round 1
(14) Babes in toyland, “bruise violet”
bruised
(3) green day, “brain stew/jaded”
363-341
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 3.
nowhere: joe bonomo on “Brain Stew/Jaded”
The album should’ve been called Fucked Up, though that likely wouldn’t have cut it with Reprise. In any event, the title Green Day did conjure for their fourth album was just as apt.
Insomniac, released on October 10, 1995, hit number 2 on the Billboard 200 chart and would eventually be certified double platinum in sales. Since its release, the album has sold over 2,000,000 copies in the United States alone. A blockbuster to be sure, though relative to Dookie’s monster sales, Insomniac was a bit of a commercial letdown. The singles—“Geek Stink Breath” (released on September 25, 1995), “Stuck with Me” (December 27, 1995), “Brain Stew/Jaded” (July 3, 1996), and “Walking Contradiction” (August 20, 1996)—performed well, each detonating in the Top 40, yet the album’s a dark affair, stuffed with lyrics about anger, sickness, mental and physical distress, addictions, abuse, disappointment, rejection, bitterness, panic attacks, and disorientation. The pop hooks, brisk pace, and melodies ultimately set Insomniac apart from the still-trending Grunge—in 2014, Billie Joe Armstrong lamented what he’d felt had been excessive “whining in rock at the time,” adding, “By nature we’re extroverts”—yet the album’s pretty brutal. Its success ensured that songs about despair and self-disgust would play in high rotation in millions of teenagers’ heads.
By 1995, Green Day was mentally and physically exhausted. (Check this interview conducted on the cusp of Insomniac‘s release, during which Armstrong, Tré Cool, and Mike Dirnt look equal parts bushed, messed-up, and surly.) Armstrong and Cool had each recently become first-time dads, and were wrestling not only with unprecedented professional demands but familial ones. Like all new dads, Armstrong was up nights with the baby, grappling with fatigue, and on top of that was dealing with insomnia, likely in part a result of commercial pressures and the unwelcome intrusions of fame—all while writing a new album in the crossfire of burdens from his label and accusations of selling out from folks in the East Bay punk scene.
Several songs on Insomniac suggest that there were other wearying factors at play. The lyrics to “Geek Stink Breath” read like a scattered journal scribbled in extremis at rehab. I’ve made my decision…a path of self-destruction…A slow progression killing my complexion…rotting out my teeth…no self-control…blowing off steam with methamphetamine…picking scabs off my face…my blood is turning sour…my pulse is beating out of time…I found a treasure filled with sick pleasure…it sits on a thin white line…. (On the lyrics sheet, the band pasted the word “thick” over the word “thin.”) The song’s an indolent lope through confession cut with denial that begins with a sick moan and ends by slightly speeding up, from either a real high or longed-for one. The video, aired late at night on MTV, included graphic scenes of a tooth pull. That the lead single from Insomniac was an ugly, explicit tale of the ravages of meth abuse indicates just where the fatigued, contrary band’s punk head was at, gazing at a Billboard Top 40 peopled with the likes of Seal, TLC, Faith Evans, and Hootie and the Blowfish.
The geek with the stink breath no doubt knew well the thrill seekers, hooligans, and mannequins partying up at “Tight Wad Hill,” the nickname for Charter Hill which overlooks California Memorial Stadium at the University of California, Berkeley, notorious for the free view of football games (hence its nickname) as well as being a haunt for druggies. “A lot of tweakers come and hang out up here, the crank victims and stuff,” Armstrong revealed in a 1995 Rolling Stone cover story. His song’s a clear-eyed take on the hollowed-out devastation awaiting users there: begging for fixes, turning tricks, burning daylight. The lyrics feature a classic Armstrong-esque paradox, the kind he loves to knot up his songs with: as the kid rots “up on the hill / living out a lie,” he’s having “the time of his life / hating every minute of existence.” Such tensions sweated out in the margins between sensations and oblivion have always appealed to Armstrong. Misfits and punks know “how to express themselves better,” he said in Rolling Stone, adding, “Besides, I always thought anger was a lot more interesting than feeling good about yourself.”
The opening line describes a simple problem: I’m having trouble trying to sleep. The chords drag you under. The cycle’s despairing. After the fifth chord, we’re hauled back to the first, and the misery deepens.
