the sweet 16

(5) butthole surfers, “pepper”
answered
(1) alice in chains, “would?”
582-531
and will play in the elite 8

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 18.

WE WERE ALL IN LOVE WITH DYING: david turkel on “pepper”

Love and life only appear to be separate because everything on earth is broken apart by vibration of various amplitudes and durations. —George Bataille, “The Solar Anus”

I dropped acid on Valentine’s Day in 1988, when I was a senior in high school. It was my very first drug. I smoked cigarette number one (of probably well over a hundred thousand) while tripping that afternoon—pulled it out of a stranger’s mouth at a sub shop on Woodward Avenue, took a puff, pronounced it “disgusting,” and dropped it back onto their table. The acid cost me three bucks. I remember holding the tiny piece of paper in my hand and thinking it was going to be a bigger dud than grocery store fireworks. You just can’t conceive of losing your mind until you do, I guess. You can’t use your brain to imagine a you that’s still you even after everything you thought of as yourself has vacated the premises. I think Foucault said that.
I remember it was Valentine’s Day because I had to take my girlfriend to a dance that night. Before that, I had to have dinner with my parents. I was sitting on the bathroom sink, staring at myself in the mirror, my face as red as a baboon’s ass, my eyes fully black to their edges. I was by this point clear-headed enough to know that it was a problem, yet still deranged enough to have settled on the following solution: I would simply stare directly into the lightbulb above our kitchen table to make my pupils shrink before looking at either of my parents when we spoke. So that was our dinner. Them: “Why is your face so red?” Me: (stares at lightbulb) “We went sledding.” Them: “Where did you go sledding?” Me: (stares at lightbulb) “The...library?” My mother had made soup that evening, and that I remember almost thirty-three years later because of the pepper. She cracked fresh black pepper over the soup and the whole thing started to spin.

Paul Leary—guitarist and co-founder of Texas punk legends Butthole Surfers—explained the non sequitur title of his band’s one and only hit song this way: Teresa Nervosa, one of the band’s drummers, was out walking her dog when a stranger approached and asked her, “What’s your dog’s name, Sonny...Pepper?” Can’t quite tell if the joke here is that the stranger misgendered Nervosa (the literal poster child of Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker), or that he seems to have thought he could actually guess the dog’s name. Of course, it’s really not possible to trust anything Leary says. It’s his story, for example, that the band’s van broke down during their first road trip in 1982 on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge and merely coasted to a stop in front of the Tool and Die on Valencia where a punk show was in the process of loading in—a show the Buttholes not only crashed (talking themselves onto the bill for three songs), but where they met Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, who agreed to put out their first EP on his Alternative Tentacles label. What a magical shitcan of a van, huh? Which is not to say that Leary is a liar, simply that Butthole Surfers are inscrutable by design. Nervosa puts it this way: “there was this unspoken code, and this is sort of what happens in a dysfunctional family, but we had a code among us that nobody told what the deal was.”

I didn’t want to go to college when I finished high school, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain that to my parents, so I did the next best thing: I enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit and moved into a house with the guy who had sold me my Valentine’s Day acid. In short order, he became the guy who got me drunk and stoned for the first times, as well. He also, as it happens, provided my introduction to Butthole Surfers. The song was “Lady Sniff” off their first, full-length album, Psychic...Powerless...Another Man’s Sac (1984). That album, like the majority of their seminal 80s output, was released on Touch and Go Records, unofficially headquartered in Detroit at the time, and the band was treated there like local heroes. Their full-length concert video, Blind Eye Sees All, was shot over two nights at Detroit’s Traxx club in 1985, one of which was an all-ages show I think my new roommate had actually attended as a high school freshman. By the time we moved in together, he was a skilled drummer who played with a band that opened up for the Buttholes. The experience changed everything for them. They began employing male and female dancers clad only in raw steaks tied around their waists and shooting homemade pornography to project against their gyrating bodies.
“Take me back to DEE-troit, Paaauuullll—Yeah heh heh!!” Butthole front man, Gibby Haynes, hollers on “Lady Sniff.” My roommate hollered along with him, playing the song for me and leering above the cassette deck. “Gibby’s a god,” he said and proceeded to describe the 6’5” Texan prowling the stage at their last performance, lipstick scrawled across his face, in a pointy bra with his dick out, waving a shotgun at the crowd. At the time, I thought my musical tastes were adventurous—I liked Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart—but I was unprepared for that song. It wasn’t that it was so challenging to listen to; it was weirdly the opposite.
“Lady Sniff” rocks. Leary’s guitar tone is blistering, and the dual drum attack of Nervosa and the band’s longest-serving drummer, King Coffey, is thunderously propulsive. In seconds you imagine everything the song could be if it wanted—you can hear the boot-stomping, ass- shaking Texas roadhouse party starting—but then it downshifts. And shits. And spits and vomits and arm-farts all over itself. “Lady Sniff” is a song that flushes the talents of its own makers down the john and hocks an enormous loogie at its audience’s every expectation.
I had never heard anything that seemed to care so little about what it was supposed to be. The punk music I knew at the time was frantic and hostile, but weirdly precious, too. It seemed so concerned about what it was and what it wasn’t and who it was for and who it was against. Butthole Surfers, by contrast, clearly didn’t give a fuck.

