the second round
(16) local h, “bound for the floor”
crushed
(8) the offspring, “self-esteem”
1020-404
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 14.
THE MORE YOU SUFFER: tom mcallister on “self-esteem”
I bought The Offspring’s album Smash because of the skeleton artwork and because I saw an older kid buying it before me, and I had decided that morning it was time for me to finally own a CD. My goal then was to develop a comprehensive understanding of popular music as quickly as possible so that I could someday have something in common with the cool kids in my class. I was in 7th grade. Almost everyone I knew had cable and watched MTV all day long; we didn’t get cable until I was in college, and anyway back then I exclusively listened to sports talk radio. When my parents drove me to and from soccer practice, they listened to the oldies station.
While my mom sorted through a rack of sweaters at Clover—sort of a regional precursor to Target—I slipped away toward the CDs. One of my main priorities at that time was to avoid displaying an interest in anything; if you have interests, then adults ask you about them and expect you to answer, and they might even ask follow-up questions. They make faces at the other adults indicating some kind of understanding that’s inaccessible to you, and later when you’re not around they’re talking about this new thing you’re into, and they’re maybe even laughing about it, as if you barely exist. First you care about something then they take it away from you and turn it into their own thing. It's awful. If I could have made it through high school without ever having expressed a specific desire for anything, I would have.
My classmates had begun wearing Green Day t-shirts, arguing about Pearl Jam vs. Soundgarden, recording Nirvana songs off the radio and trading cassettes. They were going to Weezer concerts. They were—they said—smoking cigarettes and making out with girls at these concerts. I felt that my very survival depended on catching up with them.
My dad wanted to review the lyrics and listen to a few tracks before I could retreat to my room with Smash. He was a jazz and blues guy, mostly (a year later, I would spend countless hours studying the famously sexy cover of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, but never listening to the album itself). He hated the whole thing, especially “Bad Habit,” the road rage anthem with the infamous lines:
Drivers are rude
Such attitude
When I show my piece
Complaints cease
Something’s odd, I feel I’m god
You stupid dumbshit goddamn motherfucker!
My parents weren’t the types to ban entertainments, though they might scowl and disapprove and worry about the damage I was doing to my brain by watching pro wrestling or Married… With Children. They even allowed me to buy Mortal Kombat on the condition that I first have a conversation with my dad about his concerns regarding the game’s ultraviolence. After my dad listened to Smash, we held our Offspring summit at the kitchen table, where all such meetings occurred. He asked me to read some lyrics aloud and explain what I thought they meant. He told me a lot of the ideas and language in there weren’t appropriate for someone my age, that they might feel “cool” (he did finger quotes here when he said cool) but that coolness is not about being vulgar and angry. He added, as he usually did, that he respected my intelligence enough to let me make my own judgments. I don’t remember a word I said. Over the subsequent months, he continued to review any CD I brought home, and later expressed specific concerns about Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine. “Head Like a Hole,” he said. “That’s just not the kind of thing you name a song.”
Because it was my only CD and because I needed to get the songs memorized by Monday morning, I spent the weekend listening to it on a loop while playing Mutant League Football on my Genesis. Smash was already well on its way to becoming the best selling indie record of all time, so it was me and ten million other kids across America bouncing angrily in our rooms while Dexter Holland shouted somewhat coherently about alienation and betrayal and rage. The two most famous tracks, “Come out and Play” and “Self Esteem” are both a little slower than the rest of the album, not conventionally punk (not that this distinction would have meant anything to me then), with lyrics suggestive of something like depth. Later, Holland told OC Weekly, “A lot of the bands were great back then and made great songs but didn't necessarily have a lot of melody… and that's what we were trying to do, combine those two things."
“Self Esteem” starts with a caricature of a punk group doing melody, an ugly teenage rendition of “la la la la la” sung wildly off key. It’s not clear at first whether this is self-consciousness on the part of a band that knows it can’t actually pull off melodies or if they’re trying to draw attention to the contrast between their punk influences and this new direction. Probably it’s a little of both, and now I also realize it’s also an irony-laden expression of scorn for the idea of people who can sing well; a 1999 Spin article describes Holland regularly pausing mid-concert to rant about how much he hates boy bands and pop stars, to raucous applause. I did not immediately like “Self Esteem” as I did the rest of the album, though I understood that I had to learn to enjoy it like all my friends had. I waited impatiently through the slow part—where he sings about being stuck in a relationship with a bad and manipulative girlfriend—for the music to get loud, the guitars to start wailing. I didn’t care what he was singing, I just wanted to get to the moshing part. I wanted permission to start jumping around and throwing fists.