“Brain Stew” has long been considered Armstrong’s anti-ode to his insomnia. (Before it became the album’s title, “Insomniac” was the working title for the song; “Brain Stew” was also the nickname of James Washburn, a longtime buddy of the band’s.) The new baby, the growing impositions of fame, the pressures of having to produce, the fallout from the Gilman Street drama (addressed on this album in “86”) all conspire to keep the singer up until his bleeding eyeballs bulge. Fans, many doubtful that 3 am-feedings and a fussy infant were the song’s sole inspirations, have been unpacking the lyrics since the album’s release. Talking with Rolling Stone last year, Armstrong came clean, as it were. “The song is about methamphetamine, not being able to sleep, and staying up all night,” he acknowledged. “It was something that was creeping into our punk scene at the time, and I definitely did my experimenting with it. It’s just such an evil drug.” The code officially broken, the lyrics assume their rightful place on Insomniac’s Goya-like canvas. No one had to puzzle much over the reference in the first verse to crosstops, the speed pills infamous for their cross-shaped grooves. Is the singer zooming, or crashing? Though he’s spun out, the ponderous chord progression and the solitary, sickening march when the band kicks in—“on my own, here we go”—suggest a come-down, a withdrawal, jonesing, or all three. Armstrong’s guitar scraping in the spaces between the power chords mimics the gnawing anxieties. It’s all a waking nightmare: dry mouth, numb face, delirium. After the 9/11 attacks, Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), the behemoth landlord of U.S radio stations, included “Brain Stew” on its list of “lyrically questionable” songs sent to stations that were then urged to drop them from playlists. Even as an instrumental the song might’ve made that list, so distressing is the mood.
It’s especially agonizing that “Brain Stew” lacks a bridge or chorus that might deliver the singer from the anguish; there’s no musical change to reflect—and to bring about—a mental change. Armstrong’s a devotee of classicist rock and roll, and knows (and loves) the mood-changing power of a good middle or refrain. Yet “Brain Stew”’s locked in place, sweating out its fate on the mattress with no hope of reprieve. Dirnt’s harmonies only add irony. The chords are hammered repeatedly, helplessly, as the song comes to a merciful close without resolving a thing. (Here we go—again.) Cool wallops at his snare drum during the final few bars, willing the nightmare to end, yet the song’s a perpetual motion machine with no hint of dawn.
Then, something startling occurs. If you were to read the lyrics to “Jaded,” the song that comes charging out of the distortion of the final held chord, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they were extended verses of “Brain Stew”—both deal in despair and disorientation, and “Jaded,” with its nervous, apocalyptic dread, feels like the kind of worrying you mutter toward the ceiling on a sleepless night. But sonically we’re in a different place altogether. “Jaded” is pure thrash, the band locked in and the arrangement super-tight, among the fastest songs that Green Day’s cut in the studio. (Nimrod’s “Platypus” beats it by a hair; American Idiot’s “St. Jimmy” is up there, too). At 90 seconds, it makes “Brain Stew”’s three minutes feel like the long, anguished night it is. Charging at your heels, snarling, “Jaded” is impossible to ignore, and feels like an inevitable punk roar.
“Jaded” tears open “Brain Stew”’s emotional straightjacket with a chorus, a lurching change that tries to leave anxieties behind—only to get tangled up in another of Armstrong’s bitter paradoxes:
Always move forward, going “straight” won’t get you nowhere
There is no progress, evolution killed it all
I found my place in nowhere
The chord change from Db (“there is no progress”) to Eb (“evolution killed it all…”) excites, and elevates things to an even higher pitch—yet the two chords trade punches in the last line of the chorus before settling back to Db. The chorus offers an insight, if you can hear it in the noise, but it’s complicated, promising that a straight line goes nowhere, that if you find a home, it’s in nowheresville. At the song’s stuttering close, a lyric in the final verse rings in your ears: “Count down from 9 to 5 / Hooray! We’re gonna die.”
Inertia Versus Eruption. If “Brain Stew”’s about staying down, “Jaded”’s about getting up. “Brain Stew”’s stuck in horizontal. “Jaded” moves forward. Is “Jaded” an answer of sorts to the lethargy of “Brain Stew,” or, if the speed’s coming from another dose of meth, is it fucking things up again? Pete Townshend’s been credited with observing that “Rock & Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” The brilliantly sequenced pairing of “Brain Stew” and “Jaded” tests the limits of that promise to its near-breaking point.
