the second round

(2) the breeders, “cannonball”
splashed
(7) flaming lips, “she don’t use jelly”
412-103
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 17.

One Long Splash: Susan Briante on “cannonball”

Most articles about the Breeders include an image of the Melody Maker cover from December 1993 featuring Kurt Cobain and Kim Deal. Cobain sneers. Deal looks like she’s exhaling from a long drag. The tinsel wrapped around their shoulders and necks seems oh-so-Gen-X ironic. The holiday greetings are beside the point, the image provides a quick reference to star power these two anti-stars commanded that December.

In June 1993 The Breeders released “Cannonball,” the first single from their sophomore album Last Splash. It quickly became a grunge-pop anthem (named song of the year in 1993 by Melody Maker and NME) with a delicious and bubbling baseline, lifeguard whistle, layers of guitar distortion, girl-group harmonies and a nearly indecipherable chorus (“Want you coocoo cannonball,” according to Lyrics.com). The song opens with a deft mix of whatever was on hand sounds: Kim Deal yells “Check, Check, One, Two” into a distorted mic, and Jim Macpherson taps out a frantic little rhythm on a snare rim and cymbal stand. From there on in its loud and soft, polished and rough, clear and smeared and nothing but fun. The video (directed by Spike Jonze and Kim Gordon) shares in the delirium: a cannon ball rolls and bounces down sunny streets, Kim Deal alternates between singing at the mic and into a bowl of water. There are mirrors and costumes, deadpan expressions and joyful horseplay between Kim and her twin sister Kelley, the Breeder’s other vocalist and guitarist.
But nothing in that moment is as light-hearted as it seems. By 1994, Kelley Deal would be arrested for heroin possession and end up in rehab. Kim would battle with drugs and alcoholism. The Breeders would not release their next album until 2002 without Macpherson or The Last Splash bassist Josephine Wiggs. And, of course, four months after the Melody Maker cover Kurt Cobain would be dead.

At its worst, grunge can be moody as fuck and kind of lame in the way it takes itself too seriously. Writing in the midst of a pandemic, in the wake of a white supremacist attempt at insurrection and during the worst economy since the Great Depression, it’s hard for me to remember why my generation was so angry and sad. Reading interviews from the time doesn’t help. “It’s not fair that folk singers preach a happy message and the goodness of living off the land and ‘if I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning.’ That doesn’t exist,” Kim Deal told Rolling Stone in 1994. “…When I grew up and went to Sunday school, they said that it was going to be really great, and God is love, and God is good. I believed everything everybody told me. And that’s why I’m so pissed off now….”
“I just thought it was gonna be better,” she said. “Just . . . life. I thought it was gonna be better.”
At the time Deal registered her complaint, she had been playing and touring for 8 years as the bassist for The Pixies. The Breeders started out as a side project but became her main gig when The Pixies split up. The Breeders opened for Nirvana, rose in the charts and fell into their own drama and addictions. By the mid-90s, Deal was blacking out on stage.
And yet, despite of all the rage, melancholy, and self-destruction, The Breeders’ music could always take you someplace else. That’s what makes “Cannonball,” an infectiously catchy song that croons and sneers, distorts and harmonizes, so great. Like the Breeders, the tune starts, interrupts itself, stops, and comes together finally in an undeniably pleasurable way. Even now, how can you listen to it and not want to shake your ass or grab your skateboard or fling yourself into a thrashing crowd in front of a stage?

