the second round

(14) Babes in toyland, “bruise violet”
shut off
(6) rem, “what’s the frequency, kenneth?”
416-358
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 closde @ 9am Arizona time on March 10.

WITHDRAWAL IN DISGUST IS NOT THE SAME AS APATHY: ADAM O. DAVIS ON “WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH?”

In October of 1986, Dan Rather was walking home after a day of being CBS’s Dan Rather when he was beaten like a piñata on Park Avenue. Between blows, his assailants, who in suits and ties looked more like operagoers than muggers, asked repeatedly, “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?” which did Rather no good as his name was not Kenneth and he knew of no frequency. So the question—secret code or simply that day’s unfortunate coda—went unanswered and Rather took his licks until his attackers were scared off by his apartment building’s doorman and super. In the aftermath, Rather was whisked to Lennox Hill Hospital for treatment while this story, coupled with those that came before it (see: Rather’s literal gut-punch at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and his 1980 pseudo-kidnapping by a Chicago taxi driver), cemented the news reporter as this nation’s go-to guy for weird public encounters.
High school in 1994 was nothing but a series of weird public encounters for me. Three years after my father’s job transfer took us from Utah to France, my family moved to New Jersey during the lowest point of my slow-moving puberty and I found myself in the 9th Grade at Kinnelon High School, home to roughly 600 students, the majority of whom looked upon my five feet of introspective astigmatized awkwardness with a mixture of bemused pity or violent curiosity. Though my bowl-cut and bespectacled looks didn’t help (“a young William Hurt,” my grandmother once said—hardly the epitome of relational catnip the 90s demanded), what really sunk my hopes of social mobility was that I had missed out on the grunge revolution as France had been more concerned with “le techno” than “le malaise des jeunes.”
It wasn’t that I wasn’t familiar with grunge—Nirvana was in heavy rotation on French radio, especially “Rape Me,” which along with Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” never suffered censorship because the English lyrics were considered not so much vehicles for meaning but garnish for melody—but my understanding of the movement as a whole was skewed by France’s generically-promiscuous programming that provided for sets of, say, MC Solaar followed by Bryan Adams followed by Technotronic followed by Phil Collins followed by Snoop Dogg followed by Alain Souchon followed by SNAP! and then Meat Puppets capped off with Mariah Carey. Safe to say, when I arrived in the Garden State I had no fucking clue about the strict rules that governed the listening habits of American teenagers in the 1990s.
As it turned out, the rules that governed said teenage listening habits demanded you pick a category and stick with it. And in largely white northwestern New Jersey, this meant alternative music and only alternative music. One could not, for example, appreciate both Ace of Base and The Breeders any more than one could listen to Crystal Waters and Veruca Salt. All of this was explained to me by the one friend I had whose name I can’t remember as we sat in his bedroom and played DOOM, listening to Stone Temple Pilots on the radio as downstairs his mother slowly walled herself in with baskets of folded laundry. This friend was the one who introduced me via Sony Discman to Green Day’s Dookie, to Soundgarden’s Superunknown, to Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy—all those albums that quickly became the soundtrack for my suffering, so much so that it’s impossible for me to hear “Basket Case” or “Black Hole Sun” or “Better Man” without immediately being transported back to those days of dread which were somehow heightened by the aggressive alienation I encountered on the radio.
All those songs that floated in the wake of Nirvana’s sudden dissolution spoke too clearly to the teenage sense of grief that I carried then—that unshakeable feeling that I was defective and would always be so as if grunge weren’t a musical movement but a kind of catechism for self-loathing, a feeling that was only further enforced at school. To be clear, I was not popular or well-liked during my time in Kinnelon. The transatlantic origins of my arrival didn’t imbue me with mystery so much as suspicion. And, despite the bullying that made me feel as if I burned bright as neon in the eyes of upperclassmen, I was largely forgettable as a person, which is, of course, the worst part about being bullied: You were picked on because you were convenient, not important.
