round 1
(5) garbage, “only happy when it rains”
swamped
(12) spacehog, “in the meantime”
684-284
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 2.
“You’ll Get the Message By the Time I’m Through”: kristine langley mahler on “Only Happy When It Rains”
Fuck grunge right into the ground, like the freshman girls who sat at my art table in 2000, hornily bragging about how they were going to drive to Seattle and dig up Kurt’s corpse so they could have sex with it. A world-weary senior, I side-eyed them and internally scoffed what were they, like EIGHT YEARS OLD when Kurt died? I mean, I was at least ELEVEN, so. I could have been crueler if I’d been able to bolster my disdain by noting, “You know Courtney had Kurt cremated, right?” But like most grunge facts, that was one I didn’t know either.
All “grunge” ever meant to me was those dark phone calls from a “friend,” commanding me to recite the lyrics to “my favorite” Nirvana song, then messing up the line in “All Apologies” by saying “choking on the ashes of heredity” instead of “choking on the ashes of her enemy.”
Grunge was the flannel shirts I didn’t have, the second-hand Ralph Lauren corduroy pants I bought from Goodwill—like I was supposed to—but never wore to middle school because my mom told me corduroys were dressy pants and I didn’t know how to contradict her. I didn’t know what I was supposed to wear with them, but I knew it wasn’t a “nice sweater.” Grunge was Ben and Tate using Kool-Aid to turn their blond hair faintly pink, cool Amanda with low pigtails and dark lipstick in her 8th grade school picture, Jessie dubbing the classroom praying mantis Green Day when she won the naming lottery and me thinking her choice was super poetic until my “friend” scornfully informed me that Green Day was a band.
Grunge was a code word for all the things I didn’t know. Grunge was the perpetual feeling of never being cool enough, never knowing enough. Was every adolescent generation as plagued by insecurity as mine in the mid-90s? Was there ever a worse time to witness the collision of a cultural movement—where secret knowledge was the passcode—smashing into the age where a girl realizes everything she doesn’t know?
What a horrible time to be twelve: before the internet, when the only way to source information seemed to be through an older sister or brother who somehow, organically, had found it out and passed it down. A horrible time to be that older sister to two siblings. I didn’t know to read SPIN. I didn’t even know SPIN existed. I didn’t know how distinguish between the CDs in the racks at Camelot, to delineate between which bands were “over” and which ones were cool. I was too young to go to local shows, if there’d even been any (we still drove an hour to go shopping in the state capital). Grunge was defined by passwords that were constantly shifting, and when I think about grunge now, it only makes me angry. I suppose the anger is to mask the insecurity that never went away.
Grunge was nothing but sneering, and I swear it was worse than the disdain from indie band fans in the late 90s/early 2000s. Half the music I always thought of as “grunge” was rejected from this dang tournament. WHERE IS OASIS, I ASK YOU? Distortion and anger. That’s what grunge meant to me.
The only place I was ever able to enter grunge was through Shirley Manson.
Shirley Manson, the lead singer of Garbage, is wearing a satin black short-sleeve shirt in the November 1995 issue of Seventeen magazine, arms crossed behind her head, standing in an old-time elevator with the rest of the blurry band. Seventeen called Garbage the “band du jour,” and I can still recite the entire article, right down to the “Wha?” reaction, because I reread it so many times. Cool chick singing the bejesus out of a song you’ve never heard. You do the clueless and wait for the video’s postscript. But I didn’t learn about songs through music videos, I learned about them on the radio. If I wanted to watch MTV, which was forbidden in my house, I had to go to my friends’ houses. Which I did.
You decide the catchy pop-a-delic music is like the four elements.
I was intrigued by the idea that this perfectly-turned-out grunge girl with her dark black eye makeup and dark lipstick, posing like a prisoner, could control nature, harnessing all four elements—earth, air, fire, water—to bend to her will. In the photo, she was surrounded by three men—Butch Vig, Steve Marker, and Duke Erikson, her fellow band members in Garbage—but it looked to me like she clearly knew how to make those men fade out.
I know what you’re thinking. “How the hell are you gonna take BUTCH VIG, who produced Nirvana’s Nevermind—a credential which, since we’re not handing this championship over directly to Nirvana and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” should arguably mean we’re handing the championship to the man who produced it—and relegate him to the role of a background boy? Garbage was Butch’s PROJECT! Butch, Steve, and Duke had a whole thing going long before they called in Shirley!”
