the second round

(6) everclear, “santa monica”
smashed
(3) smashing pumpkins, “today”
413-345
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 12.

Watch the World Die: melissa faliveno On “Santa Monica”

I am still living with your ghost
Lonely and dreaming of the west coast

Not long ago, a writer I know from Portland called Everclear “the Nickelback of the 90s.” I was horrified by this news. Growing up in small-town Wisconsin, where the influence of the coasts hit us late, if it hit at all, I loved Everclear with everything I had in my hard Midwestern heart. As far as I knew, they were as cool as it got.
In 1995, the year Everclear’s first major-label record, Sparkle and Fade, was released, and “Santa Monica” hit alt-rock airwaves across the country, I was twelve. At the time, my favorite records were Green Day’s Dookie and the Offspring’s Smash. I had the t-shirts, oversized and plastered with album art, purchased at Hot Topic in the West Towne Mall in Madison. It was here, twenty miles from my hometown, that I would weave my way on any given Saturday from that black-lit den of lava lamps and mass-produced alternative culture to Claire’s, spinning wire racks of cheap yin-yang rings and yellow smiley-face necklaces on ball chains and black cords, to that most hallowed mecca of the mall: Sam Goody. And afterward, just across the parking lot, Best Buy. 
In 1995, and in the years to follow, these big-box stores and their endless rows of cassette tapes and CDs in shiny jewel cases were all I knew. This was where I bought my Dookie and Smash; my Sixteen Stone and Tragic Kingdom; The Downward Spiral and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Where I bought Garbage’s self-titled debut and Everclear’s Sparkle and Fade.
Just a few miles away was Madison’s legendary Smart Studios, where Garbage and Everclear recorded those albums, at the very same time. The same studio where Nirvana recorded Nevermind. But I didn’t know this yet. I didn’t know who Butch Vig was, or what a producer did. I didn’t know the thrill of recording to tape, creating a document through music. I didn’t know about scenes, or zines, or house shows. I didn’t know the sticky floors of dark clubs, or gig posters tacked to dive-bar doors. I didn’t know there were cooler record stores too—dusty places run by punk kids and old hippies, where I would learn to thumb disaffectedly through used vinyl before I even had a record player. I didn’t know that two of my favorite records had been made in a city I loved, which I would soon call my second hometown.  

“Santa Monica” is a song about a hometown. It’s a song about leaving the place you come from and wanting to go home, even when you know you can never really return. And maybe what I mean is it’s a song about nostalgia—about longing for a place, and a time, that looks better from a distance. 
It’s a simple song, in some respects: basic chords, nothing fancy. Its complexity lies in the nuance, the slow build of tension and release. The heart of it, though, is the man who sings it.
Alone in my apartment, I work on the chords. It’s not an easy song to sing and play at the same time, but I’m trying. My guitar is plugged into a Fender Prosonic, a 90s tube amp made to be turned up loud. It sits beneath my living-room window, below a 1970s Fender Bassman. It’s a handsome stack, silver-faced and vintage (because the 90s, somehow, is vintage too) but it’s out of place here. It belongs where it once lived, in places where loud music is made. Before friends left town and bands broke up, before a rehearsal space was torn down. Before the music, like everything else in New York, went away.
I play low, at first, to not piss off my neighbors. But in this year of pandemic half the neighbors have left, and no one has moved in below us. So I turn up the volume and play to the living room, empty except for my cat, who hides beneath a chair because she hates the guitar, but who, unlike everyone else, doesn’t leave. I turn the distortion up too, till the notes are dirt and fuzz. I always sound better this way, the further I get from clean. 

