the second round

(9) veruca salt, “seether”
wilted
(1) nirvana, “in bloom”
517-492
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 13.

HE LIKES TO SING ALONG: JAS HUFF ON “IN BLOOM”

Nirvana’s Nevermind showed up when he was 10, from one of those CD mail-order clubs offering 10 albums free with the purchase of one. Jason’s mother handed him the CD catalog which he studied for hours, making sure every album was the correct choice before handing the catalog back to her with little blue checkmarks next to what he wanted. He would forget the other albums but would remember opening the brown package and seeing that blue water and that baby. Before, when Nirvana would come on the radio, he’d turn up the driver on his wood-grain mono clock radio as high as he dared and listen to the tinny reproduction of Cobain’s guitar moving between quiet in the verse and loud in the chorus. Or the “In Bloom” video would appear on his 27” Sony Trinitron TV, pouring out of the tiny speaker on the front as Kurt, Krist, and Dave (introduced as “thoroughly all right and decent fellows”) perform in black and white, in bulky suits and clean haircuts that appear to be wigs; cut to the trio in dresses destroying their set as if the suits were a costume and the dresses were their true transgressive selves. Quiet and loud. Back and forth between the two. He remembers the dresses long after the CD falls out of his rotation. I remember the dresses.

But he don’t know what it means

In 2016, Michael Hann wrote in The Guardian about “In Bloom” that Cobain’s lyrics responded to “The great unspoken fact of music…once their image is formed in the public mind it becomes a straitjacket.” The double-edged sword of identity cuts through this thought, with the perception of the public on one side and how Cobain and Novoselic and Grohl saw themselves on the other. The clean-cut pop boy band and the punk band transcending the box people wanted to put them in. Quiet verse and loud chorus.

Bruises on the fruit / Tender age in bloom

Jason was in seventh grade when the new kid ran from his house to catch the bus that’d left him behind because he wasn’t at a designated stop. Kids yelled, “Someone’s chasing the bus,” until the bus driver stopped to let him on. He just moved to our neighborhood, spiky blond hair, spiky collars and bracelets, all black clothing, and a black and green Jansport covered in white writing. The epitome of punk rock on that bus was a freshman. He introduced himself as Kenneth and he squeezed in the back where Jason sat with Josh. Jason didn’t say much to him but couldn’t keep his eyes off the backpack. The writing! Covering the backpack were band names Jason both recognized and didn’t—who is xTc? he thought, I’ve never heard of them—and pot leaves. He didn’t want to be caught staring, so he looked down. He glanced and he glanced and he glanced, discovering something new about himself each time, or something he could create, something he could transfer onto himself.

He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs

Charles R. Cross hypothesized the “he” from “In Bloom” as a “thinly disguised portrait of Cobain’s friend Dylan Carlson.” David Hollerith on American Songwriter writes “The song was, apparently, written to address, or poke fun at, the people outside the underground music scene who started coming to Nirvana shows after their first studio album.” But I think this misses the point. We are all the “he,” all looking in from the outside, singing along, but ultimately unable to understand what it’s like to be on the inside. How could we? If ever a theme ran through the story of Nirvana, it would be we are all ultimately unknowable to each other, especially how the audience relates to the artist. No matter how much of ourselves we transmit, the audience, ultimately, will see what they project.

Spring is here again / Reproductive glands

He gave up basketball jerseys and Reebok Pump high tops for brown leather Doc Martens, a black chain wallet, and plaid flannel long sleeves over t-shirts, a projection of what he understood as grunge style. Jason thought he was the “he” from “In Bloom” who liked to sing along. He never realized the lyrics made fun of him. He never noticed when people would make fun of him. Jason asked his friend Holly, “Have you ever heard of the band ex tee see?” He enunciated each letter. She looked at him for a minute as if trying to figure out if this was a prank. “No, I haven’t.” Then, some stifled laughter and, “Are you serious, Jason?” Holly, Erica, and Jason bonded over their shared love of Nevermind. In their CD cases, they all turned the booklet backward so instead of the blue pool and the baby, there was the distorted image of the band in orangish light and Cobain in that red shirt giving the finger to the camera. Like they were all saying “fuck you” to the world. He kept quiet that Erica inspired his style transition (the Docs, the plaid, the chain), or that he aspired to look like Holly. He didn’t understand why Kurt wearing a dress fascinated him. Instead, he argued “In Bloom” was the best song on the album without reason (“I just like it,” he said) and they would talk about the music and they would sing aloud together.

