round 1

(3) beck, “loser”
silenced
(14) hum, “stars”
307-189
and will play on in the second round

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 7.

Jessica Handler on “loser”

Here’s what happens when you agree to write about a song you haven’t been able to get out of your head in twenty-six years. You freeze. You wonder why the song’s been a squatter in your mind for so long, changing locations in your memory but never packing up and leaving. 
“Loser” is an earworm. It’s indestructible, a mental cypher that must be given its due.
Some things that have happened in the two and half decades since “Loser” was a hit; you quit being a television producer, and after giving up on a few choice alternative career attempts became a very good college professor, although back in the day you hated nearly every minute of college and briefly quit that, too. You quit a three-pack a day cigarette habit, grounded your frequent-flyer level recreational drug use, were shamed into getting new front teeth. You married someone actually nice, who didn’t make you cry or break things. You went to graduate school, wrote three books. Forgot how to play guitar, but learned to play drums. Your hair began to gray. You acknowledged that you are fragile.
And you think about how, in 1994, you laughed in the face of soy en perdedor because you knew that the message in the lyric’s in-your-face defiance was true.
     The year that “Loser” was everywhere on the radio, with the lyrics kill the headlights and put it in neutral, I did just that, driving home from my local after having had my usual too much to drink. My gut reaction to the blue lights gaining on me in my rearview mirror was to gun the accelerator and outrun the cops. I killed my headlights, put the car in neutral, and let physics hurtle my Honda Civic up my driveway. And there I sat in total darkness, engine off, as the blue lights sped down my street in pursuit of nothing. I was stupid and lucky and I knew it. Soy un perdedo.
Beck’s first hit went to #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart in 1994. [1] The single was certified Gold that year, and the song continues to hold a place on alternative playlists. That bouncy, goofy, rubber-band boing sound of the tremolo guitar is relentlessly catchy, the number-one character trait for an earworm. The lyrics tumble together in nonsense clusters. Spray paint the vegetables. Beefcake pantyhose. Burnin’ down the trailer park. Fun to say, those bizarre phrases rolling around my mouth like marbles. Fun to bop along, to wait and hold for the pause just before the chorus, and launch back in..
It's not his best song.
Looking now at a video recording of a performance on BBC’s Top of the Pops from 1994, a sitar player who’s a dead ringer for a garden gnome sits stage right, playing the hypnotic, slightly weird to the Western-ear notes. The sound threads through the song’s signature drum and slide guitar, stomping out a hypnotic nod. Center stage, Beck looks nervous and very young. He seems to have a zit on his chin. The dancing crowd, a la “American Bandstand” explodes into cheers at the refrain, Soy en perdedo/I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me. The musicians are playing to track, professionally miming to a recording. During the spoken-word audio clip before the last chorus, Beck gamely and somewhat awkwardly tumbles to the floor and briefly breakdances.
The chorus is a chant, its repetition a reassurance, words in Spanish then English (with the first-year German class question, “speaking German?” thrown into the final chorus), its arrival a relief after the pause—a fermata? caesura?—at the end of the lyric line. (Perhaps, in the spirit of the song’s relentless wordplay, I could call that pause a “stigmata.”)
The year I sang along to Loser was two years after my beloved youngest sister died of a congenital illness that had lurked in her, like the forces of evil in a Bozo nightmare, since her birth. Our other sister was two decades dead of a childhood cancer. I had become the only one left, estranged from our abusive and mentally ill father, clinging emotionally to my intrepid mother, and burning off my days and nights churning on the hamster wheel of a cruel and demanding job in which I was required to shoulder everyone’s troubles but my own. In doing so, I was trying to prove myself immune to the relentless destruction taking my family down.
In the official music video for “Loser,” Beck or someone like him appears to drag a casket on a rope before it scoots along on its own power. A death’s head mask waves into a car windshield, and solarized cheerleaders dance in a cemetery.
