the sweet 16

(2) hole, “doll parts”
knocked out
(14) babes in toyland, “bruise violet”
359-261
and will 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 20.

Janine Annett on “doll parts”

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life. —Hillary Clinton, 1992

I want to be the girl with the most cake. —Courtney Love, written in 1991 (from “Doll Parts,” released in 1994)

“I’m going to write about Hole’s ‘Doll Parts’ for March Plaidness—the grunge bracket,” I told my husband. 
“That song’s not grunge,” he responded.
I mean, the song’s really not very grunge, depending on how you define “grunge”. 
When I think of a typical grunge band, I think of a group of 3-6 white guys with long hair, wearing flannel shirts. There’s a singer (who may or may not also play guitar), 1-2 guitar players, a drummer, and a bass player. No keyboards. Little to no backing vocals. Distortion pedals (including, but not limited to, the Big Muff, which really is a great pedal).
Dare I suggest that “Doll Parts” is more akin to a power ballad—that old mainstay of the hair metal era that grunge supposedly wiped out—than a grunge song? For most of the song, there’s a slow tempo, with a burst of a louder, more distorted part at the end. Hole as a, well, whole, was more grunge-by-association. And we all know who they were associated with.
Courtney Love, who really needs no introduction, is forever associated with Kurt Cobain, king of the grunge scene, for better or worse. 

It stands for knife/ for the rest of my life.

Let’s go back to that “wiping out hair metal” thing for a moment: There’s a story that at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, Axl Rose from Guns N’ Roses told Kurt to “shut your bitch up”, referring, of course, to Courtney Love. Kurt turned to Courtney and said “Shut up, bitch” and they laughed and Axl didn’t know what to make of being laughed at. In many ways, Courtney was even harder and tougher and more messed up than Axl, and that’s saying a lot. You think Axl had a hard drug problem? Courtney had that, too. Difficult childhood? You betcha. Oh, Courtney also suffered from all kinds of abuse and addiction, plus she went through things that Axl couldn’t have dreamed of going through, because he was just a man. 
Hillary Clinton was also associated, for better or worse, with a man who often overshadowed her. But she, like Courtney Love, had ambitions of her own. She refused to stay quiet, to play the role of the good wife, the obedient woman. She wanted things not just for her husband, but for herself. People said terrible things about her; they said terrible things about her husband. They tried to take him down. They said: He cheated on her, but come on, look at her. She emasculated him. They said: That young intern looked at him with adoration in her eyes. Hillary didn’t abandon him, though. She never abandoned her ambitions, either. 
Maybe the world wasn’t ready for Hillary Clinton in 1992. Maybe they weren’t ready for her in 2008, either. Nor in 2016. She proved herself again and again: Lawyer. First Lady. Senator. Secretary of State. But people still said terrible things about her. They said, after all that, that she rode on her husband’s coattails. Essentially that she was a witch, a shrew. 

I was obsessed with Live Through This. I don’t think Hole did anything as good as it before or since. Of course, there were rumors back then, and even to this day, that Kurt Cobain wrote or co-wrote a lot of the songs. I have no doubt that Kurt and Courtney both influenced each other, but the thing that really sets Hole and Live Through This and “Doll Parts” apart is Courtney’s guitar playing and singing (there’s never been any doubt that anyone but her sang on the album), and the lyrics. They’re so female. No man could have written them, I assure you. And In Utero? Doesn’t that borrow from Courtney’s playbook of talking and singing about so many very female experiences? Why didn’t anyone accuse Kurt of ripping off Courtney? 
I have a confession to make: I was never a huge Nirvana fan. I always preferred Hole. Don’t get me wrong, I like Nirvana. Especially with the benefit of looking at them in hindsight, I do appreciate their music and what they did culturally. But Hole, I loved. I listened to Live Through This over and over. I saw Hole play live. 
Courtney was, and is, for sure, an imperfect role model. But millions of people idolized her. Millions hated her, too.

I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs.

Dolls are, on the surface, perfect. Unbroken. But they’re plastic; they’re not real. And they’re tossed aside when children are done playing with them, abandoned when they outgrow them. The perfect metaphor for Courtney Love. 
Probably 90% of celebrities have had some kind of plastic surgery or cosmetic procedure. So why do we know that Courtney had a nose job, had her lips done, had all kinds of things done to her? Courtney was an oversharer before oversharing was even a thing. She can’t stop talking, even when she should. Why do we know she entered the world as Courtney Michelle Harrison and metamorphosed into Courtney Love? Why do we know she used to be a stripper?  

