round 1

(6) rem, “what’s the frequency, kenneth”
tuned out
(11) afghan whigs, “gentlemen”
498-393
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 2.

WITHDRAWAL IN DISGUST IS NOT THE SAME AS APATHY: Adam O. Davis on “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”

In October of 1986, Dan Rather was walking home after a day of being CBS’s Dan Rather when he was beaten like a piñata on Park Avenue. Between blows, his assailants, who in suits and ties looked more like operagoers than muggers, asked repeatedly, “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?” which did Rather no good as his name was not Kenneth and he knew of no frequency. So the question—secret code or simply that day’s unfortunate coda—went unanswered and Rather took his licks until his attackers were scared off by his apartment building’s doorman and super. In the aftermath, Rather was whisked to Lennox Hill Hospital for treatment while this story, coupled with those that came before it (see: Rather’s literal gut-punch at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and his 1980 pseudo-kidnapping by a Chicago taxi driver), cemented the news reporter as this nation’s go-to guy for weird public encounters.
High school in 1994 was nothing but a series of weird public encounters for me. Three years after my father’s job transfer took us from Utah to France, my family moved to New Jersey during the lowest point of my slow-moving puberty and I found myself in the 9th Grade at Kinnelon High School, home to roughly 600 students, the majority of whom looked upon my five feet of introspective astigmatized awkwardness with a mixture of bemused pity or violent curiosity. Though my bowl-cut and bespectacled looks didn’t help (“a young William Hurt,” my grandmother once said—hardly the epitome of relational catnip the 90s demanded), what really sunk my hopes of social mobility was that I had missed out on the grunge revolution as France had been more concerned with “le techno” than “le malaise des jeunes.”
It wasn’t that I wasn’t familiar with grunge—Nirvana was in heavy rotation on French radio, especially “Rape Me,” which along with Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” never suffered censorship because the English lyrics were considered not so much vehicles for meaning but garnish for melody—but my understanding of the movement as a whole was skewed by France’s generically-promiscuous programming that provided for sets of, say, MC Solaar followed by Bryan Adams followed by Technotronic followed by Phil Collins followed by Snoop Dogg followed by Alain Souchon followed by SNAP! and then Meat Puppets capped off with Mariah Carey. Safe to say, when I arrived in the Garden State I had no fucking clue about the strict rules that governed the listening habits of American teenagers in the 1990s.
As it turned out, the rules that governed said teenage listening habits demanded you pick a category and stick with it. And in largely white northwestern New Jersey, this meant alternative music and only alternative music. One could not, for example, appreciate both Ace of Base and The Breeders any more than one could listen to Crystal Waters and Veruca Salt. All of this was explained to me by the one friend I had whose name I can’t remember as we sat in his bedroom and played DOOM, listening to Stone Temple Pilots on the radio as downstairs his mother slowly walled herself in with baskets of folded laundry. This friend was the one who introduced me via Sony Discman to Green Day’s Dookie, to Soundgarden’s Superunknown, to Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy—all those albums that quickly became the soundtrack for my suffering, so much so that it’s impossible for me to hear “Basket Case” or “Black Hole Sun” or “Better Man” without immediately being transported back to those days of dread which were somehow heightened by the aggressive alienation I encountered on the radio.
All those songs that floated in the wake of Nirvana’s sudden dissolution spoke too clearly to the teenage sense of grief that I carried then—that unshakeable feeling that I was defective and would always be so as if grunge weren’t a musical movement but a kind of catechism for self-loathing, a feeling that was only further enforced at school. To be clear, I was not popular or well-liked during my time in Kinnelon. The transatlantic origins of my arrival didn’t imbue me with mystery so much as suspicion. And, despite the bullying that made me feel as if I burned bright as neon in the eyes of upperclassmen, I was largely forgettable as a person, which is, of course, the worst part about being bullied: You were picked on because you were convenient, not important.
