the second round

(3) the cranberries, “zombie”
OUTLASTED
(14) bikini kill, ”rebel girl”
496-492
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 15.

“ZOMBIE,” GOATS, AND COMING UP FOR AIR: MAYA C. POPA ON “ZOMBIE”

At thirteen, the irrefutably coolest member of my friend group went grunge, and it became necessary for all of life to be inflected through the fact; slowly at first, courtesy of a spiralbound notebook scribbled in Sharpie, and culminating in the purchase of a pair of UFO pants donned in high summer on the beaches of Montauk while eating lemon ice cream served out of a frozen lemon.
As my parents smiled good-naturedly over their matching gazpachos, quietly swallowing their disappointment that their only offspring had the looks of Samara Morgan and the personality of a nursery schoolteacher, I clutched my grenade of porous yellow and relayed the events of that afternoon. I’d been introduced to a new song, the song, a vintage song released a decade prior—maybe my parents had heard of it when they weren’t busy being criminally dull. I plugged a first-generation iPod into primitive portable speakers and played “Zombie” on loop until the battery gave out. It was the sort of song, I reasoned, even they, normal pant-wearing types, could appreciate. So universal was its suffering, and it mentioned 1916, which was more or less their childhoods.
“Zombie” is a protest song by the Irish alternative rock band The Cranberries written during a period of Irish national conflict called, rather literally, The Troubles. Few calamaties carry the sting of civil war which The Troubles, a 30-year low-grade fever of ethno-nationalist struggle and dissent, very narrowly avoided. “Zombie” is a song about violence that, in the way of all good mimetic fallacy, is relentlessly circuitous on its journey back to chorus. It succeeds heartily at that compressed, claustrophobic effect, and is therefore wildly irritating unless you’ve expressly ordered it, like that one time a year you crave the dish you loathed in childhood but would pay $34.99 for a chef to reimagine in a seasonal reduction. It is full of pathos and unapologetically anthemic, made even more so by its message—1916 says it all…sort of. My friends and I spent the eighth grade convinced it was a song about World War I, not the 1916 Irish insurrection known as the Easter Rising which killed thousands over the course of a week, and led to the founding of the Republic of Ireland. We cut Dolores slack on the dates, which according to the principles of eyeliner, could be smudged. And we sustained this conviction without hint of self-scrutiny, which was another delightful part of being young.  
On the subject of things we took for granted—metabolisms that could withstand spectacular quantities of sugar, boys and their comically elaborate advances, the very idea of sleeping in—what strikes me now is how cruel and petty we often were towards one another, this, perhaps among the only forms of naivety one gains with age. How could we be the little shits we were? is more or less the question as we spoke our mercurial, half-baked truths to each other’s faces, mascara steadily running from a string of unnecessary confessions.
Nothing felt quite in balance those years, though nothing felt expressly perilous either. Now, days organized around modalities of health and wellness founder, despite our best efforts, on an undercurrent of demise. If this won’t kill you, that will. And that, perhaps, is the greatest distinction between what runs in the blood at 13 versus at 32; that early, misplaced nihilism before you’ve learned the term for it is the purest form of verve and faith in the world.
“Zombie” draws its devastating charm from the chorus in which O’Riordan—a very fine musician—bleats, for there is no other verb, the word “zombie,” the ending vowel elided so as to sound like “bay” or “baah,” the approximate sound of goat speech. A bold choice, and one that time has rendered apocryphal: no one begins singing “Zombie” for any other reason than that a sudden noise, mechanical or otherwise, has brought the chorus to mind. Suddenly, you’re back in a friend’s basement dying your hair Cream of Raven and looking up GIFs of the anarchist symbol to draw on your wrist.
There is, of course, a goat edition of the song in which the music video has been superimposed with footage of actual goats bleating, because: the internet:

