round 1
(8) the offspring, “self-esteem”
QUARANTINED
(9) mudhoney, “touch me i’m sick”
355-353
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 7.
THE MORE YOU SUFFER: tom mcallister on “self-esteem”
I bought The Offspring’s album Smash because of the skeleton artwork and because I saw an older kid buying it before me, and I had decided that morning it was time for me to finally own a CD. My goal then was to develop a comprehensive understanding of popular music as quickly as possible so that I could someday have something in common with the cool kids in my class. I was in 7th grade. Almost everyone I knew had cable and watched MTV all day long; we didn’t get cable until I was in college, and anyway back then I exclusively listened to sports talk radio. When my parents drove me to and from soccer practice, they listened to the oldies station.
While my mom sorted through a rack of sweaters at Clover—sort of a regional precursor to Target—I slipped away toward the CDs. One of my main priorities at that time was to avoid displaying an interest in anything; if you have interests, then adults ask you about them and expect you to answer, and they might even ask follow-up questions. They make faces at the other adults indicating some kind of understanding that’s inaccessible to you, and later when you’re not around they’re talking about this new thing you’re into, and they’re maybe even laughing about it, as if you barely exist. First you care about something then they take it away from you and turn it into their own thing. It's awful. If I could have made it through high school without ever having expressed a specific desire for anything, I would have.
My classmates had begun wearing Green Day t-shirts, arguing about Pearl Jam vs. Soundgarden, recording Nirvana songs off the radio and trading cassettes. They were going to Weezer concerts. They were—they said—smoking cigarettes and making out with girls at these concerts. I felt that my very survival depended on catching up with them.
My dad wanted to review the lyrics and listen to a few tracks before I could retreat to my room with Smash. He was a jazz and blues guy, mostly (a year later, I would spend countless hours studying the famously sexy cover of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, but never listening to the album itself). He hated the whole thing, especially “Bad Habit,” the road rage anthem with the infamous lines:
Drivers are rude
Such attitude
When I show my piece
Complaints cease
Something’s odd, I feel I’m god
You stupid dumbshit goddamn motherfucker!
My parents weren’t the types to ban entertainments, though they might scowl and disapprove and worry about the damage I was doing to my brain by watching pro wrestling or Married… With Children. They even allowed me to buy Mortal Kombat on the condition that I first have a conversation with my dad about his concerns regarding the game’s ultraviolence. After my dad listened to Smash, we held our Offspring summit at the kitchen table, where all such meetings occurred. He asked me to read some lyrics aloud and explain what I thought they meant. He told me a lot of the ideas and language in there weren’t appropriate for someone my age, that they might feel “cool” (he did finger quotes here when he said cool) but that coolness is not about being vulgar and angry. He added, as he usually did, that he respected my intelligence enough to let me make my own judgments. I don’t remember a word I said. Over the subsequent months, he continued to review any CD I brought home, and later expressed specific concerns about Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine. “Head Like a Hole,” he said. “That’s just not the kind of thing you name a song.”
Because it was my only CD and because I needed to get the songs memorized by Monday morning, I spent the weekend listening to it on a loop while playing Mutant League Football on my Genesis. Smash was already well on its way to becoming the best selling indie record of all time, so it was me and ten million other kids across America bouncing angrily in our rooms while Dexter Holland shouted somewhat coherently about alienation and betrayal and rage. The two most famous tracks, “Come out and Play” and “Self Esteem” are both a little slower than the rest of the album, not conventionally punk (not that this distinction would have meant anything to me then), with lyrics suggestive of something like depth. Later, Holland told OC Weekly, “A lot of the bands were great back then and made great songs but didn't necessarily have a lot of melody… and that's what we were trying to do, combine those two things."
“Self Esteem” starts with a caricature of a punk group doing melody, an ugly teenage rendition of “la la la la la” sung wildly off key. It’s not clear at first whether this is self-consciousness on the part of a band that knows it can’t actually pull off melodies or if they’re trying to draw attention to the contrast between their punk influences and this new direction. Probably it’s a little of both, and now I also realize it’s also an irony-laden expression of scorn for the idea of people who can sing well; a 1999 Spin article describes Holland regularly pausing mid-concert to rant about how much he hates boy bands and pop stars, to raucous applause. I did not immediately like “Self Esteem” as I did the rest of the album, though I understood that I had to learn to enjoy it like all my friends had. I waited impatiently through the slow part—where he sings about being stuck in a relationship with a bad and manipulative girlfriend—for the music to get loud, the guitars to start wailing. I didn’t care what he was singing, I just wanted to get to the moshing part. I wanted permission to start jumping around and throwing fists.
