elite 8

(9) veruca salt, “seether”
knocked out
(3) radiohead, “creep”
443-255
and will play friday in the final four

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 25.

THE COOL BIG BROTHER: ROB HAYS ON “CREEP”

You’ve never seen a band try harder and attain more to escape the very song that started their success. Radiohead was able to use the song “Creep” to establish an everlasting career where they pushed themselves from the shadow of “Creep” to a career of expanding the boundaries and expectations of what a rock & roll band is and what it can accomplish.
Watching this band in real time during the formative years of my life, they’ve helped me grow and understand music in ways that far outstripped the naivety and shallowness of an inexperienced listener. They acted like a big brother to me by steering me in the right musical directions and helping me as a person to higher levels of thought and appreciation.
When I say big brother here, it’s in the context of the cool, big brother who was making you mixtapes of all the bands he thought you should be listening to, helping shape your thoughts and ideals as a person. Helping you embark on thought explorations that take you to different places that transform the mind and soul.
I did have real big brothers, but not in the transformative, mind-shaping way that I feel about Radiohead. My oldest brother wasn’t really into music, he was more of an athlete, mostly gravitating toward songs that motivated him to work out more. I remember songs like Snap’s “The Power,” or that song that kept sampling the line, “Mars needs women”. My other brother was much more musically oriented and I did appreciate him trying to include me in his musical explorations, even if it didn’t quite mold me the way it did him. He was a big Beatles and Paul McCartney fan. He was listening to bands like Yes, ELO, and Styx. He had a fondness for arena rock.
My brothers and I grew up in a slightly less than ideal setting occupied by machinists, factory workers, truck drivers and low level clerical workers just trying to get by. It was typical blue collar fare, and you were much more likely to hear someone play Lynyrd Skynyrd or Bob Seger than Hüsker Dü or The Wedding Present. More often than not, if you mentioned those bands in my home town you would get strange looks.
A lot of my early musical education came from the radio. Growing up in Cleveland, in the 80s, radio was kind of a big deal. We were constantly reminded of 1950’s Cleveland disc jockey, Alan Freed, who popularized the phrase “rock & roll” and how our local station, WMMS (nicknamed The Buzzard) often broke new artists like Bruce Springsteen, Rush and David Bowie. Listening to these rock staples led to some confused and often eclectic musical listening tastes that would follow me through my years in high school. I remember when Guns and Roses and the Beastie Boys were first making waves and while today’s me would want to tune in, 80’s me couldn’t care less. I was enjoying Huey Lewis and the News (still do) and listening to adult contemporary artists like Billy Joel, and Rod Stewart. It wasn’t till I started working minimum wage joe jobs when I was sixteen that I started having my first meaningful music conversations. It was then, I would bring up said artists and was mocked mercilessly for it, that my feelings toward music were willing to change.
It was during this time that a band I never heard of and wouldn’t care about for some years to come was also finding their musical inspiration.
Radiohead has always had the same line-up throughout their career: Phil Selway, Collin Greenwood, his younger brother Jonny, Ed O’Brien, and singer Thom Yorke. They have known each other since they were at Abingdon School just outside of Oxford, England, in the mid ’80s. They started their band while they were all going through school and would play around town together, even staying together and playing whenever they were on break as they made their way through university. When Thom graduated from Exeter, with his English degree, he started taking the band more seriously.
I used to work the closing shift at a local fast food taco place. There, my real musical education began. I had a manager, who had a side gig as a bassist in a local hard rock band. After closing the dining room at night, he would invite his friends in and they would hook up their guitars and amps and noodle on their instruments while the rest of us were getting orders out for the drive-thru. I was taught to appreciate the work of Ozzy Osbourne, and the brief, inspirational career of Randy Rhoads. Rush was revered, Guns and Roses rocked, but so did Mötley Crüe, Dokken, Ratt, and Poison. These weren’t my only influences during that time, just the loudest. There was also the girl who had all kinds of piercings, who really liked Skinny Puppy and Jane’s Addiction. There were also my nerdy friends from school who preferred rap and were into the likes of Third Bass, DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, 2 Live Crew, and The Digital Underground.
It was one of those late shifts, working the drive thru, that someone put in Pearl Jam’s Ten for the first time. This was truly an exciting, transformational album. I had not heard anything quite like it before, but my initial reaction to the song, “Alive” was that I was all in. It was my first exposure to the grunge movement, a movement I had no idea would affect me so profoundly. I was ready for more.
In England, Radiohead was initially known as On a Friday, named after the day they could all come together and rehearse. They had a following around town, and eventually gained the noticed of A&R people, scoring a record deal. It wasn’t till they were being signed that they changed the name.
Their first EP, Drill, didn’t sell very well and gained them little notice. It was during those early studio sessions that “Creep” first came into being. In a small independent studio, they were rehearsing songs with their new producers for what was to be their first album, Pablo Honey. Ed O’Brien once described Pablo Honey as “Our collection of greatest hits as an unsigned band.” The songs were heavily influenced by the bands they were most into at the time: the Pixies and R.E.M. The novice members of Radiohead all wanted to be rock stars, but had yet to gain a style and develop a sound that was their own. While in studio, taking a break from the list of songs their producers wanted for the album, they played a song, referred to as the “Scott Walker” song (a solo artist popular in the UK during the 60s and 70s), mostly to just change things up. They had not played the song in their live shows and this was the first time the producers had heard it. They were amazed, and “Creep” came to be.
