gears to the pained vulnerability of I beg you my darling / Don't leave me / I'm hurting, but just as soon as we feel that pain, the sex is back in falsetto: Lick my legs I'm on fire / Lick my legs of desire. Was the vulnerability merely performative, the trying on of pain to get what one wants? Is that what the unexamined trauma of our youth is: a way to bond and manipulate? I’ll make you lick my injuries.
“Rid of Me” follows a trajectory that, when mapped out, looks like so many of my early relationships:
Threat —> Oooh, Sexy —> Threat —> My Pain —> Oooh, Sexy —> Threat —> Vengeance is Mine! —> My Pain —> Oooh, Sexy —> Threat —> Vengeance is Mine! —> Oooh, Sexy
It is unnerving to recognize yourself so readily in song.
Though it is long ago now, I can still touch the fire that scorched in me at nineteen; I at once wanted validation from men and to hurt them all more than they’d wounded me. I am not certain that Teenage Me thought of men as complete human beings, replete with the complexities we all carry and try to pull apart—the taffy we spend our lives stretching. Instead, I cast men as hero-villains, as savior-foes. I felt the world at one or ten; I wouldn’t know what a safe five looked like until my late twenties.
Harvey is no five, and in its Albini’d production, “Rid of Me” staggers between whisper and scream. Those fucking poles. Remember the teenage pain of swinging between them, the torment of not knowing what a single day would bring? Remember when, above everything, you steeped in loneliness? That is “Rid of Me,” the entirety of a relationship’s best and worst moments bound in one song—a song I will never, ever tire of, though one I have to watch out for; it has the power to resurrect the worst of me, my most insecure and vengeful bits. (Yes, I know they were there to protect me; yes, I know we do whatever we must to survive. Yes, yes: trauma.) There is something so raw and private on display in “Rid of Me” that it still makes me want to lean close to a man, tuck my panties into his pocket, and murmur Lick my legs, I’m on fire before leading him to his destruction.
I don’t, of course. But the smallest bit of me wants to, my lip half curled in a smile that, if spotted, is your cue to run.
Lisa Nikolidakis’ work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, Los Angeles Review, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Passages North, The Rumpus, New Orleans Review, Gulf Coast Online, and elsewhere. She has recently completed a short-story collection and a memoir based on her Best American essay. She teaches creative writing in the Midwest. You can find her on Twitter @lisanikol or reach her through her website https://www.lisanikolidakis.com/.
THE INVISIBLE YOKE: LUCINDA BLISS ON “WOULD?”
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. —Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Alice in Chains came into my world through my friend Phil, as did the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mudhoney, Faith No More, and many other bands in the 1980s. When I met Phil, I was settling back into college, having returned after a year of playing music with the Brood and the Gorehounds in Portland, Maine. I was waitressing to pay the bills, and Phil and I overlapped through the restaurant and as DJs for WSPN. We shared a passion for garage rock and punk, and since he was a more disciplined audiophile, Phil was constantly turning me on to new music. We saw some incredible live shows in those days, including catching the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1987 gig at QE2 in Albany. Hillel Slovak was still playing guitar, and they came out with the notorious socks-on-cocks for the encore. There was hardly anyone in the club that night, but the Peppers played hard, and we were glued to the stage. A year later, they returned to a jam-packed club. By then Slovak had died of a heroin overdose, and John Frusciante had stepped in for the band’s steep ascent to fame, before retreating into his own battle with heroin. The band has since gotten clean, but not before addiction took its heavy toll. The tragic impact of drug dependence is part of music history, and for grunge, it’s part of the musical DNA.
When Phil turned me on to Alice in Chains he said, “It’s dark stuff, but I think you’ll dig it.” I remember popping the cassette into the car radio with trepidation. Some musical discoveries require contortions of the inner critic. The sexualization of women and girls was a pretty blunt exercise in the 70s and 80s, and though the fashion and attitudes of punk (Siouxsie Sioux, Exene, Nina Hagen, the Slits…), then grunge (Courtney Love, Kim Gordon, Donita Sparks…) gave women a chance to own their sexuality and their own pleasure, there were plenty of bands that continued to press play on the old stereotypes. I love the Stranglers, for example, but I remember listening to Sometimes, thinking: Damn, that’s not really open to interpretation. I mean it’s a cheating revenge song, but still, he really does want to beat the crap out of her. Not that this lyrical approach was new; the early Beatles tune Run for Your Life follows the same plot line; news flash, misogyny is a thing. Does Five Minutes, the Stranglers song about wanting to seek revenge on a rapist by beating the crap out of him balance the scale? The point is that you can’t tie it up in a neat bundle.