At night, as the world sleeps, I lay (solo) on my side and let gravity pull my gut down so I have hips and I run my hand up and down my smooth hairless side, back and forth across the bridge between what my body is and what I wish it could be.

And I say he’s the one

One weekend, he swiped some white out—you know, with the brush—from his dad and set to drawing on his notebooks, on his binder, on his backpack. How did Kenneth get the lines so perfect? he thought, struggling with the brush, ignoring how it felt wrong, pretending it was always supposed to be that way. Maybe he had finally found himself. The next Monday, Kenneth noticed the appropriation. “You like ecstasy?” He asked, running the letters together like the word, pointing at some writing on new Jason’s backpack. This new Jason gave a nod. But the nod and the writing were just a costume, a bulky and ill-fitting suit on top of a bulky and ill-fitting suit on top of a character, “he,” on a stage. He would play this character for decades, transferring loud and bulky suits, hiding the quiet and translucent self underneath, until a moment when I see myself for the first time—not the projection of the audience—in an image manipulated to make me a woman.

Jas Huff (they/them) works in IT by day and studies for an MA in Creative Writing by other times during the day. By night they read and write and spend time with their family who say they spend too much time reading and writing. Their essays have appeared in Sweet Literary and semicolon lit and CNF Sunday Short Reads.

danielle evans on “seether”

I have seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in its entirety exactly once, in elementary school, and I am using “seen” loosely here, because I was a squeamish and sensitive child and once I gathered that our class was being shown a horror movie for children, I cradled my head on my desk and peered up only occasionally to see what fresh hell was happening on screen. As best I could follow the plot, we were meant to root for Charlie, a sycophantic boy who passively and complicitly watched his competitors, who are also children, systematically tortured by a wealthy factory owner and was rewarded by becoming the new factory owner.  In the moral world of the movie, the other children deserved their fates because they committed the respective crimes of being fat, unproductive, boastful, and a spoiled girl who demands what she wants.
In the version of the film we watched, after a rather delightful musical number, in which she screams, among other things,  I want the world I want the whole world and I want it now, Veruca Salt is sorted into the trash by the machine used to collect chocolate eggs from  magical  geese. The internet informs me that in the book and the 2005 film, Veruca is torn limb from limb by squirrels who deem her rotten. I remember being horrified enough by the version in which a child disappears into the trash chute.
I was predisposed, then, to love a band called Veruca Salt for their name alone, for embracing a feminine lack of restraint, a willingness to be loud, spoiled, rotten even, if the alternatives were punished or deprived. Their debut album, American Thighs, took its name from an AC/DC lyric She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies/ Knocking me out with those American thighs. The band introduced themselves by invoking a particular cocktail of aggression and desire and girlhood and honest rage.  “Seether”, their first single, was part boast, part apology, part warning, a love letter to the kind of rage that breaks out when you try to hold it back. I can’t see her til I’m foaming at the mouth sang Nina Gordon and Louise Post, the band’s frontwomen. Portions of the video are footage of the band in a Chicago animal shelter, surrounded by cats who are uninterested in the production, but somehow make the song’s tone both more vulnerable and more ominous. I try to keep her on a short leash, the lyrics say, while on screen a tabby cat yowls into the camera, as if to say Yeah, OK, good luck with that leash.
For a song with fairly straightforward lyrics—the seether is a personification of an explosive anger—it generated enough secondary interpretations (the seether was an illness, the seether was a vagina…) that in the song “Volcano Girls” on their second album, the band offered a footnote: “here’s another clue if you please/the seether’s Louise”.  Though “Seether” is a song about anger, the title locates it in the before of anger. What’s most interesting about the seether is not the specific quality of her rage, which is somewhat abstract, but about how long the seether can go dormant, and how hard the fight to keep her in her place is. The seether is rocked in her cradle, the seether is knocked out, the seether is boiled, the seether is swallowed, the seether is subjected to all manner of violence and domesticity, but the seether survives, and there’s some triumph in it. Also, perhaps some prescience— the positive reception to Veruca Salt’s debut thrust the band into the spotlight, and the industry, grueling tours, various personal crises, rejection by some in the indie music community that had helped form them, the difficulty of sustaining an intense friendship under even the best of circumstances, and perhaps Louise’s famously immortalized temper led to the band’s breakup after the second album. For years, Gordon and Post weren’t on speaking terms.

