3/20
ryan grandick
on
spacehog, “in the meantime”
(march plaidness)
For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.
March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee
I haven’t written a word of pop cultural analysis since this entry. Before rereading my piece on Spacehog, I had been wondering if there was a specific reason I stopped. When I wrote it I had already mainly moved into the even more doomed field of longform fiction, my first passion because we always love the ones who don’t love us back, and was finishing my first novel while was recovering from six months in complete COVID isolation and trying to figure out a new career and dealing with a nervous breakdown. I figured it was probably some combination of those things. And I guess in retrospect it was. But man, rereading this, this is a man who fucking hates that he’s writing about Spacehog.
I had wanted to write an essay on “In the Meantime” for years. I was always one of those people who found analyzing the nuances of pop stuff more interesting than talking about things I sincerely love and admire. What do I have to say about Blue Velvet or Station to Station or As I Lay Dying that hasn’t already been said by a million other smarter people who’ve devoted their lives to those texts? But Spacehog? Rob Zombie? Grim Reaper? I could really make a meal out of that. I could find a new angle. And “In the Meantime” is such a collection of weird mid 90’s cultural signifiers that I thought it would be my masterstroke and when I finally released it I couldn’t help but feel like I blew it. It didn’t feel right. Still, while I still don’t think some of the repetition stuff I experiment with here works because it mostly makes me sound like I only know three words, I think that, on a personal level at least, time has been kind to this essay.
My earlier pop culture writing always came from a place of Obama era poptimism. I viewed pop culture as a window into the American soul, a signifier of all the weird often crass and fucked up ways we were developing as people. I pushed the line that trash culture could be as informative as high art and that there was value in studying it and I guess I still believe that intellectually, but man, by the time we got through the first Trump administration, it seemed like maybe taking trash culture seriously was perhaps a mistake. It seemed like people took the argument that pop culture could be art ALSO to mean that it was all you need, and we got inundated with it. Trash culture became all encompassing. Our government was literally made up of television personalities and a gameshow host had just killed a million people through mismanaging the Covid response, which is not a responsibility we should give to a gameshow host but here we are. People were having daily arguments about where it was offensive to suggest people watch foreign films. We saw nostalgic corporate intellectual properties grinding up all of our most talented actors and directors and screenwriters into paste while venture capitalists ran every single major publisher in every artistic field. By the time I got to actually write the Spacehog essay, I fucking hated Spacehog. I hated their faces, I hated their dumb names, I hated how little meaning or invention there was to everything they did, and I hated how parodic and fake and manufactured they felt. All they had was this one perfect little song and how much does that mean anyway? Especially when the perfect song isn’t about anything?
I like this essay because it’s about that weariness. That weariness permeates it. Even though I viewed and still view music criticism as an art form all its own, I was tired of this bullshit band and tired of thinking up things to think about it. And so, this feels like a subconscious bridge between my cultural criticism work and a novel that I have been told is “very upsetting”. It’s a piece I find personally very freeing and transformative. Looking back it’s the piece where I finally internalized that pop culture can be a window into the American soul, sure, but it’s mostly a way to sell you shoes and fascism. And then I got really mad about it. And I’m still mad about it. So I consider it an honorable first round loss. —Ryan Grandick
ryan grandick on “in the meantime”
Before you first see Spacehog on MTV’s House of Style, they’re introduced by host and fashion designer Todd Oldham as “four fine young chaps from Leeds” who won a competition “so fierce that the opposing record labels actually got in a fistfight over who was going to get to sign them”, a notoriety so powerful that he immediately calls them The Space Hogs. I have been unable to verify this fistfight between record executives, but, considering that drummer Johnny Cragg fails to mention it in an interview from 2018, this feels like a put on. A winking origin story for a gang of boyish rapscallions. The appearance, shortly after the release of their first album, Resident Alien, in late 1995, feels so much like a Monkees interstitial that “The Space Hogs” seems intentional, a smirking little moment of self-awareness. Beginning