the sweet 16
(13) Electric six, “Danger! High Voltage”
erased
(8) No Doubt, “Hella Good”
178-110
and will play in the elite 8
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/21/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
KELLY SHIRE ON NO DOUBT’S “HELLA GOOD”
The waves keep on crashing on me, for some reason.
I didn’t do much research for this essay about the elements that make a song qualify as “dance,” versus any other type of song. Instead, I relied on my own knowledge base, or what my ears understand to be true: Rock songs equal heavy guitars and drums. Country songs feature the same, with additional twang and fiddle and some steel guitar, if you’re lucky. And dance songs, at least those from the last 50 years or so, also equal guitars—especially bass—and drums, but mostly feature a whole lot of synthesizer. Often there are horns, or synths that can sound almost exactly like horns. It’s the synth that makes it a dance song, I decided.
Then I thought back to all the other songs, and their enthusiastic dancers, that came before. I think of Motown, and the 60s R&B my parents loved: The Temptations, Junior Walker. Not a synth to be heard. My grandparents era: Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller. Young people out there on the floor, swinging, swaying, coming close together and then apart. I think of that dated cliche from the old, original American Bandstand show, and the line the teenage dancers would deliver to Dick Clark, when asked if they liked a new song: it’s got a good beat; you can dance to it.
No Doubt’s “Hella Good” kicks off with a simple beat, a drum tap-tap-tapping for about half a minute, but then the hook, all synth and guitar, opens it wide up and the song really begins. This groove feels low down, funky. Its electronic, buzzy tone reminds me of the opening notes of Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie on Reggae Woman,” one of the sexiest grooves I can name off the top of my head. A song that never fails to move me to dance, even if it’s just while sitting in my chair. Maybe this similarity is my ears intuiting the dancehall influences of the album, hearing somehow that parts of “Rock Steady” the album that produced Hella Good as a single, were recorded in Jamaica.
Your love keeps on comin’ like a thunderbolt.
This is an essay about a dance song, but it was also going to be about getting older alongside your celebrity peers, we members of Generation X all snide and snarky as ever about our gray hairs and creaky joints, some of us going stark gray and some of us persisting in hair dye (me) and some persisting in embracing plastic and fillers because it’s our job, or part of our job, to remain ageless (Gwen). But it’s difficult to focus solely on aging, or even merely reminisce about life in the 90s/good old days, when writing about a song that’s so clearly, openly, about sex.
I wanna see you baby, real close up.
I grew up in a household where it was a given that my parents were good dancers, and I was a terrible one. My mom laughed whenever I tried to do it, mocking – what? My ungainliness, poor rhythm, general lack of grace. I grew up hearing my family’s own creation mythology, of my parent’s initial meeting at a nightclub, how sparks flew between them on the dance floor. Early on I internalized that dancing was part of their world, their private milieu. I wasn’t invited to join them, and was actively discouraged from trying, pretty much. I was an only child for most of my first decade. Needing to keep myself entertained, I instead took up singing. There wasn’t a Disney or musical soundtrack safe from my impassioned warbling.
Despite all that, I eventually came to enjoy dancing, after tentatively allowing myself to dance, privately, and always looking over my shoulder, should an adult be watching. It was a long evolution that started somewhere in my early teens, when flush with new hormones and images of my latest crush, I felt inspired to cut loose out on my grandmother’s back patio. I turned up the radio, playing the Go-Go’s “Vacation” and jumped along, in that very 80s/Molly Ringwald-esque elbow-and-knee pumping style that passed for dancing. A flutter of curtains, my grandma was watching me from her laundry room. She came outside, scowling, and told me to turn it down.
A few years later, I cranked it up and swayed when “Let’s Get it On,” or “Beast of Burden'' came on the radio while I dried the dishes in my parent’s kitchen. Both of these songs are slow, sexy grinds, not fast, driving beats. Rather than jumping around, I learned to trust my body to find the bass, to seek its own rhythm.
You got me feeling hella good.
“Just A Girl,” was No Doubt’s first big single, off their album Tragic Kingdom. As soon as I heard it, I knew the singer had to be from Southern California (I heard the song before learning the album title, and its play on the Disneyland nickname.) “Just a Girl” lists a lot of standard complaints about being a woman stuck in a man’s world, but it was Stefani’s line “cuz they won’t let me drive late at night” that stood out to me, alerted me that here was a local girl: it was a familiar warning, the reminders I heard from my own worried parents. I was single, independent, and still their concerns rattled in my head as I zipped down the 5, the 91 freeways in Anaheim and north Orange County, visiting friends, lovers, after midnight.