Performance artist Kathleen Lynch was working her job at a peep show in Times Square, sick as a dog, when she accidentally defecated on the stage and then uttered the words that would become her new name: "Ta da!” Or, as she was known at their shows, “TA-DA the Shit Lady”—the Butthole Surfers’ naked dancer. Whatever pact or wordless code the Buttholes adhered to that banned any serious reflection on their musical intentions doesn’t seem to have extended to Lynch, whom Leary refers to without reserve as “the true artist of the band,” citing in particular a months-long vow of silence that TA-DA observed during her three-year stint as a Butthole Surfer. And here, despite the obvious irony, is the thing about Leary, because this time I believe him—not only that one might know a true artist by her silence, but that the raucous cacophony of a band like Butthole Surfers could in fact revolve around a mesmerizingly silent center. “A seaweed boa wrapped around her neck, and teeth covered in tinfoil, and dressed only in a loose-fitting diaper, when dressed in anything at all,” James Burns writes in the wonderfully informative Let’s Go to Hell: Scattered Memories of the Butthole Surfers, “[TA DA} was the complete embodiment of the band itself. Impish: childlike, grossly horrific, yet somehow tantalizingly beautiful....it was as if she sprouted out of the stage.”
Silence, or at least an interest in absence, had been in the band’s DNA from the start. They’d chosen a name unspeakable on the radio and released their albums without any liner notes (or even, on one occasion, song titles). They spent years homeless, living out of a succession of beat-to-shit vans and busses--one of which was rumored to have been equipped with a custom gas tank that allowed for fewer stops between shows—and the result of that road warrior spirit, matched with their speed- and acid-fueled mania, was that the band seemed to be both everywhere and nowhere throughout the 80s: barely escaping the federales in Tijuana one minute, playing a New York City opera house with some of the most esteemed experimental musicians in the world the next. All the while refusing to “let on what the deal was.” They were too absurd and immature to be serious, too fanatical and outright dangerous to be a joke. Yet, even transgressive Murder Junky, GG Allin, offered more explanation for his outrageous behavior; Butthole Surfers were mum.