The c’mon and dare-me sarcasm in the chorus lyric obscured something real, an in-joke for the grim. Sarcasm, doing its job. Beck told Allen Ginsburg in a 1997 interview in Shambala Sun that the irony in the song “isn’t obvious to everybody.” [2] Beck also discounted the idea that “Loser” is a slacker’s anthem. [3] The slacker’s unwritten creed advocated conspicuous underachievement as the pinnacle of cool. For me, hyperachievement was the Butane in my veins. My first taste of Châteauneuf du Pape occurred in first class on a flight from Miami to Rio de Janeiro, courtesy of my media conglomerate employer. That was me with acrylic nails and a designer shorts-suit (bought at a discount at Loehmann’s) on the way to weeks of deadline-driven celebrity-wrangling-in-a-hotel-ballroom-makeshift-newsroom (this is Beck-level linguistic phrasing, now that I think of it.) That was where a very pissed off Senator from Tennessee inconveniently and untruthfully bawled me out for not booking him on a television show, and I later found myself waylaid at U.S Customs because I honestly did not know what was in the suitcases I was carrying for my gone-to-find-herself-in-the-jungle media personality boss. No one ever did find the sandwich bag of pot in my own garment bag, so I guess I do get some slacker cred there after all.
Someone keeps saying I’m insane to complain. I fought every day to prove to myself, to the world around me because I was a woman in a job usually held by men, to my parents, to my sisters’ legacies that I was no loser. I was indestructible. Nothing would make me fail. And so, I bounced along to “Loser,” the sunny repetitive sound absorbing my own anger and loss. Overwhelmed by life and work and barely past thirty, I courted risk on a daily basis. The song was an extended middle finger to the world, a “fuck you” obscured by a smile. My survival was my defiance.
Earworms don’t spring sui generis like Athena from the head of Zeus. “Loser” has musical parents. The drum track & the slide guitar are call backs to Dr. John’s “I Walk on Gilded Splinters,” although the tempo is hopped up in a big way. Humble Pie covered the Dr. John tune, so did swamp rocker Johnny Jenkins.  
     The lyrics are nonsense rhymes, white-boy rapping, images of destruction and recklessness. The song is pop because it’s fun, but it’s grunge because it’s sarcastic. If grunge was what Rolling Stone magazine tried to codify as a “hybrid of hard rock, metal and punk (with a sprinkle of Neil Young…),” [4] seventies rock—Led Zeppelin, Neil Young—are grunge’s great-grandparents. Bass and tom-heavy drumbeat meets distorted guitars, and emotion is born. The 1970s have an imprint on Beck, or he on them, retroactively. Beck was, for a while, married to Marissa Ribisi, who appeared in the film Dazed and Confused. That film is about a high school graduation weekend in the 1970s, and launched the career of Matthew McConaughey as a fading high school swain aging into—you guessed it—a clueless loser. This connection to the song is spurious at best: Beck wasn’t married to Ribisi when he wrote “Loser” in 1991, although Dazed and Confused came out in 1993.
… time is a piece of wax fallin' on a termite. Seventies rock is the music that delivered me into alt-punk and grunge, which screamed of indestructibility, flailed against fragility, and gave voice to my anger, my sorrow, my fear. My ability to love. And that what was indestructible, it turned out. That’s what waited, like a squatter in my mind, for me to welcome it home. The nineties me who deliberately broke someone’s finger in a handshake, who threw a stapler at a co-worker, whose workday was not complete until I had made someone cry, understood that just singing along to “Loser” was a secret admission that I could fail. But a slacker fails with bravado. Me? I was chokin’ on the splinters.
That pause before the chorus in Loser, the fermata, caesura, stigmata, it’s a thrill, though. A pause like that mimics a bounce on a diving board before soaring, cutting the water, emerging in the sunlight. A pause like that is the same as watching the turning rope in Double Dutch, watching the arc above and knowing exactly when and how to step in, challenging the moving rope, and jumping out, victorious. The music after a pause like that courts risk and grabs defiance by surviving the dive, the jump rope, the job, the losses. The sound coming back from that silence is a release into the joy of being alive. The cheerleaders are no longer solarized, the singer walks into the sun.
Like “Loser,” I’ve grown another twenty-six years, and I’m still in heavy rotation.