In addition to the student-centric hostility, there was the institution itself. This high school ran as all high schools had run for decades—a kind of industrial shame machine that encouraged hazing and humiliation under the guise of a good-humored, paternalistic hierarchy that prized literal seniority over the healthy development of younger students. This codification—complete with its assortment of handy labels: jock, nerd, slut, prude, etc.—may have made John Hughes’ career possible but it really made my life hell. I’ll spare the details, but suffice to say that back then Kinnelon H.S.’s Spirit Week was a study in cheerful sadism that culminated in having all freshmen don blueface and white caps so that they could be paraded as Smurfs around the school gymnasium while their peers screamed at them, doing nothing in the long run for school unity and everything for child psychologists and college-emergent sexual fetishes.
So when R.E.M.’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” arrived in September of 1994, it arrived during the darkest days of my puberty, my adolescent disillusionment, my naïve stumbling toward an adult world that at 14 seemed an impossible two years away in the form of a driver’s license. The R.E.M. I had known—that is, the R.E.M. who’d lost their religion, who stood in a corner spot-lit and lying, who proclaimed themselves shiny happy people, who promised that everyone hurts sometimes and that if you were to nightswim it would be best to have a quiet night for it what with the recklessness of water—was no more. They, like a butterfly from the chrysalis or an aggressive teenage acne, burst back into cultural consciousness with hormonal fervor.
Gone was Michael Stipe the pensive crooner and in his place a dancing cartoon—all bald, all pelvis. Gone was Mike Mills’s pageboy haircut and hand-me-down T-shirt collection and in their places long tresses and Gram Parsons’s (!) Nudie suit. On the other hand, Bill Berry continued to drum sleeveless and Peter Buck maintained his penchant for shirts ripped from the covers of romance novels. But musically, the band was unrecognizable from its former self—no mandolin, no sweeping two-party harmonies or orchestral strings, no odes to the environment or cult Hollywood personalities. What we now had was as aggressive and biting as coffee filtered through a pair of Iggy Pop’s jeans. What we now had was a single whose delightfully deranged tribute to miscommunication took its inspiration from Dan Rather’s sudden sidewalk beatdown and whose opening chords bubbled like hydrogen peroxide on a blister, bright and antiseptic as the sun. What we now had was a song that blasted through the sonic murk that threatened to not only define but drown a generation—what we now had was the song that officially ended grunge.
If Achtung Baby was, as Bono suggested, the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree, then R.E.M.’s Monster was the sound of four men driving a chainsaw through the sacred heart of the Seattle Sound. It was a document (ahem) wherein Stipe & Co. took back the baton Stipe himself had handed to Cobain. Like the progenitors they were, R.E.M. served as both alpha (“Losing My Religion”) and omega (“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”) to this era, bookending grunge so wholly that music—with the exception of Bush and Seven Mary Three’s increasingly apish torch songs for the great white Pacific Northwest—had to move on. The song was and is a plea for understanding with the understanding that that plea will go unanswered. Just as was the case for Dan Rather on his patch of Manhattan sidewalk, just as was the case for me in the linoleum hallways of Kinnelon High.
Unlike the aforementioned songs that continue to serve as sonic quicksand for my psyche, no matter when or where I hear “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” all I feel is joy. From the opening’s electric beehive of a riff and hi-hat kickoff to the ending’s suddenly drowsy denouement, the song is killer. I love the muffled production that rightly buries everything under distortion because as was the case with Drake in his lead coffin, the denser the container, the deeper the mystery. I love the countrified undertow of Mills’s bassline and his Wilhelm scream rushing in at the end like a Scud missile. I love Berry’s Gatling-gun-at-a-disco drumming. I love Buck’s solo wound in reverse and I love that TREMOLO (which producer Scott Litt would unforgivably remove in his 25th anniversary remix) and I love Stipe’s famously unintelligible delivery that is broken again and again when he screams out “I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND!” which is exactly what I imagine Rather must’ve screamed out the night he was assaulted or what I know is what I wanted to scream out when after three years of believing I could never be understood because I was an American in France I returned to America to find I was understood there even less.
