the sweet 16

(2) the breeders, “cannonball”
laid to rest
(6) the cranberries, “zombie”
577-529
and play on 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 23.

One Long Splash: Susan Briante on “cannonball”

Most articles about the Breeders include an image of the Melody Maker cover from December 1993 featuring Kurt Cobain and Kim Deal. Cobain sneers. Deal looks like she’s exhaling from a long drag. The tinsel wrapped around their shoulders and necks seems oh-so-Gen-X ironic. The holiday greetings are beside the point, the image provides a quick reference to star power these two anti-stars commanded that December.

In June 1993 The Breeders released “Cannonball,” the first single from their sophomore album Last Splash. It quickly became a grunge-pop anthem (named song of the year in 1993 by Melody Maker and NME) with a delicious and bubbling baseline, lifeguard whistle, layers of guitar distortion, girl-group harmonies and a nearly indecipherable chorus (“Want you coocoo cannonball,” according to Lyrics.com). The song opens with a deft mix of whatever was on hand sounds: Kim Deal yells “Check, Check, One, Two” into a distorted mic, and Jim Macpherson taps out a frantic little rhythm on a snare rim and cymbal stand. From there on in its loud and soft, polished and rough, clear and smeared and nothing but fun. The video (directed by Spike Jonze and Kim Gordon) shares in the delirium: a cannon ball rolls and bounces down sunny streets, Kim Deal alternates between singing at the mic and into a bowl of water. There are mirrors and costumes, deadpan expressions and joyful horseplay between Kim and her twin sister Kelley, the Breeder’s other vocalist and guitarist.
But nothing in that moment is as light-hearted as it seems. By 1994, Kelley Deal would be arrested for heroin possession and end up in rehab. Kim would battle with drugs and alcoholism. The Breeders would not release their next album until 2002 without Macpherson or The Last Splash bassist Josephine Wiggs. And, of course, four months after the Melody Maker cover Kurt Cobain would be dead.

At its worst, grunge can be moody as fuck and kind of lame in the way it takes itself too seriously. Writing in the midst of a pandemic, in the wake of a white supremacist attempt at insurrection and during the worst economy since the Great Depression, it’s hard for me to remember why my generation was so angry and sad. Reading interviews from the time doesn’t help. “It’s not fair that folk singers preach a happy message and the goodness of living off the land and ‘if I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning.’ That doesn’t exist,” Kim Deal told Rolling Stone in 1994. “…When I grew up and went to Sunday school, they said that it was going to be really great, and God is love, and God is good. I believed everything everybody told me. And that’s why I’m so pissed off now….”
“I just thought it was gonna be better,” she said. “Just . . . life. I thought it was gonna be better.”
At the time Deal registered her complaint, she had been playing and touring for 8 years as the bassist for The Pixies. The Breeders started out as a side project but became her main gig when The Pixies split up. The Breeders opened for Nirvana, rose in the charts and fell into their own drama and addictions. By the mid-90s, Deal was blacking out on stage.
And yet, despite of all the rage, melancholy, and self-destruction, The Breeders’ music could always take you someplace else. That’s what makes “Cannonball,” an infectiously catchy song that croons and sneers, distorts and harmonizes, so great. Like the Breeders, the tune starts, interrupts itself, stops, and comes together finally in an undeniably pleasurable way. Even now, how can you listen to it and not want to shake your ass or grab your skateboard or fling yourself into a thrashing crowd in front of a stage?

Despite all of their stops and starts, the Breeders with the Deal sisters at their center never died, although they went through various iterations and long stretches between albums. A Dutch documentary on the group (The Real Deal) features the 2002 incarnation of the band playing “Cannonball” before the barred windows of a stucco home. They perform at what looks like a yard party with people milling around and drinking beer in the background. There’s no riff on the drum rim to open the song. Kim plays an electric instead of an acoustic guitar. This version feels a little leaner and maybe a little slower as Kim sings squinting into the sun. As the documentary continues, the band (which at the time included bass player Mando Lopez, drummer Jose Mendeles, and guitarist John Presley) walks the East LA neighborhood where they live, buying treats from an ice cream truck, listening to a street corner mariachi band. In other scenes, Kelley knits, Kim gets high and beads. The Deals have always had a kind of I-don’t-give-a-fuck swagger. Kim used to the cover her grays with shoe polish. One commentator from The Pixies documentary Gouge, recounts seeing her slick back her hair before going on stage by rubbing her hands on a ham slice from a green room buffet. In The Real Deal, that attitude is on full display. The Deal twins smoke too many cigarettes and walk on the railroad tracks. They finish each other’s sentences. Kelley braids Kim’s hair in a gloomy house. “I struggle with staying sober,” Kelley says. “I don’t drink or smoke pot. I miss the narcotics. I only relapse on heroin.” By this time grunge has given way to something else. When Kim sings “Off You,” the first single from the band’s album Title TK, you get the sense that band is moving right along with whatever that is.
And they’ve kept moving.