For the next two years, our main activity—most of the boys in our grade—was gathering in various basements and rec rooms and waiting until parents were safely out of earshot so we could play Nirvana or The Offspring or Silverchair at top volume and mill about anxiously until the song got loud and announced now is the time for you to fuck each other up. We rumbled and tossed each other around and took scary falls against furniture and eventually threw headbutts and punches. As long as no one was bleeding, we started it right back up. The only thing that mattered was the violence.
I was twelve when I first heard “Self Esteem” and though I was desperately interested in having girl troubles, it would be another four years before I had an actual girlfriend. I wanted to relate to the song’s beleaguered narrator, whose girlfriend keeps breaking plans, and right when he’s going to cut her off, he takes her back again (and, hilariously, makes her dessert, a line I’m pretty sure is not a euphemism, is simply describing the narrator making her a pineapple upside down cake or something). All the songs I liked then were about problems I wished I had but was too young to comprehend. When one of my best friends experienced his first troubled relationship, we sat around and listened to this song for hours, his room darkened by heavy curtains, incense burning and blacklight posters illuminated on the walls. We talked again and again about how girls just want to screw you but they’re also so beautiful and what are you supposed to do about that? I could not have imagined a worse fate than to love a girl and not be loved back.
The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care. A lyric I would have gotten tattooed on my forehead if I could have. I thought it explained everything.
One major fact I thought I knew about this band was that they took the name The Offspring because they were all the children of famous serial killers (the source: a friend who heard the info from his cousin, “somebody’s cousin” being the most unimpeachable source of information we all had). I wanted this to be true because I wanted their anger to be authentic. The first track of Ignition, the precursor to Smash, begins with Holland screaming “ahhhh, fuck! Fuck fuck! Fuck!” like a man who has just smashed his thumb with a hammer. If it was just a silly performance, the equivalent of Kid Rock tweeting his middle finger at “authority,” then it would call into question the validity of all the other stuff they were shouting about. The serial killer thing, which I would repeat with confidence for years, would mean they were actually a little scary, though of course they never were.
Perhaps the biggest problem with The Offspring in general is that, despite the well-known fact that Holland earned a PhD in molecular biology, the lyrics get dumber the smarter they try to sound. For a 7th grade English assignment, I delivered a presentation analyzing the lyrics to “Come Out And Play,” only realizing in front of the class, as I read the lines, “Hey—man you talkin' back to me?/ Take him out / You gotta keep 'em separated” that the words themselves were actually very stupid. In interviews, Holland repeatedly claimed he understood the gangland conditions of LA because he drove through those neighborhoods on his way to grad school, the sort of thing one can only say with a straight face if they’ve been praised their whole life for being smart (like me, Holland went to a private Christian college prep school, though unlike me, he was also the class valedictorian).
Though The Offspring and Green Day are often cited as gateways for 90s kids who went on to discover better punk bands, I soon skipped right past punk and into the heaviest metal I could find. By the time I was a full-on depressed teen, the sarcastic sneering on Smash wasn't enough to satisfy me. Too much angst, when I wanted to be projecting power like Pantera, shrieking in rage like Slayer, drowning in the discordance of Slipknot and Cannibal Corpse. Still, I submitted lines from the song “Smash” for my senior yearbook quote (retracting it at the last minute and replacing with a line from Vonnegut because a girl I liked told me that would make me sound smarter). The lyrics: “Head over heels I’ve fit in before/ Now I don’t want to do it no more/ I just want to be who I want to be/ Guess it’s hard for others to see.” As long as I’d been listening to The Offspring, which is to say as long as I’d been actively listening to music, I had been crafting an elaborate fantasy of myself as a rugged iconoclast who was only unpopular by choice, not because I was too cynical and unpleasant to be around. If people didn’t like me, it was because they weren’t as smart or as evolved as I was. If I wasn’t being invited to parties, it was because everybody knew I was too cool to go to them in the first place. It’s a seductive lie for a lonely teenaged boy.