For the next two years, our main activity—most of the boys in our grade—was gathering in various basements and rec rooms and waiting until parents were safely out of earshot so we could play Nirvana or The Offspring or Silverchair at top volume and mill about anxiously until the song got loud and announced now is the time for you to fuck each other up. We rumbled and tossed each other around and took scary falls against furniture and eventually threw headbutts and punches. As long as no one was bleeding, we started it right back up. The only thing that mattered was the violence.
I was twelve when I first heard “Self Esteem” and though I was desperately interested in having girl troubles, it would be another four years before I had an actual girlfriend. I wanted to relate to the song’s beleaguered narrator, whose girlfriend keeps breaking plans, and right when he’s going to cut her off, he takes her back again (and, hilariously, makes her dessert, a line I’m pretty sure is not a euphemism, is simply describing the narrator making her a pineapple upside down cake or something). All the songs I liked then were about problems I wished I had but was too young to comprehend. When one of my best friends experienced his first troubled relationship, we sat around and listened to this song for hours, his room darkened by heavy curtains, incense burning and blacklight posters illuminated on the walls. We talked again and again about how girls just want to screw you but they’re also so beautiful and what are you supposed to do about that? I could not have imagined a worse fate than to love a girl and not be loved back.
The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care. A lyric I would have gotten tattooed on my forehead if I could have. I thought it explained everything.
One major fact I thought I knew about this band was that they took the name The Offspring because they were all the children of famous serial killers (the source: a friend who heard the info from his cousin, “somebody’s cousin” being the most unimpeachable source of information we all had). I wanted this to be true because I wanted their anger to be authentic. The first track of Ignition, the precursor to Smash, begins with Holland screaming “ahhhh, fuck! Fuck fuck! Fuck!” like a man who has just smashed his thumb with a hammer. If it was just a silly performance, the equivalent of Kid Rock tweeting his middle finger at “authority,” then it would call into question the validity of all the other stuff they were shouting about. The serial killer thing, which I would repeat with confidence for years, would mean they were actually a little scary, though of course they never were.
Perhaps the biggest problem with The Offspring in general is that, despite the well-known fact that Holland earned a PhD in molecular biology, the lyrics get dumber the smarter they try to sound. For a 7th grade English assignment, I delivered a presentation analyzing the lyrics to “Come Out And Play,” only realizing in front of the class, as I read the lines, “Hey—man you talkin' back to me?/ Take him out / You gotta keep 'em separated” that the words themselves were actually very stupid. In interviews, Holland repeatedly claimed he understood the gangland conditions of LA because he drove through those neighborhoods on his way to grad school, the sort of thing one can only say with a straight face if they’ve been praised their whole life for being smart (like me, Holland went to a private Christian college prep school, though unlike me, he was also the class valedictorian).
Though The Offspring and Green Day are often cited as gateways for 90s kids who went on to discover better punk bands, I soon skipped right past punk and into the heaviest metal I could find. By the time I was a full-on depressed teen, the sarcastic sneering on Smash wasn't enough to satisfy me. Too much angst, when I wanted to be projecting power like Pantera, shrieking in rage like Slayer, drowning in the discordance of Slipknot and Cannibal Corpse. Still, I submitted lines from the song “Smash” for my senior yearbook quote (retracting it at the last minute and replacing with a line from Vonnegut because a girl I liked told me that would make me sound smarter). The lyrics: “Head over heels I’ve fit in before/ Now I don’t want to do it no more/ I just want to be who I want to be/ Guess it’s hard for others to see.” As long as I’d been listening to The Offspring, which is to say as long as I’d been actively listening to music, I had been crafting an elaborate fantasy of myself as a rugged iconoclast who was only unpopular by choice, not because I was too cynical and unpleasant to be around. If people didn’t like me, it was because they weren’t as smart or as evolved as I was. If I wasn’t being invited to parties, it was because everybody knew I was too cool to go to them in the first place. It’s a seductive lie for a lonely teenaged boy.
In a SPIN review of Days Go By, The Offspring’s last studio album, Theon Weber writes, “Even in their prime, the Offspring were not good, exactly, but they were genuinely misanthropic, which in certain situations (adolescence and its relapses) can be similar. But it took a while to realize just how misanthropic they were, and are—that underneath their punk snot is not the traditional damaged heart, but a deep and clinical hatred of nearly everything.” This line is referencing their song “Cruising California (Bumpin’ in My Trunk),” which has the sound of a poppy, Miley-style party anthem, but is a furiously sarcastic parody of the genre. It’s not funny, exactly, but if you watch the video you can recognize that a joke is indeed being made. The joke is something like: doesn’t it fucking suck when people like things? Weber continues: “One effect of this disdain is to make the band’s stabs at empathy distended and awkward. Their attempts in the grim-and-nervous 2000s to draft a song capable of tolerance and sympathy…cast the worst possible light on everything." This problem is evident especially in “Self Esteem,” which hates both the girl and the narrator, identifies the flaws in both and determines neither is worth saving.