It’s no surprise, really, that a band like Everclear was uncool in a place like Portland in the 90s—the kind of scene whose depths of cool I can’t even fathom. It was the next Seattle, or so the old alt-weeklies tell me, though I suspect it was a scene more like Madison’s at the time—small and weird and eschewing stardom, doing its own thing. A band that wanted to make it—a band that wasn’t even from there—was perhaps the furthest thing from cool.
“Everclear remain out in the cold among Portland’s band circles,” wrote the Rocket in 1994. A year later, Portland’s Willamette Week crowned frontman Art Alexakis “the most hated musician in Portland,” and “the most unpopular musician in Portland.” These words were echoed by the Portland Mercury fifteen years later. It’s a title, and a sentiment, that stuck.
“We basically got every door shut in our face here in Portland,” Alexakis told the now-defunct music site Addicted to Noise, in a 1995 interview titled “Loser Makes Good.” “‘Cause we weren’t from Portland. If you’re not part of the clique, it doesn’t happen. And we did happen, without any help from those people, and they resent the hell out of us.”
The tension between art and commerce (see what I did there?) is an old one, but I would wager it was most acute in nascent indie scenes in the 90s, that slacker’s beating heart of the grunge era. A band that did the damnable—sign with a major label, hit the charts, tour the world—were not just uncool; they were sell-outs.
But when you grow up without much money, you learn early that you can, indeed, buy yourself a new life. That working hard, and selling things—whether it’s paper or car parts or music—is a way to stay alive. No one knew this better than Art Alexakis.
“We were one of the first, really, to jump to the major labels because it wasn’t really deemed very cool,” he told Oregon Live in 2015, at the twentieth anniversary of Sparkle and Fade. “Me, I just wanted to support my family.”
With apologies to a city I like a lot, it’s hard, as an outsider, to think of Portland in the 90s and not imagine Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, dressed in plaid, hanging out at an indie record store on Hawthorne (how am I doing, Portlanders?), rolling their eyes at some bleach-haired kid asking for the new Everclear. It’s hard not to feel the kid’s shame as she scurries out the door—a feeling I’ve had in record stores so many times, including a few weeks ago, when I finally bought a copy of Dookie on vinyl. For every record, every band, every song you hold up as the pinnacle of cool, there is some much cooler kid who will tell you it sucks.
“We weren’t the hipsters,” Alexakis said. “We never have been.”

Being an outsider—being uncool, being weird—is something Art Alexakis writes about a lot. He’d been an outcast long before moving to Portland, in 1991, and by then had already begun to wear his weirdness like a badge, like a chip on his shoulder, like armor.
“I was always treated like an outcast by other kids at school,” he told Addicted to Noise, which in 1995 named Everclear Band of the Year. “Their parents would find out where I lived and they’d send me home. And I couldn’t go to those kids’ houses anymore.”
Alexakis was born in Santa Monica, California, on April 12, 1962. When he was five, his father left (and did sometimes send his son a birthday card with a $5 bill), and the family moved to a housing project in Los Angeles. When he was twelve, his brother died of a heroin overdose and his girlfriend committed suicide using the same drug. Not long after, he attempted suicide by jumping off the Santa Monica Pier.  
By age thirteen he was shooting heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth. At twenty-two, after spending time in juvie, he overdosed. He got clean, and after a few failed bands, a failed record label, and the first of three failed marriages, he moved from San Francisco to Portland, in the hopes of starting over. On public assistance with a kid on the way, he started Everclear—named after the alcohol, which he calls “pure white evil”—a drug that will fuck you up more than most but has a pretty name. (Anyone who has taken flaming shots of Everclear, like I did in college, understands this.)
In 1993, they put out an EP called Nervous & Weird. Their first full-length, World of Noise, recorded in a basement for $400 and released on Portland’s indie label Tim/Kerr, followed the same year. In 1995, Sparkle and Fade marked the band’s jump to the majors; they signed with Capitol, solidifying their reputation in Portland as opportunists, selling their collective soul to the devil. 
Still, the AV Club gave the record an A- and Rolling Stone a coveted four stars. More than twenty years later, in 2017, Willamette Week—the same publication that gave Alexakis his infamous title—called Sparkle and Fade “the best album ever recorded by a Portland band.”

With my big black boots and an old suitcase
Do believe I’ll find myself a new place

In late 1994, Art Alexakis was twenty miles away from my hometown and having a bad time. In the two weeks spent in Madison recording Sparkle and Fade, he couldn’t sleep. He was plagued by panic attacks, having nightmares about falling off the wagon. One night, he woke up in a sweat and wrote “Strawberry,” a song about a relapse that made it on the record. 
“It’s my biggest fear,” he told Addicted to Noise, “and by facing it like that and putting a face on it I think I deal with it a little bit.”

