round 2

(8) Placebo, “Running Up That Hill”
made
(1) Nirvana, “The Man Who Sold the World”
lose control
218-195
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 3/12/22.

brian oliu on placebo’s “running up that hill”

In March of 2007, Placebo announced that they were crowdsourcing their newest music video, a cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” in the most 2007 way possible: asking fans via Myspace to record a webcam video of them singing the song, and then uploading it to a personal video sharing service called Motionbox, one of what seems to be dozens of likeminded services that popped up during the late aughts in hopes of being the next YouTube, complete with the multimillion dollar Google buy out.  
The call was simple: download the instrumental version of Placebo’s cover, print out the hand-written lyrics to the song, play the song using iTunes (!), RealPlayer (!!) or Windows Media Player (!!!), sing the song directly into your video camera or webcam, and then upload it to the Capital Music Group’s personal Motionbox.
The result was a beautiful time capsule of 2007 internet culture: a stitched together montage of Placebo fans looking forlornly into their Logitech QuickCams solemnly singing the dirge-like version of Kate Bush’s synth bop anthem—a precursor to the collaborative nature of current video-centric social media platforms.
It is very dramatic. The video starts with plenty of black and white shots of heavily shadowed emo-adjacent attractive people doing their best version of an arthouse film from their bedrooms. There is someone singing along while floating in a bathtub. There are a lot of bangs and black eyeliner. There is a lot of looking everywhere but the camera, before a lot of soul-staring directly into the black fish-eye lens. There is always an awareness of self and audience when either ignoring or mouthing along lyrics into the lens; every peek a glance into the very thing that can somehow validate everything one is feeling, yet also powerful enough to capture the moment from you.
The whole video is a pixelated mess. There is somewhat of a universality between the performers & the general mood and aura, but the deviation comes in the varying qualities of the recordings. There are heavy scanlines on some of the performers—blue-ish hues where there should be black—most performers existing in a play between light and shadow, like a poorly digitally rendered chiaroscuro masterpiece.
It is both deeply moving, but deeply silly. Every shot blurs the line between incredibly earnest and wildly performative. It is dated and nostalgic, but also somewhat prescient and welcoming. While it all seems contrived in retrospect, there is a welcome lack of “TikTok Face,”—hyper-aggressive facial expressions and bombastic emoting that seems to be a necessary rite of passage to social media stardom. Instead, it is teenagers and folks in their early 20s trying their best to figure out their relationship to the song, themselves, and the camera.
So, it was definitely surprising to me that upon re-watching the video for the first time since I had a stand-alone webcam, I found myself tearing up a bit.
This isn’t overly surprising—I’m a dude who is, for the most part, rather in touch with my emotions. However, it takes a lot to make me cry, with one exception: a well-placed musical montage using a song that I love, hitting at the exact right time.
I find myself endeared to music as a visual medium, or at the very least, I find that my listening experience is always heightened when paired with something I can bear witness to. I love all music videos and find myself especially excited when a song that I have enjoyed for a few months is getting a new life as a YouTube exclusive upload. 
I could be watching a milquetoast Christmas movie that is going through all the motions, but if we get to a point where the characters are racing across a faux-Manhattan in the snow while “Pogues of New York,” is playing, I will find my eyes welling up. One of my favorite television moments of all time is in the final season of the vastly underrated sci-fi show Fringe, when all hope appears to be lost, John Noble’s Walter sees a yellow daffodil rising from the rubble, while Yaz’s “Only You” plays from a burned out taxi. Then there’s Ted Lasso recovering from a panic attack while Celeste’s “Strange” plays in its entirety over the Liverpool night. Bloc Party through the rain and a blue French horn. Meek Mill through the streets of Philadelphia. Kate Bush’s own “Cloudbusting” after breaking a time loop for love.