In a SPIN review of Days Go By, The Offspring’s last studio album, Theon Weber writes, “Even in their prime, the Offspring were not good, exactly, but they were genuinely misanthropic, which in certain situations (adolescence and its relapses) can be similar. But it took a while to realize just how misanthropic they were, and are—that underneath their punk snot is not the traditional damaged heart, but a deep and clinical hatred of nearly everything.” This line is referencing their song “Cruising California (Bumpin’ in My Trunk),” which has the sound of a poppy, Miley-style party anthem, but is a furiously sarcastic parody of the genre. It’s not funny, exactly, but if you watch the video you can recognize that a joke is indeed being made. The joke is something like: doesn’t it fucking suck when people like things? Weber continues: “One effect of this disdain is to make the band’s stabs at empathy distended and awkward. Their attempts in the grim-and-nervous 2000s to draft a song capable of tolerance and sympathy…cast the worst possible light on everything." This problem is evident especially in “Self Esteem,” which hates both the girl and the narrator, identifies the flaws in both and determines neither is worth saving.
Holland is the frontman of one of the most commercially successful bands in history (Smash did so well that Rick Sims, former frontman of The Didjits, says he lives primarily off of royalties from The Offspring’s cover of “Killboy Powerhead”). He’s highly educated, and though the punk world doesn’t exactly respect him, he’s not a punchline like wayward 90s rockers Scott Stapp or Chad Kroeger. Basically every music website cites Smash as one of the most influential albums of the decade (Guitar World called it the 37th best guitar album of the 90s!). And yet he’s still just so pissed off all the time. Interviews during their heyday are peppered with potshots at other bands, record executives, anyone involved in hip-hop, anyone shallow enough to want to show their own faces in their music videos. After a while, it becomes clear that Holland’s contempt is not about artistry or aesthetics or even commercialism; it’s just because he can’t stand other people enjoying things. In an oral history of Smash released on the 20th anniversary of the album, he says, “Isn’t it ironic? You start a punk band because you feel like you’re being ostracized. Then your punk band gets big and you get ostracized again.”
Holland, it becomes clear, is a smart, dorky, cynical, sarcastic, and (let’s be honest) ugly guy who thinks he's the only one who gets it. It’s all there on Smash, the striking mix of self-regard and self-loathing, the nervous sweaty energy of a young man who has a good life but thinks he’s owed more and can’t articulate why. The feeling that he’s been cursed with an intelligence that makes it impossible for others to really understand him. The self-pity of a man who announced over and over that he hated the whole world and wanted to be left alone, then got exactly what he wanted. Of course I loved his music when I was young. It was like looking into a mirror.
Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower's Handbook. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse and recently has been publishing a series of short essays written for each year of his life, all of which are collected at tom.mcallister.ws. He's on Twitter @t_mcallister
I've been bad. I've been worse: matt vadnais on “touch me i’m sick”
About five years ago, I ended up spending the whole of Thanksgiving at a giant house owned by a person my father described as the “nicest man in the world,” though my father was also quick to point out that I should, under no circumstances, talk about politics to the nice man or to anyone in the nice man’s house. The festivities were low-key but crowded, filled with the kinds of men who played youth hockey and grew up to wear bulky sweaters, the kinds of men who relax when they realize that I won’t make them talk about musicals or Shakespeare but also, if they’re under fifty, will eventually join a conversation about the weirdest movie to ever make them tear up, the kind of men who contain multitudes and paradoxes despite dressing in a way designed to communicate stability and prudence to their own fathers.
At some point, my luck ran out and my father took me away from the mini-patriarchs I was winning over to the maxi-patriarch nestled in his garage, away from the women, where he was roasting the meats. My father left me there, missing a chance to hear his friend describe him, my father, as the nicest man in the world. After my father left, the man was invasively effusive about his love for my father, a man he called his brother. The words are mostly lost to me, but there was something accusatory about the whole thing, something that lent itself perfectly to a transition by which he could scrutinize and pass judgement on my life choices, namely the series of graduate degrees: “when the hell did you make your money?” he asked, knowing full well that the answer was that I hadn’t.