As a writer, it’s something I’m still learning: to put your fears into words—by recording them as an album, or an essay, or a book—is a way of letting them go.
While Alexakis was recording Sparkle and Fade downstairs at Smart Studios, its cofounder Butch Vig was upstairs producing the debut album of his own band, Garbage. Madisonians claim Garbage with an unparalleled fierceness; Shirley Manson of course is Scottish, but Garbage is a Madison band. I like to think, in some small way, that we can claim Everclear too. The record they made in Madison would launch the band to international fame. It went gold, then platinum, and spent thirty-five weeks on the Billboard charts. Harder, punker, and far more grunge than the polished pop-rock of their later records, it was an album that embodied the alternative ethos of the time. But it was also doing its own thing. Alexakis, whose background was one of cowpunk and country, sounds a little more Tom Petty than Kurt Cobain. But he also sounds unlike anyone else. When he sings—and the dude can sing—you hear something true in his voice. And that, I think, is part of what makes this record so good: It’s a document of a life. It is, in the end, something real. 
“Sparkle and Fade was kind of my escape route,” he told SPIN in 2015. “It was dealing with a lot of stories about people going through tough times and trying to find their way out of it, trying to find the light at the end of the tunnel.” 
Of “Santa Monica,” he told the same magazine in 1996: “I knew the song was a good song, but you can never tell when a song is going to connect. This song, for some reason I’ll never know, connects.”

I was not a cool kid. I was, in fact, a hairy only child with a lisp. In 1995, when I was in middle school, girls started getting pretty and I just got hairier. I attempted to disguise my weirdness in band t-shirts and flannel, but it was no use. On the bus, bullies spat in my frizzy mane and called me “beast.” I pulled loogies out of my hair-sprayed bangs. In high school, I was a curious combination of band nerd, art kid, and athlete. I was never popular—I played the wrong sports, wasn’t blonde, and, despite having lived in the same town my whole life, wasn’t considered from there. In a Midwestern farm town, my Italian father (and our shared hirsute bearing) marked me an outsider. But such is the remarkable brain chemistry of the band nerd—who marches across a football field on Friday nights in their spats and feathered hat, convinced their soaring trumpet lines are admired, not mocked—I eventually stopped caring so much. 
In the deeply uncool tradition of small-town and suburban kids in middle America, where the only mixtapes pressed into my hand were recorded from alt-rock radio, I often found the early albums, the cooler albums, after I found the hits. I found Kerplunk after Dookie, Dude Ranch after Enema of the State. Like loving Nirvana after I loved the Foo Fighters, I was obsessed with So Much for the Afterglow before Sparkle and Fade. And I’m not sure about this (memory can be an excellent tool of self-preservation), but it’s possible I found Everclear—along with Garbage and Radiohead—on Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet soundtrack.
Regardless, I found Everclear when I needed them. Or maybe, as is the way of music, especially when you are young, Everclear found me. When I first heard “Santa Monica,” on Madison’s alt-rock radio station, WJJO, I heard, in Art Alexakis’s voice, things I’d never heard spoken aloud. He sang about depression and isolation and suicide. He sang about addiction. He used words like “poor” and “white trash.” He sang about things I was starting to understand, but had thus far carried alone. And in a time when to be earnest was perhaps the most uncool quality, Art Alexakis pulled his heart out of his chest and gave it to us. 
So Much for the Afterglow was my album of anthems, thirteen tracks of catharsis. I drove around my hometown at night, dreaming of escape. I played Afterglow, then Sparkle and Fade, in my Chevy Cavalier, its speakers blown out so badly the whole car rattled. I turned the volume up anyway. I drove out to the country, rolled the windows down and let in the smell of cow manure, and sang along with Art, who sang about how trauma has a way of making you weird. It’s a deep kind of weird, he tells us—the kind that doesn’t let go, that you carry your whole life. But that, if you’re lucky enough to stay alive, you might learn to wield like a weapon, or make into art. 
Walk right out to a brand new day, he sings in “Santa Monica,” and by this point in the song he’s screaming, insane and rising in my own weird way.