Maybe because, in a SPIN interview for the 25th anniversary of Garbage’s self-titled debut, Shirley spoke about her early days with Garbage, saying “I was shocked when I got to Madison and realized what a hot mess they were. I had come from bands that were very self-disciplined. But when I got to Madison, these dudes were so laid-back, drinking beer in their Green Bay Packers baseball hats. I’d never spent time with people like that before in my life.”
Shirley met the dude-bros in her new band where they were, but my Queen of Discipline and Control didn’t change herself to fit in with their lax-AF, just-keep-it-chill approach. I saw Shirley as a girl who had learned the things I wanted to know.
I saw Shirley in Seventeen magazine in 1995, but it wasn’t until the following spring when I finally saw Shirley in action, kinetic on the television at my friend’s grandma’s house in Buffalo, New York, where my friend and I had been dropped off for spring break.
Spring Break in Buffalo was about as popular as you might imagine—no one travels to Great Lakes New York in March, especially not when your actual home is only an hour from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but there we were, nevertheless. I was thirteen years old in March 1996, and my mom had allowed me to use a 7-10 day Clairol kit to dye my hair for the first time. With my freshly red hair, I sat in the backseat as my friend’s dad drove us up the inner Atlantic seaboard, away from my cooler peers who’d headed out to their families’ beach houses, and deposited us in the elderly, icicle-laden home of my friend’s grandma.
My friend and I slept in a small basement room, furnished with two blow-up mattresses which barely fit inside. The walls were whitewashed, and so we chalked it with messages like “Who’s the bomb? We’re the bomb!” We played Yahtzee. Walked to the neighborhood library and checked out books on temporary library cards. Took the train downtown to go shopping at DEB, where I bought a baby-doll ringer tee with yellow smiley faces pooling at the hem. Went to bingo with my friend’s grandma. Talked about Gone with the Wind, which I was obsessed with—a fact that tickled her grandma, who thought it was charming that a teen girl knew the same embarrassingly vast quantity of facts about the 1930s movie and book as she did.
In that TV room where we watched Gone with the Wind with her grandma, my friend and I also watched MTV. It was there, in Buffalo, that I saw the music video for Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” for the first time.
It surely was moody, gray, and rainy that spring break in Buffalo, but I don’t remember that—what I remember was how the brilliance of Shirley Manson, in her bright blue dress and blue eyeshadow, her pink dress, her knee-high black boots, outshone it all.
“Captivated” isn’t the right word. Do you remember what it felt like as an early teen, when you saw a person and thought that is who I have been waiting for? The way your mouth went dry and your heart rate sped up and you weren’t sure if you had a crush or a complex? Where your aspirations crystallized into a projection: if I were as cool as her, _____ would happen (_____ would never happen)?
I am here to defend a song—and as a Garbage devotee of nearly 25 years now, able to quote from all but the most recent album, I can crack the whip at my waist and harness plenty of textual/musical praise—but my love of Garbage’s actual music came way, way later.
I know I have to stay on topic.
Here: I never thought the lyrics to “Only Happy When It Rains” were making fun of grunge, the way some people have interpreted them. I thought they were a directive, a lesson plan. This is the method to belong, Kristine: only smile in the dark. Your only comfort is the night gone black. Now remember to make sure people know YOU DIDN’T ACCIDENTALLY TELL THEM THAT.
Everything was intentional.
Come on now, go ahead and tell me how you saw Garbage perform at a local show in 1995, just after they cut their album, before anyone had even seen the video for “Vow,” not a year-and-a-half later on an antennaed TV in Buffalo in a music video for their second damn single. I’m not surprised. Everyone has always had cooler grunge stories than me. The first time I saw Garbage live, I paid $22 to see them perform with Lit on the 1999 MTV Campus Invasion Tour. Yes I said 1999.
In an interview before Garbage’s 2017 tour, Shirley said “We’re exploring the idea of pulling out our Bond song because we haven’t played it in a long time and very few people have ever gotten to hear us perform it.”