The video debuted on MTV in the summer of 1996. Directed by Kevin Kerslake, who’d worked with Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth, Bob Mould, Prince, Nirvana, R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr., Stone Temple Pilots, and the Rolling Stones, the video, like the songs, moves between two worlds. “Brain Stew”’s bleached in a sepia tone and inhabits a hallucinatory landscape, while “Jaded”’s a more conventional, if unconventionally filmed, band performance. “The plan all along was to keep the videos married together, just like the songs appear on the album,” Kerslake told me. “As far as I can recall, there wasn’t a specific mandate to drive one or both in any specific direction, but ‘Brain Stew’ steered my brain into some absurdist no-man’s land, image-wise, while ‘Jaded’ tugged it more in the direction of band performance. With a wet finger in the electrical socket.”
The “Brain Stew” portion is an anti-narrative hellscape. In a dump somewhere in Nowhere, Armstrong, Cool, and Dirnt sit on a shitty couch (meant to evoke the similarly ratty sofa in the “Longview” video) pulled bumpily through the trash by a bulldozer steered by an old, tobacco-spitting driver. “The imagery was inspired by a good many things,” Kerslake said, “including the lyrics, the sludgy riff, and the band’s East Bay punk rock roots.” He added: “But the idea that got the motor running was that the couch from ‘Longview’ somehow ended up in a dump, and the band along with it.” You want to look away but the imagery’s mesmerizing: closeups of roiling mealworms; a line of benignly smiling hula dancers; a stray dog; a central-casting schoolmarm mouthing the lyrics; a horse writhing on its back in the dirt. “From there it was simply a matter of inviting alien figures and ideas into the picture, juxtaposed against the humdrum, day-to-day banality of life in the dump,” Kerslake said. “Nothing in the sandbox fit together on paper, deliberately, and it was fun finding ways to make all those things feel like they fit together in the edit. Not in any rational sense, necessarily, but on some level.”
Kerslake and his crew built the junkyard in Los Angeles (“out in the valley somewhere”), a trash heap for the band slouched glumly on the couch to be trapped within, moving randomly but not really getting anywhere. Armstrong adopts a meditation posture complete with a Gyana mudra (he’s sincere or goofing on it, it’s hard to say) but that doesn’t seem to provide much harmony against the ugliness of the landscape and the bizarre terrors of the clashing images.
As Cool’s drums are crushed beneath the bulldozer and the horse rises and runs off, the band launches into “Jaded” and the video moves from sepia to full, loud color. The cameras fly about the small room (a soundstage in Hollywood) filming the band in absurdly tight closeups and jittery, distorted angles, trying to keep up; the impression is that Kerslake and crew tossed their equipment into the mosh pit and then ran out of the way. “I just figured if we’re going to get into some of the bratty punk stuff, to do [“Jaded”] really crude and raw, almost like Super-8,” Kerslake said to Gillian G. Gaar in Green Day: Rebels With a Cause, adding, “And I simply wanted to distinguish between the songs; if I was going to go into the garage phase, with tweaked-out colors, I thought it might be cool to play with a more antiquated look in the first part, giving it a look like found footage, like somebody pissed on the film can and it’s been lying in the sun for decades. That was the feeling that I was shooting for.”
Kerslake remains proud of the video, which captures not only the songs’ moods but an era. “There’s nothing in it that wants to make any sense,” he remarked to Gaar. “It feels like it’s giving you the finger, or giving any sort of straight talk the finger. And that’s cool, to have that sort of teenage rebellion.”
Sometimes you do videos, and you want them to be really smart or tell a great story, or just have a great performance, and sometimes you just want to throw paint on the wall and let the splatter stay. Or just go into a certain realm and just want it to feel grim. And I feel like that’s in there too, just this bleak hopelessness, that I was happy to keep. It’s not necessarily that you have to exaggerate, or go to great lengths to say, “Oh, woe is us, life is fucked, we can’t make sense of anything,” just embody it in the flow of images or the disconnect from one image to the next. So it happens on a more subtle level.
I asked Kerslake if he was aware of the drug abuse imagery in “Brain Stew” before he worked on the video. “Since I wasn’t interested in story, I never explored the precise reasons for his insomnia,” he responded. “I figured the less it was tied to something specific in the video, the better.”