I love this song because it didn’t just capture the truth of my teenage condition but it captures the human one—misunderstanding not as misstatement or malapropism but full-fledged freak out—and I love the music video that sums up my very sense of those teenage years: being strobe-lit and awkward, desperate to be noticed yet terrified of being seen, all the while backed by a cardboard cutout of the suburbs until the chorus kicks in and then for those brief seconds the world, like Stipe, goes wild with possibility.
Stipe referred to Rather’s assault as “The premier unsolved American surrealist act of the 20th century,” so it makes sense that one of the masters of 20th Century American surrealist fiction, Donald Barthelme, was floated as a possible assailant. Barthelme was by most accounts a bit of a madman (he allegedly served as the inspiration for Jeff Bridges’s character, Bad Blake, in Crazy Heart) given to epic reimaginings of what New York City life could be (his short story, “The Balloon,” wherein a giant balloon peacefully invades Manhattan, is one of the most insanely beautiful reflections on the intersection of art and intimate relationships ever committed to print). He also once wrote a story that contained the phrase “what’s the frequency?” and the name “Kenneth,” so it’s possible that it could have been him though the evidence is, admittedly, as thin as a laundry line (in the end it was determined that William Tager, who killed an NBC stagehand in 1994, was responsible). Even so, there’s something deliciously apocalyptic in imagining this primitive meeting of writer and anchorman, not unlike when Ernest Hemingway and Wallace Stevens encountered each other in a Key West bar and, instead of discussing their totemic influence over American letters, got drunk, insulted each other, and then got into a fistfight.
“I like Dan Rather,” Peter Buck wrote. “He’s a fine newsman, an interesting person to talk to, and quite a bit nuttier than most of those media types (I consider that a good thing). That said, nothing in my rich and varied life prepared me for the experience of performing behind him as he ‘danced’ and ‘sang’ ‘What's the Frequency, Kenneth?’” All of which is to say, if you, like Mr. T in Rocky III, are interested in pain, watch the brief but bruising clip of Dan Rather singing the song live with R.E.M. The man may deliver a bizarre non sequitur like no other (ex: This race is hotter than a Times Square Rolex—I know that you’d rather walk through a furnace in a gasoline suit than consider the possibility John Kerry will lose in Ohio—We used to say if a frog had side pockets, he’d carry a handgun—This is one of the so-called “big enchiladas”), but he’s got as much business singing as a pelican has wearing gabardine slacks.
So what now? What have I been trying to say in this essay? That in the latter half of 1994 I lived in what my nostalgic nature demands I call, despite evidence otherwise, a gilded age? That in the last of those pre-internet years I was lucky enough to find a song that would spirit me through the many seasons of my life? That a newsman could take a punch and turn it into a punchline, that by transubstantiating violence into comedy he turned whatever victimhood he and others might have wanted for him into a weird kind of dignity? That a band who was born the year I was born would weather the shifting musical sands to remain not just relevant but essential and who in their wisdom would break up before they had the chance to descend like so many before them into a cover band of themselves?
It strikes me that Nirvana never got the chance to make the decision R.E.M. made, that Cobain defined a generation but never got to see where that generation went. Whenever anyone writes about grunge—or any musical movement—they wind up writing about how it ended and in this I’m no different, though what I’m more interested in is endings: about how we decide to end things and how those ends can be tragic or hopeful, about how things can get better even when you’re certain they never will, about the beauty in the passage of all things despite the pain of them being past, about how all I want is for you to understand me and it’s okay if you never do.