And yet I had gotten to hear it live, eighteen years earlier. Trying to sound cool later, listing my concert attendances to my college friends, I mocked MTV’s poor choice of “campuses to invade”—they invaded ISU? In TERRE HAUTE? But at the time I was grateful, because I was only seventeen and even though it was a school night, my parents had allowed me to drive down to our basketball arena—the one where Larry Bird had famously played twenty years earlier—to see my dream girl. The arena was set up much like it had been when I’d gone two Octobers previous, in 1997, to attend the Harvest Moon dance (unfortunately escorted by my best friend’s brother, not my actual crush, Ryan): the fabric wall was up at half court, because Hulman Center wasn’t going to fill up that night.
Garbage opened with “#1 Crush”—a dreamscape of orgasmic sighs—and then tore through the entire first half of Version 2.0, layering in the radio hits from their first album, before devastating with the last song of the set, “You Look So Fine.”
It still sticks with me, all these years later, the way Shirley left the stage first during the outro for “You Look So Fine,” followed by all of the band members slowly leaving, one by one, as their parts ended. Shirley said what she’d wanted to say before leaving us all there, breathless, waiting. In October 1999, my boyfriend had recently broken up with me and I could hardly bear it. My best friend and I were seated pretty high in the bleachers, but there were a few filled rows behind us, where Ryan (my ’97 crush) and Ben were seated, but I was too focused on watching Shirley emote my pain for my ex-boyfriend to care; Ryan’s presence was, momentarily, negligible.
After Garbage played the encore, including their Bond song, “The World is Not Enough” (it never is) and—of course—closing with “Only Happy When It Rains,” my best friend and I stayed in our seats, unwilling to leave. Ryan and Ben came down the stairs and stopped beside us, saying something about my dancing during the show. As I turned to face them, so surprised they had noticed me that my heart was still in my teeth, I didn’t have time to disaffect—tell me you aren’t going to make fun of me and that, instead, you thought I was beautiful—and the thing was that they did tease me anyway, but I think Ben saw something in my face that must have made him soften because it was gentle, gentler than he’d been in school.
My best friend and I stopped at Taco Bell on the way home and Ryan and Ben were, surprisingly, there too. We would have never hung out together in the daytime at South—Ben was cool, Ryan wanted to be—but we had shared an experience together. So we shyly waved, and the boys motioned us over to their table, and we ate our post-concert bean burritos while making small talk. Ryan mentioned my dancing one more time, kindly, and as my best friend and I drove home, it occurred to me that I’d made an impression. I had been someone he hadn’t expected me to be, and he was still stunned by it.
That was power.
Garbage gave me the language for a tormented kind of longing, the sort of crushing desire that makes you crawl on your hands and knees across the carpet to a ghost. As a teen, I was frightened and exhilarated by the intensity of my emotions. I was confused by how badly I wanted to fit in and, simultaneously, how badly I wanted to be seen. Those years were a fluorescent-lit smear, every mistake highlighted and yet indistinguishable, at the time, to anyone other than myself. I was only happy when it was complicated. I carefully listened to the lyrics of Garbage songs, deciding that I could actually brandish power by basking in my obsessions, as the bittersweet pleasure of unfulfillment became an obsession.
Shirley was a give-me-what-I-want-or-I-will-take-it revelation, the Dark Princess from “Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealers” brought to life, a flame-haired, black leather siren. I didn’t even realize how much I’d idolized the Dark Princess until I saw Shirley.
I dyed my hair red for decades, starting in summer 1998 (right before Version 2.0), trying to mimic the prominence Shirley innately carried with her presence and I wanted to believe I could still grow into. At Prom 1999, I wore a gunmetal gray dress, and for years afterward, when I would describe how I looked that night, I wrote “flame-haired and ready to fuck someone up, just like Shirley.” If I’d owned the black Doc Martens I would buy that summer (I have always arrived at the party too late), I would have worn them that night as well. There is beauty, and there is power. I wanted both.
When Kurt died in 1994, I was eleven years old, listening to R&B like SWV, although when pressed by a waiting circle of kids at a middle school church lock-in that fall, I would claim my favorite song was “Tomorrow” by Silverchair. Later that night, as the other girls who already knew each other pulled their sleeping bags closer and loudly whispered and giggled about things I could never know, I slid across the cement floor of the social hall to lie near my mother, a chaperone, because I was homesick for someone who knew me. Within the week, after the sort of pre-teen fight that loses its reasoning over the years but felt so important at the time, what I remembered most was my mother throwing my lie back in my face, telling me she didn’t even know me anymore, didn’t even know the song I’d claimed was my favorite. But my mother did know me—the me I was, not the me I wanted to be—because my true favorite song was “Something in the Way She Moves” by James Taylor, the first song on the first side of the white cassette we listened to in the minivan after church, driving the rural highways of Pitt County, my mother and sister harmonizing as I tried to stay on key.