“Things were getting really scary. I’m such a dedicated songwriter and musician, and when Dookie got so big—it was on par with becoming one of the biggest pop records of all time—I really wanted to be like, ‘I’m a rocker. I’m a punk rocker. That’s what matters to me more than being some kind of pop star.’ That sort of fueled that record.” This is Armstrong a year ago, talking about Insomniac. “Everything was happening. I got married, I had a kid, I was 23 years old, and people were climbing in my trees to look inside my house. It was the scary side of becoming a rock star, or whatever. You can’t control the outcome of your life. I wanted to show the uglier side of what Green Day was capable of.”
A couple of years ago, Armstrong revealed to Ian Winwood in Kerrang! that Insomniac “is the most honest record I ever made at the particular moment that it was written and recorded.” Startling and vivid, “Brain Stew/Jaded” remains unnervingly evocative of a soundscape nowhere, cast in 4 am shadows. Even punk thrash can’t deliver you from that joint.
Bonus video:
Joe Bonomo's the author of, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing and Field Recordings from the Inside, and the blog No Such Thing As Was. Since 2012 he's been the music columnist at The Normal School. He teaches at Northern Illinois University. Find him at @BonomoJoe and __bonomo__. His favorite Green Day song remains "The Grouch."
Cloven Tongues Like as of Fire: Scott Beal on “Bruise Violet”
The most infamous scream in heavy metal history is Tom Araya’s opening shriek in Slayer’s “Angel of Death.” It happens nineteen seconds in and lasts about seven seconds: Araya’s voice enters ear-splittingly high, then dives into a sharp growl that eventually strangles off. It’s a standalone moment, a quintessential bit of demonic stage setting for an album that does its best to sound really fucking evil. The first time I heard it, it scared me a little. But it’s just theater, along with the rest of the horror schlock imagery from the album art to the lyrics. (So the band explained in all the interviews I cited for my tenth grade report, “Are Slayer Really Devil Worshippers?”; what else could they say in the era of the PMRC, Satanic Panic, and suicides blamed on Judas Priest?)
What Araya does, Kat Bjelland does better. Just over two minutes into “Bruise Violet,” Bjelland erupts into a striking scream that curdles upward into banshee heights, stretches out, and gradually crackles toward static. It’s every bit as prolonged and piercing as Araya’s. What’s different is that her scream isn’t in the spotlight—it naturally wells up out of a quieter moment where she has just chanted the title phrase three times, bruise violet, like a spell. It’s as if, after lulling us into a false sense of calm, she dredges up this voice of hell that’s been lurking in wait. As you listen you can feel it rising in your own throat like a bubble of hysteria. When it bursts, you don’t know whether to pass out or laugh. But Bjelland’s undaunted—she punctuates with a gruff “yeah!” then downshifts into ethereality.
“Bruise Violet” is like this all the way through. The song refuses to pull a punch or stay in place. From the first two tom strikes it comes out pummeling (has any drummer ever wreaked more joyful mileage out of their toms than Lori Barbero?) as the whole band stomps at you in razory discord. Bjelland sneers “yoooouuuuuu” through clenched teeth, then gives every accusatory word of the verses its own rasp and torque. Threaded between are these translucent refrains, “you’ve got this thing that follows me around,” from a voice itself hanging back, following from a distance. Without seeing the video, you might wonder whether it was still Bjelland singing or Barbero interjecting from behind the drums.
And then of course there are the liars. Three sets of three. It feels weird to call them a chorus, though they appear in the right places. Together they tell a story. The first a straightforward accusation: Liar! The second a little deeper, with a wily smirk and tilt of the head, as if to say, c’mon, you know what you are, don’t deny it, liar. Then the sing-songy third like the voice of a maniac taunting you from the dark, liiii-aaaaar, letting you know she sees you even if you can’t see her and the bloody knife she’s clutching. As earworms go, it’s unconventional, seeming to come from inside your head rather than out—three shades of conscience gnawing from different angles.
Throughout “Bruise Violet,” Bjelland uses a different part of her repertoire every time she opens her mouth. I’m not saying the lyrics don’t matter; on the contrary, Bjelland’s lyrics are full of infectious outrage and surreal delights like “glue instead of spine.” What I’m saying is that the literal narrative the lyrics are supposed to tell [1] might be the least interesting experience you can have with this song. What Bjelland says, she says with her lungs and larynx and the machinery that churns through them. Her voice contradicts itself at every turn. It spans multitudes. To listen to Kat Bjelland’s voice is to feel the cords of human possibility stretch inside you.