with a short loosely scripted segment where The Space Hogs fail to find anything to watch on tv, they go to a thrift store and talk about rayon and polyester and pleather and play with bubble guns in painfully staged b-roll footage and say mid 90’s rock star shit like “being politically correct isn’t all it’s cracked up to be” while lounging in full length fur coats. They quote Pesci in Goodfellas while filing through polo shirts and make snarky comments about clothing labels. Antony Langdon, the band’s co-founder and the apparent star of this segment, has the long features and center part of Jarvis Cocker or Dave Davies. Royston Langdon, Antony’s brother and lead vocalist, looks so much like a 1995 Scott Weiland that it feels criminal. Johnny Cragg has Davy Jones’s mop top and boyish enthusiasm. Guitarist Richard Steel seems to be missing. They eat gummi bears and play with Light Brites and there are bad camera tricks and comically gigantic Mott the Hoople sunglasses. We learn nothing about them except that they seem to be made up of the pieces of other more recognizable bands, and Oldham tells us that after the commercial we’re going to meet “two magazine editors that just happen to be some of the coolest snowboarders around”. It’s a segment that is so of its time that it feels painful, like seeing a picture of yourself in your 20s, a mixture of nostalgia and embarrassment, and understanding that the subject you’re seeing is not equipped for what’s about to happen to it. That the world he lives in is not the world he expects.
When I was in high school, a friend of mine’s father told me that “Last Train to Clarksville” is better than any single Beatles song. It’s one of those statements that feels controversial until you consider it. It’s like saying “Friends in Low Places” is the greatest country song ever written or Tom Cruise is the greatest movie star of all time. It seems vaguely blasphemous and arguments can be made against it, but upon reflection it’s not as far off as it originally seems. “Clarksville” exists as this perfect crystalline moment, a vague and inoffensive comment on the Vietnam War that’s also about making arrangements to meet your best girl for some necking at the train station before you ship out. Sometimes a song rises to meet the moment, capturing something nuanced in a complicated period in a way that a cleverer band couldn’t. “Clarksville”’s closest relatives, “Paperback Writer” and “Day Tripper”, are a conceptual bit and a series of drug references, respectively. “Clarksville”, by being about something so innocuous, a boy seemingly about to go off to war wanting to hook up with his gal at the train station, achieves a sort of perfection. It’s genuine because that’s all it can be. It’s too cynical not to be pure. Two twenty seven year old songwriters, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, tried to come up with a song about what teenagers were thinking about: fucking and going to war, and they were right, because the answer was obvious, and they pitched it down the center of the plate. It’s a perfect song for a time right before the country realized how truly fucked it was.
In 1995, there wasn’t a war on, and there were enough songs on Resident Alien about fucking, crunchy arena rock pop punk about girls and brotherly incest and the sea and other things seemingly picked at random out of a hat, songs about being incredibly sad and brave and above it all, at one point delving into literal babytalk, so Royston Langdon wrote a song about that other evergreen topic for teens: pure existential whatever. In a later interview, Langdon said the song was “using some kind of metaphor of a worldly or inner-worldly search for the end of isolation, and the acceptance of one's self is in there. At the end of the day it's saying whatever you gotta do, it's OK, it's alright.” Which is a very long way to say that the song’s about how, hey buddy, you’re doing great. The opening sets the tone: “And in the end we shall achieve in time/The thing they called divine/When all the stars will smile for me/When all is well and well is all for all”, and the chorus continues this insistent repetition: “We love the all the all of you/Where lands are green and skies are blue/When all in all we're just like you/We love the all of you”. It’s introspection without introspection. A wooly headed sort of positive nothing. “Avalon” without the yearning. A glam revival answer to the hippie revival from a couple years before. That it happens over a chunky, seventies glam accidental reworking of “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan, a Gap ad version of Slade or Ziggy Stardust era David Bowie or Sweet or Rod Stewart, makes it feel shallow in a way that feels incredibly 90s. A contradiction in terms. High gloss self-actualization. Classic rock with shiny shirts and ringer tees and more expensive effects pedals. Placebo without the commitment, Stone Temple Pilots without the charisma, Suede a few years too late to be brit pop godfathers and without Brett Anderson’s weary English graveyard pessimism.