[1] So says Vulture magazine. https://www.vulture.com/2014/02/dave-holmes-modern-rock-hits-1994-beck-loser.html . Even after working as the music coordinator on  the television show “Name that Tune” in the 1980s, I can’t figure out the Billboard charts. Give me a Phonolog Reports any day.

[2] See Woodworth, “How to Write About Music,” pages 134 & 135, “Allen Ginsberg with Beck: A Beat/Slacker Transgenerational Meeting of the Minds.”

[3] Rolling Stone, un-ironically elevating Slackers

[4] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/50-greatest-grunge-albums-798851/  (And the very fact that Rolling Stone answers this question takes the outré out of grunge.)

Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Booksellers’ Association “Okra” Pick. Her memoir Invisible Sisters was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. She teaches creative writing and directs the Minor in Writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing.

Cavalier Days: ken caldwell on “stars”

It wasn’t my idea to cover Hum. I was listening to your Gavin Rossdales, your Billie Joe Armstrongs, drumming in a rock band inspired by your Jonathan Davis’. When I first heard Matt Talbot singing, it sounded soft, nerdy. Contrasted with the distortion on “Stars,” the delivery of the lyrics is even subdued. When my friends asked me to learn it, I went along. They were cooler than me, and even though I was said to have the voice of a disemboweled cat, I was going to croon my best about a girl who thinks she missed the train to Mars.
The cover band was Midnight Blues Cruiser. We underwent several name changes to get there, including Night Gun, because no one cared, and it was thrilling to announce a new band name every time we took the stage. Our setlist included “Stars” along with jams by Deftones and Glassjaw. We even had an original song, somewhat derivative of the bands we modeled. One of my lines, shouted aggressively, was: “There’s a hole where your heart is.” Teen testosterones, ya know?
A Catholic parish in our area let kids perform music of any persuasion at their fun and bright, multipurpose activity center—a great place to unleash the rock within. We shared a bill with some out-of-district ska kids who covered The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, brass and all. I’m pretty sure I stood there arms crossed during their set, like it was some kind of genre war.
A big, jovial guy named Ron was the chaperone and had to put up with our hormones. He was a young man who seemed sorry about everything, but also tried hard to be affable, the way a youth leader sort of relishes attention. The main thing he needed to convey was the One Rule: no cussing. Keep it clean for the Lord. Otherwise, we could grunge it out and stoke pandemonium every third Saturday. No Eucharist required. Also, there would be no pay. Just coffee and glory among peers. Hence The Coffee Haus. The whole deal was kind of a monthly revelation for us, because it was one of the only underage stages we could take in our town outside of school competitions. Come to think of it, there were probably other rules besides no cussing, and opportunities for group prayer, but I had this thing with ringing in my ears on account of the amplifiers and drums, so I couldn’t participate in anything except what I wanted to do.

Hum formed in 1989 in Champaign, IL, and released four albums through the 90s before disbanding in 2000. They were mostly dormant for 15 years outside of a few gigs that some call reunion tours. In June 2020, they put out a new album no one expected, Inlet. According to a post on their official Facebook page, remasters for You'd Prefer an Astronaut and Electra 2000 are on the way. This despite what drummer Ryan St. Pete said about the sounds on the former record in 1995: “I can't imagine them being much better," he said. “Playing, that's a whole different thing, but the sounds are excellent.”
As mainstream recognition goes, “Stars” peaked at #11 in July 1995 on Billboard Alternative Rock. That put Hum briefly beside the likes of Alanis Morissette, Weezer, Silverchair, White Zombie, and other acts competing in the Plaidness tournament. The catapulting success of “Stars” was attributed in part to KROQ-FM, a popular LA-based station that played the song in heavy rotation and influenced RCA to release the single a month sooner than planned. “Stars” is by far their best known song, followed by their only other single, “Comin' Home.” But it was “Stars” they paraded on the late night circuit in 1995, landing national TV stages like Late Night with Conan O'Brien and The Jon Stewart Show.
Hum also performed the song on the Howard Stern show in July 1995, some footage of which can be seen on YouTube at the time of writing. Stern was a vocal fan of the band and the song “Stars,” inviting them into his studio with amps and usual live setup. This in spite of the radio engineers preference that the band plug directly into the soundboard. Stern could apparently have whatever he wanted at the height of his radio and TV empire. At some point, the half-baked interview gets awkward when Tim Lash says he’d rather be asleep and Stern says “you gotta be pissed off and stuff… you gotta be angry at your guitar, too.” Lash seems to try to steer it back on course: “That’s how you get sounds out of it.” But Stern was determined is his machismo-oblivion, bound to say something unequivocally chauvinist: “That’s how you get chicks.”

Transporting band equipment from basements and garages to house shows and stages was an exercise in freedom. Having a car meant I could go anywhere within driving distance, set up, and make a racket. In my case, I had a beat-up, hand-me-down Chevy Cavalier from 1988. Included with my trim level were: stick shift, bald tires, and sagging roof liner. But it was solid as a tank. Three things concerned me most. The key turned, cassette tapes played [1], and the ignition turned over. I eked out the manual transmission and swerved around town putting citizens at risk as an amateur motorist.
It was my first vehicle. The Bronco, we called it. Except it wasn’t a Ford Bronco. It was a Cavalier, as I said. We’d cut class and just dare its durability, plowing into stray carts in grocery parking lots. Somehow it endured. My friend hated it so much he said he would drive it off a cliff. I didn’t blame him, but it pissed me off anyway. Who knows where cars like that end up? For my money, the only befitting and dignified fate is what transpires during the infamous sequence from Final Fight, in which a meat head punches it into oblivion. Every vehicle deserves that kind of treatment at the end of its service life. Wait for it… “Oh, my god!”
We called it The Bronco because I liked to clown around in first gear, slamming the throttle up and down, really bucking the whole frame of the vehicle like a cowboy saddled up. For passengers, the Bronco maneuver was a brash and unsettling experience. Imagine being jostled in a commercial dryer. As an outside observer, it was riotous and absurdly funny, according to some friends I knew.