Ok, I know that sounds lofty. Let me bring it down a notch. As I write this, I’m wearing the same flannel shirt I wore yesterday and the day before, purple and blue plaid unbuttoned over a faded concert T-shirt. I could tell you I chose this look to get in the proper mindset to hold forth about the grunge era (even the colors fit the bruising violet theme). But the real reason is that we’re stuck in this endless pandemic and there’s no reason to dress for anyone or leave the house. Also, unlike the flannels I wore from 1989 through 1994, this one isn’t thrifted. It’s from Stitch Fix. We are all different people than we used to be.
Case in point: for years I refused reality TV with a nigh religious disdain. Now, my teenage kids have got me hooked on Survivor. Survivor is a show about many things, none of which is survival. Our favorite season so far has been Millennials vs. Gen X. My sixteen-year-old daughter, a proud member of Gen Z, feels a kinship with Millennials and yearned to see their tribe prevail. Before long, I did too. The Gen Xers kept spouting off about how prepared and hardworking their (our) generation is known to be, especially compared to those lazy millennials. I found myself thinking okay boomer about people my own age. Weren’t we the slacker generation, permeated with apathy? Did I miss how Singles was a film about real go-getters working tirelessly for the common good? I thought we all hated the label Gen X anyway: the generation defined by being an unknown quantity. It puzzles me all the more how my kid enthusiastically embraces the label of Gen Z: the generation after the generation after X.
The one admirable trait I thought emerged from Generation X was the DIY ethic. I reckon some of us grew into that ethic better than others. Some of my best friends learned to make pickles and tape loops, to butcher meat and ink tattoos, to build a house or run a campground. Before she died, my friend Lisa was working her way toward living self-sustainably off the grid. I love the idea that each of them thought fuck it, there’s no reason I can’t do this, and did it.
At the end of their 1993 EP Painkillers, there’s a long unbroken track of a live set at CBGB’s. My favorite part is the first thirty seconds, before they launch into “Bruise Violet.” It’s just the sound of milling, Bjelland’s voice saying sorry (for what?), scattered calls from the crowd, a few experimental clangs on the guitar. I recognize this caesura from the beginning of every show my band ever played (stretching cringingly long on the few recordings that survive) and most shows I saw through the nineties. It’s also captured on many Babes in Toyland bootlegs on YouTube. Take this 1992 footage from the Khyber Pass Pub in Philadelphia:
For the first two-and-a-half minutes the engine is idling—band members chatting, tuning their instruments, worrying over the lighting. You see how present and life-sized they are. One step up and you could be on that stage. If you too appear to be casually loitering in the bar, sipping a drink and shielding your eyes, then couldn’t you transform as well into a machine of sonic annihilation in the second it takes for the toms to kick in?
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. —Acts 2:2-4
Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, color, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes…. —Federico García Lorca, “Theory and Play of the Duende”
When you scream like that it’s just like letting yourself go. It’s just like you just go [makes crackling noise and rolls eyes into back of head] like you just go up into your head and whatever comes out comes out. It’s like this thing that I can do, it’s just like you just go, ok NOW, and then it’s like you just like let something else take over. —Kat Bjelland, from Not Bad for a Girl
The first time I saw Babes in Toyland was at the Latin Quarter in Detroit—a place where legends from Ella Fitzgerald to The Supremes once played. (It closed the next year, and was demolished in 2011.) They were opening for Skinny Puppy, whom I’d ridden along in the back of a friend’s car to see. None of my friends knew where any of the venues were in Detroit; we would drive in circles until someone recognized a landmark, then park and walk toward the nearest people smoking cigarettes in single file. I had just turned eighteen, and a lot of my life was like that: along for the ride, hoping for the best. A recovering metalhead, I’d recently taken to dancing to a select few industrial hits at the Nectarine Ballroom in Ann Arbor. I liked Skinny Puppy’s metal-adjacent dissonance and Nivek Ogre’s distorted warbles. I knew I was in for a parahuman vocal performance. I just didn’t expect it from the opening act.
