the second round

(2) hole, “doll parts”
dismembered
(7) better than ezra, “good”
378-167
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 16.

Janine Annett on “doll parts”

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life. —Hillary Clinton, 1992

I want to be the girl with the most cake. —Courtney Love, written in 1991 (from “Doll Parts,” released in 1994)

“I’m going to write about Hole’s ‘Doll Parts’ for March Plaidness—the grunge bracket,” I told my husband. 
“That song’s not grunge,” he responded.
I mean, the song’s really not very grunge, depending on how you define “grunge”. 
When I think of a typical grunge band, I think of a group of 3-6 white guys with long hair, wearing flannel shirts. There’s a singer (who may or may not also play guitar), 1-2 guitar players, a drummer, and a bass player. No keyboards. Little to no backing vocals. Distortion pedals (including, but not limited to, the Big Muff, which really is a great pedal).
Dare I suggest that “Doll Parts” is more akin to a power ballad—that old mainstay of the hair metal era that grunge supposedly wiped out—than a grunge song? For most of the song, there’s a slow tempo, with a burst of a louder, more distorted part at the end. Hole as a, well, whole, was more grunge-by-association. And we all know who they were associated with.
Courtney Love, who really needs no introduction, is forever associated with Kurt Cobain, king of the grunge scene, for better or worse. 

It stands for knife/ for the rest of my life.

Let’s go back to that “wiping out hair metal” thing for a moment: There’s a story that at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, Axl Rose from Guns N’ Roses told Kurt to “shut your bitch up”, referring, of course, to Courtney Love. Kurt turned to Courtney and said “Shut up, bitch” and they laughed and Axl didn’t know what to make of being laughed at. In many ways, Courtney was even harder and tougher and more messed up than Axl, and that’s saying a lot. You think Axl had a hard drug problem? Courtney had that, too. Difficult childhood? You betcha. Oh, Courtney also suffered from all kinds of abuse and addiction, plus she went through things that Axl couldn’t have dreamed of going through, because he was just a man. 
Hillary Clinton was also associated, for better or worse, with a man who often overshadowed her. But she, like Courtney Love, had ambitions of her own. She refused to stay quiet, to play the role of the good wife, the obedient woman. She wanted things not just for her husband, but for herself. People said terrible things about her; they said terrible things about her husband. They tried to take him down. They said: He cheated on her, but come on, look at her. She emasculated him. They said: That young intern looked at him with adoration in her eyes. Hillary didn’t abandon him, though. She never abandoned her ambitions, either. 
Maybe the world wasn’t ready for Hillary Clinton in 1992. Maybe they weren’t ready for her in 2008, either. Nor in 2016. She proved herself again and again: Lawyer. First Lady. Senator. Secretary of State. But people still said terrible things about her. They said, after all that, that she rode on her husband’s coattails. Essentially that she was a witch, a shrew. 

I was obsessed with Live Through This. I don’t think Hole did anything as good as it before or since. Of course, there were rumors back then, and even to this day, that Kurt Cobain wrote or co-wrote a lot of the songs. I have no doubt that Kurt and Courtney both influenced each other, but the thing that really sets Hole and Live Through This and “Doll Parts” apart is Courtney’s guitar playing and singing (there’s never been any doubt that anyone but her sang on the album), and the lyrics. They’re so female. No man could have written them, I assure you. And In Utero? Doesn’t that borrow from Courtney’s playbook of talking and singing about so many very female experiences? Why didn’t anyone accuse Kurt of ripping off Courtney? 
I have a confession to make: I was never a huge Nirvana fan. I always preferred Hole. Don’t get me wrong, I like Nirvana. Especially with the benefit of looking at them in hindsight, I do appreciate their music and what they did culturally. But Hole, I loved. I listened to Live Through This over and over. I saw Hole play live. 
Courtney was, and is, for sure, an imperfect role model. But millions of people idolized her. Millions hated her, too.

I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs.

