round 1

(2) hole, “doll parts”
dismantled
(15) buffalo tom, “taillights fade”
386-217
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 9.

Janine Annett on “doll parts”

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life. —Hillary Clinton, 1992

I want to be the girl with the most cake. —Courtney Love, written in 1991 (from “Doll Parts,” released in 1994)

“I’m going to write about Hole’s ‘Doll Parts’ for March Plaidness—the grunge bracket,” I told my husband. 
“That song’s not grunge,” he responded.
I mean, the song’s really not very grunge, depending on how you define “grunge”. 
When I think of a typical grunge band, I think of a group of 3-6 white guys with long hair, wearing flannel shirts. There’s a singer (who may or may not also play guitar), 1-2 guitar players, a drummer, and a bass player. No keyboards. Little to no backing vocals. Distortion pedals (including, but not limited to, the Big Muff, which really is a great pedal).
Dare I suggest that “Doll Parts” is more akin to a power ballad—that old mainstay of the hair metal era that grunge supposedly wiped out—than a grunge song? For most of the song, there’s a slow tempo, with a burst of a louder, more distorted part at the end. Hole as a, well, whole, was more grunge-by-association. And we all know who they were associated with.
Courtney Love, who really needs no introduction, is forever associated with Kurt Cobain, king of the grunge scene, for better or worse. 

It stands for knife/ for the rest of my life.

Let’s go back to that “wiping out hair metal” thing for a moment: There’s a story that at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, Axl Rose from Guns N’ Roses told Kurt to “shut your bitch up”, referring, of course, to Courtney Love. Kurt turned to Courtney and said “Shut up, bitch” and they laughed and Axl didn’t know what to make of being laughed at. In many ways, Courtney was even harder and tougher and more messed up than Axl, and that’s saying a lot. You think Axl had a hard drug problem? Courtney had that, too. Difficult childhood? You betcha. Oh, Courtney also suffered from all kinds of abuse and addiction, plus she went through things that Axl couldn’t have dreamed of going through, because he was just a man. 
Hillary Clinton was also associated, for better or worse, with a man who often overshadowed her. But she, like Courtney Love, had ambitions of her own. She refused to stay quiet, to play the role of the good wife, the obedient woman. She wanted things not just for her husband, but for herself. People said terrible things about her; they said terrible things about her husband. They tried to take him down. They said: He cheated on her, but come on, look at her. She emasculated him. They said: That young intern looked at him with adoration in her eyes. Hillary didn’t abandon him, though. She never abandoned her ambitions, either. 
Maybe the world wasn’t ready for Hillary Clinton in 1992. Maybe they weren’t ready for her in 2008, either. Nor in 2016. She proved herself again and again: Lawyer. First Lady. Senator. Secretary of State. But people still said terrible things about her. They said, after all that, that she rode on her husband’s coattails. Essentially that she was a witch, a shrew. 

I was obsessed with Live Through This. I don’t think Hole did anything as good as it before or since. Of course, there were rumors back then, and even to this day, that Kurt Cobain wrote or co-wrote a lot of the songs. I have no doubt that Kurt and Courtney both influenced each other, but the thing that really sets Hole and Live Through This and “Doll Parts” apart is Courtney’s guitar playing and singing (there’s never been any doubt that anyone but her sang on the album), and the lyrics. They’re so female. No man could have written them, I assure you. And In Utero? Doesn’t that borrow from Courtney’s playbook of talking and singing about so many very female experiences? Why didn’t anyone accuse Kurt of ripping off Courtney? 
I have a confession to make: I was never a huge Nirvana fan. I always preferred Hole. Don’t get me wrong, I like Nirvana. Especially with the benefit of looking at them in hindsight, I do appreciate their music and what they did culturally. But Hole, I loved. I listened to Live Through This over and over. I saw Hole play live. 
Courtney was, and is, for sure, an imperfect role model. But millions of people idolized her. Millions hated her, too.