Part of the effect of Bjelland’s voice is undeniably visual—the contrast between what her façade prepares you to hear and the sound that emerges from her mouth. Her look in the “Bruise Violet” video is a classic example: cascading blond hair with tousled bangs, bright red lipstick matching a tiny red bow, a white mini-dress with flouncy sleeves. It’s a carefully ironic aesthetic, famously pioneered by Bjelland, which cobbles together and deconstructs a range of feminine reference points, from Hollywood pinups to porcelain Victorian dolls. Mish Barber-Way of White Lung has described it as “a perverted and sexy subversion of the classic ‘girl’ archetype.” When you see a performer take the stage in this guise for the first time, you recognize the irony, but you still have no way to anticipate what’s about to happen. As Babes in Toyland launched into “Catatonic,” I saw Lori Barbero pound the daylights out of her drum kit and Michelle Leon rock and squall on her bass. I saw Kat Bjelland attack both guitar and microphone with reckless abandon. She roared. She pivoted from guttural to sweet to shrill. She let something else take over. And in the process, she took the confining cypher of the feminine expectation she’d worn onto stage and dashed it to dust. I felt like I’d been slapped awake. My pulse galloped. Anything could happen.
Is it any wonder that legendary photographer Cindy Sherman became a fan and collaborator? That’s her in a blond wig and congruent mini-dress playing Bjelland’s doppelganger in the “Bruise Violet” video. That’s her creepy doll photo on the Fontanelle album cover. Sherman had built her artistic career exploding ideas of femininity, exposing the constructedness and confinement of those categories, and insistently using her own individual presence to brim over and spill out of them. Naturally she was drawn to Babes in Toyland, the way that Lori Barbero beat the ever-loving shit out of her toms, and especially the way Kat Bjelland in her cuted-up chic, her babydoll dress and sweet blue-eyed smile, would step to the mic and unleash hell.
In 1992 Sherman had undertaken her most controversial project, Sex Pictures, in which she used mannequins and prostheses to unhinge the voyeuristic conventions of pornographic sexuality—capturing their grossness and artificiality and violence. And so the Fontanelle album cover with its uncomfortably-anatomical doll crotch facing the viewer from a supine position—and also the androgyny of the expressionless doll face, and the lighting both gloomy and garish, and those disembodied fingers in the top left corner, looming toward us. Like the Sex Pictures, the album cover confronts us with an uncanny-valley eroticism constructed to be both familiar and unsettling, hinting at what’s monstrous in all we take for granted about sex.
It’s been my experience that men have trouble admiring women. No, even that word, admiring, is a problem, with cringey echoes of secret admirers we would now call stalkers. I mean admiring as in looking up to women, as in recognizing the ingenuity and talent of women, of wanting to emulate their efforts or learn from their successes. I hesitate to say respecting women because that’s often nice-guy code for extending a modicum of decency and expecting sex in return. But managing to express respect for women without an element of either objectification (doesn’t hurt she’s hot) or tokenization (badass for a chick) is pretty much what I’m talking about, and something I seldom heard for much of my life, even from progressive-minded dudes.
In in the mid-nineties Michael Moore came through Ann Arbor on a speaking tour to promote his first book, Downsize This. There’s a chapter in the book about Moore’s admiration for Hillary Clinton, and his schtick included a cardboard cutout of Hillary in a cowboy hat propped beside his podium on the Michigan Theater stage. He was trying to counteract the stream of right-wing hatred for the First Lady (during the It Takes a Village backlash). And what he said was he thought she was hot. That was the linchpin of his praise. To make a political statement on Hillary Clinton’s behalf, he led with framing her value in terms of hotness. Maybe he was dumbing it down for his audience, trying to meet our neanderthal brains halfway. After all, the crowd response was one of amused disbelief: Hillary, hot? Surely you jest, wacky documentarian!
The state of the music press was hardly better for any of the women-driven groups of the nineties. In a 1990 interview for Melody Maker, the first question asked of Babes in Toyland by journalist Everett True (who later in the article mocks hacks who ask dumb questions) is “What’s it like being an all-female band?” Three months later, True poses L7 the same query: “Sorry, but I've got to ask you…. What's it like being female?” (The subtitle of the L7 interview: “Are L7 really Californian white trash bitches from hell or is Everett True just having another wet dream?”) In a story on Hole the next year, True simultaneously sexualizes and slut-shames Courtney Love for four paragraphs before tsk-tsking that “Hole deserve far, far better than to be categorised by their sex.” True’s editor apparently saw no philosophical inconsistency. This same Everett True would later coin the term “kinderwhore” to describe the look popularized by Bjelland and Love. The portmanteau seems to have emerged unpremeditated—and surely it says something that the first association to occur to a writer tasked with capturing the zeitgeist of women seizing agency in the male-dominated rock industry was literally child whore. Just as surely, that’s the impoverished imagination that Sherman’s cover for Fontanelle is designed to subvert.