It would be very easy to dismiss Spacehog as a sort of across the pond version of Urge Overkill (Spacehog formed in New York but, as Todd Oldham pointed out, all of their members are from Leeds and they are positioned as quintessentially British rapscallions): an overhyped one hit wonder with more style than substance, more interested in wallowing in 70s rock excess than in contributing. And such an argument isn’t wrong, necessarily. But “In the Meantime” feels like their “Last Train to Clarksville”. It’s a perfect little crystalline moment, suspended in time. Just as “Clarksville” was an ode to the two things young people were thinking about in 1966, “Meantime” is an ode to the mid-90s, one of the last drops of the original messaging of the decade. Periods of time, as with any collection, develop themes. Cultural stories, told by media, by marketing, by television and music and film, reflections of the concerns and beliefs of the people in charge. A sort of translation and solidification of events. A larger narrative. “This is who we are” or, more often, “This is not who we are.” The early to mid-90s was dedicated to propagating the Woodstock 94/Lollapalooza messaging. We exist at the end of history, with our troubles behind us and a new period of enlightenment in front of us. The boomers got us here and the gen x-ers pulled us across the finish line with their sheer authenticity and commitment to diversity in advertising. It’s okay to enjoy being powerful and brave and lonely and above it all. We are allowed to enjoy the excess and inspiration that comes with winning the game.
A few years later, we’d get the new message of the 90s. Nu-Metal would tell us that we exist at the end of history, with our troubles behind us and a new period of enlightenment in front of us. It’s okay to hate it. It’s okay to hate your life. It’s okay to not believe things will ever get better. It’s okay to be thirteen forever. There’s a reason why one of the last major cultural events of the 20th century was Limp Bizkit fans burning Woodstock to the ground. There’s a reason why it feels like it never really stopped burning, like if you went back to the superfund air force base in Rome, New York, where they held Woodstock 99, there’d still be a sign for $5 water spitting off embers onto the trampled peace wall. The 2000s would become the decade of rejecting dunderheaded enlightenment in favor of dunderheaded irony and sarcasm and cruelty. But then, the fantasy shown in “Meantime” and Lollapalooza and Woodstock 94 was the attitude of a generation who had, in their mind, beaten racism and poverty and imperialism through racism and the destruction of the welfare system and imperialism. High gloss self-actualization. Old conservative politics with shiny shirts and ringer tees and more expensive effects pedals. Cool Britannia and the bridge to the 21st century. We don’t need a henhouse because chickens never come home to roost.
And yet there is an aching sadness that comes with “In the Meantime”. I was born in 1986. The Columbine massacre happened when I was thirteen. 9/11 when I was fifteen. The widespread financial deregulation that started in the Clinton years and continued through the Bush years led to the economic collapse of 2008, the year before I’d graduate college. My friends and I have gotten laid off, or could get laid off at any moment, we’ve moved back home, periods of success held together with tape leading to periods of failure that at this point seem inevitable. The myth of the end of history has been thoroughly disabused, if we were ever able to believe it at all. And so, this period, 1995, when I was nine, has become, in my mind, an American Age of Aquarius. A Pax Romana. The golden city on a hill. And while intellectually I recognize that the 90s were probably just as stupid and messy and shallow as many other parts of American history, it has achieved a form of perfection in my mind through a steadfast refusal to analyze it. The 90s are the 90s. Those years had the X-Files and Jurassic Park and Pulp Fiction and Pearl Jam and record stores. And in the middle of it sits this perfect song by this deeply imperfect band. It lacks Blur’s public-school cynicism, Pulp’s layered sarcasm and intelligence, Oasis’s smirking insincerity, Suede’s obsession with sexy drug induced brooding. It is Brit Pop, sort of, at times, but it feels important that the band is technically American, because their outlook is typically so. Life’s short, live it on your terms, do your thing, you’ll be alright, when you could say such a thing and still almost mean it, when such a sentiment felt right on the tipping point between a car commercial and genuine youthful exuberance. Between a thing that’s sold to you and a thing you buy.
