the second round

(3) beck, “loser”
dulled
(5) collective soul, “shine”
485-249
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 13.

Jessica Handler on “loser”

Here’s what happens when you agree to write about a song you haven’t been able to get out of your head in twenty-six years. You freeze. You wonder why the song’s been a squatter in your mind for so long, changing locations in your memory but never packing up and leaving. 
“Loser” is an earworm. It’s indestructible, a mental cypher that must be given its due.
Some things that have happened in the two and half decades since “Loser” was a hit; you quit being a television producer, and after giving up on a few choice alternative career attempts became a very good college professor, although back in the day you hated nearly every minute of college and briefly quit that, too. You quit a three-pack a day cigarette habit, grounded your frequent-flyer level recreational drug use, were shamed into getting new front teeth. You married someone actually nice, who didn’t make you cry or break things. You went to graduate school, wrote three books. Forgot how to play guitar, but learned to play drums. Your hair began to gray. You acknowledged that you are fragile.
And you think about how, in 1994, you laughed in the face of soy en perdedor because you knew that the message in the lyric’s in-your-face defiance was true.
     The year that “Loser” was everywhere on the radio, with the lyrics kill the headlights and put it in neutral, I did just that, driving home from my local after having had my usual too much to drink. My gut reaction to the blue lights gaining on me in my rearview mirror was to gun the accelerator and outrun the cops. I killed my headlights, put the car in neutral, and let physics hurtle my Honda Civic up my driveway. And there I sat in total darkness, engine off, as the blue lights sped down my street in pursuit of nothing. I was stupid and lucky and I knew it. Soy un perdedo.
Beck’s first hit went to #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart in 1994. [1] The single was certified Gold that year, and the song continues to hold a place on alternative playlists. That bouncy, goofy, rubber-band boing sound of the tremolo guitar is relentlessly catchy, the number-one character trait for an earworm. The lyrics tumble together in nonsense clusters. Spray paint the vegetables. Beefcake pantyhose. Burnin’ down the trailer park. Fun to say, those bizarre phrases rolling around my mouth like marbles. Fun to bop along, to wait and hold for the pause just before the chorus, and launch back in..
It's not his best song.
Looking now at a video recording of a performance on BBC’s Top of the Pops from 1994, a sitar player who’s a dead ringer for a garden gnome sits stage right, playing the hypnotic, slightly weird to the Western-ear notes. The sound threads through the song’s signature drum and slide guitar, stomping out a hypnotic nod. Center stage, Beck looks nervous and very young. He seems to have a zit on his chin. The dancing crowd, a la “American Bandstand” explodes into cheers at the refrain, Soy en perdedo/I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me. The musicians are playing to track, professionally miming to a recording. During the spoken-word audio clip before the last chorus, Beck gamely and somewhat awkwardly tumbles to the floor and briefly breakdances.
The chorus is a chant, its repetition a reassurance, words in Spanish then English (with the first-year German class question, “speaking German?” thrown into the final chorus), its arrival a relief after the pause—a fermata? caesura?—at the end of the lyric line. (Perhaps, in the spirit of the song’s relentless wordplay, I could call that pause a “stigmata.”)
The year I sang along to Loser was two years after my beloved youngest sister died of a congenital illness that had lurked in her, like the forces of evil in a Bozo nightmare, since her birth. Our other sister was two decades dead of a childhood cancer. I had become the only one left, estranged from our abusive and mentally ill father, clinging emotionally to my intrepid mother, and burning off my days and nights churning on the hamster wheel of a cruel and demanding job in which I was required to shoulder everyone’s troubles but my own. In doing so, I was trying to prove myself immune to the relentless destruction taking my family down.
In the official music video for “Loser,” Beck or someone like him appears to drag a casket on a rope before it scoots along on its own power. A death’s head mask waves into a car windshield, and solarized cheerleaders dance in a cemetery.