In addition to the student-centric hostility, there was the institution itself. This high school ran as all high schools had run for decades—a kind of industrial shame machine that encouraged hazing and humiliation under the guise of a good-humored, paternalistic hierarchy that prized literal seniority over the healthy development of younger students. This codification—complete with its assortment of handy labels: jock, nerd, slut, prude, etc.—may have made John Hughes’ career possible but it really made my life hell. I’ll spare the details, but suffice to say that back then Kinnelon H.S.’s Spirit Week was a study in cheerful sadism that culminated in having all freshmen don blueface and white caps so that they could be paraded as Smurfs around the school gymnasium while their peers screamed at them, doing nothing in the long run for school unity and everything for child psychologists and college-emergent sexual fetishes.
So when R.E.M.’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” arrived in September of 1994, it arrived during the darkest days of my puberty, my adolescent disillusionment, my naïve stumbling toward an adult world that at 14 seemed an impossible two years away in the form of a driver’s license. The R.E.M. I had known—that is, the R.E.M. who’d lost their religion, who stood in a corner spot-lit and lying, who proclaimed themselves shiny happy people, who promised that everyone hurts sometimes and that if you were to nightswim it would be best to have a quiet night for it what with the recklessness of water—was no more. They, like a butterfly from the chrysalis or an aggressive teenage acne, burst back into cultural consciousness with hormonal fervor.
Gone was Michael Stipe the pensive crooner and in his place a dancing cartoon—all bald, all pelvis. Gone was Mike Mills’s pageboy haircut and hand-me-down T-shirt collection and in their places long tresses and Gram Parsons’s (!) Nudie suit. On the other hand, Bill Berry continued to drum sleeveless and Peter Buck maintained his penchant for shirts ripped from the covers of romance novels. But musically, the band was unrecognizable from its former self—no mandolin, no sweeping two-party harmonies or orchestral strings, no odes to the environment or cult Hollywood personalities. What we now had was as aggressive and biting as coffee filtered through a pair of Iggy Pop’s jeans. What we now had was a single whose delightfully deranged tribute to miscommunication took its inspiration from Dan Rather’s sudden sidewalk beatdown and whose opening chords bubbled like hydrogen peroxide on a blister, bright and antiseptic as the sun. What we now had was a song that blasted through the sonic murk that threatened to not only define but drown a generation—what we now had was the song that officially ended grunge.
If Achtung Baby was, as Bono suggested, the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree, then R.E.M.’s Monster was the sound of four men driving a chainsaw through the sacred heart of the Seattle Sound. It was a document (ahem) wherein Stipe & Co. took back the baton Stipe himself had handed to Cobain. Like the progenitors they were, R.E.M. served as both alpha (“Losing My Religion”) and omega (“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”) to this era, bookending grunge so wholly that music—with the exception of Bush and Seven Mary Three’s increasingly apish torch songs for the great white Pacific Northwest—had to move on. The song was and is a plea for understanding with the understanding that that plea will go unanswered. Just as was the case for Dan Rather on his patch of Manhattan sidewalk, just as was the case for me in the linoleum hallways of Kinnelon High.
Unlike the aforementioned songs that continue to serve as sonic quicksand for my psyche, no matter when or where I hear “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” all I feel is joy. From the opening’s electric beehive of a riff and hi-hat kickoff to the ending’s suddenly drowsy denouement, the song is killer. I love the muffled production that rightly buries everything under distortion because as was the case with Drake in his lead coffin, the denser the container, the deeper the mystery. I love the countrified undertow of Mills’s bassline and his Wilhelm scream rushing in at the end like a Scud missile. I love Berry’s Gatling-gun-at-a-disco drumming. I love Buck’s solo wound in reverse and I love that TREMOLO (which producer Scott Litt would unforgivably remove in his 25th anniversary remix) and I love Stipe’s famously unintelligible delivery that is broken again and again when he screams out “I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND!” which is exactly what I imagine Rather must’ve screamed out the night he was assaulted or what I know is what I wanted to scream out when after three years of believing I could never be understood because I was an American in France I returned to America to find I was understood there even less.