Being a teenager in the 80s felt like being Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes—only it was the 1960s, not Lady Liberty, shattered to pieces in the surf. For all that was captivating about that decade’s counterculture, the evidence of its ultimate failure was undeniable in Ron and Nancy’s America. And that tension, more than anything, is what Butthole Surfers captured for me. They were a parody of the 1960s in many ways: punks who played in the wreckage of that decade’s demolished architecture. They gobbled acid and jammed like the Grateful Dead, lived a commune lifestyle like MC5, were as cultish as Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, as arty and profane as the Velvet Underground. They sported the cock-rock guitar- worship of Grand Funk Railroad and were as trippy at the controls as Funkadelic and as homebrewed and wrong-headed as their Texas forebearers, psych-rock pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators. But they gutted the whole enterprise, turned it all on its head.
This is how they smuggled the music of the 60s (and early 70s) past the militant gatekeepers of the American hardcore scene: by serving it up empty of meaning, idealism or any belief system whatsoever. In the process, they exposed the naivety of that scene and redefined what it meant to be punk. Because ultimately, the bands and fans of hardcore that so rigidly structured their aesthetic as an uncompromising rebuke of all things Hippie still clung to the one core tenant of 60s counterculture that the Buttholes rejected: the idea that any of it fucking mattered.
Butthole Surfers brought extended guitar solos, studio trickery, eight-minute-long songs, theatrical stage shows and direct homages to Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer, and Led Zeppelin past the purity-policing of punks who were so reactionary, they wouldn’t even let Black Flag fool around with an alternate tempo on their second album. And they pulled it all off because the Buttholes clearly cared less, looked worse and went harder than anyone else around. In their wake, punk became not a style of music and a haircut, but an actual lifestyle— an orientation and attitude which could be applied to anything, or nothing at all.
It’s not uncommon for lovers of Butthole Surfers to talk at length about the band without ever mentioning their music. Mannequins full of hamburgers, cymbals full of fire, and a band and audience full of drugs predominate. This shouldn’t suggest that the music itself was inconsequential, simply that it soundtracked a broader, more transformative experience. In this sense, their shows were closer to happenings than concerts. But unlike Hippie lovefests, these shows, as you might suspect, were pulled inside out. Rather than wash the stage in trippy gobos and art films, they showed multiple movies at once—often sped up and in reverse—featuring graphic car wrecks, scatology and, most famously, penis reconstruction surgery. Instead of triumphantly smashing a guitar at the end of a set, the Buttholes were as likely to break four guitars on their first song. Their stages were swathed in smoke and bombarded with strobe light so intense, Nervosa eventually had to leave the band due in part to the seizures they induced.
Fans frequently fell ill. After one concert, Daniel Johnston—the brilliant but disturbed Austin-based singer/songwriter that the Buttholes helped launch to international attention—suffered a psychotic break so severe, he had to be institutionalized. But perhaps their most infamous performance was a 1986 concert at Manhattan’s Danceteria, in which TA DA and her friend Kabbage sprayed the audience with “piss wands” (plastic toy bats they’d filled with urine), Leary destroyed the PA system with a screwdriver, and Gibby and TA DA apparently had sex in front of the drum riser. That show lasted all of five songs, but catapulted the band to a new level of notoriety. Within days they were earning twice as much for performances—fans now adding the possibility of a live sex show to an already dazzling list of perverse thrills in store for them.

Though I couldn’t know it at the time, this incarnation of the band was coming to a close when I first heard them in 1988. But the world around me seemed to be only then catching on. These were the NEA Four days of chocolate-covered performance artists, sculptures made from human blood, urine-submerged crucifixes. There was a growing sense that art shouldn’t just push boundaries, but dissolve them altogether. GG Allin was arrested in Ann Arbor for assault and pledged to kill himself on stage at a Halloween performance. It felt impossible at the time not to hear an echo of the word “artificial” in any so-called art that failed to trouble the notion of its safe confinement. Audiences wanted the window into real psychosis that Daniel Johnston provided, the real truth about the street as told by Ice-T and NWA. Which is another way of saying that artists were expected to be their art, not just make it. And Butthole Surfers delivered on that premise in spades. They made genre-defying music in their kitchen and toured it while eating out of trash cans, but we were just as likely to discuss rumors—that they had been stalking Michael Stipe, or were wanted by Interpol, or had set the ceiling of a Philadelphia club on fire—as we were to talk about their lyrics, performance chops, or even their D.I.Y. ethos. This was the demented monkey’s paw they offered: the idea that the music itself was somehow only a byproduct of that lifestyle, not its aim. That art was ultimately the measure of one’s willingness to go too far.