In January 1998, Hum was broadcast on Modern Rock Live, a nationally syndicated radio show, on the eve of their sophomore album release, Downward is Heavenward. The audio interview and performance was part of a promotion for RCA records, the label that would go on to drop the band from their contract in 2000.
I like how lead singer Matt Talbot talks about how Hum aimed to preserve its artistic integrity in the process of their record label dealings. It’s hard to argue with him, but is there any band that says, “To hell with our integrity, let’s get hammered?” Disillusionment reigns, and artists the world over believe they are producing the next White Album. Still, Hum’s work speaks for itself, and there is plenty of critical acclaim. Who knows what informed RCA’s decision, but two factors were likely that Downward is Heavenward sold just 30,000 copies compared with the quarter million of their major label debut and that the sophomore release failed to produce a follow-up smash to “Stars.”
As the band stated on Modern Rock Live, “We never really thought it was possible for a band like us to get signed... we just played because we wanted to. Bands like us really didn't get signed a lot, and then Nirvana changed the world, and we got signed.”

I had one or two friends back then. They also had cars. After the doldrums of public school hours, in the parking lot, sometimes we’d deliberately slam bumpers before the rush to get home. Maybe we were misunderstood, but that was an exciting part of the day. For our peers, I imagine it was not comprehensible to have their path temporarily blocked as they witnessed our slowly moving automobiles repeatedly back into one another. What was the point?
Once I truly rear-ended someone with the Bronco. It was one of those “wintry mix” days where the sky spritzes precipitation and keeps the roads glazed. Plus my bald tires were completely neglected. Plus my teenage attention was completely distracted by the girl beside. So insurance-wise, you could say I was unquestionably at fault in this incident. Carved off the other guy’s back bumper like the top of a tuna can. But not a scratch on my old tank. GM must have had some spare, military-grade materials for the 1988 production run, because this thing was hefty.
Driving the Bronco in winter was a stunt show. To begin, I had to get a rolling start up a steep incline out of my driveway when it was slick with ice (again, it was a stick shift). Stopping to look in both directions for oncoming traffic was out of the question. One frigid morning around 7 a.m., I could hardly get the windshield defrosted. The fans just blew cold air. Already late for school, I hurriedly backed up the full length of the driveway to get a good run up the slippery concrete. I couldn’t afford to lose momentum and slide back down. Goosing the throttle in first gear—and probably waking up Ron the Youth Leader, wherever he was—I managed to reach the crest and veered into the road, punk music already blaring. It’s safe to say I was encased in ice without a view to the outside world. The whole sequence is full of inept teen decisions that, in retrospect, are not easy to explain. Maybe the internal monologue went something like, ‘I guess I’ll commute five miles with my head out the window.’
So, of course there was an oncoming car at that moment. I didn’t see or hear it, but I certainly felt it. Just a love tap at the passenger side front bumper. As I got up to second and then third gear, in the rear-view I could faintly make out brake lights through the veil of frost. Maybe I was desensitized by all the smash-ups and ridiculous collisions. Maybe I was aloof. But I just motored away, not fully grasping the near-death experience. It was just another knick in the paint. We told stories later about who might have been in the other vehicle and how much coffee they must have spilled. Or how much terror was inflicted as they witnessed a frozen Bronco blasting out into the street. Maybe not. For all I knew, they spent their time crashing up carts after hours.

Members of Hum performed in side projects in the late-90s and early 2000s when the group disbanded. By then, they had established the short-lived record label Martians Go Home as a way to put out their own music. Matt Talbott formed Centaur with an ex-member of the notable Campaign band, Castor. Centaur’s full-length “In Streams” was released in 2002. The same year, Tim Lash released “Under and In” as part of an electronic-shoegaze duo called Glifted. Jeff Dempsey played in National Skyline with several Champaign-area musicians, releasing an EP, “Exit Now,” and an album, “This = Everything.” He also released music under the name Gazelle with the full-length “Sunblown.”
Scene-wise, Braid, Promise Ring, and Castor were adjacent bands from Champaign-Urbana in the mid-90s with similar styles.