That Melody Maker cover from 1993 displays all the antifashion and screw-you power of the moment: the mismatched, thrift store clothes; the irreverent cover models. (“Advertising looks and chops a must!” Stephen Malkmus screams on Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair” in another kind of anthem of the moment.) But antifashion became fashion; the 1994 Rolling Stone article on the Breeders describes in detail the Deal sisters’ sartorial choices. The reporter notes Kim’s “clunky J. Crew luggers, which she buys in a men’s size” and Kelley’s “black, ragged Florsheim ankle boots, one of which has duct tape wrapped around it to keep the sole from flopping open.” By then all of it—the style and the music—had become just another commodity. And maybe that in and of itself would have been enough to depress any young artist.
I was a moody-as-fuck kid when I begged my mother to buy me a pair of Doc Marten boots for my birthday circa 1994. I wore them with sundresses and cardigans as I walked the streets of Mexico City where I studied, translated for an art magazine, and lived for a good part of the 1990s. At the time, I was no more articulate than Kim Deal about what was so overwhelmingly rotten about the world I was growing up into, even with all of my considerable privilege and good fortune. Despite my initial dismissals (see section 2, above), life in the 90s was as violent and unjust as it anything facing us today: the Gulf War, the Bosnia war, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, the brutal beating of Rodney King, the LA uprisings, NAFTA—the continuation of so much of that foundational evil that dogs us now.
I still have those Doc Martens. They’ve come in handy over the last 30 years substituting for work, snow, or hiking boots. Although they are back in fashion, I wear them because they feel more comfortable than most of my shoes on the days when I park my car in a neighborhood adjacent the university where I work and walk a mile to my office to avoid paying for parking.
The Breeders are back in fashion, too. When The Last Splash line up reunited to record a new album, All Nerve, in 2018, The New York Times, the New Yorker and the Guardian wrote pieces hailing the band’s return. Still, they are no longer the center of any music universe.
The Deals have moved back to their hometown of Dayton, Ohio, to help care for their mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s. Kim lives down the street from her parents. Kelley lives only a few blocks away as does Macpherson, who keeps a day job as a carpenter. When they began recording the latest album, Wiggs left her Brooklyn apartment to live in Kim’s attic. Speaking to The Guardian, Kim remarked “…just look outside my window… Nothing. Nobody recognizes us or knows us at all.” Being where you need to be or where you can be useful, doing what you want to do without the approval of an industry—there’s something that feels authentically grunge about that to me.
Journalists no longer comment on what the Deals are wearing, but they look great. In an appearance on Later…with Jools Holland the band plays a tight and fun version of “Cannonball.” Wiggs looks like a hip grad school professor. Kelley’s face shows the beautiful lines of a woman in her 50s who hasn’t been Botox-ed, filled, or tucked. You can see the age in Kim’s face as well as she screams and smiles and blows into a lifeguard whistle. It might be stage lights, but it might also be shoe polish that leaves her hair with a kind of sheen.

An earlier version of this essay incorrectly stated that the Deals returned to Akron instead of their hometown of Dayton, OH. WTF, says the author, who is embarrassed about the mistake. But perhaps fucking up is as grunge as it can get.

Susan Briante is the author, most recently, of Defacing the Monument. She lives and works in Tucson, AZ.

“ZOMBIE,” GOATS, AND COMING UP FOR AIR: MAYA C. POPA ON “ZOMBIE”