I’ve played in a few bands, but I’ve never fronted one. I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted to. Like most altos, I’m all harmony and never melody. I like it there. What I love about making music, and what I miss, is creating something collectively.
My band’s rehearsal space was in a warehouse in Greenpoint, between a motorcycle garage and the Gutter, a bar and bowling alley where we played few shows. It had a weird smell, the bathroom was heinous, and we made music there for eight years, playing in friends’ bands and our own. We were a collective, kind of, in a way I didn’t realize then. Two years after the building was torn down, the lot is still empty. There’s a high-rise going up next door, but where our space once stood is a graveyard of broken cement, the remnants of walls that once held music. I walk by sometimes and look into the plastic scaffolding window, then press on past the places we used to drink—the Diamond, Jimmy’s—that are gone now too. In a year spent living with so many ghosts, this walk feels particularly haunted.

The year before we released our record, our bandmates left Brooklyn. They left, as people do, for places where they’d find more space, have families, make new lives. My partner—our frontman—and I stayed. 
But the previous summer, in 2017, before we knew an era was ending, we went to see Everclear. The show was my birthday present, and the four of us went to Irving Plaza on a weeknight. Everclear had played the same venue in 1997, on the release of Afterglow, when we were all in high school. This was the twentieth anniversary tour. Our bassist and I had connected over Everclear, reminiscing at practice about deep cuts like “White Men in Black Suits” and “Pale Green Stars.” I said, at least once, that I wanted to cover an Everclear song someday. I thought we had all the time in the world.
On that warm night in June, Everclear played to a sold-out crowd. Mostly made of people like us—thirtysomething and giddy with nostalgia, very far from cool. Art’s voice was raw and plaintive and breaking, just as it had been twenty years before. We stood in the crowd, packed in and sweating, leaning close to shout in one another’s ears, our lips close to skin, the slick bodies of strangers pressing against us. We drank $15 beers from plastic cups, and we spilled some on ourselves, and our shoes stuck to the floor, and the hum of the amps rattled in our teeth, and we danced around like kids, and we sang along to every song, as if no time at all had passed.

I just want to see some palm trees
I will try and shake away this disease

Like pretty much everyone on the planet, I’ve been sad lately. I spent much of the past year alone, in the shadow of disease, haunted by old ghosts and new ones. It would be so easy, I’ve thought, to find that old oblivion; to swim out toward the breakers and let them pull me under.  
Some days, music keeps me afloat. When I started thinking about this song, and what I might say about it, I remembered an old idea. What better way to inhabit a song—to feel connected to it again, like I did when I was young; maybe discover something new about it—than to play it? What better way to tell you how it makes me feel? I asked some friends if they wanted to record a cover of “Santa Monica.”
“I’ve been waiting twenty-five years for someone to ask me that,” one said.  
We recorded the song ourselves. After a night of practice, we spent a Saturday in a rehearsal space not unlike the one my band once had, and ran a motley collection of mics into a multitrack recorder. A jumble of cables snaked across the floor. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be in a hot room with carpeted walls, making something with other people.
Historically, I’m self-conscious about the way I sing. My voice is weirdly low, my mouth moves in a strange way. Sometimes, on soft esses, my lisp comes back. As when I play guitar, I prefer distortion—afraid of what I’ll sound like on my own. I always stand too far from the mic. 
But this time, I got up close. For the first time, I stood in front and sang the lead. I laid down my guitar lines, then turned to vocals. On my last take, I screamed it more than I sang it. For the outro, rather than take Art’s iconic ohhs and yeahs and whoas myself, we recorded gang vocals. We sang wearing masks, screaming together into one mic. I listen to what we made—faster, looser, a little more punk than the original—and I like what I hear. It sounds like what, at its essence, a recording is: a document. Not just of sound but of energy, of a feeling, of a moment in time. When I listen, maybe what I hear is catharsis.

