round 2

(11) The Cardigans, “Iron Man”
lives again, beating
(3) Tiffany, “I Think We're Alone Now”
233-219
and will play on in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/15/22.

justin st. germain on tiffany’s “i think we’re alone now”

If I’d known that by the time I wrote this I’d have Covid, I would’ve picked a different song. Under the circumstances, “I Think We’re Alone Now” feels a little on the nose. You have to understand that I chose it last summer, when everyone was getting vaccinated and cases were down and there were no new variants and it seemed like it was almost over. Some things were, it turns out, but not Covid.
I’m writing from the pit of an Oregon winter, in the throes of Omicron, during what they’re calling the worst days of the pandemic. It’s been the worst days for weeks now. Yesterday I went to the county fairgrounds to get tested inside my car inside a barn, and today received my positive result. It did feel sort of positive, almost like an accomplishment—after all that waiting, all those times I thought my relationship stress or existential dread or seasonal allergies were Covid, I was finally right. I looked on the county website at this week’s orange bar, five times taller than any other, and found it oddly reassuring: at least I’m not alone. The feeling didn’t last.

*

Recently—yesterday, last week, who knows—the algorithm delivered a headline to my device. Our AI overlords have noticed how much I’ve been listening to “I Think We’re Alone Now”; I can’t look at a screen anymore without seeing ads for dating apps or boner pills or suicide hotlines. This link was, thankfully, more specific to my interests: Tiffany, née Tiffany Darwish, whose cover of this song is arguably the best-known version, was in the news.
She took “I Think We’re Alone Now” to number one in 1987, twenty years after the Tommy James original. Tiffany was sixteen at the time. She’s fifty now, and had recently taken the stage in some minor Florida burg to sing her biggest hit. The article linked to a video on TMZ. Such is the age in which we live.
The clip starts in the middle of the song. Tiffany seems lost, disoriented, possibly drunk, pretty much the way we all seem at this point. Her voice breaks and she forgets the lyrics, growls a few oh yeahs to stall. (Speaking of 1987, she sounds sort of like Macho Man Randy Savage.)
It’s sad. She’s all alone up there. Not literally—a dude on a stool strums a guitar, and a fiddle fires up offscreen during the chorus. But nobody came to see the fiddler. They came to hear Tiffany sing this song, and she can’t. Soon someone starts booing. She stops and points at them.
“Fuck you guys!” she yells.
Instantly, every time—and I’ve been watching this video a lot—I think: Yeah, fuck those guys!
“This is my hit!” she yells. “I’m going to sing it right!”
She tries her best, remembers and screams: running just as fast as we can. Holding on to one another’s hand. Trying to get away, into the night. And then you put your arms around me and we tumble to the ground and then we s— The clip cuts off mid-syllable, but you know the rest. You sang some of it right now, didn’t you? Or are you one of those people who lies about not liking this song?
Tiffany caught a lot of shit online about her performance, but I think it was perfect. To get up on stage in November of the worst year we can remember and totally botch a song about being alone, a song she didn’t want to sing in the first place thirty-five years ago, but now she’s stuck with it forever, because the song reminds us of a past we’re all half-delirious and desperate to return to. Tell me that wasn’t true, authentic, whatever people want from a performance. The fuck-you-guys fiddle version of “I Think We’re Alone Now” might be my favorite one, and that’s saying something, because everyone and their mother has covered this song.
A few days later, Tiffany posted an apology video to Instagram. She starts by singing the chorus again. She sounds better, the song re-recognizable, but you wonder why she’s doing it. To prove that she still can? Is she covering herself? What does that even mean? She says she had a panic attack, lost her voice: “I got up there and it just wasn’t there.” She appreciates the support. “I’m vulnerable,” she says, “and I’m human.”
You and me both, sister.