Few of my male friends loved Babes in Toyland like I did. I never knew any who bought their albums or ventured to their shows. We could all agree that Kat Bjelland’s shrieks were awesome, but that was as far as it went. No one admired her guitar stylings, her melodic choices, the raw propulsions of the rhythm section. Admirable qualities that people saw in Mudhoney, say, they didn’t see in Babes in Toyland. And I don’t know why. I never talked to my friends about this. I don’t know if I had the vocabulary to bring it up, or the self-awareness, or the audacity. Maybe they didn’t love the targets of Babes in Toyland’s vitriol? Was it easier to sing along with a misogynistic screed like Mudhoney’s “Here Comes Sickness” than Babes in Toyland’s “Bluebells,” a wrathful condemnation of a would-be rapist?
We are all different people than we used to be. It’s a sad fact that I rarely talk to most of my friends from the 90s unless it’s at one of our funerals. I wouldn’t even know how to get in touch with the guys who drove me to see Skinny Puppy. I woke up last week from a dream in which I was frantically digging through mud pits with my old friend Amy for some artifact that our lives depended on. I woke up missing her terribly, reached out on Facebook for the first time in two years, and asked her about Babes in Toyland. Amy: “I loved the gritty dirtiness of their music. Bjelland’s vocals were fire!”
Amy tells me this story about a bachelorette party from 1997. Fifteen young women hanging out in a big house, eating food, getting wasted and rocking out. As the night wears toward two a.m., the last half-dozen diehards are blaring Nemesisters, and our friend Steph, wearing a trapper hat, picks up a bass and starts air-guitaring along with Babes in Toyland’s version of “We Are Family.” Her face twists in an iconic rock-and-roll scowl as her hat flaps fly everywhere. Everyone rolls around the room in fits of laughter.
In the photo Amy sends me, our friend Lisa has tumbled back on the bed, twisting at the waist, arms crossed over her torso as if to hold herself in. Her head is thrown back, eyes shut, and her mouth hangs wide open: she is howling with laughter. She is making a noise with her entire body that is artless and unplanned, a pure eruption of joy that bursts out and goes where it will.
We were digging for the artifact to save our lives and found it.
When have I ever had to scream? A genuine scream is rare. Outside of music, when have I even heard a scream? Once, from a wife laying over the casket of her husband of fifty years. Mostly just in movies though—I’ve been lucky. Screams emerge from moments of the utmost terror and anguish.
There’ve been plenty of screams I’ve muffled. I’ve buried my face in a pillow after a breakup or a friend’s suicide and shrieked myself breathless into the padding. Being human in a crisis sometimes means being caught between the need to let it out and the need to maintain decorum, to not let your own anguish wake the neighbors. Even unleashing our demons, we feel the imperative to keep them to ourselves.
To bruise is to take a temporary kind of damage, and violet is the prettiest intermediary shade in the life cycle of a bruise. To call on someone to bruise violet is not so much to wish them harm as to wish them to weather harm—to live through the forces that damage you, to wear their marks without hiding or holding still. But that isn’t easy. It’s a quality I admire. When I rack up griefs and joys and still have trouble screaming for myself, I’m grateful to have Kat Bjelland’s voice to scream through me.
[1] It’s widely presumed the “you” in “Bruise Violet” is Courtney Love. There are many places you can read or hear the story of Bjelland and Love’s early friendship, fleeting collaborations, and eventual falling out. When I chose to write about this song I swear I didn’t know any of this, and in the end it was the last thing I wanted to talk about. There’s a 1995 Rolling Stone interview in which, between asking Bjelland about clothes and dating, the writer presses her for details about her feud with Courtney Love. Bjelland rejects the line of inquiry as “a boring old topic,” but he insists. Greedy to keep the rivalry going, he wants to know if Hole’s hit “Violet” might be a counterstrike. Bjelland refuses to feed the voyeuristic desire to see one woman artist tear down another. She defuses the question by noting that “Violet” is a kick-ass song.
Scott Beal is the author of Wait 'Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books, 2014) and The Octopus (Gertrude Press, 2016). His poems have recently appeared in The Rupture, Sugar House Review, Crosswinds, Quiddity, and other journals. He teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan and co-hosts the Skazat! monthly poetry series in Ann Arbor.