The members of the band thought of it as a throwaway number, nothing of any real consequence. Initially, when released in the UK in September of 1992, it did not get much fanfare, topping out at number 78 on the UK singles charts. BBC’s RADIO ONE barely played it, saying that the song was “too depressing.” It wasn’t till the end of the year when the song started becoming a huge hit in places like, Israel, Scandinavia, and New Zealand. In America, it first started getting recognition at a small college station outside San Fransisco. It eventually swept across the nation in popularity, with listeners relating to the song’s themes of alienation and self-loathing.
I tried really hard to remember the first time I heard “Creep.” it came in with a number of new sounding music at the time. Nirvana was still a big deal, and Soundgarden was making a name for themselves. “Creep” was just another interesting song coming from the radio. While alienation and self-loathing were not new to my teenage self, I wasn’t ready to empathize with this song in any meaningful way.
The song was first written by Thom early in his time at Exeter University. The actual story behind the song is a little fuzzy and hard to pin down. To hear others tell it, Thom wasn’t very comfortable around women early in his adult life, and the song appears to speak of a time, where he took a fancy to a woman who hung around with a different group of people, and while he liked her, he never felt comfortable talking to her or being around her, and was remorseful for the feelings he was having. In interviews, years later, Thom would remark that he always thought the song was a bit of a joke and disliked the fact a lot of people identified him as the “Creep.”
The song followed a familiar song structure: verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, mid section climax, verse, bridge, chorus. It was Thom’s heart felt singing and emotional lyrics that had people take notice. It was also the aggressive jabs of guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s prelude to the chorus that helped give the song some of its most distinctive elements. Jonny was derisive about the song and was later quoted as saying, “I didn’t like it. It stayed quiet…So I hit the guitar hard – really hard.” It was often thought of as Jonny’s attempt to sabotage the song. The producers loved it, and made it a point of emphasis for the song. It was even featured on MTV’s Beavis and Butthead.
Cleveland had finally gotten its first Alternative Rock station around this time. They played music for the 90s, leaving behind classic staples like The Who, Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC. All the bands that 80s Cleveland radio had taught me to admire and enjoy.
“Creep” was an okay song, I didn’t mind it when it was on the radio, but my early, totally misguided music tastes had me smack in the bullseye for a band called Candlebox. Their first album was amazing. It had that hard rock edge that my friends at the late night drive-thru appreciated as well as some great guitar hooks and lyrics that spoke to an emerging adolescent brain in a way other songs hadn’t before. It was these alt rock inspirations that prepped me for my musical journey’s to come. For the time being, I was was excited to be rockin’ out to “You” by Candlebox, or “Three Strange Days” from School of Fish, or “Teen Angst” by Cracker. These last two songs inspired me to do album reviews in my local high school news paper. For the first time, I wasn’t just listening to the music, I was “hearing” it.
Meanwhile “Creep”, launched Radiohead to the forefront of the modern rock movement. They toured America and played at MTV Beach House and on Arsenio Hall as well as several other late night talk shows. The song was rereleased in the U.K. where it reached number 7 on the singles chart. Readers of Melody Maker and NME magazines named “Creep” “Single of the Year”. It was the Rolling Stone’s writers, top choice for best song of 1993.
By 1995, Radiohead really started to sour on the song. There were rumors their record company thought of them as one-hit-wonders. The band was growing impatient with the type of audience that was showing up for their shows, where fans would scream for “Creep” to be played then leave immediately after. One band member was quoted as saying, “There was a point where we seemed to be living out the same four-and-a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.” While they continued to play it, they often would just refer to it as “that song.” The band themselves never thought of it as a good song and were astonished as to how popular it had become. They’ve been trying to move away from “that song“ ever since.
I could relate to those feelings. Early musical fascinations were no longer doing it for me. I once thought groups like Foreigner, Bad Company, and Journey were what music listeners favored, not realizing it was a preference of the working class people around me that I had trouble relating too. I had grown up a certain way and was expected to be into certain music, and I was finding it was leaving me empty. Grunge music hit me at just the right time, helping me expand my musical tastes and inspirations.
For Radiohead, their next album, The Bends, was said to be a tortured affair to make. Thom had a lot of anxiety around trying to prove that Radiohead was more than just “that song.” They had been playing it at just about every show for a couple years and Thom thought of it as playing a cover of some other band’s song. John Leckie, the producer for The Bends, was quoted, “My impression, was they were being requested to do something even better than ‘Creep.’ And they felt they were being asked to better something, where they didn’t know what was good about it in the first place.“
Their first single from The Bends was “My Iron Lung,” a song still very much in the grunge style, written during their fury of touring supporting the Pablo Honey album. It was a response from the band to all the success brought to them by “Creep.” The end of the song contained the lyrics: 