I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs.

Dolls are, on the surface, perfect. Unbroken. But they’re plastic; they’re not real. And they’re tossed aside when children are done playing with them, abandoned when they outgrow them. The perfect metaphor for Courtney Love. 
Probably 90% of celebrities have had some kind of plastic surgery or cosmetic procedure. So why do we know that Courtney had a nose job, had her lips done, had all kinds of things done to her? Courtney was an oversharer before oversharing was even a thing. She can’t stop talking, even when she should. Why do we know she entered the world as Courtney Michelle Harrison and metamorphosed into Courtney Love? Why do we know she used to be a stripper?  

They say: Why wasn’t Hillary Clinton content with what she had? She had money, admiration, a career. Why’d she have to run for President, too? Isn’t it all her fault that we had Donald Trump as a president? What if the Democrats had chosen someone else for the presidential bid? Maybe they shouldn’t have picked a woman. The country just wasn’t ready.  

“Doll Parts” and all of Live Through This took the trappings of motherhood and domesticity—dolls, cake, milk—and turned them on their head. Motherhood is sweet!? No. The road to Motherhood is paved with blood and guts and pain. You have to be tough as hell to be a mother. The milk is sour. 

I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait

“Big veins”, of course, is referring to all the stories and rumors about Courtney’s drug use. She was accused of doing heroin while pregnant. She’s dog bait—the tidbit no one can resist going for and fighting over. 
Courtney and Hillary each have one daughter. Chelsea was born in 1980. Frances was born in 1992. 
Frances was born in 1992, and Live Through This was recorded in 1993 and came out in 1994. Of course, lots of moms go back to work shortly after having a baby. But if you had Nirvana money, and you chose that? It’s the same things people say about moms everywhere: If you’re so ambitious and want to work so badly, why’d you have a baby in the first place? 
Live Through This has sold more than 2 million copies. Nevermind sold 30 million copies. In Utero has sold over 15 million copies. 

 I love him so much it just turns to hate.

“Doll Parts” is about Courtney’s relationship with Kurt, as well as her relationship to fame.

They really want you, they really do
Yeah, they really want you
They really want you, and I do too

The line “Someday you will ache like I ache” took on a special significance after Kurt died, but of course she wrote the line—and lines like “Live through this with me, I swear that I would die for you”—before his death. I can still see her with a foot up on an amp, playing her guitar, in a babydoll dress, singing and shouting her rage at everything, and everyone. 

By all rights, I think Frances Bean Cobain should be a huge star. Where’s her major label record deal, if such a thing still exists? I’d always sort of hoped she’d grow up and start a band with Coco Gordon Moore. Sometimes Frances posts videos on her Instagram of her singing and playing guitar. One she posted recently got 261,000 views. That’s not nothing. But it’s not 30 million. Or even 2 million. Of course, album sales in general are not what they were in the 90s.
According to Billboard,  “Post Malone closed out 2019 with the most popular album of the year in the U.S., according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. The data-tracking company reports that the genre-blending artist’s Hollywood’s Bleeding effort, his third release, earned 3.001 million equivalent album units during the year, with 357,000 of that sum coming from album sales.” 
Maybe Frances doesn’t need a record deal. 

I fake it so real I am beyond fake 

This line is genius—taking the accusations of Courtney being fake and plastic, using Kurt, being a fame whore, and turning them on their heads. 
What the world hates even more than a young, attractive woman who speaks her mind is a woman who’s middle-aged (or, heaven forbid, a senior citizen! Hillary Clinton is now officially a senior!) and speaks her mind. 
As Lisa Whittington-Hill wrote in her amazing essay “Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55”, Courtney Love’s solo album America’s Sweetheart, released in 2004, “was a disappointment for Love, selling fewer than 100,000 copies and receiving mostly negative reviews.” The 2010 Hole release Nobody’s Daughter also received mixed reviews. “Each time Love stars on a television show, appears in a movie, or releases a new album, headlines proclaim ‘the return of Courtney Love,’ even though she has never gone anywhere. She has always been here, but it is as if the media and critics want her to prove herself all over again.” 
Should Hillary and Courtney just be quiet and go away? Or should they keep screaming, fighting for what they believe in? Fighting for themselves, their daughters, their countries, change, progress? How much progress have we made since the 1990s? 