At thirteen, the irrefutably coolest member of my friend group went grunge, and it became necessary for all of life to be inflected through the fact; slowly at first, courtesy of a spiralbound notebook scribbled in Sharpie, and culminating in the purchase of a pair of UFO pants donned in high summer on the beaches of Montauk while eating lemon ice cream served out of a frozen lemon.
As my parents smiled good-naturedly over their matching gazpachos, quietly swallowing their disappointment that their only offspring had the looks of Samara Morgan and the personality of a nursery schoolteacher, I clutched my grenade of porous yellow and relayed the events of that afternoon. I’d been introduced to a new song, the song, a vintage song released a decade prior—maybe my parents had heard of it when they weren’t busy being criminally dull. I plugged a first-generation iPod into primitive portable speakers and played “Zombie” on loop until the battery gave out. It was the sort of song, I reasoned, even they, normal pant-wearing types, could appreciate. So universal was its suffering, and it mentioned 1916, which was more or less their childhoods.
“Zombie” is a protest song by the Irish alternative rock band The Cranberries written during a period of Irish national conflict called, rather literally, The Troubles. Few calamaties carry the sting of civil war which The Troubles, a 30-year low-grade fever of ethno-nationalist struggle and dissent, very narrowly avoided. “Zombie” is a song about violence that, in the way of all good mimetic fallacy, is relentlessly circuitous on its journey back to chorus. It succeeds heartily at that compressed, claustrophobic effect, and is therefore wildly irritating unless you’ve expressly ordered it, like that one time a year you crave the dish you loathed in childhood but would pay $34.99 for a chef to reimagine in a seasonal reduction. It is full of pathos and unapologetically anthemic, made even more so by its message—1916 says it all…sort of. My friends and I spent the eighth grade convinced it was a song about World War I, not the 1916 Irish insurrection known as the Easter Rising which killed thousands over the course of a week, and led to the founding of the Republic of Ireland. We cut Dolores slack on the dates, which according to the principles of eyeliner, could be smudged. And we sustained this conviction without hint of self-scrutiny, which was another delightful part of being young.  
On the subject of things we took for granted—metabolisms that could withstand spectacular quantities of sugar, boys and their comically elaborate advances, the very idea of sleeping in—what strikes me now is how cruel and petty we often were towards one another, this, perhaps among the only forms of naivety one gains with age. How could we be the little shits we were? is more or less the question as we spoke our mercurial, half-baked truths to each other’s faces, mascara steadily running from a string of unnecessary confessions.
Nothing felt quite in balance those years, though nothing felt expressly perilous either. Now, days organized around modalities of health and wellness founder, despite our best efforts, on an undercurrent of demise. If this won’t kill you, that will. And that, perhaps, is the greatest distinction between what runs in the blood at 13 versus at 32; that early, misplaced nihilism before you’ve learned the term for it is the purest form of verve and faith in the world.
“Zombie” draws its devastating charm from the chorus in which O’Riordan—a very fine musician—bleats, for there is no other verb, the word “zombie,” the ending vowel elided so as to sound like “bay” or “baah,” the approximate sound of goat speech. A bold choice, and one that time has rendered apocryphal: no one begins singing “Zombie” for any other reason than that a sudden noise, mechanical or otherwise, has brought the chorus to mind. Suddenly, you’re back in a friend’s basement dying your hair Cream of Raven and looking up GIFs of the anarchist symbol to draw on your wrist.
There is, of course, a goat edition of the song in which the music video has been superimposed with footage of actual goats bleating, because: the internet:

But I would now like to tell you a story about goats.
In 1905, a Scottish physiologist named John Scott Haldane was commissioned by the British Royal Navy to solve a curious problem. English divers were resurfacing with a fatal illness. Autopsies performed revealed bubbles in major organs, as though their very blood had turned effervescent.
And so Haldane, a character to be certain, and one whose family motto was “suffer,” was called to work out a set of principles for safe, staged decompression. The ailment never struck divers who stayed above 33 feet, so it was merely a matter of determining at what rate to acclimate divers to changes of air pressure. Haldane had a penchant for practical experimentation; he once entombed himself in order to record the physiological effects of asphyxiation.
For this particular experiment, however, he used goats.
85 goats were gathered in London. In groups of eight, they were placed inside chambers whose air was compressed then normalized at different rates. They were subsequently released into the yard and observed.
Now, I admit the image of a herd of goats stumbling about on a makeshift pasture while a line of humorless scientists document their symptoms—stiff legs, crossed eyes, weakness on one side of the haunch—is rather droll. A part of me is even tempted by the obvious “zombie goats” joke. It’s there, and a different writer could stick the landing.
Instead, I see white lab coats flapping in the wind. I hear the shallow breaths of young men in decompression chambers, nicknamed “diver’s ovens,” as they await a cure for what usually killed. I think of how the illness is colloquially called the bends because its afflicted bend over as nitrogen wrecks havoc on joints and muscles, leaving the heart frothing.
I think of how only one out of the 85 goats survived to the end of the experiment.
I will never go scuba diving because I would have to tell the young captain how the mechanism of decompression was devised, and he would smile tolerantly, shielded by the vigor of his youth. Or else, he might ask a follow-up question, and I would have to face yet again how pathetic and soft I am, how difficult it is for me to bear even what is meant to be a happy tale of progress when I am still not over mourning the 84 goats sacrificed to this twisted art.
“It’s the same old theme since 1916,” O’Riordan sings, landing a perfect rhyme. It’s the same old theme since the cave paintings, Homer, the Old Testament. What is less obvious is the violence synonymous with progress, the discomfiting reality that those same advancements that allowed a navy to maintain its edge on the brink of catastrophic world wars makes it possible for vacationers to misidentify tropical fish—the scientific violence inseparable from human progress. Is there a distorted electric guitar riff that captures the ways we hurt each other in the name of the future?
Are there any anthems for that?

Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith (Sarabande 2019) winner of the 2020 North American Book Prize. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. Her writing appears in The Paris Review, TLS, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, writing on the literary role of wonder.