This this is our new song
Just like the last one
A total w.a.s.t.e. of time
My iron lung

It was around this time I first started noticing Radiohead. I was in college, still living high on my enjoyment of Candlebox, and catching them live during their many frequent tours, getting exposure to other bands that would open for them, like Sponge and the Flaming Lips. I was just getting past my latest musical fixation at the time, Live’s Throwing Copper album, and was ready to move on to something different.
I heard Radiohead’s song “High and Dry” and enjoyed the simple melody and the story painted from the lyrics. For some reason, this was all brought more into context by the music video featuring some bizarre Pulp Fiction type narrative in a diner. I wanted more. I picked up The Bends and remembered it to be a more challenging, deeper album. It didn’t have a bunch of instantly likable hits. My brain was still trying to divest itself from all the corporate radio and adult contemporary miasma I had embraced earlier in my youth. I had to think about the music more, I had to dig deeper into songs that stopped following familiar song structures. Songs willing to go in a different direction. The Bends was one of the first transformative records for me, it challenged the ways I had originally thought about music and took me away as a convert.
Radiohead started making changes around this time that would start forming their direction and distinguishing them from other bands. Early on, Thom had written all the lyrics, very much evident on the Pablo Honey album. Except for “Creep,” no one was claiming there was anything lyrically significant about the songs. Thom had a conversation with friends about this where he later explained that he wasn’t really interested in writing lyrics at the time, and it showed. His friends pointed out to him, “Your lyrics are crap, They’re too honest, too personal, to direct, and there’s nothing left to the imagination.” It was during this time that Thom started working more with Jonny and the others, and pushed the band into a different creative direction. Radiohead was evolving.
Radiohead started working with new members of their team that have helped them shape their image and music over the coming years. Nigel Godrich came on as an engineer during The Bends, and he would go on to produce OK Computer and every Radiohead album thereafter.
     Another key addition during this time was artist Stanley Donwood. He worked with Thom Yorke initially on the art work for The Bends and, like Godrich, would contribute in that role for the remaining albums. The addition of these people were key to the band in helping deliver a more consistent sound and a more congruous image which was largely dark and dystopian in nature. Feelings I was much in line with at the time.
After completing a couple years of junior college, I was going away to school for the first time to complete my four-year degree. With my eyes and ears open to new experiences I started integrating into the musical conversations happening around me. There was the prog-metal fan who was in the room across the hall, who really wanted to get me into Dream Theater. There were guys down the hall, who introduced me to 90’s techno in the forms of the Prodigy, Apex Twin, DJ Shadow, and Orbital. Then there was a friend, who loved Frank Black, not just his work with the Pixies, but his solo stuff, like Teenager of the Year. It was these tangential musical discussions that got me excited about music. I joined the local college radio station and while I played a lot of R.E.M. and U2, and occasionally still throwing on a Bob Seger album, I was opening myself up to stuff I wasn’t willing to consider before like The Eels, Buffalo Tom, and Pavement. I was also willing to explore earlier work by bands I already liked; Camper von Beethoven was a treat after enjoying the first couple Cracker Albums. I also started to acknowledge musicians I should have respected in the first place, like Johnny Cash and The Rolling Stones, not so much for their catchy tunes, but understanding their influence on music as a whole.
   By the time OK Computer came around, Radiohead was starting to establish a theme to how they go about their work. They wanted to keep doing something new and had little interest in looking back. Radiohead understood they could put out another album like The Bends and make a lot of money and fans would be happy, but they thought that was boring. They were interested in pushing in new directions. OK Computer brought in more effects and atmospheric sounds, leaving behind the introspective songs that were on Pablo Honey and The Bends and focusing more on society’s modern ills and how they affect us.