The c’mon and dare-me sarcasm in the chorus lyric obscured something real, an in-joke for the grim. Sarcasm, doing its job. Beck told Allen Ginsburg in a 1997 interview in Shambala Sun that the irony in the song “isn’t obvious to everybody.” [2] Beck also discounted the idea that “Loser” is a slacker’s anthem. [3] The slacker’s unwritten creed advocated conspicuous underachievement as the pinnacle of cool. For me, hyperachievement was the Butane in my veins. My first taste of Châteauneuf du Pape occurred in first class on a flight from Miami to Rio de Janeiro, courtesy of my media conglomerate employer. That was me with acrylic nails and a designer shorts-suit (bought at a discount at Loehmann’s) on the way to weeks of deadline-driven celebrity-wrangling-in-a-hotel-ballroom-makeshift-newsroom (this is Beck-level linguistic phrasing, now that I think of it.) That was where a very pissed off Senator from Tennessee inconveniently and untruthfully bawled me out for not booking him on a television show, and I later found myself waylaid at U.S Customs because I honestly did not know what was in the suitcases I was carrying for my gone-to-find-herself-in-the-jungle media personality boss. No one ever did find the sandwich bag of pot in my own garment bag, so I guess I do get some slacker cred there after all.
Someone keeps saying I’m insane to complain. I fought every day to prove to myself, to the world around me because I was a woman in a job usually held by men, to my parents, to my sisters’ legacies that I was no loser. I was indestructible. Nothing would make me fail. And so, I bounced along to “Loser,” the sunny repetitive sound absorbing my own anger and loss. Overwhelmed by life and work and barely past thirty, I courted risk on a daily basis. The song was an extended middle finger to the world, a “fuck you” obscured by a smile. My survival was my defiance.
Earworms don’t spring sui generis like Athena from the head of Zeus. “Loser” has musical parents. The drum track & the slide guitar are call backs to Dr. John’s “I Walk on Gilded Splinters,” although the tempo is hopped up in a big way. Humble Pie covered the Dr. John tune, so did swamp rocker Johnny Jenkins.  
     The lyrics are nonsense rhymes, white-boy rapping, images of destruction and recklessness. The song is pop because it’s fun, but it’s grunge because it’s sarcastic. If grunge was what Rolling Stone magazine tried to codify as a “hybrid of hard rock, metal and punk (with a sprinkle of Neil Young…),” [4] seventies rock—Led Zeppelin, Neil Young—are grunge’s great-grandparents. Bass and tom-heavy drumbeat meets distorted guitars, and emotion is born. The 1970s have an imprint on Beck, or he on them, retroactively. Beck was, for a while, married to Marissa Ribisi, who appeared in the film Dazed and Confused. That film is about a high school graduation weekend in the 1970s, and launched the career of Matthew McConaughey as a fading high school swain aging into—you guessed it—a clueless loser. This connection to the song is spurious at best: Beck wasn’t married to Ribisi when he wrote “Loser” in 1991, although Dazed and Confused came out in 1993.
… time is a piece of wax fallin' on a termite. Seventies rock is the music that delivered me into alt-punk and grunge, which screamed of indestructibility, flailed against fragility, and gave voice to my anger, my sorrow, my fear. My ability to love. And that what was indestructible, it turned out. That’s what waited, like a squatter in my mind, for me to welcome it home. The nineties me who deliberately broke someone’s finger in a handshake, who threw a stapler at a co-worker, whose workday was not complete until I had made someone cry, understood that just singing along to “Loser” was a secret admission that I could fail. But a slacker fails with bravado. Me? I was chokin’ on the splinters.
That pause before the chorus in Loser, the fermata, caesura, stigmata, it’s a thrill, though. A pause like that mimics a bounce on a diving board before soaring, cutting the water, emerging in the sunlight. A pause like that is the same as watching the turning rope in Double Dutch, watching the arc above and knowing exactly when and how to step in, challenging the moving rope, and jumping out, victorious. The music after a pause like that courts risk and grabs defiance by surviving the dive, the jump rope, the job, the losses. The sound coming back from that silence is a release into the joy of being alive. The cheerleaders are no longer solarized, the singer walks into the sun.
Like “Loser,” I’ve grown another twenty-six years, and I’m still in heavy rotation.