As judgmental shakedowns go, his was kind.
I got through the inquisition eventually, falling back on some very old habits—I’m a bleep-blob android, not a bleep-blob man-person, you’re bleep-blop right and it’s funny how unmanly I am—and we were able to go for about a half hour without politics any more serious than my repeatedly acknowledging that had I failed my birthright.
The most memorable thing about the conversation was that this man, thirty years older than me, firmly ensconced in an entirely different tax… situation… had a speaker and subwoofer set up so that he could loudly listen to the Pearl Jam station on Sirius. With the exception of the truly kind and genuine toast he gave before cutting the turkey—a toast built around the idea that differences didn’t matter at all when love was in the picture, a speech that was heartfelt but didn’t seem to extend to the world outside his walls—he spent the entire gathering in the garage, every moment scored by Pearl Jam. During our conversation alone, he mouthed along to “Betterman” and, more impressively, “Dirty Frank,” a genuinely deep cut that I first encountered on a CD I bought from the special section at Disc and Tape where they always had about fifteen bootlegs and three packs of clove cigarettes. I joined him and we sung along; eventually, he held his O’Doul’s up to me like a microphone as I grunge scatted. When I rolled my eyes, Vedder-style, into the back of my head, he touched my shoulder in a way that communicated pride.
I’m not going to lie: it was nice.
It was nice even if the version of me that paid that $30 in 1994 for a bad recording of a live show in Düsseldorf or some such would have had an impossible time reconciling the moment of singing along to “Dirty Frank” with a hyper-conservative Boomer in a mini-mansion in Johnson County, Kansas. Even if the version of me that found politics and personality and a goddamn purpose through grunge—to say nothing of the problematic Peruvian pull-over I bought on campus from people who sold Dali and Klimt posters—would have been fucking offended by the moment and my failure to pick a fight about Trump, it really was nice.
Do I think he and I could have had the same moment singing the song I’m actually writing about here? Probably not. Still, when I started thinking about this essay, my mind kept coming back to his tricked-out garage and the Pearl Jam station. I suspect I was planning on using the moment to suggest that, because “Touch Me, I’m Sick” and its what-if-Leprosy-is-good-actually scuzz would have been a minor chord too far for the man who loved my father like a brother, the Mudhoney song was “real” grunge. I was going to do some purity shit.
Fuck that, both because the song is good enough without me doing gatekeeping bullshit, but also because the song is its own gatekeeper, one that, despite my last paragraph, suggests that the Boomer and his Sirius station are as grunge as Mudhoney; he was as grunge as the version of me that got multiple concussions snowboarding with headphones tucked into my Peruvian pullover.
Reader: I have misunderstood grunge the whole time.
The primary project of grunge—and this is not Riot Grrrl or other things that were grunge-adjacent, just grunge grunge—was in keeping with this man’s Thanksgiving toast: love—his love—can make you human. In social terms, the work of grunge was to strive for a world that no white man—no matter his foibles, politics, history, or bathing habits—is beyond redemption if he merely asks for it. The project of grunge is hyper-liberal Eddie Vedder developing a profound bromance with Johnny Ramone, an actual white supremacist. The project of grunge is a Neo-liberalism where all people are worthy but nearly everyone in the room happens to be a white man. The project of grunge was welcoming, with pride, Dennis Rodman’s love for Pearl Jam as though it said something about him and not something about the genre and gatekeeping that there weren’t a ton of Black athletes listening to grunge. Likewise, the project of grunge was respecting women who braved the pit despite often having faces that were the exact right height for elbows without once thinking about systemic factors that maybe could have made the pit safer for everyone. The project of grunge is absolutely made manifest by “Touch Me, I’m Sick” and its aged-better-than-it-should-have video of white dudes going apeshit on stage. But my dad’s friend and his question—when did you make your money?—is not at all anathema to the project and in some ways is just evidence that he was a better listener than I was.