     I was starting to feel a bit of regret and disenfranchisement by this point in my college career. I was pursuing a degree in International Economics and Management and was taking an International Business class that did various case studies of business failures. It was my first introduction into the often hurtful practices of capitalism abroad. This usually involved some form of American company A, going to Country B, doing no due diligence on local culture or customs and insulting or hurting the local population in some way with product C. Granted, we were taught to be good, empathetic souls trying to meet the company’s goals, but it was not hard to see how the themes from these case studies kept repeating themselves in various ways.
It wasn’t just listening to the music of Radiohead who also seemed to feel very uncomfortable with the world they were experiencing around them, but buying into the whole message they were sending. I remember getting their Airbag EP and there was a quote from Noam Chomsky in the liner notes telling me not to unknowingly leave the complicated matters of the world to others, to pay attention; the world is more messed up than you think. These just weren’t messages being delivered by Britney Spears, Whitney Houston or other popular musicians of that era. It was thoughtful, intelligent, and pushed the limits of what I knew of the world.
     Kid A would take another step completely to the left of OK Computer introducing a shocking, at the time, mix of guitar and electronica, creating rich atmospheric songs with very abstract lyrics. While the Kid A and the Amnesiac albums were recorded around the same time, each album that came after had its own distinct sound. The songs in them fit together, where you could distinguish specific tracks, but the listening experience worked as a whole. There were no filler songs. Every song would be worked on till the band felt it was good enough to release to the world.
The album was a huge challenge to absorb upon first listen. The songs diverged from the music that came before it. I remember not liking “The National Anthem” with its bombastic horns and discordant rhythms. It took several listens before I could appreciate what was happening. It was moving forward, it was bringing the next big thing. Each song on the album could be found to be beautiful If you just looked hard enough, and today Kid A delivers some of my favorite Radiohead tracks.
“Everything in its Right Place,” the first track off Kid A, was as if Radiohead was saying they were never looking back to “Creep.” The digitized vocals, the dark, haunting synthesizer melody that becomes more driving as the song progresses, the dissonant sampling, mixed throughout. It introduces everything that would change about Radiohead going forward. “Idioteque” is another one. DJ Shadow once sampled it into one of his mixes and left it almost entirely intact. It was so well done, why change it? The song is mostly electronica, a modular synthesizer with a series of beats and effects in loop. Mixing this with the urgency in Thom’s voice as he sings the lyrics that make you feel like the world is falling apart but energizing you at the same time is the kind of thing only music can deliver.
It was around this time when Radiohead first pointed me toward the book, “No Logo” by Naomi Klein, about how our current consumer culture works. Helping me learn about EPZ’s (Export Processing Zones) and desperate factory workers, who endure bad conditions for little money with the promise the work will be better than their rural subsistence farming existence could bring them.
     I abandoned that dream of international business travel and taking capitalism to people in the far reaches of the world.I ended up in technology and now work for a company that, I at least think, is helping better the world in a more positive way. I feel I’m more aware of what’s happening in the spaces around me. I feel more empathetic.
Was it all the evolution of Radiohead, the evolution of myself that brought me to this state? I like to think there was a little responsibility there. I’m no longer listening to Rod Stewart or Candlebox. I find myself listening to a multitude of different types of music these days. I abandoned the tropes of my youth and everything radio said I should be admiring about music. Really, music is never about what everyone wants, it’s about personal connections, and the music you’re interested in is always the most important. I don’t know if I’d have ever gotten to this state if it wasn’t for Radiohead allowing me to see that music can change. Radiohead and I are both different entities since “Creep” was popular. Like that cool big brother, they showed me there can be a different way.      Radiohead would continue to make new albums and “Creep” would continue to be a sore spot for the band. They hardly ever played it after Kid A was released. They’ve come to accept the song and what it is since then, introducing it a little bit more into their concert sets on the A Moon Shaped Pool tour.
Thom Yorke recently married Italian actress Dajana Roncione. This came after the divorce, and not long after passing, of his long-time partner, whom he met while at university. Dajana is beautiful, the kind of girl one could “look in the eye,” maybe “float like a feather in a beautiful world.” This time around, Thom is “so fucking special,” a creep no more.