[1] So says Vulture magazine. https://www.vulture.com/2014/02/dave-holmes-modern-rock-hits-1994-beck-loser.html . Even after working as the music coordinator on  the television show “Name that Tune” in the 1980s, I can’t figure out the Billboard charts. Give me a Phonolog Reports any day.

[2] See Woodworth, “How to Write About Music,” pages 134 & 135, “Allen Ginsberg with Beck: A Beat/Slacker Transgenerational Meeting of the Minds.”

[3] Rolling Stone, un-ironically elevating Slackers

[4] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/50-greatest-grunge-albums-798851/  (And the very fact that Rolling Stone answers this question takes the outré out of grunge.)

Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Booksellers’ Association “Okra” Pick. Her memoir Invisible Sisters was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. She teaches creative writing and directs the Minor in Writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing.

THIS KID I KNEW: TUCKER LEIGHTY-PHILLIPS ON “SHINE”

This kid I knew played basketball at the end of his street.
There was a basketball goal there, at the end of his street. The goal did not have a backboard, and the goal leaned forward a little bit, like it had a bad back and was lurching. You had to be careful while shooting at this basketball goal, because there was no backboard. If you shot too hard, too far over the goal, you’d shoot past it, and have to pull the ball from the hedges, which were tall.
But there was a net, and it made a satisfying swish when you shot the ball just right.
This kid I knew was learning to shoot the ball just right.
Square the elbows, complete the follow through.
This kid I knew always wanted to be an athlete. He wanted to swish in a game, in a college game, for the Kentucky Wildcats. In the kid’s fantasies, he wasn’t the sixth man, more like the tenth man, a walk-on player. Someone given a chance in garbage time. He was from Appalachia, where even in his dreams he was asked to bootstrap. This kid shot free throws at the goal at the end of his street and pretended they were important free throws for the Kentucky Wildcats. He was making an appearance off the bench in a conference game. He had a system. If he hit a certain number in a row, Kentucky won. If he missed, Kentucky lost. There was a heaviness on his shoulders.
Also on the block was a neighbor, a woman who claimed to see angels in old photographs. She would invite this kid I knew into the house by offering him a Pepsi, which this kid’s mother never bought, and she’d have shoeboxes of pictures across her kitchen table. Look, do you see him? the neighbor would ask, pointing at the background of an old family photo, an easter lunch or a day after church. She had named the angels, each after her many uncles. She was the only one who saw them in the photos, but he couldn’t tell her that.
This kid I knew didn’t just love sports, he loved the aesthetics of sports. He wanted to pitch in the majors, but also wanted to sit in the dugout, ice pack resting on his arm. He wanted to make a crucial save as a goalkeeper, but he also wanted to shout instructions at defenders, to motion them into better positions. He wanted to sidewalk slam his opponents like Kane, but he also wanted to enter the ring like him, adjusting his glove as he strutted. This kid I knew appreciated theatrics, the performances within performances. He mimicked the slapping of high fives between free throws.
One year, this kid’s school had thirty-two bomb threats. At some point, students realized they were a prank phone call away from a waltz to the football field, a reimagined recess. There must have been fifteen kids cycling through making the calls, a secret network of break-makers.
With his first paycheck, This kid I knew spent eighty dollars on used CDs at On Cue, which was what Sam Goody was called before it became FYE, before it went out of business. He bought Dylan, The Specials, AFI, Collective Soul. He burnt them to his computer. He put them on his first MP3 player. The full albums, not just the hits. He believed in the sequence of things, liked believing in numbers, that adding and subtracting made sense. He created a game with his baseball cards where players competed against one another through a competition of compared statistics. The game relied on numbers. Without them, there was no game. Sometimes you can play without a backboard, but you can’t play without a backbone.
This kid I knew was simultaneously desensitized and untouched by the outside world. He was a ten-year-old during 9/11, watching the news at school, thinking this is what happens in the world. He was taught to assume the war.
This kid I knew believed every alarm or warning or siren was just that: a threat. The things on the news were just programming. He couldn’t imagine violence that wasn’t telecast. He grew up in a small town. He heard a guy was shot at the root beer stand once. Actually, that might have happened after all this. Most of the pain he knew, at least the action-packed pain, shootings and car crashes and knifings, he saw on television. He knew about the slow-burn pain, drug addiction and poverty and hunger, he even felt some of it, but that wasn’t televised pain. He had been taught that all these pains were natural, inevitable. What could he do about what happened on the TV?
There was a shooting at a college campus, he saw it on television, but this didn’t feel like television pain. This felt closer. He wasn’t a college student, and he wasn’t planning on going to college, but he was in high school, dreaming dreams of playing basketball in college, even if he didn’t play basketball for high school, or anywhere for that matter, since his stepdad couldn’t give him rides to tryouts, though he’d tried once; he’d driven him halfway to the gymnasium before pulling into a Save-A-Lot and saying, we won’t be able to give you rides, you know, maybe we should just turn around. This kid I knew was at the basketball goal without a backboard thinking about pain, about pain that wasn’t his but felt like his because he was a number added to a much larger number, and people in that number had been subtracted. Some in that number had been failed.