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020). The recipient of the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The Best American Poetry 2021, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, and Prairie Schooner. He never saw R.E.M. live but he was once headbutted at a Collective Soul concert. More at www.adamodavis.com. 

Cloven Tongues Like as of Fire: Scott Beal on “Bruise Violet”

The most infamous scream in heavy metal history is Tom Araya’s opening shriek in Slayer’s “Angel of Death.” It happens nineteen seconds in and lasts about seven seconds: Araya’s voice enters ear-splittingly high, then dives into a sharp growl that eventually strangles off. It’s a standalone moment, a quintessential bit of demonic stage setting for an album that does its best to sound really fucking evil. The first time I heard it, it scared me a little. But it’s just theater, along with the rest of the horror schlock imagery from the album art to the lyrics. (So the band explained in all the interviews I cited for my tenth grade report, “Are Slayer Really Devil Worshippers?”; what else could they say in the era of the PMRC, Satanic Panic, and suicides blamed on Judas Priest?)
What Araya does, Kat Bjelland does better. Just over two minutes into “Bruise Violet,” Bjelland erupts into a striking scream that curdles upward into banshee heights, stretches out, and gradually crackles toward static. It’s every bit as prolonged and piercing as Araya’s. What’s different is that her scream isn’t in the spotlight—it naturally wells up out of a quieter moment where she has just chanted the title phrase three times, bruise violet, like a spell. It’s as if, after lulling us into a false sense of calm, she dredges up this voice of hell that’s been lurking in wait. As you listen you can feel it rising in your own throat like a bubble of hysteria. When it bursts, you don’t know whether to pass out or laugh. But Bjelland’s undaunted—she punctuates with a gruff “yeah!” then downshifts into ethereality.
“Bruise Violet” is like this all the way through. The song refuses to pull a punch or stay in place. From the first two tom strikes it comes out pummeling (has any drummer ever wreaked more joyful mileage out of their toms than Lori Barbero?) as the whole band stomps at you in razory discord. Bjelland sneers “yoooouuuuuu” through clenched teeth, then gives every accusatory word of the verses its own rasp and torque. Threaded between are these translucent refrains, “you’ve got this thing that follows me around,” from a voice itself hanging back, following from a distance. Without seeing the video, you might wonder whether it was still Bjelland singing or Barbero interjecting from behind the drums.
And then of course there are the liars. Three sets of three. It feels weird to call them a chorus, though they appear in the right places. Together they tell a story. The first a straightforward accusation: Liar! The second a little deeper, with a wily smirk and tilt of the head, as if to say, c’mon, you know what you are, don’t deny it, liar. Then the sing-songy third like the voice of a maniac taunting you from the dark, liiii-aaaaar, letting you know she sees you even if you can’t see her and the bloody knife she’s clutching. As earworms go, it’s unconventional, seeming to come from inside your head rather than out—three shades of conscience gnawing from different angles.
Throughout “Bruise Violet,” Bjelland uses a different part of her repertoire every time she opens her mouth. I’m not saying the lyrics don’t matter; on the contrary, Bjelland’s lyrics are full of infectious outrage and surreal delights like “glue instead of spine.” What I’m saying is that the literal narrative the lyrics are supposed to tell [1] might be the least interesting experience you can have with this song. What Bjelland says, she says with her lungs and larynx and the machinery that churns through them. Her voice contradicts itself at every turn. It spans multitudes. To listen to Kat Bjelland’s voice is to feel the cords of human possibility stretch inside you.