Placebo’s “Running Up That Hill” has been used as a soundtrack to a long list of television shows since its official release in 2003, usually to dramatic effect. In many ways, adding music to a television scene allows for the producers to say something that cannot be easily said by the characters—to add an additional layer to what one is watching or supposed to infer from the scene. It relies as both guide and signal to let us know what we are expected to think about what is unfolding—a disclosure of a secret. This is why “Running Up That Hill,” works so well and what works impeccably well about the cover: whereas Bush’s version was famously about wanting to swap places between a man and a woman to learn about each other’s differences to further their love, the Placebo version comes across as bleak, defeated, and a little sinister. It puts the one wishing for a deal with God in a position of powerlessness—pleading to be able to swap places with someone who seems to be struggling. It is a yearning from a place of emptiness: a way to signal to the viewer that everything here is incomplete. It’s Ryan from The O.C. living in Mexico as a cage fighter at the beginning of Season Four ignoring the pleads of America’s Dad, Sandy Cohen, as he attempts to track down the man responsible for killing Marissa Cooper. It’s Stefan in the Vampire Diaries getting scolded for returning to Mystic Falls and killing two of its residents while he pines over a picture of Katherine, who, gasp! looks exactly like Elena, the girl he just met during his first day of high school. It’s Michaela showing Gabriel where the hidden camera is while the news report of the District Attorney’s death plays in the background in How To Get Away With Murder. It’s a crazed Shawn Michaels goading The Undertaker into a rematch at Wrestlemania to end Taker’s undefeated streak by putting his career on the line—alienating his best friend and emerging from underneath the ring during the Elimination Chamber. It’s strangely and hilariously literal as a television promo for The History Channel’s documentary about Gettysburg, playing in the background as soldiers charge through a battlefield while the words “We faced our deadliest enemy yet…OURSELVES,” appear and disappear on screen.
And yet every single time it is incredibly effective. Are you looking for a slightly more obscure and more menacing “Hallelujah,” for your brooding scene? “Running Up That Hill” has got you. It is the “Gonna Fly Now,” of being down bad; of questionable motives. Beloved characters doing something out of character. Underhanded reveals. Penultimate episodes. Sea changes.
This is all to say is that this cover seems to exists to elicit a response within the listener and viewer—this is one of the larger debates we hear about music and its purpose. Often we regard art as something that is created with an audience in mind: a novel about intergenerational heartbreak is meant to make the reader think, or an abstract painting brings upon self-reflection and curiosity. However, there is an equally important debate that what the audience feels is a byproduct of the art, rather than the crafting of the art itself. This raises larger conversations—of control of one’s audience once the work has been released into the world, of corporatization of one’s creations, of the massive weight of it all. The crux of Placebo’s version of the song relies upon the “you” of the song: in Kate Bush’s original, the “you” is smashed into a quickly uttered “d’jou” before getting to the rest of the line; a product of the rolling up-tempo original against the slow tin-can goth downward spiral synth of Placebo’s. When Brian Molko is singing, he is singing directly to you: you want to feel how it feels. You don’t want to hurt me.
The music of a montage is there to tell you how to feel when the images simply aren’t enough—it’s less of an exchanged experience, but a shared one. It’s the illusion of being there in the moment: whether in a storage room in Mexico, or breaking through the plywood and canvas to kick your sworn enemy in the throat. You aren’t there, but you still have the effect of being there: a sugar pill of a down-tuned piano and a synth replaced with a human whisper conjuring up your own feelings of being alone and being misunderstood.
But it’s still all about you. The production team and the paid actors melt away. And in those moments—the mixing of elixirs, the summoning of something real while being presented something entirely scripted, the camera seems to find its way back to you—back in time through upstairs bedrooms and heavily filtered video uploads and broken codecs. It’s where we imagine our own montages—our quaint-footed soundtracks—ourselves existing in the third person as if we are the one filmed; letterboxed and alive; bigger than we’ve ever been. We will not have ourselves pulled and stretched thin the way the piano strings on the opening haunts slide through our computer speakers. We will not be uncompressed to unimaginable sizes: grown bloated and deteriorated because we have grown too large in the moment. We will be stripped down, but no less grandiose. We will be missing a few letters, but remain grandiose. We will be small. You and me. We will steal those moments back.