Despite all of their stops and starts, the Breeders with the Deal sisters at their center never died, although they went through various iterations and long stretches between albums. A Dutch documentary on the group (The Real Deal) features the 2002 incarnation of the band playing “Cannonball” before the barred windows of a stucco home. They perform at what looks like a yard party with people milling around and drinking beer in the background. There’s no riff on the drum rim to open the song. Kim plays an electric instead of an acoustic guitar. This version feels a little leaner and maybe a little slower as Kim sings squinting into the sun. As the documentary continues, the band (which at the time included bass player Mando Lopez, drummer Jose Mendeles, and guitarist John Presley) walks the East LA neighborhood where they live, buying treats from an ice cream truck, listening to a street corner mariachi band. In other scenes, Kelley knits, Kim gets high and beads. The Deals have always had a kind of I-don’t-give-a-fuck swagger. Kim used to the cover her grays with shoe polish. One commentator from The Pixies documentary Gouge, recounts seeing her slick back her hair before going on stage by rubbing her hands on a ham slice from a green room buffet. In The Real Deal, that attitude is on full display. The Deal twins smoke too many cigarettes and walk on the railroad tracks. They finish each other’s sentences. Kelley braids Kim’s hair in a gloomy house. “I struggle with staying sober,” Kelley says. “I don’t drink or smoke pot. I miss the narcotics. I only relapse on heroin.” By this time grunge has given way to something else. When Kim sings “Off You,” the first single from the band’s album Title TK, you get the sense that band is moving right along with whatever that is.
And they’ve kept moving.

That Melody Maker cover from 1993 displays all the antifashion and screw-you power of the moment: the mismatched, thrift store clothes; the irreverent cover models. (“Advertising looks and chops a must!” Stephen Malkmus screams on Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair” in another kind of anthem of the moment.) But antifashion became fashion; the 1994 Rolling Stone article on the Breeders describes in detail the Deal sisters’ sartorial choices. The reporter notes Kim’s “clunky J. Crew luggers, which she buys in a men’s size” and Kelley’s “black, ragged Florsheim ankle boots, one of which has duct tape wrapped around it to keep the sole from flopping open.” By then all of it—the style and the music—had become just another commodity. And maybe that in and of itself would have been enough to depress any young artist.
I was a moody-as-fuck kid when I begged my mother to buy me a pair of Doc Marten boots for my birthday circa 1994. I wore them with sundresses and cardigans as I walked the streets of Mexico City where I studied, translated for an art magazine, and lived for a good part of the 1990s. At the time, I was no more articulate than Kim Deal about what was so overwhelmingly rotten about the world I was growing up into, even with all of my considerable privilege and good fortune. Despite my initial dismissals (see section 2, above), life in the 90s was as violent and unjust as it anything facing us today: the Gulf War, the Bosnia war, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, the brutal beating of Rodney King, the LA uprisings, NAFTA—the continuation of so much of that foundational evil that dogs us now.
I still have those Doc Martens. They’ve come in handy over the last 30 years substituting for work, snow, or hiking boots. Although they are back in fashion, I wear them because they feel more comfortable than most of my shoes on the days when I park my car in a neighborhood adjacent the university where I work and walk a mile to my office to avoid paying for parking.
The Breeders are back in fashion, too. When The Last Splash line up reunited to record a new album, All Nerve, in 2018, The New York Times, the New Yorker and the Guardian wrote pieces hailing the band’s return. Still, they are no longer the center of any music universe.
The Deals have moved back to their hometown of Dayton, Ohio, to help care for their mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s. Kim lives down the street from her parents. Kelley lives only a few blocks away as does Macpherson, who keeps a day job as a carpenter. When they began recording the latest album, Wiggs left her Brooklyn apartment to live in Kim’s attic. Speaking to The Guardian, Kim remarked “…just look outside my window… Nothing. Nobody recognizes us or knows us at all.” Being where you need to be or where you can be useful, doing what you want to do without the approval of an industry—there’s something that feels authentically grunge about that to me.
Journalists no longer comment on what the Deals are wearing, but they look great. In an appearance on Later…with Jools Holland the band plays a tight and fun version of “Cannonball.” Wiggs looks like a hip grad school professor. Kelley’s face shows the beautiful lines of a woman in her 50s who hasn’t been Botox-ed, filled, or tucked. You can see the age in Kim’s face as well as she screams and smiles and blows into a lifeguard whistle. It might be stage lights, but it might also be shoe polish that leaves her hair with a kind of sheen.

An earlier version of this essay incorrectly stated that the Deals returned to Akron instead of their hometown of Dayton, OH. WTF, says the author, who is embarrassed about the mistake. But perhaps fucking up is as grunge as it can get.