Holland is the frontman of one of the most commercially successful bands in history (Smash did so well that Rick Sims, former frontman of The Didjits, says he lives primarily off of royalties from The Offspring’s cover of “Killboy Powerhead”). He’s highly educated, and though the punk world doesn’t exactly respect him, he’s not a punchline like wayward 90s rockers Scott Stapp or Chad Kroeger. Basically every music website cites Smash as one of the most influential albums of the decade (Guitar World called it the 37th best guitar album of the 90s!). And yet he’s still just so pissed off all the time. Interviews during their heyday are peppered with potshots at other bands, record executives, anyone involved in hip-hop, anyone shallow enough to want to show their own faces in their music videos. After a while, it becomes clear that Holland’s contempt is not about artistry or aesthetics or even commercialism; it’s just because he can’t stand other people enjoying things. In an oral history of Smash released on the 20th anniversary of the album, he says, “Isn’t it ironic? You start a punk band because you feel like you’re being ostracized. Then your punk band gets big and you get ostracized again.”
Holland, it becomes clear, is a smart, dorky, cynical, sarcastic, and (let’s be honest) ugly guy who thinks he's the only one who gets it. It’s all there on Smash, the striking mix of self-regard and self-loathing, the nervous sweaty energy of a young man who has a good life but thinks he’s owed more and can’t articulate why. The feeling that he’s been cursed with an intelligence that makes it impossible for others to really understand him. The self-pity of a man who announced over and over that he hated the whole world and wanted to be left alone, then got exactly what he wanted. Of course I loved his music when I was young. It was like looking into a mirror.
Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower's Handbook. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse and recently has been publishing a series of short essays written for each year of his life, all of which are collected at tom.mcallister.ws. He's on Twitter @t_mcallister
JOHN MELILLO ON “BOUND FOR THE FLOOR”
This is an essay about Local H’s most commercially successful song, “Bound for the Floor.” It was the first single from the album As Good As Dead, released in April 1996. Local H, at the time an interracial duo composed of singer-guitarist Scott Lucas and drummer Joe Daniels, was founded in 1990 in Chicago. The band—really Lucas’s project—continues to make music today. Local H are the last grunge band.
But this is an essay, really, about this particular Local H of 1996, of “Bound for the Floor.” Listening to this Local H again makes me wonder about what it means to persist in ruins, what it means to linger in the coming after. Listening to this song and this album again, I realize that this song asks me (and all of us) to reckon with debt and mourning and influence.
Local H in 1996 work in a deeply Nirvana-esque style. I say this as a matter of course: the total internalization of quiet-loud-quiet; of textured guitar distortion; of melodic screamed sickness unto death. Local H kill their idols with the kindness of repetition. This is absolutely a compliment.
That’s because for Local H in As Good As Dead this mastery and retransmission of Nirvana’s style produces a kind of newness, even in its fidelity to a previous model. Style as knowledge and homage is something I want to dwell in here: it’s what makes the repetition a swerve, a slight difference. It’s what composes Local H’s afterness and lastness: their continuation.
“Bound for the Floor” and the other songs on this album take up grunge as an idiom in a way that is both totally inside of and removed from it. Mastering grunge (Nirvana’s grunge) as musical style—as a duo no less!—means opening up a gap between recognition and rehearsal, between the enraptured first listening and the task of taking apart and making sense of that listening. This gap shows a band giving in to the power of a style, doing it again not because it is an emotional territory to be misread and mined but because one can continue to work in its nuances and possibilities. Local H represent, for me, how the minor swerve works just enough to manifest a concrete feeling, rather than something tired, cliché, and embarrassing. There is a clear contrast between Local H and the insipid irony-free post-grunge masculinist tragicomedy that filled rock radio in the second half of the 90s.
On a purely technical level, they simply sounded better—more interesting sound textures, better drumming—than the many other Nirvana-esque bands. Their transformation of the power trio into a power duo was inspiring. They worked out an even more efficient system for reducing rock to rhythm and noise.