I love this song because it didn’t just capture the truth of my teenage condition but it captures the human one—misunderstanding not as misstatement or malapropism but full-fledged freak out—and I love the music video that sums up my very sense of those teenage years: being strobe-lit and awkward, desperate to be noticed yet terrified of being seen, all the while backed by a cardboard cutout of the suburbs until the chorus kicks in and then for those brief seconds the world, like Stipe, goes wild with possibility.
Stipe referred to Rather’s assault as “The premier unsolved American surrealist act of the 20th century,” so it makes sense that one of the masters of 20th Century American surrealist fiction, Donald Barthelme, was floated as a possible assailant. Barthelme was by most accounts a bit of a madman (he allegedly served as the inspiration for Jeff Bridges’s character, Bad Blake, in Crazy Heart) given to epic reimaginings of what New York City life could be (his short story, “The Balloon,” wherein a giant balloon peacefully invades Manhattan, is one of the most insanely beautiful reflections on the intersection of art and intimate relationships ever committed to print). He also once wrote a story that contained the phrase “what’s the frequency?” and the name “Kenneth,” so it’s possible that it could have been him though the evidence is, admittedly, as thin as a laundry line (in the end it was determined that William Tager, who killed an NBC stagehand in 1994, was responsible). Even so, there’s something deliciously apocalyptic in imagining this primitive meeting of writer and anchorman, not unlike when Ernest Hemingway and Wallace Stevens encountered each other in a Key West bar and, instead of discussing their totemic influence over American letters, got drunk, insulted each other, and then got into a fistfight.
“I like Dan Rather,” Peter Buck wrote. “He’s a fine newsman, an interesting person to talk to, and quite a bit nuttier than most of those media types (I consider that a good thing). That said, nothing in my rich and varied life prepared me for the experience of performing behind him as he ‘danced’ and ‘sang’ ‘What's the Frequency, Kenneth?’” All of which is to say, if you, like Mr. T in Rocky III, are interested in pain, watch the brief but bruising clip of Dan Rather singing the song live with R.E.M. The man may deliver a bizarre non sequitur like no other (ex: This race is hotter than a Times Square Rolex—I know that you’d rather walk through a furnace in a gasoline suit than consider the possibility John Kerry will lose in Ohio—We used to say if a frog had side pockets, he’d carry a handgun—This is one of the so-called “big enchiladas”), but he’s got as much business singing as a pelican has wearing gabardine slacks.
So what now? What have I been trying to say in this essay? That in the latter half of 1994 I lived in what my nostalgic nature demands I call, despite evidence otherwise, a gilded age? That in the last of those pre-internet years I was lucky enough to find a song that would spirit me through the many seasons of my life? That a newsman could take a punch and turn it into a punchline, that by transubstantiating violence into comedy he turned whatever victimhood he and others might have wanted for him into a weird kind of dignity? That a band who was born the year I was born would weather the shifting musical sands to remain not just relevant but essential and who in their wisdom would break up before they had the chance to descend like so many before them into a cover band of themselves?
It strikes me that Nirvana never got the chance to make the decision R.E.M. made, that Cobain defined a generation but never got to see where that generation went. Whenever anyone writes about grunge—or any musical movement—they wind up writing about how it ended and in this I’m no different, though what I’m more interested in is endings: about how we decide to end things and how those ends can be tragic or hopeful, about how things can get better even when you’re certain they never will, about the beauty in the passage of all things despite the pain of them being past, about how all I want is for you to understand me and it’s okay if you never do.