Susan Briante is the author, most recently, of Defacing the Monument. She lives and works in Tucson, AZ.

MAYBE WE JUST NEEDED A BREAK, ALREADY: LINDA MICHEL-CASSIDY ON "SHE DON'T USE JELLY"

The Flaming Lips were around in various lineups, as bands tend to be, for a solid decade before their one and only Billboard hit, "She Don't Use Jelly" hit the charts in February of 1995, peaking at #55. The song had come out two years prior, on their sixth album, Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, the single only breaching the surface of popular culture's collective consciousness when it appeared on Beavis and Butthead. Produced by MTV, the cartoon-meets-music criticism show, in a roundabout potty-humor way, brought a lot of lesser-known bands into the public sphere. Jelly was boosted further when it appeared (prepare yourself, reader) on the televised teen melodrama Beverly Hills 90210, during which the purported teen heartthrob, Steve, played by a pre-Sharknado Ian Ziering, uttered the important verdict, "I don't usually like alternative music but those guys rock."
I saw The Lips in the late 1980s, I believe in LA, maybe with the Butthole Surfers, or maybe with X. Going was not my idea, but I probably had a good time [1]. I had friends in music-adjacent jobs, managers, entertainment lawyers, critics, a DJ I would eventually marry, and would happily take any tickets I was offered. That I don't recall the concert says more about me than the band.
Amidst the undiscernible angsty and scrimpish sea of grunge, The Flaming Lips were and continue to be a maximalist fantasia. By 1995, under the direction of Wayne Coyne, they brought extravagance and joy into a moment when much of music considered forward-thinking denied the possibility of whimsy. Coyne, adept across media, later went on to make art films, installations, and now lives in a compound that's a sort of Matthew Barney-meets-the human heart exhibit you can walk through-meets-Earthship art project, but with brighter colors. This is not to say there wasn't levity afoot, as proven by the likes of chartmates Boys II Men and Hootie and the Blowfish. But, you know, there's the good lite, and there's the bad. The Lips' "She Don't Use Jelly" fell right into the great chasm between misery and pop. Grunge was starting to look like anti-effort, and pop was moving towards stylistically and technically manufactured confection. The Lips offered an alternative without bruises, and accessibility without pablum.
There has been much talk about the meaning of the lyrics of Jelly. Opinions range from: they mean nothing­­—they're just for fun, to: sex, masturbation, and drugs. Many specific and lengthy Reddit posts elaborate what sex and which drugs, apparently written by boys who know little of either. Coyne answers differently every time he is interviewed. Going into this, I did have questions, but found Coyne's cheery art-speaky non-answers savvy and enough. Which say: relax, engage, it is whatever you think it is.
Let us begin.

I know a girl who thinks of ghosts
She'll make ya breakfast
She'll make ya toast
But she don't use butter
And she don't use cheese
She don't use jelly
Or any of these
She uses Vaseline
Vaseline
Vaseline

Obviously, it's the word "Vaseline" that got the Reddit boys going on their lengthy discourse about personal lubricants. Here and there, they offer some conjecture around the fact that Vaseline is chemically similar to some butter substitutes. The top of the stanza has some basic rhymes, and when we get further down, it is likely that Vaseline's main import is to set up later rhymes. No one ever talks about the first line, "I know a girl who thinks of ghosts," which I find charming, and unlike the rest of the stanza. The series vibes like a modern-day limerick: catchy, maybe a little bawdy. Possibly more about sound than anything else.

And I know a guy who goes to shows
When he's at home and he blows his nose
He don't use tissues or his sleeve
He don't use napkins or any of these
He uses magazines
Magazines
Magazines
Magazines

In a variety of maneuvers, the Reddit boys link the above stanza to cocaine (blow) and masturbation (blow, again, and they are positive the magazines are porn). A stretch? Perhaps.