*

My chest constricts, I cough a lot, and my face hurts, but most of it’s mental: I feel dumb and unstable, keep forgetting why I walked into rooms and nearly falling over. I wear a mask around my house. I’m trying not to infect my wife, who’s packing boxes in the living room as I write this. I probably should’ve mentioned that I’m also getting divorced right now. If I’d known I’d be getting divorced, I would definitely not have picked this song.
I wasn’t going to write a personal essay. My thoughts on the genre have been documented. But have you ever been around someone who’s getting divorced? Not just divorced—a lot of them are happier—but getting there. Everything is personal; I lost it last week during an episode of BoJack Horseman. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s worth writing about. One of the first things you realize when you start getting divorced is that nobody gives a shit, just like you didn’t when all those other people you knew got divorced. Besides, the world is ending, divorce isn’t that big of a deal. For my parents, my soon-to-be-ex-wife’s parents, Tiffany’s parents, and all the other parents of the ’80s, divorce was like Omicron, everybody got it. My parents got divorced six times between them. Seven if you count theirs twice. Eight if you count the murder. If you think divorce is some kind of tragedy you’ve never seen one. But I have brain fog and a deadline, so here I am, writing about it.
As I frequently try to remind myself, divorce isn’t even all bad. Sure, it’s sad, and scary: all that emptiness ahead, the fear and loneliness and fear of loneliness. But being married sucked—that’s why we’re getting a divorce. I once heard a recently divorced acquaintance say that when someone says they’re getting one, you shouldn’t say you’re sorry, you should say congratulations. I never understood that until now. The calmness, the freedom, no more compromises or resentment or tension. It’s almost a relief that there doesn’t seem to be anyone around.
The tape dispenser screeches. I crank up the volume and try to focus. A while back I made a playlist filled with like thirty different versions of “I Think We’re Alone Now”—there are more, I just gave up—which I’ve now been listening to for a solid month, as its title has gotten truer and truer. I’ve been trying to figure out why people don’t like it.
For example, when I picked this song back in those halcyon days of August, our friendly tournamentmongers responded: oh god, really? Tiffany? They’re not alone in that sentiment: the single currently has a 2.8/5 on rateyourmusic.com, and last year, as part of a series reviewing every number-one hit ever, Stereogum gave Tiffany’s version of the song a 5/10, saying: “it’s a perfectly digestible pop product, but it never sounds like anyone’s world exploding.” I beg to differ—right now, it sounds exactly like my world exploding.
Which brings me to a question I’ve been asking perhaps too often lately, in a variety of contexts: am I wrong here? Because I want to be clear about this, and communicate my honest feelings in the way I’ve been told I often fail to: I fucking love this song. I didn’t pick it ironically or cleverly or for some contrarian reason, or even because I thought it could win. (Although I do—I think it should.) I just love it. Especially now. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense, but what does anymore? Every time I hear “I Think We’re Alone Now,” any old version, even the shitty ones, it makes me happy. Well, happier. I catch myself singing it all the time. I don’t dance as a policy—it looks like I’m being defibrillated—but sometimes when Tiffany’s version comes on in my headphones I find myself trying to imitate that heel-intensive thing she does in the video, in my kitchen, with limited success. This last month, as I’ve been listening on repeat, it’s become one of my favorite songs.
So I’m trying to be empathetic or whatever, and understand why so many people are so wrong about this song. I guess the lyrics—penned by cover-song savant Ritchie Cordell, who also wrote “Mony Mony” and produced Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock n’ Roll”—don’t make a lot of sense. Even the title is full of contradictions. Wouldn’t you know whether you were alone? If someone is saying all that stuff, how could the beating of their hearts be the only sound? Can you even be alone together? Actually, don’t answer that: the tape dispenser just did.
The track itself doesn’t help. Tommy James had a whole band, the fungible Shondells: backup singers, drums, guitars, a tambourine, possibly a marimba there at the end. His producer included that deeply strange but technically innovative sample of crickets. The original has texture. Tiffany’s version seems to be her and a Casio keyboard; its most innovative gesture is a synth solo.
Mr. James could be another factor. It seems like people don’t give him enough credit. Is it because his first hit, “Hanky Panky,” was a cover? Or because he’s been covered so much? (This tourney includes two Tommy James covers, and could’ve easily had a third, Billy Idol’s “Mony Mony.”) Is that why he doesn’t get the respect he deserves? James had two number-one hits—not including “I Think We’re Alone Now,” which reached #1 on some lists, but not Billboard’s—and released eight studio albums in the span of four years, charting a whole artistic evolution from bubblegum pop to psychedelic rock; Crimson & Clover is a stone-cold classic. He helped pioneer the concept of a music video by making a short film for “Mony Mony” fifteen years before MTV existed. He’s been touring steadily for sixty years. He once dosed a presidential candidate with amphetamines on the campaign trail. He was so mobbed up in the ’70s that he had to flee New York so he didn’t wind up with concrete shoes. One time before a concert he got so high that he collapsed and was pronounced dead onstage; fifty years later, he put out an album called Alive. That guy is punk as fuck.
Then there’s Tiffany, whom people also underestimate, for reasons that are more apparent: young, female, pretty, most famous for a cover song. You don’t hear so much the story of a child prodigy who started performing in clubs at the age of ten, killed Star Search at fourteen, and recorded her first album a year later, the self-titled one that would soon top the charts, making her the youngest female artist ever to do so. Nobody talks about how she had two number-one hits: “I Think We’re Alone Now,” which wasn’t even supposed to be a single, and the ballad “Could’ve Been.” Or that she’s released ten more albums since, voiced Judy in the Jetsons movie, has a handful of other film and TV credits—and sure, Mega Piranha isn’t exactly Citizen Kane, but she got top billing, and how many movies have you been in? She has an active fan club, tens of thousands of followers, more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify. Thirty-five years after this song came out, she’s still one-name famous.
Maybe it’s the video? I should probably talk about the video. Four and a half minutes of pure, uncut 1987. Teenaged Tiffany dances alone in stonewashed jeans by some train tracks, then hangs out the window of a moving car like people did back in that gloriously unsafe era. The synth solo hits, and she does her signature dance. Gumby makes a cameo. God, I love this video. Most of it takes place in a mall in Ogden. A mall in Ogden! That tells you everything you need to know about 1987: a teen pop star could film the music video for a number-one song in a mall in Ogden. Tiffany’s manager sent her on a nationwide tour of malls to promote her album, and back then, that worked. “I Think We’re Alone Now” shot to number one mostly because of malls. Is that why people don’t respect it? Do you have something against malls?
If you still have a mall nearby, like an honest to god food-court-and-atria mall, you should go before it’s gone. Until I got Covid, et cetera, one of my plans for this essay was to go hang out in a mall all day and see what happened. There is no better place to meditate about how much has changed since this video came out, the death drive of consumer capitalism and social media’s fragmenting of our shared reality blah blah blah. A mall used to be the kind of place Tiffany could pack so full of fans that a bunch of bros in tank tops had to hold them back, as they do somewhat unconvincingly in the video. Now they’re the loneliest places in America.