Rob Hays is a technologist currently residing in the Cleveland area. He spends much of his free time searching for the next band to get excited about. 

danielle evans on “seether”

I have seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in its entirety exactly once, in elementary school, and I am using “seen” loosely here, because I was a squeamish and sensitive child and once I gathered that our class was being shown a horror movie for children, I cradled my head on my desk and peered up only occasionally to see what fresh hell was happening on screen. As best I could follow the plot, we were meant to root for Charlie, a sycophantic boy who passively and complicitly watched his competitors, who are also children, systematically tortured by a wealthy factory owner and was rewarded by becoming the new factory owner.  In the moral world of the movie, the other children deserved their fates because they committed the respective crimes of being fat, unproductive, boastful, and a spoiled girl who demands what she wants.
In the version of the film we watched, after a rather delightful musical number, in which she screams, among other things,  I want the world I want the whole world and I want it now, Veruca Salt is sorted into the trash by the machine used to collect chocolate eggs from  magical  geese. The internet informs me that in the book and the 2005 film, Veruca is torn limb from limb by squirrels who deem her rotten. I remember being horrified enough by the version in which a child disappears into the trash chute.
I was predisposed, then, to love a band called Veruca Salt for their name alone, for embracing a feminine lack of restraint, a willingness to be loud, spoiled, rotten even, if the alternatives were punished or deprived. Their debut album, American Thighs, took its name from an AC/DC lyric She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies/ Knocking me out with those American thighs. The band introduced themselves by invoking a particular cocktail of aggression and desire and girlhood and honest rage.  “Seether”, their first single, was part boast, part apology, part warning, a love letter to the kind of rage that breaks out when you try to hold it back. I can’t see her til I’m foaming at the mouth sang Nina Gordon and Louise Post, the band’s frontwomen. Portions of the video are footage of the band in a Chicago animal shelter, surrounded by cats who are uninterested in the production, but somehow make the song’s tone both more vulnerable and more ominous. I try to keep her on a short leash, the lyrics say, while on screen a tabby cat yowls into the camera, as if to say Yeah, OK, good luck with that leash.
For a song with fairly straightforward lyrics—the seether is a personification of an explosive anger—it generated enough secondary interpretations (the seether was an illness, the seether was a vagina…) that in the song “Volcano Girls” on their second album, the band offered a footnote: “here’s another clue if you please/the seether’s Louise”.  Though “Seether” is a song about anger, the title locates it in the before of anger. What’s most interesting about the seether is not the specific quality of her rage, which is somewhat abstract, but about how long the seether can go dormant, and how hard the fight to keep her in her place is. The seether is rocked in her cradle, the seether is knocked out, the seether is boiled, the seether is swallowed, the seether is subjected to all manner of violence and domesticity, but the seether survives, and there’s some triumph in it. Also, perhaps some prescience— the positive reception to Veruca Salt’s debut thrust the band into the spotlight, and the industry, grueling tours, various personal crises, rejection by some in the indie music community that had helped form them, the difficulty of sustaining an intense friendship under even the best of circumstances, and perhaps Louise’s famously immortalized temper led to the band’s breakup after the second album. For years, Gordon and Post weren’t on speaking terms.