But the afterness and lastness of Local H—their ability to straddle the abyss between grunge’s operative moment in rock and its cultural exhaustion—goes beyond the technical details of their music. On this album—and in this song’s style and delivery—they are aware of their belatedness. That belatedness neither silences nor alienates them. Rather, it grants them voice. “Bound for the Floor” emerges in the wake of a double death: a death that is actual—Kurt Cobain’s—and another kind of dying: a loss and resolution of the vividness and ongoingness of the past into the concluded fact of the object, the photograph, the status update, a conclusion. The end of Nirvana froze grunge into a death mask. Alice Notley describes this feeling in an essay on Frank O’Hara: “I discovered a curious thing: … Frank O’Hara’s poetry had frozen into art for me. It, like my own past, wasn’t my life, a vivid motion-filled thing; it had died into artifact.”
All over As Good As Dead it is hard not to hear this process of grunge dying into artifact. But to be in that process, to demarcate it as it happens: that is the magic of Local H on this album. This happens in both sound and lyrics. Throughout the album, it’s hard not to hear Cobain as the “you” addressed by Lucas. For instance, on “O.K.” he sings:
Drawing a collective breath
I could cry myself to death
And wash this all away
In a flash, you were gone
Leaving me a couple of songs
That I listen to everyday
And I don't even care
That you were so unfair
Or on “Manifest Density (Part 1)” we hear:
You're on to something good
But I can't believe it's all
That matters to you
A foolWho never seems happy
When things are great
It's too late…
Fidelity—to the call, to those other songs—grants the possibility of speaking to the dead. Your voice both is and is not their voice. The other popular single from As Good As Dead, “Eddie Vedder,” expands on this attitude. It is an angry turn on the one who has left, the one rejecting the singer (and the world): “You go ahead as good as dead / That’s it / I quit / I don’t give a shit.” The one who is dead and gone was always “as good as dead.” The pronounced semblance of death now precedes the actual loss of death.
Such a projection seems to be the power of afterness: the ability to warp time and remake causality.
I should say that this structural atemporality was also part of my lived experience of this music. At the time As Good As Dead and Nevermind were co-emergent in my adolescent brain: my summer ’96 awakening to grunge (brought on by a chance radio listen of Nirvana’s “Drain You”) manifested as a near constant desire to listen to and make these sounds. To hear Local H was to hear the possibility of the reproduction and continuation of not just grunge music but music. Even in the act of repatterning my brain by listening to Nevermind on a nightly basis, I was also hearing other “Nirvana” (i.e. Local H) songs that could distance and somewhat displace the Nirvana-idol-sound-image. That little bit of separation in the music—what at the time I heard (and still hear but less intensely) as distinctions in presentation, in voice, in texture, in attitude, in the sounds of the songs themselves—granted me futurity. The music seemed to be saying: “Can’t go on, must go on.”
All this time passed and passing. So much repetition and difference. “Bound for the Floor,” with its intensely repeated lines of “You just don’t get it / you keep it copacetic / and you learn to accept it / and oh it’s so pathetic” is on the surface a mantra of alienated self-hatred. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the tone of the hatred here: does the singer hate himself as the one keeping it copasetic, hate others for keeping it copasetic, or hate a particular other for going too far? Is the “you” another way of saying “I”? Is the “you” the quiet seeker of a false normality? Is the “you” the potential suicide who holds back and sustains their dread, until the end?
The mantra becomes a magic spell, simultaneously undoing itself and reveling in its failure to undo a single goddamn thing, to change that “you” it calls to. The song seems to be telling us: “Don’t keep cool! Get the fuck loud! Scream!” while also freezing in place, stuck in its own cycle. The song battles an affectlessness that I can’t but hear as a particularly Midwestern take on grunge. I flash to my sophomore year of high school, the commute with my father across the city of Wichita in the blue Chevy Astro van to the high school where he taught and coached football. What were the effects of hearing this song nearly every morning on the radio? Was I hearing myself hate myself or hearing myself hate my dad? Or hearing myself hate the self that dad, school, football, world were making of me? “What good is confidence.” Or hearing myself hate the very emptiness of a self that would admit to such influence? Or hearing myself hate the afterness of adolescence, the irredeemable fall into desire, responsibility, compromise? “Bound for the floor.” Or hearing myself hate already death? “Born to be down.”
All, none, others.
There is something about minor voices, the voices that are perhaps underrated or forgotten by the mass projections and delusions of immense popularity, that helps answer the question: how do you survive this shit? Debt, mourning, influence. To come after grants the possibility of survival, the grace of keeping things going. To call to Cobain and to recall Nirvana’s sound both freezes and animates the object. It remains there as immovably movable as the stars. We pass into the afterness—which is, at least, still passing.
John Melillo is a professor, writer, and musician who lives in Tucson, Arizona, and St. Joseph du Moine, Cape Breton. His first book, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk, was published by Bloomsbury in the Fall of 2020. Melillo teaches/researches at the University of Arizona and performs under the name Algae & Tentacles.