*

Nobody wants to read about the pandemic anymore, but it’s relevant: “I Think We’re Alone Now” has become a pandemic anthem. A few weeks into the first lockdowns, Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer of Green Day, recorded a cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now” and posted it to YouTube, along with the following note: I figure if we have to spend this time in isolation at least we can be alone together. (Remember that? When we were all going to be alone together?) He sang it again a week later on The Tonight Show, then released another version with his kids on drums and bass. Half a dozen other bands have released cover versions since the pandemic started, and someone made an 8-track sorta-cover that’s better than it has any reason to be.
Like everything else, this song has changed in the last two years. At first, “I Think We’re Alone Now” was clearly about sex: we all know what they’re tumbling to the ground for. Children, behave? Watch how you play? Those kids are totally fucking. But the meaning of art changes according to context. I could quote Roland Barthes or something, but it’s pretty obvious: everyone’s singing this song now because the pandemic has made us lonely. In an interview about Billie Joe’s cover of her cover, Tiffany said as much: “There are people out there that need a little pick-me-up.” This song might have been about sex in 1987, but now it’s about loneliness.
One of the interesting things about this song is that its two best-known performers can’t stop singing it, either. Tommy James has made at least three different versions, not including his minor hit “Mirage,” which according to legend—more specifically, a really old and disreputable-looking website—contains the same chord progression as “I Think We’re Alone Now,” only in reverse, the result of him accidentally playing it backward during a songwriting session. He also cut his own pandemic version: his 2020 album, the aforementioned Alive, includes an acoustic cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now.”
Tiffany has done at least four different versions, as far as I can tell, and possibly hundreds; Spotify lists 213 versions performed by her. This song has been in so many movies and TV shows and 80s compilations, not to mention re-covers and re-mixes, that it’s impossible to say which ones should be considered independent versions. There’s probably some profound essayistic observation to be made about that, quoting Baudrillard or Benjamin or some shit, but give me a break here.
Her latest recording was in 2019, so wasn’t technically a pandemic version, but it is about loneliness. It’s longer, more rock than pop, and Tiffany’s voice is husky, soulful, more mature. A portrait of the artist as a grown woman. She was getting divorced at the time. That’s not my business. I’m only mentioning it here because she discussed it publicly in interviews, and because I wonder how much getting divorced informed her decision to record this song again. Maybe I’m projecting.
It certainly shows up in her other recent songs. A few months into the pandemic, Tiffany released an EP of acoustic self-covers, Pieces of Me Unplugged. My favorite, “Starting Over,” begins with the lyric: I wish that I could just be free / from the loneliness in me.