We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die

I’ve never seen the Pacific Ocean. At least not up close. I’ve never been to L.A. either, unless you count Anaheim, which as far as I can tell is made entirely of strip malls, Disneyland, and the Mighty Ducks. Growing up in a place where we called lakeshores “the beach,” where the closest we got to California was Pacific Sunwear in the mall, the west coast was a fantasy. A place where kids rollerbladed in short-shorts and tube socks, ice cream dripping down their arms. It was MTV’s Spring Break, a season of Real World. It was a place that seemed, to my cold, landlocked heart, like paradise—a place no one ever leaves. When I left Wisconsin, I moved to the east coast in no small part because I was sure I wouldn’t stay. 
I can’t write about “Santa Monica” without mentioning the photos my friend sent me last spring from L.A. The sky was orange. She said she was afraid to leave her house, not just because of the virus, which was just starting to take hold in L.A., but because the air was full of ash, poison in another way. That it might fill her lungs, or the lungs of her daughter, or of her son, who was still inside her and would be born in July. The sky, she said, was on fire.
In New York, where I’ve somehow lived for twelve years, I think of last summer, when the ash reached us here, our own skies hazy and orange. Now, I look out my window at a gray and endless winter. I see a brand-new building in our backyard. It’s been done for months, but one has moved in. It’s a hideous thing, made of floor-to-ceiling windows and cement that blocks out our sun. The lights burn all night, illuminating empty rooms—a ghost ship that never had life inside. And I can’t help but wonder, if we could do the things “Santa Monica” suggests—if we could shake away this disease, if we could leave the fire behind, if we were to swim out past the breakers and watch the world die, what might we find in its place?

We often talk about the importance of writing from a distance—when we’ve had time to heal, when retrospect helps us make sense of things. But lately I’ve been more interested in writing from inside a struggle, a still-fresh wound. When we don’t know how we’ll make it through, or what waits on the other side. When time hasn’t made a feeling fade. Whether it’s music or essays, maybe writing from a place of uncertainty, of fear or rage or grief, can help us find a greater truth. Sparkle and Fade, “Santa Monica,” are like that. 
“So Much for the Afterglow feels like the work of a man who’s dealt with his demons and is ready to dispense wisdom,” the AV Club wrote in 2015. “Sparkle and Fade follows someone in the midst of them, a flawed figure who wants to be better but can’t follow through. The latter almost always makes for more compelling art, if only because the stakes are infinitely higher.” 
Art Alexakis has been called a jerk, a dick, an asshole. He has said, “I am Everclear. Everclear is me,” a sentiment that, understandably, has pissed people off, not least former bandmates Craig Montoya and Greg Eklund, who were with him when the band got big. But Art Alexakis has also been called “the nicest musician in Portland.” Friends whose bands have opened for him offer similar reports. I think maybe he’s just an artist, a complicated human, who turned his pain, his trauma, his weirdness, into something we could feel.
“It’s not the band we relate to,” the AV Club writes. “It’s the heart beating at its center.”

I didn’t listen to any Everclear records beyond Afterglow. I heard some singles, but never bought another CD. I’ve listened to a few tracks off Alexakis’s solo record, Sun Songs, released at the end of 2019, but it’s a hard record to hear. Not long ago, Alexakis was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. On the record, he sings of fear and death and disease—things he’s sung about before, but this is different. Now, he sings about the fear of falling apart, of a new disease he can’t shake away. At fifty-eight, though, his voice hasn’t changed much since he was thirty-three. And when I hear him sing these songs, I can’t help but hear “Santa Monica.” So many years later, he’s still trying to find the sun. 
In 2012, Alexakis founded Summerland, a music festival named after a song on Sparkle and Fade and composed entirely of alternative bands from the 90s. The festival has been called, derisively and not, a “90s nostalgia tour.”
“Liking stuff from the 90s is really about nostalgia,” Alexakis told Diffuser in 2015. “And I think a little bit of nostalgia is a healthy thing.”
Nostalgia is a funny word. From the Greek -algia, or “pain,” and -nostos, “return.” In the ancient epics like The Odyssey, Nostos means, specifically, “a return home from sea.” Some linguists have interpreted the word to mean, simply, a homecoming.
“Santa Monica” is a song about leaving, and it’s a song about going home. It’s a song about jumping off the Santa Monica Pier, but it’s not a song about dying. It’s about swimming out to sea, past the waves that might pull us under, to find what might exist beyond them. About watching a world on fire die behind us, but looking to the horizon with the hope. It’s about looking back, too—toward the places that made us, that once held us, that we long for even though they nearly killed us, and seeing both darkness and light. Maybe even perpetual summer. 
“Santa Monica,” Alexakis once said, “it’s just about—I was in the rain and I grew up in the sun.”
There’s a reason I haven’t listened to Everclear’s later stuff. I heard it got too poppy, yes, that it recycles the same old groove. But this is not the reason. In the 90s, when I was twelve, then fourteen, then sixteen, Everclear was more than just a band. They—and what I mean is Art Alexakis—spoke to me in a way that nothing had yet. They spoke of things I was struggling with then, that I’m struggling with still. When I was most alone, “Santa Monica,” and Everclear, found me. And maybe this is the nostalgia talking, but I prefer this song, these records, this band—this more-than-band, this beacon, this catharsis, this shock of connection, this beating heart, this hand reaching out in the darkness and pulling us into the light—to exist as it existed then, and where it might live forever, in the globulous glow of a lava lamp, suspended in some golden sunlight of the California coast I’ve never seen.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of TOMBOYLAND: ESSAYS, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, O Magazine, and Electric Literature. She is the 2020-21 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill, and her wardrobe has not changed much since 1995.