Here’s where I confess that I have squeaked into this tournament in spite of missing the heyday of grunge. I was a few years too young for generation X, and I was a Black kid growing up in the late 80’s and early 90s when music and radio were much more firmly segregated. In our car the radio presets were two R&B stations, two hip hop stations, one oldies station, and one generic pop station. Several years ago, when a friend of mine had a 90’s themed 30th birthday party, most of the guests showed up in plaid flannel; I showed up in glitter makeup and the bright blue wig I’d coveted since Lil Kim’s appearance in “Crush on You”.  Up through middle school, if a white person had made music after 1970 and hadn’t made it to the top 40, odds were high I hadn’t heard of them.  I had heard of grunge as a category, and understood it well enough to tell people some of my classmates were into it, but not well enough to answer my mother’s question when she asked “Grunge? Why would they call it something that sounds dirty?”
Not knowing much about what my classmates were into had become something of a badge of honor for me. In the third grade I’d tested out of my neighborhood school and been moved to a gifted classroom in which I was not just the only Black person but one of only a few kids without blue eyes. It hadn’t been welcoming. When my mother looked for a neighborhood to move to where the gifted class might be more diverse, she discovered I was the only Black child in my grade in the gifted program in whole county.  (I was also in the minority in having been placed in the program by the school’s own tests—most of the gifted students had gotten their placements through tests administered by paid private psychologists, something Black parents in the country weren’t regularly told was an option.) We did move, to a school where I was still the only Black student in my class, but no longer the only person of color, but I clung tight to my sense of identity being in part about what I wasn’t. I didn’t want to become that kind of Black girl, the one people worried didn’t understand she was Black. I assumed I wouldn’t like whatever pop culture my white classmates were into in part because it made the ongoing rejection feel mutual, and in part because I didn’t want to wonder who I’d be if it turned out I loved it.
By the late 90s, MTV and the radio were better integrated, and I, being in high school and having a more fully-formed identity, was less defensive about my own tastes. Plus, it was the birth of streaming music services, and for a few brief years before it all got shut down as the widespread theft system that of course it was, through the magic of Napster and Limewire I could hear all the music I’d heard of but never actually heard. The aesthetics were different, but I recognized in grunge feminism a bravado, a willingness to lack decorum and shun respectability,  that reminded me of the most interesting women in the hip-hop and R&B I’d grown up with, women who also had to navigate a scene run by men, women who developed a way of talking about sex without being reduced to it, women who didn’t have the privilege to grow up spoiled or be treated delicately, but had still found a language for telling the world what they wanted, had found the boldness to make demands, had found, in music, a kind of freedom even if it required relentless performance to maintain.  Some of the music of the alternative early 90’s bewildered me, some it took me years to come around on, but I loved “Seether” from the first time I heard it. I understood “Seether” because it understood how much effort goes into performance, how hard it is to keep yourself in a mold.
Anger—who can express it, who gets punished for it, who gets called angry or hostile and who gets praised for being firm or direct—is of course always political. I was raised alongside a generation of women who were fed slogans like girl power and lean in and have it all, which were meant to be inspiring, but sometimes feel instead like we built a generation of girls who were told it was their fault if they didn’t ask for enough, but didn’t build a world prepared to give them much of what they asked for. I was born into the first full generation of Black Americans raised in a post-civil rights act country, the generation of kids sent into schools people threw rocks at their parents to keep them out of, raised by a generation of Black parents who understood that entering formally segregated spaces and seats of power was the beginning of the work, just as the country was patting itself on the back for having reached the end. I was raised in a generation that was fed a story of endless growth and possibility and a bright tech-led future while we watched the wealth gap explode and the social safety net stripped apart and whole industries that had once been the source of stable jobs and communities vanish altogether or shift into gig work. There are costs—physical and mental—to constantly advising people to ask more of a world that keeps telling them no and judging them greedy for wanting it. No wonder all these years later so many people still love a song about seething.  