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020). The recipient of the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The Best American Poetry 2021, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, and Prairie Schooner. He never saw R.E.M. live but he was once headbutted at a Collective Soul concert. More at www.adamodavis.com. 

mo daviau on “gentlemen”

The following is not an accurate representation of indie rock history, but bear with me for a minute.
In the beginning, there was Beat Happening.
     And this baby indie band was a very innocent baby.
Imagine, if you will, that you are a teenager in, say, 1993. And you find the first Beat Happening album, with the yellow cover with the drawing of the cat in the rocket ship.
And you, tender and green and so, so young, hear Calvin Johnson sing this:

To me
The best part of sex
Is walking home holding hands
After swimming in the lake

You are probably white. You probably laugh and feel uncomfortable when “Baby Got Back” comes on the stereo in your mom’s car. You will go to college and DJ at the radio station, and your sex life for the sum total of those four years of good grades and late nights with friends at the 24-hour diner will be just that: walking home holding hands after swimming in the lake. Your music—your life, really—speaks of heartbreak and wistfulness and a self-awareness that will take you decades to realize doesn’t serve you for shit.
Fast forward a quarter of a century, and in your horny middle age, you will drop the needle on an old Afghan Whigs album and ask yourself why the only indie band of your youth that fucked were these guys.

The cover of the album Gentlemen depicts two children, maybe around nine or ten, fully clothed but assuming the very adult positions of post-coital consternation. That girl is about to get slammed with a world of hurt. You know it. I know it. But she’s not the focal point of the photo. The boy is. 
Who posed those children for the photo, and what was said to that girl to make her make that face?
He’s about to dump you and deliver some long-winded, high-minded monologue as to why, but really it’s because he’s fucking someone else.. 
Look like you don’t know that yet, except you do but you’re hanging onto a shred of hope that he really does love you, or at least this isn’t yet another fuck-and-run.
Look like you’re waiting for him to say something you want to hear. 
Look like it’s the nanosecond before you know without a doubt that you’re going to die right there on that bed if you don’t hear what you need to hear.
I understand that Gentlemen, the album, in its entirety, is not about her experience.
Frontman Greg Dulli’s goal here isn’t necessarily orgasm, his or any woman’s, or the shared transcendence of sensual union, but some nebulous self-actualization achieved through sex. The woman isn’t the subject. She isn’t even the thing that is desired, per se. She is necessary but fleeting, an occasional obstacle, an inconvenience.
I’ve spent the last few years of my life trying to explain, using the insufficient medium known as the English language, the psychological motivations of men and women in their pursuit of…what? Sex? Avoidance of death? Self-actualization? The divine?

A few years ago, I traveled to Italy to promote the Italian translation of my novel. I was invited to an English language book club meeting in an apartment in Rome, and when I arrived, after noting the wine and the box of freshly-fried supplì on the kitchen table, I watched each of the Italian readers buzz around the room kissing each other’s cheeks hello. But when they got to me, the American author and guest, they stopped themselves, straightened their backs, and offered their hands for me to shake. “Hello,” they said with a cold formality. “It is nice to meet you.”
What have you heard about Americans? I wondered. I knew. We don’t kiss each other’s faces. We don’t do that, and the Italians knew, and maybe felt sad for us.
Americans are totally repressed about such things.
There was nothing sexual about any of this kissing business, but someone had told someone to not kiss the cheeks of the American author. Or they knew. All those healthy Italians, with their olive oil and fresh tomatoes and their oxytocin from their daily supply of face kisses. I wanted them to kiss my face, and a few times, to certain Italians. And some of them did, but I had to ask for it. But sometimes asking for it felt just as strange and dirty as if I were asking for a finger up the butt from a stranger in the bathroom at a nightclub.
We’d be healthier if we were a people who kissed each other’s faces. But we’re not. And that’s why we have songs like Gentlemen.

In the ‘90s indie pantheon, you could have angst (as evidenced by Nirvana and its antecedents), you could bop around the room to two chords to celebrate your extended childhood (Beat Happening and its heirs), or, very rarely, you could bear witness to the musings of a virulent horndog whose sexual conquests were predatory and desultory in equal measures (The Afghan Whigs). 
But what set apart Dulli’s angst from the angst of his labelmates and contemporaries was the depth of disgust he allowed himself to express, both to himself and to the emotional trainwrecks he left behind. While The Afghan Whigs were certainly grunge-adjacent, based on their status as a Sub Pop band, their sound was audacious, influenced by R&B, big and brassy and full of flash, did not sport the clichéd plaid flannel. This is a sound that wears a suit. And indeed, the Whigs wore suits and gold rings on their fingers, with Dulli gazing deep into your eyes, as if he wants whatever is at the bottom of your soul and knows he’s going to get it.
When Dulli begs his listeners to understand, understand, he’s a gentleman, it’s raw and real and uncomfortable. He plays both the villain and the victim. He knows he’s both and he needs you to understand how conflicted he is about that. There is a moment in the middle of the song, when the tempo of the song decreases, (“I waited for the joke/it never did arrive”) as if the band needs to take a breather in the middle of so much exertion, where the demons relent just a little, but then Dulli’s back in the ring, punching even harder as the sound battles towards its end.
Listening to an R&B song made by a Black artist, I would feel a little more loved and cherished than I do in the Dulliverse. I guess if you, as a woman, are going to fuck the well-fed white boys, you better know the psychodrama. I’m not getting roses from his man. This song is not about the glory of my ass. This is all about him. I think about all of the hours of Joni Mitchell’s sadness I have nodded along to, knowing that my role as a heterosexual woman is to grieve and endure and never ask for too much. I think about how many times in recent years that I have lied on the bed with that exact same frozen anticipation on that little girl’s face, only with the burning shame that I am now older and should know better.

