the elite 8
(16) local h, “bound for the floor”
floored
(2) hole, “doll parts”
1599-610
and will play on in the final four
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 24.
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/.
JOHN MELILLO ON “BOUND FOR THE FLOOR”
This is an essay about Local H’s most commercially successful song, “Bound for the Floor.” It was the first single from the album As Good As Dead, released in April 1996. Local H, at the time an interracial duo composed of singer-guitarist Scott Lucas and drummer Joe Daniels, was founded in 1990 in Chicago. The band—really Lucas’s project—continues to make music today. Local H are the last grunge band.
But this is an essay, really, about this particular Local H of 1996, of “Bound for the Floor.” Listening to this Local H again makes me wonder about what it means to persist in ruins, what it means to linger in the coming after. Listening to this song and this album again, I realize that this song asks me (and all of us) to reckon with debt and mourning and influence.
Local H in 1996 work in a deeply Nirvana-esque style. I say this as a matter of course: the total internalization of quiet-loud-quiet; of textured guitar distortion; of melodic screamed sickness unto death. Local H kill their idols with the kindness of repetition. This is absolutely a compliment.
That’s because for Local H in As Good As Dead this mastery and retransmission of Nirvana’s style produces a kind of newness, even in its fidelity to a previous model. Style as knowledge and homage is something I want to dwell in here: it’s what makes the repetition a swerve, a slight difference. It’s what composes Local H’s afterness and lastness: their continuation.
“Bound for the Floor” and the other songs on this album take up grunge as an idiom in a way that is both totally inside of and removed from it. Mastering grunge (Nirvana’s grunge) as musical style—as a duo no less!—means opening up a gap between recognition and rehearsal, between the enraptured first listening and the task of taking apart and making sense of that listening. This gap shows a band giving in to the power of a style, doing it again not because it is an emotional territory to be misread and mined but because one can continue to work in its nuances and possibilities. Local H represent, for me, how the minor swerve works just enough to manifest a concrete feeling, rather than something tired, cliché, and embarrassing. There is a clear contrast between Local H and the insipid irony-free post-grunge masculinist tragicomedy that filled rock radio in the second half of the 90s.
On a purely technical level, they simply sounded better—more interesting sound textures, better drumming—than the many other Nirvana-esque bands. Their transformation of the power trio into a power duo was inspiring. They worked out an even more efficient system for reducing rock to rhythm and noise.
But the afterness and lastness of Local H—their ability to straddle the abyss between grunge’s operative moment in rock and its cultural exhaustion—goes beyond the technical details of their music. On this album—and in this song’s style and delivery—they are aware of their belatedness. That belatedness neither silences nor alienates them. Rather, it grants them voice. “Bound for the Floor” emerges in the wake of a double death: a death that is actual—Kurt Cobain’s—and another kind of dying: a loss and resolution of the vividness and ongoingness of the past into the concluded fact of the object, the photograph, the status update, a conclusion. The end of Nirvana froze grunge into a death mask. Alice Notley describes this feeling in an essay on Frank O’Hara: “I discovered a curious thing: … Frank O’Hara’s poetry had frozen into art for me. It, like my own past, wasn’t my life, a vivid motion-filled thing; it had died into artifact.”
All over As Good As Dead it is hard not to hear this process of grunge dying into artifact. But to be in that process, to demarcate it as it happens: that is the magic of Local H on this album. This happens in both sound and lyrics. Throughout the album, it’s hard not to hear Cobain as the “you” addressed by Lucas. For instance, on “O.K.” he sings:
Drawing a collective breath
I could cry myself to death
And wash this all away
In a flash, you were gone
Leaving me a couple of songs
That I listen to everyday
And I don't even care
That you were so unfair
Or on “Manifest Density (Part 1)” we hear:
You're on to something good
But I can't believe it's all
That matters to you
A foolWho never seems happy
When things are great
It's too late…
Fidelity—to the call, to those other songs—grants the possibility of speaking to the dead. Your voice both is and is not their voice. The other popular single from As Good As Dead, “Eddie Vedder,” expands on this attitude. It is an angry turn on the one who has left, the one rejecting the singer (and the world): “You go ahead as good as dead / That’s it / I quit / I don’t give a shit.” The one who is dead and gone was always “as good as dead.” The pronounced semblance of death now precedes the actual loss of death.
Such a projection seems to be the power of afterness: the ability to warp time and remake causality.
I should say that this structural atemporality was also part of my lived experience of this music. At the time As Good As Dead and Nevermind were co-emergent in my adolescent brain: my summer ’96 awakening to grunge (brought on by a chance radio listen of Nirvana’s “Drain You”) manifested as a near constant desire to listen to and make these sounds. To hear Local H was to hear the possibility of the reproduction and continuation of not just grunge music but music. Even in the act of repatterning my brain by listening to Nevermind on a nightly basis, I was also hearing other “Nirvana” (i.e. Local H) songs that could distance and somewhat displace the Nirvana-idol-sound-image. That little bit of separation in the music—what at the time I heard (and still hear but less intensely) as distinctions in presentation, in voice, in texture, in attitude, in the sounds of the songs themselves—granted me futurity. The music seemed to be saying: “Can’t go on, must go on.”
All this time passed and passing. So much repetition and difference. “Bound for the Floor,” with its intensely repeated lines of “You just don’t get it / you keep it copacetic / and you learn to accept it / and oh it’s so pathetic” is on the surface a mantra of alienated self-hatred. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the tone of the hatred here: does the singer hate himself as the one keeping it copasetic, hate others for keeping it copasetic, or hate a particular other for going too far? Is the “you” another way of saying “I”? Is the “you” the quiet seeker of a false normality? Is the “you” the potential suicide who holds back and sustains their dread, until the end?
The mantra becomes a magic spell, simultaneously undoing itself and reveling in its failure to undo a single goddamn thing, to change that “you” it calls to. The song seems to be telling us: “Don’t keep cool! Get the fuck loud! Scream!” while also freezing in place, stuck in its own cycle. The song battles an affectlessness that I can’t but hear as a particularly Midwestern take on grunge. I flash to my sophomore year of high school, the commute with my father across the city of Wichita in the blue Chevy Astro van to the high school where he taught and coached football. What were the effects of hearing this song nearly every morning on the radio? Was I hearing myself hate myself or hearing myself hate my dad? Or hearing myself hate the self that dad, school, football, world were making of me? “What good is confidence.” Or hearing myself hate the very emptiness of a self that would admit to such influence? Or hearing myself hate the afterness of adolescence, the irredeemable fall into desire, responsibility, compromise? “Bound for the floor.” Or hearing myself hate already death? “Born to be down.”
All, none, others.
There is something about minor voices, the voices that are perhaps underrated or forgotten by the mass projections and delusions of immense popularity, that helps answer the question: how do you survive this shit? Debt, mourning, influence. To come after grants the possibility of survival, the grace of keeping things going. To call to Cobain and to recall Nirvana’s sound both freezes and animates the object. It remains there as immovably movable as the stars. We pass into the afterness—which is, at least, still passing.
John Melillo is a professor, writer, and musician who lives in Tucson, Arizona, and St. Joseph du Moine, Cape Breton. His first book, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk, was published by Bloomsbury in the Fall of 2020. Melillo teaches/researches at the University of Arizona and performs under the name Algae & Tentacles.