PAUL HURH ON “TODAY”

The first guitar: plucked naked, falling intervals. Thin, fragile, bare, yet as perfunctorily positive as a jack-in-the-box, crank handle jaggering forward the metronomic wait.

Macomb, Illinois. 1994. Lunch. Jammed into the back of someone’s parent’s car brimming with awkward testosterone and so many knees, I first heard the porcelain music box chime that opens Smashing Pumpkins’s “Today.” I remember arguing about the song, “Today” or “No Rain”? Writing this essay, I seem to be transported back to that car to finish a debate that surely no one else remembers. Along the way, I’ll try to describe my insular hometown, circa 1994, in a way that will generate exception from anyone who lived there, and I’ll mount some kind of defense of a generation that would reject anyone speaking for it.
Macomb, pop. 19,341 in the last census, is an isolated prairie/college town in west central Illinois, surrounded by a flat monotony of farmland that is almost sublime. At first glance, it could be lifted from Norman Rockwell—the town square with cupolas on the courthouse, ice cream stand on the corner, quaint library with “Carnegie” etched above its doors. On the surface, and for the first thirteen years of boyhood at least, it’s a sunny slice of Americana, preserved like can-filling cherry pie under a glass dish.
The surface of “Today” is also sunny. The major key, the undeniably upbeat chorus: “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known,” Billy Corgan sings. But under the cheerful exterior is a darkness and desperation: “I’ll burn my eyes out / before I get out.” I submit, and I have when reminiscing with fellow friends from Macomb in the years since, that under the surface of Macomb is also something dark: an evil magic, a forgotten curse of ancestors or ancients, a substrata of desperation and despair.    
I look back with some horror on the rebelliousness of youth, and though I feel that another story could be written from the point of view of those teachers and parents and less angst-ridden students, who, themselves horrified, tried to mollify and rein in what may have seemed to them the uncoiling of the devil in his antinomian splendor, it’s the kids’ story I want to tell. In hindsight, there was so much toxic sludge. But out of that sludge bloomed unknown, unrecognized, flora—beautiful in its own way—and perhaps through the beauty that complicates the irony of “Today,” I can make a case for it. A glass case for monsters.  
You know where there wasn’t glass? Macomb High School--a nightmare of brutalist architecture seemingly designed by someone who recognized teenagers as Lovecraftian horrors and was inspired by some Pirenesi fever dream to contain them. Key to this plan was the complete absence of windows from the classrooms. It felt like a penitentiary, a solid brick edifice without natural light, squatting in the middle of the windswept plains like a troll, heavy and grinning. Open campus lunch, when kids would flee amid shouts and gravel as one after another economy sedan or mud-specked pickup truck peeled out in a daily drama of escape, was a Dionysian vortex in the center of what felt like a sci-fi experiment in institutionalization.

Hearing “Today” for the first time in the little bubble of companionship that those crowded cars offered feels to me now entirely appropriate. The right venue for the pretty sound of perfunctory waiting and the narrowness of the constricted youth, all the narrower for all the space and infinite horizon limning it.

The second guitar: four measures in that opening jingle is buffeted by a wall of sound: all stops pulled, full crunch distortion. I-V-IV, a basic inversion of rock’s conventional spinal I-IV-V ascent. It is the same wait, you can still hear the jack-in-the-box pedaling. The waiting isn’t over, it’s louder.