I was only happy when it rained, but not for the dramatic reasons you might expect from an adolescent. I was still homesick for Oregon, where I had lived before moving to North Carolina, and where the rain was a constant moody drizzle. When I grew into moodiness as a teen, it felt like a return to the person I had meant to be. No, that is not true. I was not morose when I lived in Oregon. The weather was morose, but I didn’t know any different. I was happy when it rained in North Carolina because it reminded me of something I actually knew.
I am sitting in a yurt in rural Nebraska now, cows in the fields surrounding me, wind battering and pattering rain against the canvas walls. I packed a Shirley-like outfit to write in, a cropped mauve furry sweater and pleather leggings. I brought the red lipstick I seldom wear, black eyeliner, and the pot of *jane eyeshadow I have had since high school. I didn’t use a brush to apply it, because I didn’t have a brush in high school. I didn’t know I needed a brush, because no one ever told me or showed me. I always used my ring finger on my right hand, so when I applied it to my eyelids this morning, it was a sense memory, knowing how much to pat, how to smear, remembering the residue that I always wiped against the inner palm of my hand instead of on a tissue.
I am as Shirleyfied as I can be, at 38. She was 29 when “Only Happy When It Rains” came out, which means that 25 years later, she must be 54. Duke Erikson (Garbage’s bassist) is from Lyons, Nebraska, a tiny little town up in the northeast corner of my state. He is 69 years old this year; will be 70 by the time this essay comes out. Butch (drums) is 65, Steve Marker (guitar) is nearly 62. We have all grown past who we were in 1995; our cells have regenerated through at least three selves by now.
I tried to co-opt Shirley’s style for years, listing her as my icon in countless email questionnaires. In that viral 2010 commercial for a glasses brand, where Shirley and Elijah Wood are bored on Sundays, it felt like validation, because for many years, I had been told that my husband looked like Elijah Wood. In 2013, I chopped off my hair (very “Androgyny”-era Shirley) to take control over what I admired in men, realizing I could actually embody it in myself.
After all, Shirley modeled the power in growing beyond who others thought we were meant to be. “I think of how different I was as a person, compared to who I am now. I was so young and so afraid.”
Garbage is not the grungiest band in this tournament. And “Only Happy When It Rains” isn’t nearly grungy enough to define the era; it’s a pop song with grunge sensibilities and grunge cred, thanks to Butch. I think it’s pretty remarkable that Shirley was able to call out all the tropes of grungedom in that song—you fucking sell-outs, you’re “only happy when it’s complicated”? Fine: here’s your song—while simultaneously embodying them. I’m telling you that Shirley was the representation of grunge that brought me in, showed me the girl I could become: a girl who didn’t give a fuck whether or not she belonged. So fuck the best grunge song, fuck the way grunge made me feel. The only thing that matters is how Garbage and Shirley made me feel. Like I could finally say FUCK GRUNGE.
MAHA Music Festival, August 11th, 2012. Shirley has a high ponytail, ripped black tights, black shorts, short sleeved black shirt, black wristbands. Rain starts to fall just as Garbage begins to close their set with “Only Happy When It Rains.” Shirley smiles and calls it a “precious moment,” says this has never happened before.
I was at that concert, four months pregnant with my third daughter, and when Butch pounded the drums, my daughter pounded on my stomach. I took my Elijah Wood-alike husband’s hand and made him feel how our daughter moved only when the beat thumped. I am reporting a fact: when Shirley demanded “pour your misery down on me,” God himself responded. Shirley said, “I’m only happy when it rains,” and the air thickened, condensed into water to put out a flame on earth, all four elements wanting to please her. Power.
Kristine Langley Mahler wants to hear about your new obsession. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie of Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine's previous Xness essays include an impassioned defense/condemnation of NKOTB's "Hangin' Tough" for March Badness, an extracurricular on Stabbing Westward and goth confusion for March Vladness, and a link-laden essay on Great White's "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" for March Shredness. Non-Xness work can be found at kristinelangleymahler.com, and you can always find her on Twitter at @suburbanprairie.
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 has an MFA from the University of Arizona and currently lives in Iowa. If you'd like to read more of his writing, you should hire him and he'll write about whatever you want.