And someday, you will ache like I ache
And someday, you will ache like I ache
And someday, you will ache like I ache
And someday, you will ache like I ache

Janine Annett's writing has appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, and many other places. Her humor book I Am “Why Do I Need Venmo?” Years Old is coming out in July 2021. Make friends with her online at https://twitter.com/janineannett or http://www.janineannett.com/.

katie darby mullins on “taillights fade”

Hi. I’m Katie. As a late addition, I feel a little like I’m the little sister of another March Plaidness author, someone who was dragged along because of an obligation, but now here I am, and I get to play with the big kids. You remember that pride, right? When they had to take you in, because they’d get in trouble if they didn’t, but also—you were part of things, now? You got to be involved?
One of the first times I ever felt involved—and maybe now isn’t a good time to be honest, but I want you to know how deeply grateful I am to be in this competition—was when I heard Hole’s “Doll Parts.” I remember recording it off the radio and being enraged that the DJ talked over the last fuzz. But when Courtney Love screamed, “Someday you will ache like I ache”? I believed her. Better, I believed it to be some kind of hex, some powerful incantation that if I screamed it along at just the right tone with her, it would be true of me as well.
Why am I writing about my competition?
     Because if I hadn’t had “Doll Parts”? Who knows if I ever would have gotten to the part of my life where Buffalo Tom’s “Taillights Fade” made sense to me. “Doll Parts” found me when I was a confused kid, still trying to figure out what pain was and how to hold it inside my body (which, spoiler alert, was already a home for pain: the collagen and soft tissue was already falling apart. By the time I was a teenager, one ankle spent more time in a brace than out, and I’d had one compound fracture and several just ‘normal’ ones. I could reset my own wrists and ankles. For those of you playing out there at home, yes, I do have Ehler’s-Danlos Syndrome, and it culminated in a stroke a few weeks after my 31st birthday: much like the little sister forced on you, you have to listen to my overshare). Because of Hole and songs like “Doll Parts,” I can sit now, as a woman in my thirties, in a dark room with headphones on, and…

Sister can you hear me now
The ringing in your ears
I'm down on the ground
My luck's been dry for years…

There it is. Bill Janovitz’s vocals always ground me. Not just on “Taillights Fade,” either. I’m one of those annoyingly completionist fans. I’ll argue that their 2011 song “Arise, Watch” from Skins should have been on Top Ten lists that year. I think Janovitz’s 33 1/3 on Exile on Main Street is one of the best books in the series, and I’m a die-hard “Sticky Fingers is the best Stones album” person. But in 1992, Buffalo Tom pulled off a hell of a trick with “Taillights Fade”: they leaned into the simplicity not just of phrases that can echo off the walls of any home they’re invited into, they leaned into the simplicity of what makes a good rock song.
I guess I should tell you here that my body falling apart? That’s still literal. I’ve fried some weird thing that’s irritating my optic nerve on the left, which is causing movement problems on the right. Hell of a thing, brain stem strokes. You can’t really predict them. But what that means for me right now? Is that I could be thinking about doll parts, literally—but I almost feel like that would be a cop out for me. So instead? Every night for weeks, I have plugged my headphones in, completely dampened every other sense, and listened to Bill Janovitz ask if I could hear him.
It has been all I could hear. So let’s all pretend this is a Wes Anderson movie and for a moment, let me be Steve Zissou: but instead of “Let me tell you about my boat,” “Let me tell you what I hear.”