*

The good news about being alone is that you get used to it. That’s also the bad news. I’ve been alone a lot. I was the son of a single mother who worked, and I grew up on the outskirts of a pissant town in rural Arizona where I was frequently the only human in sight. And I read and write, both of which involve a lot of time alone pretending that you’re not. When the pandemic started, my wife and I joked that I’d been preparing for it all my life. Turns out it wasn’t so funny. Soon we were lonely together.
Now, in my first days of being alone again, it sometimes feels lonely and sometimes feels natural, inevitable, the way it is. Nothing lasts forever: someone leaves or someone dies. That’s why so many people are lonely. Nobody admits it, not out loud, not in a conversation. But search for loneliness on Spotify, read the lyrics:

Look at all the lonely people.

At my window, sad and lonely.

I’ve got my own loneliness.

Can’t get away from loneliness.

Loneliness is the worst thing in the world.

Loneliness is something I can’t endure.

I think we’re alone now.

*

There are at least three movies called “I Think We’re Alone Now.” One came out during the pandemic, a slasher film I didn’t bother to watch; in the trailer, Tiffany’s version of the song plays over a gratuitous tableau of a murdered woman. Another one came out before the pandemic but is about a pandemic. Tyriann Lannister lives alone in a library by a lake after everyone dies in some kind of plague. Nobody talks for the first twenty minutes. It doesn’t include the song.
The third one does. A documentary from 2008—which somehow looks much longer ago than 1987 does—it follows two people who are obsessed with Tiffany. One of them might be the most sympathetic stalker ever portrayed on film, and the other radiates so much pain and loneliness it hurts to see, even with a screen. Together they go to Vegas to see Tiffany live. After the concert, they take pictures with their idol, and that night, in their hotel room, these two broken people inflate that interaction until they’re arguing over who’s better friends with Tiffany. The next morning they go back to their grim little apartments far away. It’s a great documentary, smart and subtle, with a sophisticated approach to portrayal, a complicated aesthetic and ethic. It’s the loneliest movie I’ve ever seen.

*

I once spent a week alone in Belgium, touring breweries and battlefields and researching a novel I was writing as far as the IRS was concerned. I went because I was lonely at the time, the last of my book money was burning a hole, and I’d been listening to the Camera Obscura song “Let’s Get Out of This Country” so much that finally I said to myself: let’s.
So I flew into Brussels, rented a Nissan, and drove out to the German border, to a hamlet called Winterspelt that the German writer Alfred Andersch once named a novel after. It’s about a German officer near the end of World War II who wants to surrender. Well, that’s the plot—I don’t really remember, but want to say it was about loneliness. Andersch was a German deserter himself, and he spent time in both Dachau and American POW camps, so he knew a thing or two about the subject. I liked his book. My war novel was sort of a homage, although I never actually wrote it.
I did spend a night in Winterspelt, in a German bed and breakfast I’d booked online, where nobody spoke any English except for the owner’s teenaged son, who showed me to my room and asked why I was there and ended our conversation rather quickly after I said to see where Americans died in the war. It was hard to sleep in all that German quiet, and the next day, after a breakfast of sliced cheese and unnerving sausage, I returned for good to the Belgian side of the border.
In Bastogne, where Americans died in the war, I went to museums and war memorials and a brewery or two alone, drawing glances and stares and the occasional polite inquiry in languages I didn’t speak. One day I drove out into the Ardennes to find some battlefield I’d read about online, and after I got lost on a switchbacked forest road, the GPS announced I’d entered Luxembourg—lonely, neutral Luxembourg—which I must have left at some point, imperceptibly, because soon enough I was back in Belgium, at my destination, a museum in a barn beside a field where an Army platoon was ambushed during some peripheral skirmish of the Battle of the Bulge.
I parked and followed signs down a path blazed through a field of shoulder-high grass, probably barley, for all the beer. As I groped through the gloam the signs petered out, and in the fading light I couldn’t read the garbled English on the pamphlet. But I didn’t need to be told what had happened or where. There are benefits to being alone. Soon I found myself pulled like a witcher’s stick to the spot where the ambush happened, a clearing where I just knew. I stood there, staring into the dark treeline, imagining an enemy out there in the forest, waiting for the terror to descend before they started shooting. It was the loneliest place I’ve ever been.