Here’s where I confess that I have squeaked into this tournament in spite of missing the heyday of grunge. I was a few years too young for generation X, and I was a Black kid growing up in the late 80’s and early 90s when music and radio were much more firmly segregated. In our car the radio presets were two R&B stations, two hip hop stations, one oldies station, and one generic pop station. Several years ago, when a friend of mine had a 90’s themed 30th birthday party, most of the guests showed up in plaid flannel; I showed up in glitter makeup and the bright blue wig I’d coveted since Lil Kim’s appearance in “Crush on You”.  Up through middle school, if a white person had made music after 1970 and hadn’t made it to the top 40, odds were high I hadn’t heard of them.  I had heard of grunge as a category, and understood it well enough to tell people some of my classmates were into it, but not well enough to answer my mother’s question when she asked “Grunge? Why would they call it something that sounds dirty?”
Not knowing much about what my classmates were into had become something of a badge of honor for me. In the third grade I’d tested out of my neighborhood school and been moved to a gifted classroom in which I was not just the only Black person but one of only a few kids without blue eyes. It hadn’t been welcoming. When my mother looked for a neighborhood to move to where the gifted class might be more diverse, she discovered I was the only Black child in my grade in the gifted program in whole county.  (I was also in the minority in having been placed in the program by the school’s own tests—most of the gifted students had gotten their placements through tests administered by paid private psychologists, something Black parents in the country weren’t regularly told was an option.) We did move, to a school where I was still the only Black student in my class, but no longer the only person of color, but I clung tight to my sense of identity being in part about what I wasn’t. I didn’t want to become that kind of Black girl, the one people worried didn’t understand she was Black. I assumed I wouldn’t like whatever pop culture my white classmates were into in part because it made the ongoing rejection feel mutual, and in part because I didn’t want to wonder who I’d be if it turned out I loved it.
By the late 90s, MTV and the radio were better integrated, and I, being in high school and having a more fully-formed identity, was less defensive about my own tastes. Plus, it was the birth of streaming music services, and for a few brief years before it all got shut down as the widespread theft system that of course it was, through the magic of Napster and Limewire I could hear all the music I’d heard of but never actually heard. The aesthetics were different, but I recognized in grunge feminism a bravado, a willingness to lack decorum and shun respectability,  that reminded me of the most interesting women in the hip-hop and R&B I’d grown up with, women who also had to navigate a scene run by men, women who developed a way of talking about sex without being reduced to it, women who didn’t have the privilege to grow up spoiled or be treated delicately, but had still found a language for telling the world what they wanted, had found the boldness to make demands, had found, in music, a kind of freedom even if it required relentless performance to maintain.  Some of the music of the alternative early 90’s bewildered me, some it took me years to come around on, but I loved “Seether” from the first time I heard it. I understood “Seether” because it understood how much effort goes into performance, how hard it is to keep yourself in a mold.
Anger—who can express it, who gets punished for it, who gets called angry or hostile and who gets praised for being firm or direct—is of course always political. I was raised alongside a generation of women who were fed slogans like girl power and lean in and have it all, which were meant to be inspiring, but sometimes feel instead like we built a generation of girls who were told it was their fault if they didn’t ask for enough, but didn’t build a world prepared to give them much of what they asked for. I was born into the first full generation of Black Americans raised in a post-civil rights act country, the generation of kids sent into schools people threw rocks at their parents to keep them out of, raised by a generation of Black parents who understood that entering formally segregated spaces and seats of power was the beginning of the work, just as the country was patting itself on the back for having reached the end. I was raised in a generation that was fed a story of endless growth and possibility and a bright tech-led future while we watched the wealth gap explode and the social safety net stripped apart and whole industries that had once been the source of stable jobs and communities vanish altogether or shift into gig work. There are costs—physical and mental—to constantly advising people to ask more of a world that keeps telling them no and judging them greedy for wanting it. No wonder all these years later so many people still love a song about seething.  