Dolls are, on the surface, perfect. Unbroken. But they’re plastic; they’re not real. And they’re tossed aside when children are done playing with them, abandoned when they outgrow them. The perfect metaphor for Courtney Love. 
Probably 90% of celebrities have had some kind of plastic surgery or cosmetic procedure. So why do we know that Courtney had a nose job, had her lips done, had all kinds of things done to her? Courtney was an oversharer before oversharing was even a thing. She can’t stop talking, even when she should. Why do we know she entered the world as Courtney Michelle Harrison and metamorphosed into Courtney Love? Why do we know she used to be a stripper?  

They say: Why wasn’t Hillary Clinton content with what she had? She had money, admiration, a career. Why’d she have to run for President, too? Isn’t it all her fault that we had Donald Trump as a president? What if the Democrats had chosen someone else for the presidential bid? Maybe they shouldn’t have picked a woman. The country just wasn’t ready.  

“Doll Parts” and all of Live Through This took the trappings of motherhood and domesticity—dolls, cake, milk—and turned them on their head. Motherhood is sweet!? No. The road to Motherhood is paved with blood and guts and pain. You have to be tough as hell to be a mother. The milk is sour. 

I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait

“Big veins”, of course, is referring to all the stories and rumors about Courtney’s drug use. She was accused of doing heroin while pregnant. She’s dog bait—the tidbit no one can resist going for and fighting over. 
Courtney and Hillary each have one daughter. Chelsea was born in 1980. Frances was born in 1992. 
Frances was born in 1992, and Live Through This was recorded in 1993 and came out in 1994. Of course, lots of moms go back to work shortly after having a baby. But if you had Nirvana money, and you chose that? It’s the same things people say about moms everywhere: If you’re so ambitious and want to work so badly, why’d you have a baby in the first place? 
Live Through This has sold more than 2 million copies. Nevermind sold 30 million copies. In Utero has sold over 15 million copies. 

 I love him so much it just turns to hate.

“Doll Parts” is about Courtney’s relationship with Kurt, as well as her relationship to fame.

They really want you, they really do
Yeah, they really want you
They really want you, and I do too

The line “Someday you will ache like I ache” took on a special significance after Kurt died, but of course she wrote the line—and lines like “Live through this with me, I swear that I would die for you”—before his death. I can still see her with a foot up on an amp, playing her guitar, in a babydoll dress, singing and shouting her rage at everything, and everyone. 

By all rights, I think Frances Bean Cobain should be a huge star. Where’s her major label record deal, if such a thing still exists? I’d always sort of hoped she’d grow up and start a band with Coco Gordon Moore. Sometimes Frances posts videos on her Instagram of her singing and playing guitar. One she posted recently got 261,000 views. That’s not nothing. But it’s not 30 million. Or even 2 million. Of course, album sales in general are not what they were in the 90s.
According to Billboard,  “Post Malone closed out 2019 with the most popular album of the year in the U.S., according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. The data-tracking company reports that the genre-blending artist’s Hollywood’s Bleeding effort, his third release, earned 3.001 million equivalent album units during the year, with 357,000 of that sum coming from album sales.” 
Maybe Frances doesn’t need a record deal. 

I fake it so real I am beyond fake 

This line is genius—taking the accusations of Courtney being fake and plastic, using Kurt, being a fame whore, and turning them on their heads. 
What the world hates even more than a young, attractive woman who speaks her mind is a woman who’s middle-aged (or, heaven forbid, a senior citizen! Hillary Clinton is now officially a senior!) and speaks her mind. 
As Lisa Whittington-Hill wrote in her amazing essay “Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55”, Courtney Love’s solo album America’s Sweetheart, released in 2004, “was a disappointment for Love, selling fewer than 100,000 copies and receiving mostly negative reviews.” The 2010 Hole release Nobody’s Daughter also received mixed reviews. “Each time Love stars on a television show, appears in a movie, or releases a new album, headlines proclaim ‘the return of Courtney Love,’ even though she has never gone anywhere. She has always been here, but it is as if the media and critics want her to prove herself all over again.” 
Should Hillary and Courtney just be quiet and go away? Or should they keep screaming, fighting for what they believe in? Fighting for themselves, their daughters, their countries, change, progress? How much progress have we made since the 1990s? 