There was a famous crime around that time, a girl whose face appeared on billboards, gone missing in SoCal after attending a Cure concert. She had a flat tire or car trouble, pulled over on the freeway, and the rest eventually became a feature story on Dateline. Gwen and I came from close-knit families, heard the same warnings. It was a drag, being just a girl. And there was something unseemingly, too, about being out late at night, the Puritanical scold I heard from other, over-30 adults: nothing good happens after midnight, after one, two in the morning. What’s a girl doing out there? Having sex. Looking for sex, tempting it. Or out at a club, which was understood to be the same thing. “Meat market,” they called popular bars. We know what you’re out there doing, was the subtext.
A great, favorite song with an irresistible beat came over the sound system, and you grabbed your friend’s hand, rushed out of the bathroom maybe, to wiggle out onto the dance floor, your body needed to move, thrust, writhe to the beat pounding all the way through your bones. How good of a song, to be unself-conscious, lost in the groove, unaware. Cuz they often stare with their eyes, as Stefani sang. From the beginning, No Doubt made me want to dance. Even if it was more the jumping/pumping kind, versus a funky, disco groove. Jumping up and down is its own kind of dancing, too.
You hold me like you should, so I’m gonna keep on dancing.
If dance is a stand in for sex, then I can assume my parents were good at it. Maybe it’s why I wasn’t allowed to participate in the thing they had in common. When you’re an only child, you learn quickly the ways of adults. You look away from sights not meant for you, learn that your precocious comebacks will land wrong, half the time. It’s true that for much of my childhood I was chubby, near-sighted, unable to follow basic choreography steps required in school plays and talent shows. Maybe my parents had a point. After all, I still can’t follow any steps, or succeed at any of those dance routines that go viral on Tik Tok. My parents, if they could see me, would surely smirk and shake their heads at all my sweaty, spazzy attempts.
Don’t wake me if I’m dreaming/Cuz I’m in the mood
Despite the grainy, gritty black and white, the video for “Hella Good” looks high budget, artsy and sophisticated. Gwen appears a little older, wiser, one could argue sexier in 2002, than she did eight years prior, in her first videos. Gone is her baby face, the little-girl pout. Gone, at least in this song, is the novelty of the Betty Boop, cartoon character voice. It’s a sexy beat, a dirty, grooving synth, and water, water is everywhere. Gwen, the whole band, is wet, splashing about. Submerged, playful, going under, bobbing up again.
The song, the second single from No Doubt’s Rock Steady album, debuted 22 years ago, as of this writing. I know that, because I looked it up, and saw that my firstborn was born almost exactly a month before Hella Good was released. I would have been exhausted, covered in baby spit and struggling to breastfeed, and Gwen, well, she was on my late-night, baby-won’t-sleep TV screen, hotter than ever, rocking this funky, confident beat she wrote along with the Neptune Brothers, singing, panting about good sex:
A performance deserving of standing ovations/And who would’ve thought it’d be the two of us?
22 years ago, Gwen and I were both over 30. Do the math, a little addition: Women over 40, 50, aren’t supposed to groove. We aren’t supposed to yearn, lust for, seek out, desire that certain beat. Dancing, splashing about in all that metaphorical water—that’s for the young. Unless you’re an icon—Tina Turner, Rita Moreno, my mother, maybe—you’re supposed to hang all of it up, right around the time you’re supposed to stop going out to clubs, and instead sport your pricey yoga pants on the school pick-up line.
For years, whenever her name came up, if her voice or face was in the room, I’d offer up this fact about Gwen Stefani: we’re the same age, y’know. It became something of my private punchline, delivered mostly to my husband, and later, my kids. What I believe this proved, I’m not sure. Perhaps I wanted to infer that given different opportunities, different life choices, I too could marry a rock (or country) star, or dress in a sports bra and Dickies, affix a rhinestone bindi between my eyebrows, and present myself this way in mixed company. More recently, as Gwen has crossed over into that portal of celebrity vague-aging, while the years show more plainly on my own face, I might want you to assume that I, too, am just like her: still hip, stylish, relevant. That I too am energetic, cool enough to grab a mic and, like Gwen, hear the beat and start jumping up and down, with maybe even a few hip thrusts in your face, for good measure.