I'm lost in the dark
And I feel like a dinosaur
Broken face and broken hands
I'm a broken man

Janovitz has a clean, clear voice, something he’ll learn to muddy in coming records, but I’m glad he didn’t bother yet. The relative clean-cut-ness undercuts the story of two jagged people he’s hopeful will fit together like puzzle pieces, even though the picture he paints is much more like that of two pieces of a picture cut apart by a kindergartener and pasted together—close, but with edges forever poking up.
His songwriting abilities were foreshadowed—this was a man who didn’t mind throwing the word “dinosaur” in the first verse, above the chorus. But what’s perhaps most impressive is they fall into a harder pre-chorus/chorus than they ever do in the verse—until the guitar solo. Jesus. It burns. It burns like actual acid. There’s a line coming from the hardest guitar part that just slides out and cauterizes anything that gets too close to it. Every time I hear the guitar solo, I have a hard time, because I know it won’t be long enough. This is close enough, age-wise, that it wouldn’t have been ridiculous for him to have taken a Nuno Bettencourt-esque guitar break. The driving rhythm core of bassist Chris Colbourn and drummer Tom Maginnis keeps the song on the rails, enough that it could have stayed a pop song if they hadn’t been a little more subtle, if Janovitz wasn’t pushing harder in every single way. But here and there Maginnis drops a beat or doubles one: sometimes he rides the high hat for an unexpected moment and rides the anxious tension. And while that leaves it to Colbourn to keep a relatively simple song, well, simple—by 1992, Buffalo Tom was already a great band, even though most of us would never hear of them until 1993’s “Soda Jerk”:

I've hit the wall
I'm about to fall
But I'm closing in on it
I feel so weak
On a losing streak
Watch my taillights fade to black

What’s outrageous is I’ve just told you the whole band. Buffalo Tom killed this song as a three-piece. Janovitz was already brave enough to be playful and experimental in his lyrics. The rhythm section was already well-defined—and Janovitz, against the advice young Katie would have given him, already knew when he was ahead and when to cut a guitar solo shorter so it wouldn’t grate on the listener. And while the chorus may feel a little simple (a lot of the best ones are: sometimes what we’re looking for in a repeating section is a piece of clear projector paper that we can put over our own lives and say, “See, there? This is about me!”), I can say it reads a little different in the dark, one eye taped closed and because of the neuropathy, feeling like ants are crawling all over it, and the other side of my body—well, electric with pain. Rolling out of that chorus into a high, elongated chord. It doesn’t matter how many pills you take at night to make neuropathy go away sometimes, you know? Sometimes it just lives inside you.
Look at me, there. Making this about me. It’s not, of course. Hell, you don’t want to know how old I was in 1992. You wouldn’t let me play this game, for sure. My mom would probably force you to, anyway, though…
     On a losing streak. Watch the taillights fade to black.
Is escape always losing? I wonder that, night after night.
     Never mind. Some questions can’t be answered so easily. Let’s go to my favorite part of the song, since we’re there.

I read a thing about this girl
She was a hermit in her world
Her story was much like mine
She could be my Valentine

And although we’ve never met
I won’t forget her yet
She cut herself off from her past
Now she’s alone at last