And someday, you will ache like I ache
And someday, you will ache like I ache
And someday, you will ache like I ache
And someday, you will ache like I ache

Janine Annett's writing has appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, and many other places. Her humor book I Am “Why Do I Need Venmo?” Years Old is coming out in July 2021. Make friends with her online at https://twitter.com/janineannett or http://www.janineannett.com/.

IT WAS GOOD, RIGHT? RAGINI THAROOR SRINIVASAN ON “GOOD”

Like most things I saw in or around 1995, it blends into everything else. Did I watch this film? Did I hear this song? 

I grew up in the long-1990s, bookended by the falls of the Berlin Wall and the Twin Towers. The rest is mixed-together headlines screaming on newsprint in 108 pt. font—OPERATION DESERT STORM, NOT GUILTY, IMPEACHED—my mother waking me up from sleep in the top bunk of the bunk-bed I shared with my little brother, tears in her eyes over the death of Princess Di.
The ’90s for me were looking forward to the year 2000 when I would be, impossibly, fifteen. The ’90s for me are Rachel Leigh Cook’s face overlaid with Gabbie Hoffman’s and Christina Ricci’s and Anna Chlumsky’s and Macaulay Culkin’s and the Savage brothers and the Olsen twins, scrunchies from the late ’80s in their hair.
The soundtrack to their morphing faces might be Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” or The Cranberries’ “Zombie” or it could be “Good,” from Better Than Ezra’s 1995 album, Deluxe. My dad had that album; it’s the one with heavy, plum-colored velvet curtains on the cover. “In the Blood” is track 1. “Good” is number 2. Those are the only Better Than Ezra songs I know, because that’s where I stopped the CD and switched it out for No Need to Argue (also my father’s).

But I’m not too sure, and I’m not too proud                                           

At the end of the ’90s, at the end of the Grunge Era, I embraced grungier grunge—Nirvana, Silverchair, Alice in Chains—in order to distinguish myself from the Britney Spears fans. But it was, for me, a distinction without a difference.
Now, watching the trailer to the 1995 Babysitter’s Club movie on YouTube, the era returns to me, with those songs. I don’t know if I actually saw the BSC movie. But I did read the books about the friends who started a babysitting service in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, back when there were no cell phones and the height of cool was having your own phone in your room.
I was nobody’s babysitter. I didn’t have diabetes, mono, divorced parents, or even braces, but I learned about those things from Kristy, Mary Ann, Claudia, Stacey, Mallory, Jessi, and Dawn, who, this year, during the suspended time of never-ending pandemic lockdown and virtual school, my seven-year-old with a Kindle and “Buy Now”-trigger-finger has also gotten to know intimately.
The BSC movie trailer starts with the opening chords of Tori Amos’s “Cornflake Girl,” from her 1994 album, Under the Pink. It cuts off before we hear Amos singing about cornflake girls and raisin girls, everyday mean girls and special ones.
“Hi. I’m Kristy. And these are my friends.” A multi-culti group of cute pre-teens at a generic restaurant table with a red and white-checkered tablecloth, straws in their milkshakes.
They’re all raisin girls. “We’re pretty tight. We even have our own club.”
The phone rings; Kristy answers. “Babysitter’s club.” With sing-songy sweetness.
“Everyone knows us. That’s because everybody uses us.” A montage: babysitters playing board games, painting signs, outdoorsy stuff.
Cut to a scene with one of the sitters, who is supposedly 13, but is being played by a 15-year-old actress who looks 18. “I brought a little something for your little cousin,” she says, “where is he?” The “little cousin”, supposedly 17, but being played by an actor who is 23, appears on the stairs with a winking grin. They’re both blondes.
This is when we hear the first bars of “Good.”