But I had hard time explaining why I loved “Seether” in the way that I love songs that have given me a vocabulary for a part of myself I didn’t know I needed to name. I don’t generally seethe at people. I rarely yell. I am almost never angry when people think that I am. I am a Black woman with an expressive face, and a person raised by New Yorkers who spent nearly a decade of her adult life in the upper Midwest, and so I eventually learned to anticipate that people would often interpret all manner of emotions— hurt, mild dissatisfaction, indifference, confusion, enthusiasm about an opportunity for change, directness when making a neutral statement of fact — as anger, and that it wouldn’t do me any good to protest. But if I am talking to you, I am almost never angry. I am at best, tired or exasperated or very sad. Well before I’m angry enough to scream, I’ve usually decided the person I’m angry at isn’t worth the effort.
I have two modes of truly angry: I am never going to acknowledge you again unless it will cost me money not to, and I am never going to acknowledge you again, but first I am going to tell you why, calmly but at great length and in specific detail, so that I never have to say a word or worry about hearing from you in the future. My purest rage is not so much an explosive anger as a cold one, a calculation. You win a fight with someone who is screaming at you or trying to hurt you by being indifferent or refusing to hear them out. You win a fight with a person who is careless by caring even less about them than they do about you. You win a fight with a narcissist by ignoring them.  Of course, this strategy only works when you have the power to walk away.
It costs something to build a life where you almost always have the power to walk away. It costs something to understand that most of time when someone is cruel or careless, it’s not because you misunderstood them or are lacking a secret exculpatory piece of information known perhaps only to them or because you did something to deserve it and can still undo whatever the thing was, to understand that a person who treated you that way probably did so because they believe you’re a person with whom they can afford to be cruel and uncareful, either because they don’t value you much or they didn’t expect you to value yourself enough to object. It costs something to object. It costs something to know that you can, in your heart, forgive people for how they let you know they didn’t value you, but you cannot in your heart unknow it, you cannot, in your life, hold space for people who don’t value you, or pretend that you’ll be open to them again.  It costs something to believe that you deserve more than people you care about often believe they should give you.
After I have walked away from someone or someplace that treated me badly, I still remember what it cost, even when I’m not sorry, even once I’m as close to forgiveness as I’ll come. If forgiveness means I’ve stopped saying a hex for you at night before I go to bed, well then sure, I’ve forgiven a lot of people. If forgiveness means I have to be friendly… well then. I don’t seethe before I’ve reached a breaking point, but I often seethe after, when the cord has been cut and there’s nowhere for the anger to go. It can’t be directed at a person or institution I’ve already cut off. When I rock and soothe and fight and swallow and boil my anger, I’m not trying to keep it away from someone else before it hurts them. I’m trying to get rid of it before it hurts me to hold onto it. It’s hard though, to let go of something you know has saved your life more than once.

But letting go of anger apparently has its virtues. It would have been a depressing end for one of the best known grunge bands fronted by women to emerge from the era as another cautionary tale about the cost of feminist rage and desire, another story with the message that you can want the whole world and want it now if you must, but the machine will eat you alive or the world will tear you to pieces, and no one will blame it: you were a bad egg, a bad nut.  But that’s not, after all, how the story ends. After years of open hostility, Gordon and Post met up to sit down and talk things out. The full original band got back together. In 2015, they released a long-awaited new Veruca Salt album, appropriately titled Ghost Notes. It’s moody and playful and sharp and delightful and sounds both like the third album they might have made together in the 90s and also like an album that needed another decade of adult life to get made. NPR’s review says “A group of friends and musicians who have overcome internal turmoil and external pressures that caused them to part ways in the '90s would sound this invincible. Embracing a throwback sound isn't stagnation for Veruca Salt. It's celebration.” I wanted to live so I pretended to die, opens the first song on the album “The Gospel According to Saint Me”, a tongue in cheek song about resurrection and coming back from the dead. The song concludes Surprise surprise it’s gonna be bright.

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her work has won awards and honors including the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction. She is a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a 2021 finalist for The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, and The Sewanee Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.