But I had hard time explaining why I loved “Seether” in the way that I love songs that have given me a vocabulary for a part of myself I didn’t know I needed to name. I don’t generally seethe at people. I rarely yell. I am almost never angry when people think that I am. I am a Black woman with an expressive face, and a person raised by New Yorkers who spent nearly a decade of her adult life in the upper Midwest, and so I eventually learned to anticipate that people would often interpret all manner of emotions— hurt, mild dissatisfaction, indifference, confusion, enthusiasm about an opportunity for change, directness when making a neutral statement of fact — as anger, and that it wouldn’t do me any good to protest. But if I am talking to you, I am almost never angry. I am at best, tired or exasperated or very sad. Well before I’m angry enough to scream, I’ve usually decided the person I’m angry at isn’t worth the effort.
I have two modes of truly angry: I am never going to acknowledge you again unless it will cost me money not to, and I am never going to acknowledge you again, but first I am going to tell you why, calmly but at great length and in specific detail, so that I never have to say a word or worry about hearing from you in the future. My purest rage is not so much an explosive anger as a cold one, a calculation. You win a fight with someone who is screaming at you or trying to hurt you by being indifferent or refusing to hear them out. You win a fight with a person who is careless by caring even less about them than they do about you. You win a fight with a narcissist by ignoring them.  Of course, this strategy only works when you have the power to walk away.
It costs something to build a life where you almost always have the power to walk away. It costs something to understand that most of time when someone is cruel or careless, it’s not because you misunderstood them or are lacking a secret exculpatory piece of information known perhaps only to them or because you did something to deserve it and can still undo whatever the thing was, to understand that a person who treated you that way probably did so because they believe you’re a person with whom they can afford to be cruel and uncareful, either because they don’t value you much or they didn’t expect you to value yourself enough to object. It costs something to object. It costs something to know that you can, in your heart, forgive people for how they let you know they didn’t value you, but you cannot in your heart unknow it, you cannot, in your life, hold space for people who don’t value you, or pretend that you’ll be open to them again.  It costs something to believe that you deserve more than people you care about often believe they should give you.
After I have walked away from someone or someplace that treated me badly, I still remember what it cost, even when I’m not sorry, even once I’m as close to forgiveness as I’ll come. If forgiveness means I’ve stopped saying a hex for you at night before I go to bed, well then sure, I’ve forgiven a lot of people. If forgiveness means I have to be friendly… well then. I don’t seethe before I’ve reached a breaking point, but I often seethe after, when the cord has been cut and there’s nowhere for the anger to go. It can’t be directed at a person or institution I’ve already cut off. When I rock and soothe and fight and swallow and boil my anger, I’m not trying to keep it away from someone else before it hurts them. I’m trying to get rid of it before it hurts me to hold onto it. It’s hard though, to let go of something you know has saved your life more than once.

But letting go of anger apparently has its virtues. It would have been a depressing end for one of the best known grunge bands fronted by women to emerge from the era as another cautionary tale about the cost of feminist rage and desire, another story with the message that you can want the whole world and want it now if you must, but the machine will eat you alive or the world will tear you to pieces, and no one will blame it: you were a bad egg, a bad nut.  But that’s not, after all, how the story ends. After years of open hostility, Gordon and Post met up to sit down and talk things out. The full original band got back together. In 2015, they released a long-awaited new Veruca Salt album, appropriately titled Ghost Notes. It’s moody and playful and sharp and delightful and sounds both like the third album they might have made together in the 90s and also like an album that needed another decade of adult life to get made. NPR’s review says “A group of friends and musicians who have overcome internal turmoil and external pressures that caused them to part ways in the '90s would sound this invincible. Embracing a throwback sound isn't stagnation for Veruca Salt. It's celebration.” I wanted to live so I pretended to die, opens the first song on the album “The Gospel According to Saint Me”, a tongue in cheek song about resurrection and coming back from the dead. The song concludes Surprise surprise it’s gonna be bright.

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her work has won awards and honors including the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction. She is a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a 2021 finalist for The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, and The Sewanee Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.