Royston would marry Liv Tyler, in a move that feels natural for a person so of the 90s, and the band would start playing with its sound in a way that feels as though it’s supposed to be fresh and innovative but really just feels like they finally started listening to Roxy Music and Bowie’s Berlin records. The Chinese Album, their next release, was apparently supposed to be a film that probably wouldn’t have aged well called Mungo City, about an expat band trying to make it in Hong Kong. Their third album, The Hogyssey, continued the band’s trend of terrible album titles and interesting if derivative experimentation. They broke up in 2002 and didn’t reunite until Royston got divorced in 2008. In 2010, Antony Langdon, either working as an assistant for Joaquin Phoenix or portraying Joaquin Phoenix’s assistant, appeared in Phoenix’s mockumentary I’m Still Here, where he had a fictional argument with Phoenix and then took a shit in his shower. In 2013, they released As It is On Earth, which completed their brit pop career trajectory by introducing a bunch of synthesizers and sounding like Zooropa. In 2014 they went on tour with Eve 6, Everclear, and Soul Asylum, all writers of their own perfect songs from the before time. Cavemen banging on rocks, warning us about teenage runaways and Santa Monica and my tender heart being put in a blender. And listening to them returns us to Reagan’s shining city of promise and prosperity, when we looked out over the horizon and didn’t see that all the towers were teeth, broken gravestones in a gaping maw, each drop of blood and gold shimmering in the throat like the sequins on an ill-fitting button up. When we told ourselves we were enlightened and honest and that, for its faults, things were looking up.
“In the Meantime” continues to be featured in television and video games whenever there’s a need for a quick hit of mid-90s nostalgia, a pure and potent dose of the past, a time machine, where it doesn’t matter how manufactured the band feels, how manufactured the song feels. If Spacehog is a trick of the light, a means of convincing us that a better America existed and could again, it’s a successful one. It’s a pair of rose-tinted glasses, oversized and chunky and heart shaped. And it makes sense that we’d fall for something so overly constructed: for a period so self-mythologizing and for a band so full of tossed off lore, of movies that will never be made and concept albums that will never be conceptualized. America manufactures its own past in real time, pulling bits and pieces of itself into an image, a theme, a message. Sometimes it seems like it’s all we make, an ever-present self-replicating product that we both purchase and produce. Create and consume. As Americans, we are our own construction, best shown through what we own. For a few months in 1966 we were “Last Train to Clarksville”. Blissfully unaware of our own looming pain. And for a few months in 1995 and 1996, as unlikely as it seems, we were Spacehog because we didn’t know how to be anything else. And we probably could have been better, but we’ve definitely been worse. And if we ever get close to being Spacehog again, maybe we could try a little harder and be a little better this time.
Ryan Grandick must have gotten some energy back because his original pitch for the rewind was looking at Spacehog’s second album. As the pitch was made before Trump was reelected, it would have probably ended up being a series of personal death threats or something so we lucked out there. He has an MFA from the University of Arizona. His previous March Xness subjects include Rob Zombie, Grim Reaper, and Deadeye Dick. He has proudly and bravely never left the first round.
Additionally, the novel in question, A Melee of Human Endeavor, has since been self published under a pseudonym and is available on Amazon and also maybe other places if there’s an interest and Ryan can figure out how that stuff works. He is open to advice.