Back in my car, popping in the cassette, I braced my inner critic, but Alice in Chains, in spite of their name, wasn’t challenging in that way; their rage was interior and self-flagellating.
The sweaty pus orange that permeates their visual world (Dirt, Jar of Flies) evokes the lust for needles, the ooze and goo of bodies, the hazy desire to be lost, and the fury ignited by that predicament. No small part of the band’s catalogue is given to regret, loss, and to honoring the dead. Jerry Cantrell, Alice in Chains’ founder and lead guitarist, wrote songs about the loss of his tribe to addiction and overdose, along with songs about religion, war, and politics. Would was the former--a song about his friend Andy Wood, the singer from Mother Love Bone who overdosed from heroin in 1990, twelve years before Alice in Chains’ lead singer, Layne Staley, would die from a speedball overdose. Cantrell got sober a year after Staley died and in the years since has worked to support other musicians in recovery. Would might have been inspired by a specific event, but to listen to Staley and Cantrell’s gut-twisting harmonies is to feel the unique ways each of us feels trapped by the trench we’ve uniquely built for ourselves.
Across her body of writing, the philosopher-critic Julia Kristeva offers a reading of literature that’s filtered through the deep, complicated core of human experience. She peers through an analytical lens, interpreting author and reader with equal intensity. In Powers of Horror, her essay on abjection, the author links the nature of being (who am I?) with the horrors that lingers in us—the fears (and oppressions) that prevent us from becoming. Theoretical writing can illuminate our darker, more contradictory selves. It can make us feel known and seen, to be understood underneath persona. Kristeva describes how shedding light on the darker passages of literature, and of ourselves, can result in these oppressive bits being cast off, and this casting off creating a profound freedom. This notion of personal freedom located in uncensored creative expression leads right back to Alice in Chains. In “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” Hal Foster uses Kristeva’s abject to categorize a group of 20th century visual artists who use grotesque imagery in an attempt to get at something real. Foster uses the progression of Cindy Sherman’s work, from the film stills to her later photographs, as an example. In the late work, Sherman uses the vocabulary of horror: images of rot and decay, demented clowns, and highly dramatized, mannequin-like figures reduced to pimpled butts. The work is disgusting and repellent, and in fueling our revulsion, Foster makes the case that it does its work. Though more stylized, the experience of listening to Alice in Chains (and punk and grunge in general) plays in this same field. Death and isolation lurk in the subconscious with all the piss, shit, cum, blood, mucus, and bacteria that we are host to, no matter how much we try to sanitize. Giving voice to transgressions of propriety, taste, and of our actual physical bodies is mesmerizing, and it has the potential to crack the shell of our fictions.
I remember sitting on a porch swing with my mother—I must have been in second grade. I was sobbing because I had just gotten death. My mother had acknowledged that I too would someday die, and I felt emptied out by the tragedy and expanse of it. I can still feel that realization in my heart--that there are things we can’t know. We carry death--the fact that our time is limited--like an invisible yoke. Sometimes we pretend it’s not there, sometimes it drives us to create, and sometimes the weight is more than we can handle. Music (creative work) can inspire us to feel what we can’t or won’t acknowledge in our conscious minds, and the result is catharsis. I am at risk of tying things up too neatly, and there is nothing neat and tidy about it. Perhaps it’s enough to express gratitude to Alice in Chains and all the complicated rockers and artists who make us feel beyond our (and their) knowing.
Lucinda Bliss is an artist and writer from New England. She is currently engaged in a project exploring history, genealogy, and narratives of privilege and oppression with the Stanley Whitman House in Farmington, CT. Bliss’s drawings, installations, and mixed media works have been exhibited at venues including the Boston Center for the Arts, Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Whitney Art Works, Aucocisco, Bates College Museum of Art, and the Tucson Museum of Art, among others. Documentation of selected projects, along with her blog on art and running, can be found on her website. Bliss currently serves as Dean of Graduate Studies at MassArt. Instagram connect @blisspix.