This kid I knew watched the news, dialed up the internet and read the news, found message boards and read those.
This kid I knew loved Collective Soul. But so did this kid I didn’t know. So did this kid that did this terrible thing, that shooting on campus. He listened to Shine on repeat, scribbled the lyrics onto surfaces in his dorm room, searched it for a message.
This kid I knew couldn’t listen to that song for a while, fearing what he might find.

This kid I knew wanted to help, but didn’t know how. What could a kid in the holler offer anyone who had felt real pain? He had no idea; then he had one idea. He’d shoot free throws for the college. For every free throw he made, he’d donate a dollar to the university. He didn’t know anything about charities or NGOs and didn’t really have any money in the first place, but he wanted to help, to find a way to contribute, to provide numbers that added to a great cause, to make sense of something unsensible.
He was fifteen. His heart was in the right place, his mother said, but there wasn’t much he could do. So he shot free throws anyway, just to have some sense of equilibrium. The sound of the swish was soothing. Angel Neighbor hollered at him from her front door. She wanted to give him a Pepsi, which was her way of saying she wanted him to look at her angels. This kid’s mother had been fighting with Angel Neighbor. She believed Angel Neighbor was stealing her mail. She angled a video camera at the mailbox to catch her. Angel Neighbor had been mowing into their front lawn, four long stripes on the other side of the hedges, claiming she’d found blueprints that showed it was her property. This kid’s lawn was always half-mowed, his mother racing to complete what Angel Neighbor started so the block didn’t gossip. But she said she had the blueprints, blueprints only she could see. This kid’s mother didn’t want this kid to spend anymore time with Angel Neighbor, but this kid was too nice to say no.

Angel Neighbor was watching the news about the shooting. A man in a suit from the college was talking about tragedy. On the crawler was a statement from Collective Soul, who were heartbroken about the tragedy. This kid sat at the table with his neighbor, looking for angels, trying not to think about the tragedy. Angel Neighbor smiled as she pointed to photographs, telling him each of the angel’s names. Each one an uncle. He squinted over each picture, scanning the shadows and glares of light in the background, trying to catch a glimpse.

Tucker Leighty-Phillips is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky. His website is TuckerLP.net. He was never a walk-on for the Kentucky Wildcats, but likes his odds this season.