There’s a tyranny to Butthole Surfer lore. If you’re not careful, the stories take over and you end up sounding like a carnival barker shilling a freakshow. But there’s one more chestnut which I will relate, if only because no one ever seems to say what it’s actually a story about. This is the fact that Gibson “Gibby” Haynes (son of Texas’s beloved children’s TV entertainer, Mister Peppermint) was an MBA at Trinity University voted “Accountant of the Year” before graduating to take a job at Pick Markham—then the largest accounting firm in the nation. Journalists enjoy the irony but fail time and again to pick up on a larger point, which is that Gibby and Paul (also a Trinity student on track to becoming a stockbroker at the time of the band’s formation) weren’t outcasts; theirs isn’t the story of rock-and-roll salvation, of two misfit kids headed nowhere until the day they heard their first electric guitar. No, the story of the Butthole Surfers is a story of self-exile: two highly functioning adults who simply decided one day to throw themselves into a gigantic fan blade to make splatter art.
At the same time, it’s the story of their band’s almost preternatural competence. Yes, their shows were chaotic beyond measure, but amidst all the fire, nudity and gunplay, the core rhythm section of King Coffey and bassist Jeff Pinkus remained in lockstep with Leary’s spiraling, spastic guitar; and the music—barring any intervention from the authorities—never stopped. And while it’s true that they would go 15 years before a hit song, the success of their catalogue anchored Touch and Go Records for much of the 80s, fueling that label’s rise to become one of the most adventurous and influential indie labels ever.
Though much of the audience that met the Buttholes through their 1996 smash hit “Pepper” would come to regard the band as just another of Kurt Cobain’s obscure obsessions, the actual fact is that when Nirvana formed in 1987, Butthole Surfers were the most successful independent rock band in America, fetching as much as fifteen thousand dollars for a single performance. They began the decade opening for bands like Minutemen, TSOL and Dead Kennedys, and finished it headlining sold-out concerts with warmup acts like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Green River, the Flaming Lips, Jesus Lizard, and L7. If grunge can be defined as the music of the 60s and 70s lensed from a post-punk perspective and laced with a nihilist, “oh well, whatever, never-mind” spirit, then Butthole Surfers are clearly the progenitors of that dumb baby. Or, at least, they are the primordial ooze from which it crawled. With the release of Electriclarryland—the album containing “Pepper”—they would become grunge’s undertakers as well.

I was back living with my parents in 1996, finally finishing up at Wayne State after a series of misadventures. I’d returned to discover that my old poetry professor, an avid sailor, had gone missing on Lake Michigan; my favorite bookstore on Cass Avenue was shuttered following the grisly murder of its owner; and my old college roommate—the Butthole Surfer fanatic—had graduated from experimentation to full-blown heroin addiction. I was working at a record store in a mall and I remember when the promotional copy of Electriclarryland arrived—we got the “clean” cover at our store with the prairie dog—thinking that the band’s name, redacted as “B***H***”, simply ended up looking like a series of buttholes pressed to the jewel case.
Some fans of the band thought it had been the ultimate betrayal when they signed to Capitol Records in 1992. I never felt that way. To me this was always part of their deal. Is betrayal even possible when you don’t know what something or someone stands for? Leary answered the accusations with his typical absurdism—they were never an independent band, he said, they were instead “a co-dependent band”; had never been punk, but, rather, “schlock rock,” even “pop,”—“we rhymed love and dove on our first record.” You’ll never get anywhere talking to a guy like that.
Their first Capitol release, 1993’s Independent Worm Saloon, had been decent enough, but it was never just about the music. The band themselves had seen to that. All shrugs aside, the Capitol deal pretty much destroyed them. They were sent on an arena tour as the opening act for Stone Temple Pilots. None of their old fans wanted to see them that way, or share a seated venue with the STP bros who hated Butthole Surfers almost as much as the Buttholes were rumored to have hated STP. Gibby succumbed to heroin addiction and took STP frontman Scott Weiland along with him, according to Weiland’s own very public accusations.
Throughout the 1990s, Gibby became the sort of Slenderman of Grunge. Everybody knew that Kurt and Courtney—grunge’s homecoming couple—had their meet-cute at a Butthole Surfers show. That’s his drunken voice playing the maniac preacher in Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod.” Later, Gibby lurked in the background of one public disaster after another: onstage at the Viper Room the night River Phoenix died, bunking with Kurt Cobain at the rehab center a week before Cobain’s suicide. Witnesses claim that it was under his hero’s influence that Cobain jumped the facility’s wall and abandoned his final attempt at treatment.
More than three years lapsed between albums and by the time of Electriclarryland’s release, the real news in Butthole Surfer-land was that the band was suing Touch and Go Records. Now the band’s peers and even heroes, like Ian MacKaye and Texas punk’s founding father Biscuit Turner, leveled accusations of betrayal. The Buttholes had only a handshake agreement with Touch and Go all this time—it was a very punk thing to do, but if you didn’t just hear Leary, they were never punk—they were a pop band founded by an accountant and a stockbroker.