But I would now like to tell you a story about goats.
In 1905, a Scottish physiologist named John Scott Haldane was commissioned by the British Royal Navy to solve a curious problem. English divers were resurfacing with a fatal illness. Autopsies performed revealed bubbles in major organs, as though their very blood had turned effervescent.
And so Haldane, a character to be certain, and one whose family motto was “suffer,” was called to work out a set of principles for safe, staged decompression. The ailment never struck divers who stayed above 33 feet, so it was merely a matter of determining at what rate to acclimate divers to changes of air pressure. Haldane had a penchant for practical experimentation; he once entombed himself in order to record the physiological effects of asphyxiation.
For this particular experiment, however, he used goats.
85 goats were gathered in London. In groups of eight, they were placed inside chambers whose air was compressed then normalized at different rates. They were subsequently released into the yard and observed.
Now, I admit the image of a herd of goats stumbling about on a makeshift pasture while a line of humorless scientists document their symptoms—stiff legs, crossed eyes, weakness on one side of the haunch—is rather droll. A part of me is even tempted by the obvious “zombie goats” joke. It’s there, and a different writer could stick the landing.
Instead, I see white lab coats flapping in the wind. I hear the shallow breaths of young men in decompression chambers, nicknamed “diver’s ovens,” as they await a cure for what usually killed. I think of how the illness is colloquially called the bends because its afflicted bend over as nitrogen wrecks havoc on joints and muscles, leaving the heart frothing.
I think of how only one out of the 85 goats survived to the end of the experiment.
I will never go scuba diving because I would have to tell the young captain how the mechanism of decompression was devised, and he would smile tolerantly, shielded by the vigor of his youth. Or else, he might ask a follow-up question, and I would have to face yet again how pathetic and soft I am, how difficult it is for me to bear even what is meant to be a happy tale of progress when I am still not over mourning the 84 goats sacrificed to this twisted art.
“It’s the same old theme since 1916,” O’Riordan sings, landing a perfect rhyme. It’s the same old theme since the cave paintings, Homer, the Old Testament. What is less obvious is the violence synonymous with progress, the discomfiting reality that those same advancements that allowed a navy to maintain its edge on the brink of catastrophic world wars makes it possible for vacationers to misidentify tropical fish—the scientific violence inseparable from human progress. Is there a distorted electric guitar riff that captures the ways we hurt each other in the name of the future?
Are there any anthems for that?

Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith (Sarabande 2019) winner of the 2020 North American Book Prize. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. Her writing appears in The Paris Review, TLS, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, writing on the literary role of wonder.

When She Talks I Hear the Revolution: Emily Mills on “rebel girl”

That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood
She's got the hottest trike in town
That girl, she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah

By the time I first heard “Rebel Girl,” Bikini Kill had just broken up. It was 1997 and I was a 15-year-old awkward tomboy who wore Snoopy shirts and played drums in a happy punk band and was terrified to sing in front of anyone. I was also nearly oblivious to riot grrrl or women in punk music generally. I at least partly lay the blame on being surrounded almost exclusively by white, suburban punk and goth boys.
Things began to change when I met Mari. She was a year older but seemed miles ahead. We met over the summer between my freshmen and sophomore years of high school LARPing Vampire: The Masquerade. Hosted by a mix of alterna-kids from three adjacent cities in the far western suburbs of Chicago, we bonded over our mutual love of Ani DiFranco and outsmarting boys, and so we teamed up to take down the most powerful characters in the game.
Up until then, I hadn’t given much conscious thought to the ways in which I was different from most of my friends. I had frankly fought for and then accepted my place as the weird one, the tomboy, without realizing that I’d let myself get locked into a one-dimensional box from which I wasn’t sure how to escape.
Then I met Mari, and, well, a whole lot changed.