And here’s the thing anyone or google will tell you: the central irony of “Today” is that, despite its seemingly positive chorus “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known!”, it’s actually an extremely dark song, apparently about surviving suicide and depression. It’s all right there when you look: “pink ribbon scars will never forget,” “I’ll tear my heart out / before I get out.” “A chirpy song about my suicidal thoughts that kids can sing along to,” Corgan once wrote of it. 
So “Today” is a contradiction. It is soft, quiet, ballad-like. And it is loud and huge and distorted. It is positive and celebratory. Desperate and suicidal. Ironic, like the generation that it has become associated with.
I was born in 1976. There were fewer births in the U.S. in 1976 than in any other year since. Gen X is not really a generation but a gap between them, a gap we are reminded of in every surviving shopping mall in the U.S. You knew that the Gap was named the generation gap, right? Before we were gen X, we were the gap. I’ll let you sit with that for a moment.
So there were fewer of us. Less buying power in an increasingly capitalist, market-driven world. Our music was “alternative.” We were known as slackers. Some of us adopted grunge which, in the most generous accounting, was a style based on not caring about market forces or what we were supposed to do. We are a generation of contrarians, for better or worse. Or maybe neither better nor worse. Don’t put your evaluative categories on me.
One avenue of escape: the garage band. I was in one of the several blossoming, no, fermenting, rock bands in the high school. There were several. Wal-Mart Funk Shop. Korn (named before anyone knew about that other band, Korn). Baked Not Fried. Dandelion Boy. Others whose names I have forgotten. At that time, I was playing in the Mystic Puppies. We played Alice in Chains, Offspring, Quiet Riot, but also maybe Van Morrison? And, am I remembering “My Sharona”? I’m not sure—it wasn’t like any of it made sense. But I am sure that we played “Today.” We played it in the wrong key, and we played it without the third guitar part. At Stunt Night, I wore a hat made of whipped cream that melted down my face, over my swim goggles, and left my bass sticky for months.

Stunt Night is an MHS tradition. It is half pep-rally/half Jackass. It happens before Homecoming. The story was that after one famous stunt night where a band took sledgehammers to four console TVs in unison, puncturing the cathode ray tubes and deafening the entire audience the day before the homecoming dance, students had to have stunts pre-approved. That band, before my time, might have been the band that would later become the industrial 90s band, Stabbing Westward. They would become famous with songs with Macomb-like titles like “Shame,” and “Save Yourself.” “Westward” in the band’s name refers to west central Illinois, home of Western Illinois University, or, Macomb.
The other recent claim to fame is Marcus Dunstan, a favorite at Stunt Night where he would show his homemade movies on VHS tape. “Captain Macomb” with its violent stunts brought the house down. Marcus has since become a recognized filmmaker in the horror genre, writing graphic movies about bondage and torture and painful escape, oftentimes with a dark wit that those of us from Macomb will recognize. He was also, I believe, a member of the Wal-Mart Funk Shop. Papers will yet be written on the Funk Shop and its influence on Saw VI. Do you see it yet? The dark undercurrent of the town? Some may argue with me, but I know I’m not alone in finding it gothic.
I’m not sure what students do today for Stunt Night, but when we were there it was an invitation to line step. Pushing the envelope of the acceptable to test authority. The rock bands did it by playing the Rage Against the Machine and breaking TVs. The Bomberettes (facepalm, do I have to explain that Macomb’s mascot was the Bomber, and that dancing female Bombers are Bomberettes?) did it by choreographing increasingly racy dance moves that pulled influence from Paula Abdul’s “Cold-Hearted Snake.” One number with folding chairs apparently caused much hand-wringing from the school board.
Eventually, though, the bands started playing shows on their own, away from parents and supervision. An entrepreneuring set of seniors would secure a venue—a vacant storefront or a cornfield, space was not hard to find—and high school students would gather, largely, perhaps totally, unsupervised. Bands would play. Moshing flourished. These shows, called Binky’s, were the closest thing to Lollapalooza that most of us would get to, and it was entirely organized by high school kids. It was the stuff of parental nightmares and it was lovely.