Brian Oliu lives, teaches, writes, and spreads the gospel of Kate Bush in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His newest book, Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling was released in September 2021 by The University of North Carolina Press. A chapbook with the poet Jason McCall, What Shot Did You Ever Take, was released by The Hunger Press in June 2021. Find him on Twitter talking about running, football, wrestling, and pedagogy @BrianOliu.

EMILY POPEK ON “NIRVANA’S “THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD”

The rules as I understood them in 1994 were this: If you liked someone, you made them a mix tape. If you were cool and you liked someone, you made them a mix tape full of meaningful songs. But only if you were extremely cool and really liked someone could you pull off a little bit of mix tape magic, like lining up two songs—one an original, the other a cover—so that if you hit the “auto reverse” button on your tape deck at exactly the right moment, you could hear David Bowie’s spacey vocals shift seamlessly into Kurt Cobain’s rasping delivery as both sing “The Man Who Sold The World”; hear the textured rhythm of Woody Woodmansey’s guiro give way to Dave Grohl’s simple percussion. 
I was not cool enough to do this. I was not cool enough to even have a recording of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged session, filmed in November 1993 and hitting the air a month later. But someone who was exactly this cool liked me enough to do it for me, and I have never forgotten it. 
I probably saw Unplugged when it first aired on Dec. 16, 1993. Two days earlier, I had seen Nirvana play some of the same songs live at the Salem Armory—including “The Man Who Sold The World,” which was the encore of their set (unbeknownst to me, busy as I was crying in the bathroom over a lost contact lens). 
But when I think about the songs from Unplugged—the rough, spare mix of covers and original tracks, old material and new, half-acoustic but still very electric, and “Man Who Sold The World” in particular—I am hearing them not from a TV set or a concert stage, but from a bad tape deck in a public park on one of those spring days in the Pacific Northwest that is so glorious and bursting with blossoms and sunshine that it almost makes you forget the four months of grey rainy days.
He and I met at a debate tournament when we were in high school. It was one of those magical teenage moments of clarity where you can feel your first kiss coming a mile away—all you have to do is hang out for long enough, and you know it will happen. But he lived 175 miles away and neither of us could drive and debate tournaments only happen every month or so. So everything happened in slow motion. Everything was strung apart by letters and interrupted by miles of distance, too many miles for phone calls, only enough for letters. How long two months is when you’re 15. How long it takes to make a good mix tape, decorate the cover with nail polish and Wite-Out and clippings from Sassy magazine, go to Kinko’s to buy a padded envelope, go to the post office to find out how much it would cost to mail it, and drop it into the mail. 
Any time I could see him, I would. So when I found out that spring that he would be in town for two days—doing something at a local college, some school club activity or field trip or something—I, obviously, cut school and set off to find him. 
Most of my memories of the early 90s fit into a radius about 2 miles in diameter. My high school was about eight blocks from downtown, depending on how you got there. The Salem Armory, where I had seen Nirvana just a few months earlier—just a few months before Kurt died—was a mile or so in the opposite direction. Two years later, my friends and I would stand on that stage at our high school graduation and remind each other that we were standing where Kurt Cobain had stood.
That day in 1994, I remember slipping out of the high school building and walking downtown. The Capitol Mall was blanketed with cherry blossoms and the days felt endless. For two days we got to hang out on a college campus with all of downtown at our doorstep, and hours to spend together doing positively, blissfully nothing. 
He brought the recording with him to the tournament—I want to say he brought it because he wanted me to hear it. But maybe that’s not true. All I know is that we sat in the park, in the shade of some tree, as close to each other as we dared to be without touching, listening over and over again to the recording he had captured from the MTV broadcast. The Unplugged album had yet to be released, and it felt like a rare treat to be able to listen to these songs, which were like precious gems to two ardent Nirvana fans.  
I remember hearing all the patter, the applause and the little things Kurt Cobain muttered between tunes (“These are the brothers Meat Puppet”). We listened to it from start to finish, flipped the tape, and listened to it again. The first two songs we all knew from Nirvana’s albums, but the surprises came quickly—first a cover of a Vaselines song, which I was thrilled to already know, having read in some interview that Kurt Cobain loved the Vaselines, and bugged my local record store to order me a copy of The Way of the Vaselines so that I could hear whatever he heard. 
But after that came a song I didn’t know, a David Bowie tune, that opened with the not-electric not-acoustic droning line and loose rattle of Cobain’s breaking, clear voice. I hadn’t heard the song but I had heard of it; the title signaled, to me, something mysterious and important, something that I should know about, something that cool people would know about. Something I should understand. And before we said goodbye that day—that achingly perfect spring day, with everything around us exploding into vibrant life—he looked at me and I looked at him and we both leaned in and finally, finally, we kissed. 
“The Man Who Sold The World” seems simple when Nirvana plays it. It’s a smooth tune that starts off easy, bouncing briefly with energy as the verse moves into the chorus. “Oh no / not me / we never lost control,” Kurt’s voice rasps as the bass line steps upward in a rapid scale. 
Unlike Bowie’s spaced-out vocals, which drift away from your ears like ghosts, Kurt Cobain’s voice is front and center on “The Man Who Sold The World,” unable to hide, telling a story that gripped me without making any actual sense. 
Him and me didn’t make any actual sense, either. It was too far, the phone calls were too expensive, the letters didn’t come often enough and two days on some college campus in between rounds of a debate tournament isn’t enough either. There wasn’t enough to hold on to. But there was something there—something I didn’t want to let go of. 
A few years later, David Bowie would tell the BBC that the enigmatic song was about “how you feel when you're young, when you know there's a piece of yourself that you haven't really put together yet—you have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are.”
I could not say exactly what I was searching for that day in the park as we played Nirvana’s songs over and over and over again. But the first few notes of the track—the droning guitar line that draws you into the song and repeats throughout it—grabbed my heart every time we played it. In Bowie’s version, the last several repeats are layered with an unearthly vocal wail. On Unplugged, Kurt’s guitar does the wailing instead, buoyed by the faint hum of Lori Goldston’s cello, which can barely be heard. In all versions of the song—which has been covered by Michael Stipe, Lulu, Midge Ure and hundreds more—there is a magic to it, something that makes you feel a little bit cooler for having heard it. (Except maybe the John Cougar Mellencamp version.) 
It was months later that I got the cassette tape in the mail from him, the song titles and artists carefully yet cryptically spelled out in his spidery hand. The liner notes didn’t reveal his magic trick, and it was by accident that I found it when I punched the “fast forward” and the “rewind” buttons at the same time to flip the tape over—a little Easter egg, a love note, buried in sound, transmitted from his basement bedroom to the stereo of my ‘77 Subaru station wagon, transporting me back to that day in the park.
“Who knows,” I wrote in my diary that night. “Not me.” We never lost control.
It’s a cliche to try to tell you how much that band, that song, that mix tape meant to me, as a 15-year-old kid growing up in decidedly uncool Salem, Oregon, in the 1990s. But I will say that being cool wasn’t easy, and the boy who made me that mix tape, and forever imprinted that song on my heart, made it look effortless. 

Emily Popek is an Oregonian at heart, living in upstate New York. Her writing can be found at The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Romper, 100 Days in Appalachia, and elsewhere. Find her complaining about parenting, education and PDFs on Twitter at @EmilyFPopek