Ok, I know that sounds lofty. Let me bring it down a notch. As I write this, I’m wearing the same flannel shirt I wore yesterday and the day before, purple and blue plaid unbuttoned over a faded concert T-shirt. I could tell you I chose this look to get in the proper mindset to hold forth about the grunge era (even the colors fit the bruising violet theme). But the real reason is that we’re stuck in this endless pandemic and there’s no reason to dress for anyone or leave the house. Also, unlike the flannels I wore from 1989 through 1994, this one isn’t thrifted. It’s from Stitch Fix. We are all different people than we used to be.
Case in point: for years I refused reality TV with a nigh religious disdain. Now, my teenage kids have got me hooked on Survivor. Survivor is a show about many things, none of which is survival. Our favorite season so far has been Millennials vs. Gen X. My sixteen-year-old daughter, a proud member of Gen Z, feels a kinship with Millennials and yearned to see their tribe prevail. Before long, I did too. The Gen Xers kept spouting off about how prepared and hardworking their (our) generation is known to be, especially compared to those lazy millennials. I found myself thinking okay boomer about people my own age. Weren’t we the slacker generation, permeated with apathy? Did I miss how Singles was a film about real go-getters working tirelessly for the common good? I thought we all hated the label Gen X anyway: the generation defined by being an unknown quantity. It puzzles me all the more how my kid enthusiastically embraces the label of Gen Z: the generation after the generation after X.
The one admirable trait I thought emerged from Generation X was the DIY ethic. I reckon some of us grew into that ethic better than others. Some of my best friends learned to make pickles and tape loops, to butcher meat and ink tattoos, to build a house or run a campground. Before she died, my friend Lisa was working her way toward living self-sustainably off the grid. I love the idea that each of them thought fuck it, there’s no reason I can’t do this, and did it.
At the end of their 1993 EP Painkillers, there’s a long unbroken track of a live set at CBGB’s. My favorite part is the first thirty seconds, before they launch into “Bruise Violet.” It’s just the sound of milling, Bjelland’s voice saying sorry (for what?), scattered calls from the crowd, a few experimental clangs on the guitar. I recognize this caesura from the beginning of every show my band ever played (stretching cringingly long on the few recordings that survive) and most shows I saw through the nineties. It’s also captured on many Babes in Toyland bootlegs on YouTube. Take this 1992 footage from the Khyber Pass Pub in Philadelphia:

For the first two-and-a-half minutes the engine is idling—band members chatting, tuning their instruments, worrying over the lighting. You see how present and life-sized they are. One step up and you could be on that stage. If you too appear to be casually loitering in the bar, sipping a drink and shielding your eyes, then couldn’t you transform as well into a machine of sonic annihilation in the second it takes for the toms to kick in?

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. —Acts 2:2-4 

Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, color, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes…. —Federico García Lorca, “Theory and Play of the Duende”

When you scream like that it’s just like letting yourself go. It’s just like you just go [makes crackling noise and rolls eyes into back of head] like you just go up into your head and whatever comes out comes out. It’s like this thing that I can do, it’s just like you just go, ok NOW, and then it’s like you just like let something else take over. —Kat Bjelland, from Not Bad for a Girl

The first time I saw Babes in Toyland was at the Latin Quarter in Detroit—a place where legends from Ella Fitzgerald to The Supremes once played. (It closed the next year, and was demolished in 2011.) They were opening for Skinny Puppy, whom I’d ridden along in the back of a friend’s car to see. None of my friends knew where any of the venues were in Detroit; we would drive in circles until someone recognized a landmark, then park and walk toward the nearest people smoking cigarettes in single file. I had just turned eighteen, and a lot of my life was like that: along for the ride, hoping for the best. A recovering metalhead, I’d recently taken to dancing to a select few industrial hits at the Nectarine Ballroom in Ann Arbor. I liked Skinny Puppy’s metal-adjacent dissonance and Nivek Ogre’s distorted warbles. I knew I was in for a parahuman vocal performance. I just didn’t expect it from the opening act.
Part of the effect of Bjelland’s voice is undeniably visual—the contrast between what her façade prepares you to hear and the sound that emerges from her mouth. Her look in the “Bruise Violet” video is a classic example: cascading blond hair with tousled bangs, bright red lipstick matching a tiny red bow, a white mini-dress with flouncy sleeves. It’s a carefully ironic aesthetic, famously pioneered by Bjelland, which cobbles together and deconstructs a range of feminine reference points, from Hollywood pinups to porcelain Victorian dolls. Mish Barber-Way of White Lung has described it as “a perverted and sexy subversion of the classic ‘girl’ archetype.” When you see a performer take the stage in this guise for the first time, you recognize the irony, but you still have no way to anticipate what’s about to happen. As Babes in Toyland launched into “Catatonic,” I saw Lori Barbero pound the daylights out of her drum kit and Michelle Leon rock and squall on her bass. I saw Kat Bjelland attack both guitar and microphone with reckless abandon. She roared. She pivoted from guttural to sweet to shrill. She let something else take over. And in the process, she took the confining cypher of the feminine expectation she’d worn onto stage and dashed it to dust. I felt like I’d been slapped awake. My pulse galloped. Anything could happen.
Is it any wonder that legendary photographer Cindy Sherman became a fan and collaborator? That’s her in a blond wig and congruent mini-dress playing Bjelland’s doppelganger in the “Bruise Violet” video. That’s her creepy doll photo on the Fontanelle album cover. Sherman had built her artistic career exploding ideas of femininity, exposing the constructedness and confinement of those categories, and insistently using her own individual presence to brim over and spill out of them. Naturally she was drawn to Babes in Toyland, the way that Lori Barbero beat the ever-loving shit out of her toms, and especially the way Kat Bjelland in her cuted-up chic, her babydoll dress and sweet blue-eyed smile, would step to the mic and unleash hell.
In 1992 Sherman had undertaken her most controversial project, Sex Pictures, in which she used mannequins and prostheses to unhinge the voyeuristic conventions of pornographic sexuality—capturing their grossness and artificiality and violence. And so the Fontanelle album cover with its uncomfortably-anatomical doll crotch facing the viewer from a supine position—and also the androgyny of the expressionless doll face, and the lighting both gloomy and garish, and those disembodied fingers in the top left corner, looming toward us. Like the Sex Pictures, the album cover confronts us with an uncanny-valley eroticism constructed to be both familiar and unsettling, hinting at what’s monstrous in all we take for granted about sex.