I know a girl who reminds me of Cher
She's always changing
The color of her hair
She don't use nothing
That ya buy at the store
She likes her hair to be real orange
She uses tangerines
Tangerines
Tangerines
Tangerines
Tangerines
Tangerines

Bypassing the battle over whether hair can be dyed with fruit, let's look at these rhymes. In my opinion, the song exists as a vehicle for Vaseline, magazines, and tangerines. That is its job, and it does it well. These stanzas are little character studies encased in goofy, slant, and straight-up direct rhymes. It feels like productive play to me, calling up Edward Lear's nonsense poems. Maybe a runcible spoon is a spork, and maybe it isn't.
     In stanza #3, we have a bit of curious going on. The first four lines rhyme ABAB directly (depending on how you pronounce "Cher") and then #5 and 6 rhyme very slantily as orchestrated:

That ya buy at the stORE
She likes her hair to be real OR(ange) 

In the versions I found, a cymbal crash cuts off the "ange" of "orange, thus manhandling it into a rhyme. Besides dispelling the myth that nothing rhymes with orange, this move demands the listener relax and let the song roll on by. No need to get all literal [2]. Given how heavily rhymed the song is, and how colloquial some of the language is, The Lips also could have taken advantage of the varied regional pronunciation of "orange," [3] which includes (as a last pick, but still) the single-syllabic slide, "OARnge," the chosen pronunciation of my people. Did I call folks from different regions of the US to verify? You bet I did. Are there some small arguments going on in my house right now about the legitimacy of the rhyme? Of course, there are [4].
The Flaming Lips would go on to stranger, larger, and more experimental projects, such as their concept album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. "She Don't Use Jelly" was just a warm-up, and likely would not have even made the charts without the assistance of Beavis and Butt-head. Still, it landed, albeit belatedly, in a way that the band could broaden their audience, which afforded them the space to continue to experiment. The thing I like about The Flaming Lips is that they are never not reaching. They don't remind me of anything else, and if they do, it isn't music, but a book, or an immersive art installation, or some weird Dadaist play I might have seen in a basement of a not-yet-converted warehouse. While surely not their best work, "She Don't Use Jelly" sits on the short end of the Flaming Lips' ever-expanding cone of the splendiferous.
Soon, in the town that birthed The Lips, we'd have the Oklahoma City bombing, which, along with the O.J. Simpson trial, would dominate the national consciousness for most of the year. Maybe the music-listening world, even the "alternative" factions, wanted a loosening, some respite. Grunge was closing in on itself in many ways, and when it hit the mainstream, it lost some of its low-down charm (Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis Grunge Collection 1992, I'm looking at you). The YouTube comments—my favorite music criticism format—to mid-1990s to current videos of the song reminded me of the pleasure uncomplicated music gives us.

"This might be the least weird thing that the Flaming Lips put out, and that's saying          something." (tonecot89)

"I love how this song isn't about anything at all, it's just fun." (Justin Y.)

"great song but you can definitely buy tangerines at a store" (Norumbega Man)

Is "She Don't Use Jelly" a masterpiece? No, not even close. Is the performance transformative? It's fine. But does it hold up? It seems to, in that group feelgood kind of way, where everyone at the concert knows the words, and will rage on just the right beat (in the case of this song, the moment the cymbals slice "orange" in two). More importantly, it is its own thing. It doesn't remind me of anything else and it has room for the imagination. It is whatever the listener needs it to be.
Further evidence that The Flaming Lips just wanna have fun (but also might be clairvoyant) is their continuing use of giant bubbles. Wayne Coyne has, in the recent past, floated over the audience in one. In 2019, he got married in one. And now, as we navigate how to be together alone, The Lips held a concert where the band and an audience were each encased in individual personal bubbles. Is this tempting to me? Not at all, but I imagine it was lovely.

[1] I will not be answering any questions at this time.

[2] Yes, apocopated rhyme. I know.

[3] Have at it, regional dialect nerds: https://www.giantbomb.com/orange/3055-510/forums/is-orange-one-or-two-syllables-393183/

[4] And this comic, circa the same time. Hmmm. https://rhymeswithorange.com/about

Linda Michel-Cassidy lives on a houseboat near San Francisco. She is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, teaches, and is fond of experiments. True to form, she is wallowing in several projects. Writing at lmichelcassidy.com