I found myself pondering something that the last guy said to me on his way out the door, about the women who go for him, the women he chooses, being “submissive women.”
LOL.
You’re not a Dom, I wished I had said. You’re just tall.
For most of the last decade, I lived in Portland, Oregon, where I wrote and ate ramen at cramped wooden counters and, for a time, attended the Southeast Portland Munch, a weekly gathering of people interested in kink and BDSM that met at a gay bar that made especially delicious nachos.
At that point in my life, I sometimes called myself a Domme, but I also knew that I was just tall.
In Portland, I learned that the proper answer to “are you submissive?” is “you tell me.”
Because I may be a six-foot tall woman in middle age with a streak of gray in her hair, but if you are a gifted Dominant, gifted enough to not demand a partner that is small and young and inexperienced enough to make you feel bigger and stronger than you actually are, then I am yours, Sir.
You tell me.
You show me. You show me not by the size of your body or the tone of your voice in your commands, you show me not by calling yourself a Dom out loud in a room full of other men doing the same. You show me you have earned the right to call yourself that when you see into me. When you are so emotionally present with a woman that you can intuit her needs in the moment. When you see your position not as a self-given title or a quick fix for a fragile ego but as an enormous responsibility. When you know that you know that her submission is a gift, that a woman is trusting you with her physical and emotional safety, that when you agree to take someone to the darkest of places, you do so with love and care and concern for that person’s well-being. Show me that you know how to protect me. Show me that you know that a selfish Dom is a dangerous Dom. Show me you’re coming from a place of strength, not weakness. I’m not young anymore and I can smell weakness. I have seen it so many times on men who will choose to destroy a woman rather than put out their own internal trash fires. And if that’s the case there, well…
Then you don’t understand me. And damnit, I am worth understanding.

The thing is, though: if you read the online histories of Gentlemen that came out around 2014, when Rhino Records reissued the album and it got a fair bit of press, you’ll know that Dulli actually was a gentleman in the way that an older relative might understand that word to mean. In Spin magazine at that time, he wrote, “When you’re sad or angry or things aren’t going well in your life, and in your mind you’re looking for blame placement and shooting all the rounds at everybody else — that’s a slippery moment. That song [What Jail is Like] is blaming other people for my problems, and I had yet to examine my own culpability, and full-stop examined it on that one.”
I understand, Greg. I understand that exact moment where, despite what the culture tells men about what they are owed by women, that you stepped the fuck up. You saw yourself, cooties and all, and called bullshit on your own damn self. And that is so little to ask, and so much, too. And the rage behind it. The roar of those guitars and the crash of those drums will force you towards your darkest corners, your most hideous shadows.
In my mid-forties, I’m still smashing my trauma against the trauma of men who hide behind sex and big words to protect the tiny, scared little boy cowering inside. Why did my last lover, his bigger-than-mine body on top of mine, consider the thinness of my wrists as he fucked me, and how he very easily could have broken them? And when he took those skinny wrists and held them down over my head, as if I were actually going to try to get away? What, of all the broken bits inside of him, was he trying to heal in that fleeting moment? 
His trauma won, though. Or that’s what it felt like to me. My redemption versus his freedom. My trauma required his compassion, his responsibility; his trauma demanded my disappearance, my irrelevance. 
The cover of Gentlemen looks a little different when you replace the kids with actual damaged adults, still playing that shit out. And, I wonder, as I listen to the ancient wailings of Greg Dulli again as a grown-ass woman, if I were ever the type to merely be happy with walking home from the lake, what my life would look like. What less pain would feel like. Where does my anger get to go when a lover throws me over to smother his fears? I listen, though, as Dulli demands from my stereo that I understand him. He’s pretty sexy when he does it. He’s a gentleman. He’s ashamed and it burns. And I still listen. I listen in hopes that this time, finally, it will be different.

Mo Daviau is the author of Every Anxious Wave, a time travel/indie rock novel that was published five years ago. Her essays have appeared in two previous Xness tournaments, as well as The Rumpus, The Offing, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Nailed Magazine, and others. Her soup-making game has been particularly on point during the pandemic. Her favorites include avgolemono, chicken tortilla, and sausage/potato/kale.