It’s been my experience that men have trouble admiring women. No, even that word, admiring, is a problem, with cringey echoes of secret admirers we would now call stalkers. I mean admiring as in looking up to women, as in recognizing the ingenuity and talent of women, of wanting to emulate their efforts or learn from their successes. I hesitate to say respecting women because that’s often nice-guy code for extending a modicum of decency and expecting sex in return. But managing to express respect for women without an element of either objectification (doesn’t hurt she’s hot) or tokenization (badass for a chick) is pretty much what I’m talking about, and something I seldom heard for much of my life, even from progressive-minded dudes.
In in the mid-nineties Michael Moore came through Ann Arbor on a speaking tour to promote his first book, Downsize This. There’s a chapter in the book about Moore’s admiration for Hillary Clinton, and his schtick included a cardboard cutout of Hillary in a cowboy hat propped beside his podium on the Michigan Theater stage. He was trying to counteract the stream of right-wing hatred for the First Lady (during the It Takes a Village backlash). And what he said was he thought she was hot. That was the linchpin of his praise. To make a political statement on Hillary Clinton’s behalf, he led with framing her value in terms of hotness. Maybe he was dumbing it down for his audience, trying to meet our neanderthal brains halfway. After all, the crowd response was one of amused disbelief: Hillary, hot? Surely you jest, wacky documentarian!
The state of the music press was hardly better for any of the women-driven groups of the nineties. In a 1990 interview for Melody Maker, the first question asked of Babes in Toyland by journalist Everett True (who later in the article mocks hacks who ask dumb questions) is “What’s it like being an all-female band?” Three months later, True poses L7 the same query: “Sorry, but I've got to ask you…. What's it like being female?” (The subtitle of the L7 interview: “Are L7 really Californian white trash bitches from hell or is Everett True just having another wet dream?”) In a story on Hole the next year, True simultaneously sexualizes and slut-shames Courtney Love for four paragraphs before tsk-tsking that “Hole deserve far, far better than to be categorised by their sex.” True’s editor apparently saw no philosophical inconsistency. This same Everett True would later coin the term “kinderwhore” to describe the look popularized by Bjelland and Love. The portmanteau seems to have emerged unpremeditated—and surely it says something that the first association to occur to a writer tasked with capturing the zeitgeist of women seizing agency in the male-dominated rock industry was literally child whore. Just as surely, that’s the impoverished imagination that Sherman’s cover for Fontanelle is designed to subvert.