*

This is going off the rails. Nobody cares about my divorce or the pandemic, and why the hell am I writing about Belgium? I should’ve picked Limp Bizkit. This is due tomorrow, but it’s just not there.
Fuck you guys. It’s my essay.

*

Today we went down to the courthouse and sat knee-to-knee in a cubicle as a clerk slid forms through a hole in the plexiglass and we signed them one after another, cracking jokes, trying to keep it light and quick. Behind the clerk, above her desk, hung a sign with one of those quirky office slogans, something about the beach. There isn’t a real beach in five hundred miles, nowhere you’d want to swim or drink a margarita, just the cold and lonely places people around here call beaches, all dead kelp and outcrops. That’s not fair—there’s a nice one about an hour west of here, a halfway secret you have to hike down stairs to get to, where a big rock out in the water makes for a nice sunset. That’s where we got married.
Ten years together, over in ten minutes. The clerk said we’d get the papers in a week, depending on the mail, and wished us luck. It was freezing outside. We gave each other one last married hug and walked away. In the car, while I was Venmoing my half of the divorce fee—in the note field, emojis of a husband, a wife, a skull and crossbones—my phone’s Bluetooth connected, and guess what song came on. The original. Tommy James. Crickets.

Justin St. Germain wrote the memoir Son of a Gun and the book-length essay Bookmarked: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. He dressed a lot better back in '87.

THE CARDIGANS COVERING BLACK SABBATH’S “IRON MAN” EXPLORES A MORE FEMININE APOCALYPSE BY KATIE DARBY MULLINS

If given the choice, I’d choose ‘surprise’ over ‘predictable’ with any cover song, even if the production quality suffered. I’m not alone in this: it’s why Limp Bizkit’s ill-advised cover of George Michael’s “Faith” charted. Sure, many people—even people you love, maybe even you!—just really like rap-rock and nu metal, but most people who listened in were a little surprised-then-delighted to hear someone scream over shrieking guitars and a battery of percussion what Michael had whispered like pillow talk over an acoustic a decade earlier. Tori Amos released Strange Little Girls and covered only male songwriters; years later, Kyle Craft’s Girl Crazy covered only women, and in both cases, the musicians played hard and fast with genre. That’s my kind of cover record: for a song to need covering, you almost have to feel like you, the artist, can say something new about the art without changing the essence completely. You can play with form, you can play with tone; you can drop a rap verse or add one. But for a cover to really stand out as essential, it has to use the same basic outline that the original does and then say something totally different in effect.
“Wait, wait. You’ll recognize it. Like, immediately,” I said to a friend, typing furiously on Apple Music. I didn’t want Siri to give away the surprise.
Five seconds, a drum shuffle, and then—there it is—Nina Persson’s perfect baby-doll declaration: “I am Iron Man!”
It took a moment for my friend to stop laughing, but then they said, “No,” kind of softly, almost like they didn’t want to know how bad the rest of the song was going to be. They were as shocked as everyone always is by how alluring this version is, though no one can put their finger on why at first listen.
     By the way, you know Nina Persson’s voice. You might have to close your eyes and remember when you were, like, wearing slip dresses over t-shirts with platform sneakers, when her band The Cardigans’ song “Lovefool” was on a constant loop on pop radio stations. The same quality that leads her to say, “So/ I cried/ And cried in my bed” kicks off the band’s cover of “Iron Man,” and then, like in that hit, her voice immediately strengthens a little, except instead of saying, “Love me, love me, say that you love me,” she’s singing, “Has he lost his mind?/ Can he see or is he blind?”
I understand if you need to look this up before proceeding. Actually, I think you should: if you haven’t heard The Cardigans taking on Black Sabbath, a Swedish pop act covering a UK-based metal band, you really should know how disconcerting it is. Years and years later when Robert Downey Jr. would confidently say, “I am Iron Man” at the end of the first Iron Man movie, I sometimes like to pretend he is doing his best job to cover the delight and surprise in Persson’s delivering of the same line. There is almost a moment of discovery, of becoming, before the playful bass line and shuffle-percussion clicks in and locks the song into a chill, anesthetized BPM.
And every time I hear it I think, “Oh, thank God. Someone else gets it.”