They say: Why wasn’t Hillary Clinton content with what she had? She had money, admiration, a career. Why’d she have to run for President, too? Isn’t it all her fault that we had Donald Trump as a president? What if the Democrats had chosen someone else for the presidential bid? Maybe they shouldn’t have picked a woman. The country just wasn’t ready.  

“Doll Parts” and all of Live Through This took the trappings of motherhood and domesticity—dolls, cake, milk—and turned them on their head. Motherhood is sweet!? No. The road to Motherhood is paved with blood and guts and pain. You have to be tough as hell to be a mother. The milk is sour. 

I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait

“Big veins”, of course, is referring to all the stories and rumors about Courtney’s drug use. She was accused of doing heroin while pregnant. She’s dog bait—the tidbit no one can resist going for and fighting over. 
Courtney and Hillary each have one daughter. Chelsea was born in 1980. Frances was born in 1992. 
Frances was born in 1992, and Live Through This was recorded in 1993 and came out in 1994. Of course, lots of moms go back to work shortly after having a baby. But if you had Nirvana money, and you chose that? It’s the same things people say about moms everywhere: If you’re so ambitious and want to work so badly, why’d you have a baby in the first place? 
Live Through This has sold more than 2 million copies. Nevermind sold 30 million copies. In Utero has sold over 15 million copies. 

 I love him so much it just turns to hate.

“Doll Parts” is about Courtney’s relationship with Kurt, as well as her relationship to fame.

They really want you, they really do
Yeah, they really want you
They really want you, and I do too

The line “Someday you will ache like I ache” took on a special significance after Kurt died, but of course she wrote the line—and lines like “Live through this with me, I swear that I would die for you”—before his death. I can still see her with a foot up on an amp, playing her guitar, in a babydoll dress, singing and shouting her rage at everything, and everyone. 

By all rights, I think Frances Bean Cobain should be a huge star. Where’s her major label record deal, if such a thing still exists? I’d always sort of hoped she’d grow up and start a band with Coco Gordon Moore. Sometimes Frances posts videos on her Instagram of her singing and playing guitar. One she posted recently got 261,000 views. That’s not nothing. But it’s not 30 million. Or even 2 million. Of course, album sales in general are not what they were in the 90s.
According to Billboard,  “Post Malone closed out 2019 with the most popular album of the year in the U.S., according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. The data-tracking company reports that the genre-blending artist’s Hollywood’s Bleeding effort, his third release, earned 3.001 million equivalent album units during the year, with 357,000 of that sum coming from album sales.” 
Maybe Frances doesn’t need a record deal. 

I fake it so real I am beyond fake 

This line is genius—taking the accusations of Courtney being fake and plastic, using Kurt, being a fame whore, and turning them on their heads. 
What the world hates even more than a young, attractive woman who speaks her mind is a woman who’s middle-aged (or, heaven forbid, a senior citizen! Hillary Clinton is now officially a senior!) and speaks her mind. 
As Lisa Whittington-Hill wrote in her amazing essay “Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55”, Courtney Love’s solo album America’s Sweetheart, released in 2004, “was a disappointment for Love, selling fewer than 100,000 copies and receiving mostly negative reviews.” The 2010 Hole release Nobody’s Daughter also received mixed reviews. “Each time Love stars on a television show, appears in a movie, or releases a new album, headlines proclaim ‘the return of Courtney Love,’ even though she has never gone anywhere. She has always been here, but it is as if the media and critics want her to prove herself all over again.” 
Should Hillary and Courtney just be quiet and go away? Or should they keep screaming, fighting for what they believe in? Fighting for themselves, their daughters, their countries, change, progress? How much progress have we made since the 1990s? 

And someday, you will ache like I ache
And someday, you will ache like I ache
And someday, you will ache like I ache
And someday, you will ache like I ache

Janine Annett's writing has appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, and many other places. Her humor book I Am “Why Do I Need Venmo?” Years Old is coming out in July 2021. Make friends with her online at https://twitter.com/janineannett or http://www.janineannett.com/.

CLOVEN TONGUES LIKE AS OF FIRE: SCOTT BEAL ON “BRUISE VIOLET”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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