Even STP bros know the words to Pepper’s chorus: I don’t mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows. For George Bataille, the sun itself is a butthole. As he explains in “The Solar Anus,” his 1927 parody of a manifesto, the entire world is “purely parodic...each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.” To me, the Capitol deal, the lawsuit—it was all just one more evolution in Butthole Surfers’ parody of the 1960s. They’d simply reached the sell-out phase. As with everything else, they were going to do it in their own inimitable style.
A lot has been said over the years about the comparisons between “Pepper” and Beck’s 1993 hit “Loser.” Both songs alternate spoken word verses with psych-rock choruses in roughly equal measure, both backmask those choruses into the bridges, both use a sitar. And while defenders of Butthole Surfers are correct in arguing that the band had done virtually all of those things long before Beck ever set foot into a recording studio (or had hair on his gonads, for that matter), I would like to do my part here in setting the record straight. Yes, quite obviously, Butthole Surfers stole the song. For my evidence, I simply submit the fact that the band vehemently denies these accusations. I mean, seriously, when have these guys ever given a straight answer about their music to anyone? It’s 101-level B.S. detection.
I have to question the instincts of fans who wish to defend the band on this score. It’s like thinking you have to defend racoons against accusations of dumpster-diving. Butthole Surfers were just doing what they’d always done—playing in the wreckage—and by 1996, that’s what was left of grunge. There sat “Loser,” Beck’s admittedly half-assed track, like a house with a broken skylight, which the Buttholes just sort of pried open, to shimmy inside and ransack the refrigerator. This happened to a friend of mine (with actual racoons) while he was away on vacation—the racoons couldn’t get out of the house and they ended up tearing the whole place apart and he came home to discover them in his bathtub. That’s basically what went down here, too—the Buttholes got stuck inside the song, only they’re radioactive racoons and so they ended up tricking the thing out, made it a lot cooler.
The real comparison that needs to be drawn between “Loser” and “Pepper,” in my opinion, has nothing to do with their structural similarities or relative merit. Instead, it’s a study in perspective. “They were all in love with dying, they were drinking from a fountain, that was pouring like an avalanche, coming down the mountain,” Gibby intones in the flat, disaffected patter of his song’s verses. Not “I”—as Beck implicates himself in “Loser”—or even “we.” They. He’s singing as an observer, casting his mind’s eye back on real figures from his Dallas upbringing: nutbags, freaks and weirdos (and the “ever-present football player rapist”) who fell to car wrecks, stabbings, viruses and sordid accidents. But when the chorus rolls around and things turn “cinnamon and sugary,” we hear what anyone familiar with 60s psychedelia knows right away—this is a drug song, and the names in the verses could just as well be Kurt, Scott, River, Hillel. The music has gone loopy and an “I” emerges, tasting and scenting sweet traces.
Then, yet another shift in POV: You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes. Of all the chicken-fried lunacy to come out of Gibby’s mouth over the years, this line may have my vote as the looniest. The only thing I feel that I can say with any certainty about Gibby is that he has always known exactly how he looks to others. Gavin Bowden, director of the song’s inspired music video, puts the lie to it right away, casting Gibby as the wild-eyed perpetrator of a seedy, unspecified crime (and Eric Estrada, of TV’s C.H.I.P.S., as its victim). Guilty is how the Butthole frontman looks here. And he knows it. He keeps his head down, buries his face in his hands. He’s tired, almost relieved to be caught:

Some will die in hot pursuit and fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit while sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain

In almost every story about Gibby, there’s a moment when those on hand see the demon arrive and know things are about to go sideways. He could turn that certain look on and off like a flashlight. It happens palpably for one breathtaking instant in the video at minute 1:16. You can feel the wheels beneath you hitting black ice. It’s a look that dares you to cross the line: between music and mayhem, art and crime, freedom and madness. He’s flashed it from a thousand stages, and as one-time Butthole bassist Kramer attests in a 2020 Believer interview, in every other location imaginable, as well. Gibby has always known how he appears to those around him and what his effect on them will be. So, for me, the thing that’s most fascinating to consider about “Pepper’s” use of pronoun: the possibility that in his own mind, Gibby was never one of “them.” Like his infernally competent band, was he always a bit more in control than it seemed?
Gibby recently wrote a YA novel about a magic dog and claims to devote most all of his time these days to his sons. The band has reunited and even Nervosa (aka Teresa Taylor) is back onboard—the Buttholes having turned out to be not quite as dysfunctional a family as it once seemed. King Coffey won a “Yard of the Year” award from his Austin neighborhood committee, for god sake. Pinkus, when not busy as a Butthole Surfer, is steadily at work with his band Honky and on projects with the Melvins. And Leary has parlayed the tricks he learned recording Butthole Surfers songs in his kitchen into a successful career as a producer of acts like Meat Puppets and Sublime. And though Kathleen (TA DA) Lynch is not part of the reunion, Leary has this to say about the “true artist” formerly known as the Shit Lady: “I saw her about seven or eight years ago, and she was doing great...turned out to be a pretty normal person, with a normal kind of job, which made me real happy.”
Since I started writing this, I’ve spent more than a few nights staring at my old roommate’s Facebook page, weighing the pros and cons of reaching out, even just to ask a question or two about those early shows. I want to know if it was the Traxx show he attended or an earlier one at Paycheck’s Lounge in Hamtramck, and how their shows evolved with the lineup changes over those years from the mid to late 80s. And I also want to know if he remembers a certain night in May of 1996, when I followed him from a bachelor party to a crack house on Cass after he said to me, “You want to be a writer, don’t you?” It’s not that I don’t think he’d remember. Most of the pictures on his page are actually from those days. It’s just, how should I put this? Most of the pictures on his page are from those days.

David Turkel is a playwright and bartender--which, in pandemic, means that he is a cat-dad and personal chef. He teaches screenwriting at Oregon State University.

THE INVISIBLE YOKE: LUCINDA BLISS ON “WOULD?”

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. —Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

Alice in Chains came into my world through my friend Phil, as did the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mudhoney, Faith No More, and many other bands in the 1980s. When I met Phil, I was settling back into college, having returned after a year of playing music with the Brood and the Gorehounds in Portland, Maine. I was waitressing to pay the bills, and Phil and I overlapped through the restaurant and as DJs for WSPN. We shared a passion for garage rock and punk, and since he was a more disciplined audiophile, Phil was constantly turning me on to new music. We saw some incredible live shows in those days, including catching the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1987 gig at QE2 in Albany. Hillel Slovak was still playing guitar, and they came out with the notorious socks-on-cocks for the encore. There was hardly anyone in the club that night, but the Peppers played hard, and we were glued to the stage. A year later, they returned to a jam-packed club. By then Slovak had died of a heroin overdose, and John Frusciante had stepped in for the band’s steep ascent to fame, before retreating into his own battle with heroin. The band has since gotten clean, but not before addiction took its heavy toll. The tragic impact of drug dependence is part of music history, and for grunge, it’s part of the musical DNA.
When Phil turned me on to Alice in Chains he said, “It’s dark stuff, but I think you’ll dig it.” I remember popping the cassette into the car radio with trepidation. Some musical discoveries require contortions of the inner critic. The sexualization of women and girls was a pretty blunt exercise in the 70s and 80s, and though the fashion and attitudes of punk (Siouxsie Sioux, Exene, Nina Hagen, the Slits…), then grunge (Courtney Love, Kim Gordon, Donita Sparks…) gave women a chance to own their sexuality and their own pleasure, there were plenty of bands that continued to press play on the old stereotypes. I love the Stranglers, for example, but I remember listening to Sometimes, thinking: Damn, that’s not really open to interpretation. I mean it’s a cheating revenge song, but still, he really does want to beat the crap out of her. Not that this lyrical approach was new; the early Beatles tune Run for Your Life follows the same plot line; news flash, misogyny is a thing. Does Five Minutes, the Stranglers song about wanting to seek revenge on a rapist by beating the crap out of him balance the scale? The point is that you can’t tie it up in a neat bundle.
Back in my car, popping in the cassette, I braced my inner critic, but Alice in Chains, in spite of their name, wasn’t challenging in that way; their rage was interior and self-flagellating.