When people say, “I’m a 1980s kid” or “I was a child of the late ’70s” or “I grew up in the ’90s”, when are they talking about? Do you grow up over the course of two decades, or one? If a decade, then which? Do you grow up between ages 10 and 20? Between 5 and 15?
I wonder about this because my daughter, M., is in second grade and we’ve had a full, eventful life together these past seven years, but personally I don’t remember all that much from my own first seven years, and I’m realizing that she might not either. I’m realizing that all these days and months and years of happenings (like living in five states and traveling in three continents) might one day mush together for her the way everything before 1995 does for me.
My daughter’s childhood, the one that she will remember, the one that she will recount when she’s in her 30s and 40s in stories that start with the words, “When I was a kid, I” and “Growing up, my parents” and “My brother and I, we always”—has that childhood even begun?
In the trailer, “Good” scores scenes from an idyllic American summer. The music is just instrumental at first, so we don’t hear these words: 

Looking around the house /
Hidden behind the window and the door /
Searching for signs of life but there’s nobody home.

Well, maybe I’m just too sure /

Then, as the babysitters are talking about “change,” the lyrics return, and Better Than Ezra’s Kevin Griffin ventriloquizes Ann M. Martin’ Kristy Thomas: “Or maybe I’m just too frightened by the sound of it.”
It’s not a subtle trailer.
The girls are frightened about divorce, frightened about older boys, frightened about fighting with their friends, frightened about not being frightened about the right things, frightened about whatever is hidden behind the window and the door.
“Likes her?” Mallory asks Jessi. “Or like likes her?” There’s as much terror as delight in the question.
But it’s good, they know. Life is good. This is the good life.

It was good, ah-wa-aha /
It was good, living with you, aha.

In case we didn’t get the point, watching the girls playing at working, it was, the song reminds us:

good good good good good good

And why wouldn’t it be? Running in the sprinklers, playing baseball, riding bikes, blowing out candles on a birthday cake, riding a Ferris wheel, giggling with friends leaning on a white picket fence, your date ringing the doorbell, a first kiss.
I don’t know if a seven-year-old’s childhood has begun, but M.’s stalled out in 2020, a year without school or friends, without clubs or carnivals, a year spent reading on the couch. Which is to say, a year that will be terribly memorable because nothing happened. Which is also to say that unlike most of childhood, it will be impossible to forget.
We spent most of 2020 in a state of foggy yet acute disbelief, in a mood caught between “Cornflake Girl”—

This is not really happening /
You bet your life it is. 

—and “Good”:

Sitting around the house /
Watching the sun trace shadows on the floor /
Searching for signs of life, but there’s nobody home.

Of course, we were home, we were home all the time, we were sitting around the house, we never left the damn house, and I suspect we will remember every swollen second of it forever and ever and ever. And we’ll miss it, too, this period of life outside life, those of us who had the chance to live it. The year of the never-ending spring break. The year in which every day was a working Saturday. The year that closed with the ninth month of March.
Looking around the house we moved into in 2017 but, thanks to 2020, have lived in for over a decade, I have two thoughts. One: it was good, being here. Sitting around this house, we lived, loved, survived. We were lucky; we were safe. It was good.
But also: we cannot stay here. In this place. In this house. In this time. Pandemic. Abortive childhood. We have been too frightened. We have absorbed too much low-grade terror.
Toward the end of the BSC trailer, the 12 and 13-year-old babysitters look around their club headquarters (one of their bedrooms) and Dawn says, wistfully threading her fingers together, “We’ve spent some of the best years of our life in this place.”
It’s a ridiculous moment, but like the song, “Good”—which is both deeply felt and deeply forgettable (my husband, overhearing it while I was writing these words, mistook it for Semisonic’s “Closing Time”) and which is itself confused about whether it was good or you were good or if it’s even any good (I’m not too sure, Griffin sings more than once)—it is also totally right.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona. She is editor of “From Postcolonial to World Anglophone” (Interventions 2018), co-editor of “1990 at 30” (Post45 Contemporaries 2020), and co-editor of “Thinking with an Accent.” She is working on a book about the itineraries of Indian English literature as ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone. She was eight when this picture was taken and probably thought the outfit was not just good, but great.