Few of my male friends loved Babes in Toyland like I did. I never knew any who bought their albums or ventured to their shows. We could all agree that Kat Bjelland’s shrieks were awesome, but that was as far as it went. No one admired her guitar stylings, her melodic choices, the raw propulsions of the rhythm section. Admirable qualities that people saw in Mudhoney, say, they didn’t see in Babes in Toyland. And I don’t know why. I never talked to my friends about this. I don’t know if I had the vocabulary to bring it up, or the self-awareness, or the audacity. Maybe they didn’t love the targets of Babes in Toyland’s vitriol? Was it easier to sing along with a misogynistic screed like Mudhoney’s “Here Comes Sickness” than Babes in Toyland’s “Bluebells,” a wrathful condemnation of a would-be rapist?
We are all different people than we used to be. It’s a sad fact that I rarely talk to most of my friends from the 90s unless it’s at one of our funerals. I wouldn’t even know how to get in touch with the guys who drove me to see Skinny Puppy. I woke up last week from a dream in which I was frantically digging through mud pits with my old friend Amy for some artifact that our lives depended on. I woke up missing her terribly, reached out on Facebook for the first time in two years, and asked her about Babes in Toyland. Amy: “I loved the gritty dirtiness of their music. Bjelland’s vocals were fire!”
     Amy tells me this story about a bachelorette party from 1997. Fifteen young women hanging out in a big house, eating food, getting wasted and rocking out. As the night wears toward two a.m., the last half-dozen diehards are blaring Nemesisters, and our friend Steph, wearing a trapper hat, picks up a bass and starts air-guitaring along with Babes in Toyland’s version of “We Are Family.” Her face twists in an iconic rock-and-roll scowl as her hat flaps fly everywhere. Everyone rolls around the room in fits of laughter.
In the photo Amy sends me, our friend Lisa has tumbled back on the bed, twisting at the waist, arms crossed over her torso as if to hold herself in. Her head is thrown back, eyes shut, and her mouth hangs wide open: she is howling with laughter. She is making a noise with her entire body that is artless and unplanned, a pure eruption of joy that bursts out and goes where it will.
We were digging for the artifact to save our lives and found it.

When have I ever had to scream? A genuine scream is rare. Outside of music, when have I even heard a scream? Once, from a wife laying over the casket of her husband of fifty years. Mostly just in movies though—I’ve been lucky. Screams emerge from moments of the utmost terror and anguish.
There’ve been plenty of screams I’ve muffled. I’ve buried my face in a pillow after a breakup or a friend’s suicide and shrieked myself breathless into the padding. Being human in a crisis sometimes means being caught between the need to let it out and the need to maintain decorum, to not let your own anguish wake the neighbors. Even unleashing our demons, we feel the imperative to keep them to ourselves.
To bruise is to take a temporary kind of damage, and violet is the prettiest intermediary shade in the life cycle of a bruise. To call on someone to bruise violet is not so much to wish them harm as to wish them to weather harm—to live through the forces that damage you, to wear their marks without hiding or holding still. But that isn’t easy. It’s a quality I admire. When I rack up griefs and joys and still have trouble screaming for myself, I’m grateful to have Kat Bjelland’s voice to scream through me. 

[1] It’s widely presumed the “you” in “Bruise Violet” is Courtney Love. There are many places you can read or hear the story of Bjelland and Love’s early friendship, fleeting collaborations, and eventual falling out. When I chose to write about this song I swear I didn’t know any of this, and in the end it was the last thing I wanted to talk about. There’s a 1995 Rolling Stone interview in which, between asking Bjelland about clothes and dating, the writer presses her for details about her feud with Courtney Love. Bjelland rejects the line of inquiry as “a boring old topic,” but he insists. Greedy to keep the rivalry going, he wants to know if Hole’s hit “Violet” might be a counterstrike. Bjelland refuses to feed the voyeuristic desire to see one woman artist tear down another. She defuses the question by noting that “Violet” is a kick-ass song.

Scott Beal is the author of Wait 'Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books, 2014) and The Octopus (Gertrude Press, 2016). His poems have recently appeared in The Rupture, Sugar House Review, Crosswinds, Quiddity, and other journals. He teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan and co-hosts the Skazat! monthly poetry series in Ann Arbor.