Have you ever been the only chick in the record store? Things are a little better now, but it used to be that you only had two choices. Overcompensate and blow the person at the counter away with knowledge so quickly that they don’t have time to underestimate you, or buckle up for a long talk on how The Beatles all went on to have some degree of success as solo artists. (That is an actual conversation I’ve sat through. For the record, my father taught me how to flip and change a record when I was two or three so that I could listen to the White Album all the way through.)  It’s better than being the only chick in the guitar store (“Do you know if you play an acoustic or electric? Is it your boyfriend’s?”), and MUCH better than being the only chick at a hardcore show (“Wow. You have really big tits”). I’m telling you this because by the time I was eleven, I organized my CDs alphabetically within the record label, then chronologically within the artist. I used to agonize over whether or not to put artists like Richie Furay with Poco, or whether to split Madonna’s records by when she started Maverick. What to do about mergers? Capricorn? Chrysalis? The Rolling Stones, who famously left Decca?
What does any of that have to do with The Cardigans?
     I have spent my life so immersed and washed in music that I couldn’t stand to be away from it. It was my first true love, and when I met my husband, I fell madly in love with him over a conversation about music. Later, he’d email me that the moment reminded him of a line from a Counting Crows song—my favorite band—and I’d know far too soon that I would marry him. And this thing I love so much, this art that I have spent my life studying and trying to learn how to write about—well, every time I try to participate in the community in public and they don’t know my day job, I get told who The Beatles are or that my tits are big. My guess is that a lot of women at Sabbath shows, especially in the hey-day, got similar treatment. I can only imagine.
Are you here with your boyfriend?
So do you think Ozzy’s cute or something?
Take off your top!
     I’m willing to bet that no one yelled that at women who went to The Cardigans’ shows. “Iron Man” is a great song, and Sabbath is a great band. They made some important music and ushered in a type of mainstream heavy that is still essential today. The way the guitar storms into the original is iconic for a reason. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to be a metal fan, especially one encased in the body I live in.
As The Cardigans’ version of the song drops in, it feels like it’s filtered through an old radio: there’s a separation between Persson’s vocals and the rest of the world, like she’s singing under glass. Or maybe we’re under glass: she seems to be completely immersed in the narrative of “Iron Man.” It doesn’t hurt that the bridge takes on a totally new meaning with the slowed down, Valium-cloud vocals on “Nobody wants him/ They just turn their heads/ Nobody helps him/ Now he has his revenge.” It feels not quite like pity, but nothing like the frustrating battle cry it was in the original, either. It almost feels as though the narrator understands there’s a deep sadness in being pushed to revenge via rejection. The be-bop outro also feels like it contradicts the tone of the original.
     The song is apocalyptic. This is a machine-man who has seen the future and knows of our destruction. Unlike Bowie’s alien Ziggy Stardust, he’s not warning us that we only have five year—he’s stomping around with boots of lead. This is a creature unlike us in some way, something separate from humanity. (And no, it’s not about the superhero, even though it plays over the credits in some movie with the same title.) Ozzy understood that the appeal of writing this powerful non-human was that time and space didn’t apply to Iron Man.
Persson’s interpretation manages to pull that same truth off, but with a degree of pathos about the end of it all. I think as we’re all seeing terrifying headlines and contemplating what our future looks like, globally, it’s not bizarre to think of The Cardigans’ “Iron Man” as the more emotionally in-touch look at the destruction caused by war machines. By taking the hyper-masculine, overdriven and fuzzed out metal of Black Sabbath and turning it into a slinky pop song with muted, concerned vocals, Persson and The Cardigans have managed to honor the original song—which is, rightfully, a rock standard—while still evoking a tenderness and sorrow that the original doesn’t quite touch. Make no mistake, that’s because it didn’t want to: when the time comes for fighting, you can observe the sorrow of it all from behind glass or you can go in raging. Neither is right or wrong. But by opening the song up with hyper-femininity, Persson creates a space for women at the table: it allows us to take on the strange animal of Iron Man, the visage of something that knows danger is coming, and to live in the moment where our rejection can be avenged.
That feels like a natural fantasy for women who participate in music to me. I love when I get to sing along, discover myself again in the foreign, and chirp, “I am Iron Man!” 

Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, Prime Number, and the music magazine The Aquarian. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out on Summer Camp Press in late 2020.