Keep on, keep on…
Stefani and No Doubt are reuniting to play at least one of the weekends at Coachella this year. I live a couple of hours from the Empire Polo Field where the annual music festival takes place; I’ve never been. I hope Stefani and the band can get the crowd…moving? Jumping? Do people even dance at Coachella, or do they merely vibe? Did Stefani, like me, like a lot of Gen X friends I know, squint at the full line up across the April weekends and scratch her head with one of her manicured fingernails over the majority of the acts? Who even ARE these people? Regardless, it’s her job to paint her face, pull her hair into that high, tight ponytail, and put on a show.
The artists, the musicians will age, my generation and our music will also eventually fade into obscurity. Still, the music itself will be there, hopefully always as easy to listen and dance to, as searching for the Glenn Miller band’s “In the Mood,” on my Spotify.
Keep on, keep on dancing.
And also: What I succumb to is making me numb.
Kelly Shire has participated in several March Xness tournaments, most recently writing about Motley Crue’s cover of “Helter Skelter” for March Faxness in 2022. Her essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Catamaran journal, Brevity, and Quarterly West, among others, and her fiction is included in the crime anthology Palm Spring Noir. Born and raised in Southern California, she works as a school librarian by day and is finishing a memoir of music, road trips, and family.
ANDREA PANZECA ON ELECTRIC SIX’S DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE
Don't you wanna know how we keep startin' fires?
The lyrics to Electric Six’s “Danger! High Voltage” are sung by two voices. That one contributor’s identity could remain a secret for years is a relic of the pre-stan (verb, not song), pre-fancam, pre-dox era. The secret contributor, Jack White, himself kept the nature of his relationship with bandmate Meg White a secret. Can you imagine, in 2023, two people claiming to be siblings when at any moment someone could post receipts of their marriage (at least one witness, right) and put them on blast? This was pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-smartphone. This was the age of LiveJournal and MySpace.
The closest maybe one can come to keeping a secret today is Orville Peck, obscuring his face with a fringed eye mask. (Within seconds one can look it up, but that’s research—a word I’ve recently qualified with “not the Trump-voter, anti-vax kind”).
Each rotating member of Electric Six adopts a sort of drag name—an alter ego like in roller-derby or wrestling or American Gladiators. The gender-bending duet reminds me of Peck and Trixie Mattel’s cover of Johnny Cash and June Carter’s “Jackson,” itself about a fire-seeking couple.
It’s my desire!
In the “Danger! High Voltage” video, White’s voice, like Mattel’s, is female-embodied, bra-clad and tits ablaze. Having recently rewatched 2001: A Space Odyssey (though obviously the on-the-go edit: fast-forwarding the space-opera shots to get to the dialogue), I thought: Hal looks boob-like (like how Nope’s Jean Jacket’s vagina-coded).
Or Hal (singular) is more crotch. Singer Dick Valentine (Tyler Spencer)’s codpiece glows, the mound of a male ballet dancer. I did want to see the pussy! on! fire!, a phrase thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race that’s been in the lexicon for a decade. I wanted to see it lit for representation. Female gaze.
When they make out—“when we touch, when we kiss, when we touch”—it’s not exactly sexy. It is in that oh-yeah-I-have-genitals sorta way. Feeling that vasovagal nerve connection from brain to lungs to heart to gut and yes to genitals, now aflame with another’s touch. The costumes signal the campiness: the making-out overlong like maybe they are siblings. Elbow sex with sibs Magenta and Riff Raff.
It’s Janet and Frank-N-Furter in “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me,” though musically closer to “Hot Patootie.” Surrounding the two, canoodling in the creepy parlor (easily an interior in the “Frankenstein Place”) the sad portraits portend, like the tombstones and skeletons at the queue of the “Haunted Mansion” ride: you’ll die.
Danger! Danger!
It’s a choice to remind a dancing crowd of death when certainly some had not forgotten. But that’s why it’s important to dance—to suspend thoughts of mortality for a night (or at least a few minutes a time).
Learning my great-grandfather died in a fire, when my grandmother was 16, only deepened my ancient fear. Epigenetic. I remember seeing my dad fall asleep with a cigarette in his hand, the very thing that took out the grandfather he never met. When I was 24, my dad died of a heart attack—a surprise but not really, since he always “ran hot.” His own grandson, my nephew, never got to meet him.