The sweaty pus orange that permeates their visual world (Dirt, Jar of Flies) evokes the lust for needles, the ooze and goo of bodies, the hazy desire to be lost, and the fury ignited by that predicament. No small part of the band’s catalogue is given to regret, loss, and to honoring the dead. Jerry Cantrell, Alice in Chains’ founder and lead guitarist, wrote songs about the loss of his tribe to addiction and overdose, along with songs about religion, war, and politics. Would was the former--a song about his friend Andy Wood, the singer from Mother Love Bone who overdosed from heroin in 1990, twelve years before Alice in Chains’ lead singer, Layne Staley, would die from a speedball overdose. Cantrell got sober a year after Staley died and in the years since has worked to support other musicians in recovery. Would might have been inspired by a specific event, but to listen to Staley and Cantrell’s gut-twisting harmonies is to feel the unique ways each of us feels trapped by the trench we’ve uniquely built for ourselves.
Across her body of writing, the philosopher-critic Julia Kristeva offers a reading of literature that’s filtered through the deep, complicated core of human experience. She peers through an analytical lens, interpreting author and reader with equal intensity. In Powers of Horror, her essay on abjection, the author links the nature of being (who am I?) with the horrors that lingers in us—the fears (and oppressions) that prevent us from becoming. Theoretical writing can illuminate our darker, more contradictory selves. It can make us feel known and seen, to be understood underneath persona. Kristeva describes how shedding light on the darker passages of literature, and of ourselves, can result in these oppressive bits being cast off, and this casting off creating a profound freedom. This notion of personal freedom located in uncensored creative expression leads right back to Alice in Chains. In “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” Hal Foster uses Kristeva’s abject to categorize a group of 20th century visual artists who use grotesque imagery in an attempt to get at something real. Foster uses the progression of Cindy Sherman’s work, from the film stills to her later photographs, as an example. In the late work, Sherman uses the vocabulary of horror: images of rot and decay, demented clowns, and highly dramatized, mannequin-like figures reduced to pimpled butts. The work is disgusting and repellent, and in fueling our revulsion, Foster makes the case that it does its work. Though more stylized, the experience of listening to Alice in Chains (and punk and grunge in general) plays in this same field. Death and isolation lurk in the subconscious with all the piss, shit, cum, blood, mucus, and bacteria that we are host to, no matter how much we try to sanitize. Giving voice to transgressions of propriety, taste, and of our actual physical bodies is mesmerizing, and it has the potential to crack the shell of our fictions.
I remember sitting on a porch swing with my mother—I must have been in second grade. I was sobbing because I had just gotten death. My mother had acknowledged that I too would someday die, and I felt emptied out by the tragedy and expanse of it. I can still feel that realization in my heart--that there are things we can’t know. We carry death--the fact that our time is limited--like an invisible yoke. Sometimes we pretend it’s not there, sometimes it drives us to create, and sometimes the weight is more than we can handle. Music (creative work) can inspire us to feel what we can’t or won’t acknowledge in our conscious minds, and the result is catharsis. I am at risk of tying things up too neatly, and there is nothing neat and tidy about it. Perhaps it’s enough to express gratitude to Alice in Chains and all the complicated rockers and artists who make us feel beyond our (and their) knowing.

Lucinda Bliss is an artist and writer from New England. She is currently engaged in a project exploring history, genealogy, and narratives of privilege and oppression with the Stanley Whitman House in Farmington, CT. Bliss’s drawings, installations, and mixed media works have been exhibited at venues including the Boston Center for the Arts, Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Whitney Art Works, Aucocisco, Bates College Museum of Art, and the Tucson Museum of Art, among others. Documentation of selected projects, along with her blog on art and running, can be found on her website. Bliss currently serves as Dean of Graduate Studies at MassArt. Instagram connect @blisspix.