What has all this have to do with “Today”? I have to apologize, an earlier version of this essay spent more time analyzing the song, the impeccable and restrained arrangement, and discussing the band—so idiosyncratic, diverse, and, I believe, midwest in its goth/prog/metal/psychedelic sound. For there was always something about the obvious effort, the virtuosity and polish, in the Smashing Pumpkins that spoke to the Macomb in me. Most grunge had perfected the sound of careless rough drafts—take it or leave it, the angst was raw and the directness, true. In the Smashing Pumpkins, the rawness was polished, worked over, scrubbed until it glinted, turned ironic. It is what one does with time. 
Binky’s, Stunt Night, Captain Macomb, the proliferation of garage bands: though the 90s in Macomb could feel like an us/them battlefield against the control of parents and authorities, creativity coursed through the adversity. Life, compressed over eons, becomes energy. And even then, someone could point out: was any of it real or were they just acted out tropes from so many movies? From Children of the Corn to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (both Midwest films), generation X was defined as a problem, as an evil behind the corn or rebels who shirked responsibility. Never having power, why not internalize that identity? Rather than fix the world we would never have power over, why not build our own alternative one, declare it the greatest we had ever known?

The third guitar: counterpoint melody, subtle and threaded behind the other two parts. It is fleeting, an accompaniment and adaptation that deviates slightly, occasionally, from the melodic formula. Harmonic, absently fluttering among the gloom, as unoccupied hands will shape a straw’s wrapper into ephemeral braided sculpture, or ballpoint pens, like a medium’s planchette, will trace strange blue geometries, arcane constellations, while your words spiral down corded phonelines that stretch away across hollow train-whistle nights.

What if the wait were the destination?
This is the part of the essay that would recuperate “Today,” the generation. Because really, the song isn’t ironic, at least, not merely. It is only ironic if you take it too objectively, if you judge it from some predetermined site of value, of a concept of good and bad, of what you take to be greatness.
But decentered, rejecting dominant values, resisting projections, defiant and rebellious and creative and juvenile, the song floats somewhere between celebrating our own ability to define a personal greatness out of suffering and mourning that such greatness will always be nothing more than a moment receding.
Even in its truncated impatience the maligned millennial “yolo” signals the challenge of that generation: you only live once, so make much of time. Yolo, for better or worse, is about preserving time because it feels scarce. There is so much to do and only one life, so don’t regret what you didn’t do.
But this is emphatically not the message of “Today.” For the problem of gen X was not at all about preserving time. There was so much time, oceans of it. In another place, Billy Corgan sang, “my boredom has outshined the sun.” For a generation, or at least my midwestern corner of it, that had lots of time and little to do, “Today” is about making the mental flip to accommodating the wait, the failure, the endless and vacant afternoons. Starting a band.
This may be the greatest irony, that subjectively what “Today” expresses isn’t ironic: today is the greatest day because, according to the song, the rest will be worse: “Can’t live for tomorrow / tomorrow’s much too long.” In rebellion and rejection, the song defines a new form of acceptance. We accept our lack of satisfaction. Not in order to then become satisfied, but rather, perversely, to work with all the world seems to give. To live for tomorrow, to live for a positive future, to be the change you want to see in the world—these are all admirable propositions, but they are not what this song offers, nor is it what gen X did particularly well.

What this song offers is a reason for living not grounded in purpose. It is hedonistic—“I want to turn you on”—but even then it isn’t about being turned on oneself. It is about giving pleasure, giving the feeling of meaning within a meaningless universe. Pessimism does not mean that you can’t have a good time.
So what I take this song to say is: we do not live because we will do good. We do not live even to enjoy ourselves. We live to turn others on. We will not redeem the world or prove a worth beyond ourselves. We accept suffering and in that acceptance convert hopelessness, not to hope, but to creative arousal. To the Wal-Mart Funk Shops. To dances with folding chairs. To homegrown music festivals in muddy cornfields. To elaborate brackets of songs and nostalgic essays.
In its best moments, and I do not deny all of its selfishness and myopia, such a message turns the long frustrations of life, the periods between our moments of joy, into the occasions for fellowship. The jostle of your body against mine in the back of a car, uncomfortable, listening to music alone together.
Today is the greatest day. Gen X, the greatest generation. Macomb, the greatest hometown.

Paul Hurh researches and teaches 19th century American literature and the gothic. He sometimes writes reviews of horror movies at rockpaperhatchet.com but not lately.