I moved to New Orleans, site of these traumas, in 2008, comforted by the higher likelihood of flood than inferno (though increasingly marsh fires are common, and for dozens of days this summer temps topped 100).
High Voltage!
I’m a fire sign—one friend said I even kinda look like a lion—but my rising and moons signs are water. I’m drawn to it physically—I like to swim—because I too “run hot.” I’m prone to fainting. Once in a yoga/meditation circle, an athlete noted the warmth radiating from my hands, said I “could charge for that.” I burned these same hands, at five, when I grabbed too close to a sparkler’s fire.
In 2001, my friends at the time, junior year of high school, liked to do “the hippie trick”: slice a lamp wire, maybe wet your heels (with spit?), squeeze them and the wire together. Hold hands: connect. Plug in. Voltage! Add people to the mix: 10, 12, the current maybe becoming fainter the more circuitry. You might hear, “I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid.”
A friend asked an electrician coworker if it was safe. Probably. No one ever got singed, fried, burnt, smoked, blown like the Jurassic Park kid from the electrified fence. The hippie-trick-house family’s dad, at NASA, might have been adjacent to the O-ring disaster; the Challenger explosion (Y-shaped flame a reference for Jean Jacket’s final form).
When we touch!
Before the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016, the UpStairs Lounge fire in the French Quarter, in 1973, was the deadliest attack at a gay bar in US history. 32 people died. Although my dad told me about it when I was a kid, only when I moved to New Orleans as an adult, 35 years after the tragedy, did it become widely commemorated. At the time, mere years after Stonewall in 1969, the city government offered no condolences, churches refused burials, and many of the victims’ families didn’t claim their children’s bodies.
So it’s a choice to remind people they could die at any moment, especially while squeezed into a small space, maybe with cheap tinder-like decorations, maybe with obscured doorways, maybe with only one stairway as egress. And did you know your vision fades when oxygen’s low, at least when you’re about to faint. Eyes require a large oxygen load, and when it’s in short supply they’re not strictly necessary (though certainly advantageous when trying to flee). Body pulls the system’s plug like Dave methodically (spoiler alert) disconnecting Hal’s higher capacities: “I can feel it. I’m afraid.”
In 2023, since a pandemic, panting and sweating in a ventless space with so many bodies hits different. But maybe you learn to stop worrying and love the bomb; you maybe give yourself over, to absolute pleasure.
Fire in the disco!
Those opening riffs of “Danger!”High Voltage” beep (beat) like a funky smoke detector. I think of Talking Head’s “Psycho Killer” and Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks,” also lyrically anxiety-minded, maybe more with talk of running. “Danger!” claims the space. Like Beyonce’s “Freedom,” it inspires me to move manically (as I’m inclined) and yet there’s little movement in the video, a contrast both appealing and instructive. The couple in the “Danger!” barely move. They make out. One room.
The song was released in the US three days before Bush declared war on Iraq. The last generation with internetless adolescence had a taste of chaos with 9/11. But the federal assault weapons ban wouldn’t expire until 2004, so mass shootings weren’t yet on the reg. 2003 was four years post-Columbine, four years pre-Virginia Tech.
[Sax solo]
“Danger!” lore wasn’t limited to (ultimately-confirmed) Jack White vocals: it was also rumored Bill Clinton played sax. Early-internet hijinks! Maybe a music biz thing: Kate Bush was rumored to have vocals on “Hilly Fields (1892)” in 1982. Turns out, nick nicely (Nickolas Laurien) couldn’t remember the real Kate (Jackson)’s last name, only credited “Kate.”
The sax in this song isn’t tacked on like in “Baker Street,” or obligatory like in “I Will Always Love You.” It’s more integrated, closer to X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours” or Tupac’s “Shorty Wanna Be a Thug,” maybe the first to sample Hank Crawford’s “Wildflower.” I honestly even like bad sax; like pizza they say.
Fire in the Taco Bell!
In New Orleans, a few years post-Katrina, there was a blighted building, once a Taco Bell. One day from the ground sprouted contractor signs. In response a warning, spray painted on the building: If this isn’t a Taco Bell, “expect arson.” It became a bakery, famous for adjacency with the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. One night, some years later, a grease flame, though extinguished at 9 pm, reignited at 3 am. The spray-painter relented: “This was better than a Taco Bell.” Today the building, again a Taco Bell, reminds us like “Danger!” and many a dance song: live más.
Andrea Panzeca is a writer and teaching artist in New Orleans.