Here’s the deal: this song is really good and passes the purity test I would have set up for it when I was nineteen. It’s genuinely abrasive and off-putting, which was important to a version of me who actually responded to a girl asking me why I wore dirty glasses and hid my pretty eyes that I “didn’t trust anyone who wouldn’t look hard enough to find me.” The song and band in general are more comfortable in their own skin than I ever was when I was conflating being honest about my flaws with working to be a better person, but the song manages to function like a rusted out station wagon that can still do ninety. It’s gross and seeping and wounded but also features three of the best, most rock-n’-roll guttural noises in music (all before the lyrics start). It is thrillingly fast and also playful. It *is* pure grunge, sprung directly from Iggy and the Stooges.
Its purity is revealing.
There’s a second-season episode of Community—this is the second March X-ness essay in which I’ve used a Community episode as a data point—in which Jeff and Troy find a trampoline in a Nazi’s secret garden and come to the realization that purity necessarily comes from exclusion.
I’d argue that the folks who started grunge *weren’t* necessarily hell-bent on exclusion, at least not along lines of race and gender; sure, the whole notion of selling-out is about exclusion, but that’s not unique to grunge, certainly. The point is, I believed Kurt Cobain when he said in liner notes to Incesticide:
At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.
I still believe him. But, now, I notice the way the sentences are worded: his proclamation of equity is worded in such a way that the fans of Nirvana are assumed to be white, straight men.
And all of this tracks. I thought I was into grunge because it was about a more equitable world, but it really was also promising me three things. First, Cobain’s liner notes set up a syllogism: Matt is a fan, therefore Matt is a white, straight man, a litmus test so much simpler but no less essentialist than the real-man bullshit in the hallways of my school. Second, and relatedly, it promised me that no number of small-town snowmobile jockeys making fun of me while I beat them in games of hearts during study hall would prevent me from being loved. It promised me, in fact, that my desire to be loved was so strong—thinking about Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night here, Shakespeare’s OG fuckboi who I played for sixty shows in 1995, including the one captured in the photo attached to this essay—that it was in and of itself a reason to love me, a sentiment perhaps best articulated by the Mudhoney song I’m supposed to be on about here:
Oh
I’m diseased
I don’t mind
I’ll make you love me
Until the day I die.
Obviously, in hindsight, a whole lot of media from the 90s needs to rethink the idea of a white man making someone love them as romantic, and I imagine Mark Arm would say this was sarcasm or satire, which, sure. But, also, it’s worth noting how many 90s everydorks used their new powers, first and without thinking, to make someone love them.
As unsettling as the consent issues in that verse are, it’s the bridge that contains the most damning evidence in terms of revealing the actual project of grunge:
Come on, Baby, come with me
and if you don’t come, if you don’t come, if you don’t come
you’ll die alone
This, again, has multi-valence. It’s still funny* and abrasive and dirty and a little childish. It still slaps, or whatever the kids say now. But it’s also a fancy way of saying “my love makes you worthy,” which is the final thing grunge promised me. I was a white, straight man worthy of love and my love made people into people. My love erased difference and meant that anyone who ran with me was “one of the guys.”
Come with me if you don’t want to die (but more about me somehow).
And so we get to the sales pitch. Mudhoney *is* grunge AF and that matters here. But so was the guy who wanted me to feel less manly about not making scads of money so that he could touch my shoulder and accept me as the sometimes-close-to-estranged-son of his “brother.” His shoulder touch is the promise of grunge. It’s the promise of whiteness and masculinity. Even if it has worse hair and a toothbrush one only finds when one isn’t depressed, the ethos at the center of “Touch Me, I’m Sick” is that of an American individualism in which our founding documents clearly demonstrate for whom the freedom of individualism is intended, the same population represented by the Dinosaur Jr. lyric “I feel the pain of everyone,” the same population represented in this video’s crowd shots.
All of this is to say that if I ever find myself in the nice man’s garage, again, I’m playing this song.
I’ll bet you fifty bucks he fucking loves it.
Matt Vadnais teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He is the author of All I can Truly Deliver (Del sol Press, 2005) and essays about early modern staging practices and Shakespeare's printed plays (Shakespeare Quarterly). He can be found writing about music at covermesong.com and comics at Solrad.co, yourchickenenemy.com, and comicsmnt.com. He has said "grunge saved my life" and meant it.