Rebel girl, rebel girl
Rebel girl you are the queen of my world
Rebel girl, rebel girl
I think I wanna take you home
I wanna try on your clothes, uh

Mari was smart and confident and weird. She shaved all her hair off and had her nose pierced. She talked openly about being bisexual, maybe, and read feminist authors and listened to women singer-songwriters and techno and forged her parents’ signatures so she could get out of our shitty public school to go to some fancy all-girls boarding school out east.
People called her a lesbian and she didn’t care. She didn’t care! I had been ducking and dodging similar accusations for years by then, bound-and-determined to prove that no, I like boys (too)! Because surely if I admitted just how much I liked girls, that would be it, labeled for life, the same lack of nuance or fluidity I’d been confined to for so long, just with the switch flipped the other way and even more harassment and abuse.
I had feelings for Mari that were unlike anything I’d felt about anyone before. Not even my friend and punk bandmate, Dave, on whom I’d had a massive, unrequited crush for so many years. He’d introduced me to Minor Threat and Black Flag and The Specials. He once referred to The Mighty Mighty Bosstones as his “secret band” and was legitimately crestfallen when “The Impression That I Get” hit the big time. He was an amazing guitar player and we wrote stupid, catchy songs and built tree forts together. I wrote a lot of tortured diary entries about him. Still, nothing prepared me for Mari. I was rocked.
Compared to everyone I’d ever known Mari was a whole-ass revelation. The only problem was, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to make out with her or just be her. Or both.
In interviews, Kathleen Hanna has said that’s precisely the feeling “Rebel Girl” is meant to capture. “I always liked the older, kind of bitchy girls in my neighborhood, who used to leave me out of things,” she told NPR in 2019. “I wanted to be them, or be like them, or make out with them—I didn't really know. [With "Rebel Girl"] I was kind of like, ‘All of the above.’"
I’d never heard music that expressed so clearly the inexplicable feelings I was feeling, and with such raw, unrestrained punk energy. They didn’t care what the boys at the punk shows thought about it, they were going to sing about whatever they damn well pleased, and make sure the girls in the room were at the front of the audience, too.
A skinny white kid with an Elmer’s glue mohawk at a punk show once sneered that female-fronted punk acts were just “period rock.” We were in a bunker-like building in a small town in southern Oklahoma, where a handful of local bands were playing a show for all the weird kids starved for culture deep in the Bible Belt. Between acts, a few dudes were taking turns showing off their best beats on the shared, battered old drum kit missing its hi-hat clutch. When I took my turn, I heard him say it behind my back, shout-whispering to another guy, whose snigger I cut off midway by launching into my fanciest, most blistering drum work. I knew I was better than everyone there that day, but I was also 16 and needed to prove it. Loudly.

When she talks I hear the revolution
In her hips, there’s revolution
When she walks, the revolution’s coming
In her kiss, I taste the revolution

The gay girl coming-of-age movie All Over Me was released in 1997. I remember furtively renting a copy from Blockbuster, no doubt sandwiched between two totally straight/innocuous titles and thrilling at its realistic and painful portrayal of queer girlhood. I also fell in love with its riot grrrl and indie rock soundtrack. It was my first exposure to Sleater-Kinney, to Babes in Toyland, Helium, even Patti Smith. I was almost mad that I’d never heard these bands before. I was determined to dig further, to transform my dude-heavy record collection into a deep well of queer and female angst and ideas. My mission led me, inexorably, to Bikini Kill.
It wasn’t easy. The internet was not yet an accessible wonderland of musical exploration. My local, mall-based record shop didn’t carry much punk at all, let alone riot grrrl. I guess it’s no surprise that those bands didn’t make it onto my radar until the riot grrrl and grunge scenes had, arguably, already crested and waned.
None of that mattered to me, though. The right music seems to find you at the right time: Just as I began more seriously grappling with my identity and who I wanted to be, was uprooted from one part of the country to another, watched my mother get sick and die, became suddenly an only child with a mostly absent, grief-stricken father. I needed an outlet for the boiling cauldron of fucking feelings that I’d become and in walked the most perfect anthem of all that and more. In “Rebel Girl,” I found everything I was feeling about Mari—about my girl friendships and my relationship with my own evolving, confusing, thrilling, maddening young life—all wrapped up in two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of groin-deep scream-singing and catchy, grimy guitar riffs.