The same parish that hosted The Coffee Haus also held an annual carnival known as Applefest in a converted parking area. For me, Applefest was an autumn celebration/nightmare that featured various ways to be entertained/disoriented. Exhibit A: Swill apple cider and board the precariously undulating pirate ship until your stomach turns over. Exhibit B: Pound down apple crisp & strap on to diabolic, twirling teacups until your intestines twist. Exhibit C, and here’s where space-time redefines: Slather elephant ears with apple butter and clench ass through the organ squeeze known as Gravitron. Staggering off that monster meant entering a lifelong relationship with vertigo.
More than anything, I wanted to beat the midway games. Those carny smiles always seemed so insincere. ”Maybe next time,” they jeered. What is the gratification in finally jackpotting a rigged system? That broken-perspective basketball game with a misshapen rim. The BB shootout with weighted bottles. All of those prize plushies taunted me beneath stuttering neon marquees. When the Applefest crowds cleared and the tokens ran out, one could sense a palpable dread in the September twilight, reeling between the dizzy adults boozing out in the beer tents and the dizzy teens gagging aboard the Gravitron. Distant screams blended with laughter to form an indiscernible cackle. The rides would go dark and the harvest moon splashed open a new aura. Squatting curbside in the church parking lot, splattered with cider or holy water or stains from the prior Coffee Haus. Nights like those, I don’t remember how the Bronco bailed me out.
On Sundays sometimes I’d go to Catholic mass there. It seemed inevitable given how big the church influence was in our community. Mostly I remember catchy hymns and the solemnity of the service. Once I passed out while attending with a friend’s family. I face-planted on my friend while we knelt on the pews saying grace. It was sweltering hot that day. The last thing I recall is watching an usher struggle to ventilate the sanctuary by tilting open the stained glass windows using an extension rod. My ears still glimmered from the rock show the night before. That crunch of a Marshall stack blended with the long, shimmering sustain of a Zildjian crash. So loud it stung. Right before it happened, I remember counting and repeating unusual words in my head. Or is that typical of a Christian service? The room grew soft, fuzzy. The Latin chanting dropped out to a hush somehow. Did I accept the Eucharist that day?
My friend said he thought I was joking, resting my head on his shoulder and feigning a nap. That’s when I got heavy. When I awoke, emergency responders were gathered around me as I regained focus. Turned out they were on site already, because two other sinners fainted just before me. Imagine that. It took a little fresh air and I was back on my feet. Why was I smote down among the pews? The pastor said “It happens to the best of us.”

The bucking Bronco incensed at least one neighbor who witnessed its frame-creaking fury. It was a cul-de-sac and round and round I went, bucking that machine like a bareback stallion. The circular route allowed me to lock the wheel far-left, then keep my right hand on the faux-rawhide stick shift much like the one-handed rigging of a saddle. This freed my left hand to toss out the driver window and wave boastfully. You could tell I was hitting my stride with this technique, because the tires started to grip and peel at the pavement, creating a nice screech, the way you’d expect a horse to whinny once you’d tamed it. All at once, I was a concrete cowboy.
Then out of his blessed house he came banging the screen door, power-walking out to the street to teach me a lesson. I was going to jail, he screamed. (Was it a citizen’s arrest?) He also never, ever wanted to see my face around again. Did I understand? As he drew closer I could see how upset he was, nearly in tears. I sat there stunned, foot on clutch as the guys in Midnight Blues Cruiser watched on nearby, in tears of joy. I looked over at my girlfriend in the passenger seat. She looked exhausted, as though she had just participated in a rodeo. We would break up later that year.
What was this neighbor so angry about? I don’t think he fully appreciated the sport I had pioneered. Could I show him the nuance involved? Maybe he could hop in. But I knew that could never come to pass. It was late in the year, and people were getting new ideas and different fashions. It was time for a change. I thought about Ron at the activity center, how the church gave us a stage and a PA, no questions asked. I thought about fender benders and second chances. Maybe our neighbor had been in a traumatic collision.
What could I do but put the Bronco to sleep forever? Maybe I could finally drive it off that cliff, get something new. God knows the transmission had had enough. I was fed up, too. Fed up with the unkempt mop on my head. Fed up hearing “Only the Lonely” backward on cassette. Fed up with all the apples and nausea. My grunge days were over—it was time to thrash.

[1] I only owned two cassettes, and one was a now-obsolete 3.5mm cassette adapter, a device which connected to the headphone jack of a portable CD-player, or even my early MP3 player, the Creative Nomad Jukebox, a predecessor to iPod. The other tape was a Roy Orbison anthology, but that one became permanently lodged and only played backward, which was a delight: The greatest, reversed hits by a pop legend known to me as NOSIBRO.

Ken Caldwell is an information strategist and independent musician in Michigan.