I’m someone who becomes easily obsessed with grammar, and I know from following Janovitz as a writer and a songwriter, so is he. There aren’t accidents in his songwriting, which means, “I won’t forget her yet” is absolutely intentional. I trust you, that you already believed that. This is the part of me that has to show you I belong here, that I should be allowed to play on these courts. Because frankly, this is a master’s move—and he was still a relatively new songwriter.
Admitting this girl is someone he made up (and evoking things like Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song”: “(I think I made you up inside my head)”) and then saying that he won’t forget her yet creates the idea that he is prone to creating these perfect women, or almost perfect women, or women who are broken in the same way he is, or maybe differently, just a way that fits—just someone, anyone who keeps him from being so damned lonely—and then he is willing to forget them, because in the end, they aren’t real.
     But then at the end of the stanza? She gets what she wants, this hermit he has conjured into being. She’s alone at last.
See? He’s got magic spells, too. It’s just that in his, the loneliness is something that even his dream girls are drawn to. In his, when the taillights fade to black, even though they are his, he has a better view of himself from behind the car, watching himself disappear.
     This is a song about a man who is so disassociated from the whole world that he tells the listener to watch his taillights fade—but who am I kidding? I’m in the dark, and when I watch the car drive away, when I hear that soaring solo, when I hear the stutter of the drumbeat in the last chorus—
It’s my car. I’m picturing my own car. And I can watch it go deep into the distance until the taillights are black, and even my imaginary friends are happier without me, and you know, one day, I’ll allow myself to forget them.
     Does that sound dark? Darker than “Doll Parts”? I can’t imagine it does. I mean, we didn’t sign up for “Power Pop 1965 Madness!”, did we? We can be honest with each other here. But if we’re being really honest? Sometimes I wish I was sending this shell of a body, the one that is broken in one eye and on one side, to drive into the distance until the taillights fade, while the rest of me, the brain, the heart, the memories, the parts of me that hear this perfectly simple song and am in absolute tears by the end—I wish it would leave those parts behind.
Want to talk dark? We’ve talked dinosaurs and Valentine’s, cars driving into the distance—and Janovitz lands the song here:

Lost my life in cheap wine
Now it's quiet time
Cappy Dick nor Jesus Christ
Could not help my fate

But I'm underneath a gun
I'm singing about my past
Had myself a wonderful thing
But I could not make it last

You know, it’s not every day that someone admits that neither booze nor religion can help them, they’re staring down a gun like they can see their own life story written on the inside of the barrel, and they still manage to bring it back to a wonderful thing that they blame themselves for losing.
     Can you really write about this song if you ignore this verse? Because I’ll be honest, I’m a little surprised every time I hit it. Remember when I said a lot of times songs are simple and they don’t use specific examples because it makes a listener feel like it’s easier to have been there? The opposite is true, too. Absolutely stunning detail can bring a listener to the same brink of clarity and camaraderie, and whether you’ve ever been underneath a gun literally, it’s hard not to be there metaphorically by the time Janovitz is done wringing you out over this song.
Because here’s something I didn’t know was true yet when I was learning how to be angry from Courtney Love: sometimes you can be so real it is beyond fake. That’s true. Reality TV has shone the scariest light on that phrase. But while I was learning that lesson, I was also learning “Taillights Fade,” and I didn’t yet know what it meant to have a wonderful thing but be unable to make it last.
Permit me to jump forward to a different genre, just a few years ago? Jason Isbell has a brilliant song called “Speed Trap Town,” in which he talks about a high school football team like this: “Those 5A bastards threw a shadow cross/ It’s a boy’s last dream and a man’s first loss.”
     Hole: you were my last dream as a girl, and that bitter sweetness, some of the language and timbre of your anger? I needed it.
Buffalo Tom: you helped to score my first loss.
     I’ve been through so many more losses than the first one I listened to this song during and cried, but that didn’t make me cry any less when I put it back in regular rotation last month. Bill Janovitz is a songwriter who is surgical in his precision—perhaps that’s why I bring up Jason Isbell, another person I consider a songwriting specialist, someone who excises anything that weakens the song and only leaves the healthy parts. Janovitz has been like that since he was a kid.
I’m someone who needs that in my life. My body won’t ever be healthy. But with songs like “Taillights Fade”? I can keep my mind both occupied and clear. I can comfort myself with its chorus or I can regale myself with his creations. Or I could just shut up and wait for that solo, the one that feels—maybe a little bit like a nerve on fire, you know? And I could close my eyes, wait for everything to fade to black.

Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. She’s been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, and Prime Number. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC. Her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out on Summer Camp Press in late 2020.