That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood
I got news for you, she is!
They say she's a dyke, but I know
She is my best friend yeah

Arguably Bikini Kill’s most classic and well-known song, “Rebel Girl” was recorded three separate times between 1992 and 1993, but the version most people hear and know is the last one. That’s when rock icon Joan Jett stepped in to produce, giving what had been a slower, sludgy, ode to the neighborhood cool girl a faster tempo and a bubblegum veneer. That was enough to propel it to a kind of hit single status, though thanks to lead singer Kathleen Hanna’s unashamed declaration of sapphic potential, the song didn’t get radio play outside of college stations and safe harbor hours.
While still not widely known, the song has gone on to gain steam as a feminist anthem, showing up in everything from political candidate fan videos to Rock Band 2 and introducing it to successive new generations. As much as the angry, protective punk youth that still lurks in my heart might rankle at the idea of her beloved song showing up in mainstream media, the softer bits of me are always glad when the music finds someone at the right time, just when they need it, transcending time.
Overall, the world has become a vastly different and better place for the weird and queer kids. The amount of representation in media, the laws, the access to other strange and queer kids through the internet and school clubs, would have blown my teen self away. But there will always be teen (and adult) angst. There will, for the foreseeable future, be the need to scream about confounding crushes and identity crises, about damning the man and smashing the patriarchy. Especially now, nearly a year into a pandemic that’s largely torn live music from our lives, I feel the loss of the needed, visceral experience of the live show. The bass frequencies that fill up your chest and push blood through your veins. The shivering joy of screaming or singing along to lyrics alongside dozens or hundreds of other people.

I never got to see Bikini Kill live. I did get to play in a tribute band where I took on Kathleen Hanna’s lead singer role. Over the years, with the help of awesome friends and distant icons like Hanna, I’ve finally overcome my fear of singing in public. Technique is an ongoing learning process, however.
I absolutely trashed my voice in the process. But I remember standing in the middle of a small, packed barroom—the audience literally inches away from me and the band—as my drummer started the rhythmic, chugging snare-and-bass-drum intro to “Rebel Girl.” We’d saved it for last and everyone seemed to lose their minds at the same time. We became one, collective organism, shout-singing the lyrics together in a chorus of sweaty, slam-dancing queers and weirdos and even a few normies. When we got to the end of the song, I collapsed gratefully into the embrace of the audience. As one, they lifted me overhead to crowdsurf as I rasped out the final, rambling lines:

Love you like a sister always
Soul sister, rebel girl
Come and be my best friend
Will you, rebel girl?
I really like you
I really wanna be your best friend
Be my rebel girl

“You don't have to only have a song be about desire, or only be about politics, or only be about a certain kind of love,” Hanna said. “It can be about a friendship love that also has a sexy element to it. Or if you want to read it a different way, like I'm singing to my girlfriend, fine. I just really like to write songs [with] the idea that you can be a lot of different things at once.”
Mari and I never did make out. We became the kind of friends I’d never known you could have; people who love you fiercely for your whole, messy, evolving self. People you love back with the same complexity, sometimes platonically, sometimes romantically, sometimes a raspberry swirl of both. I learned, over time, that I wasn’t only a tomboy, only a girl drummer, only into one gender, or only any one thing at all. We are all, like the song, open to interpretation.
In a world that tries to wedge everything into binary boxes, that kind of wide-open approach to life feels like the most rebellious thing of all.

Emily Mills is a professional queer, writer, and musician--formerly the editor of Our Lives, Wisconsin's LGBTQ magazine, currently the comms and media manager for a conservation non-profit. Her freelance work has appeared in various national and local outlets, if you care to search. She is one-half of the queer feminist punk band Damsel Trash and writes a bi-weekly newsletter called Grist From the Mills because she's a cheesy binch. Emily lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her partners and two teeny dogs. Find Emily on Twitter @millbot and Instagram @millb0t.