round 1

(3) smashing pumpkins, “today”
swatted
(14) the flys, “got you (where i want you)”
337-195
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 8.

paul hurh on “today”

The first guitar: plucked naked, falling intervals. Thin, fragile, bare, yet as perfunctorily positive as a jack-in-the-box, crank handle jaggering forward the metronomic wait.

Macomb, Illinois. 1994. Lunch. Jammed into the back of someone’s parent’s car brimming with awkward testosterone and so many knees, I first heard the porcelain music box chime that opens Smashing Pumpkins’s “Today.” I remember arguing about the song, “Today” or “No Rain”? Writing this essay, I seem to be transported back to that car to finish a debate that surely no one else remembers. Along the way, I’ll try to describe my insular hometown, circa 1994, in a way that will generate exception from anyone who lived there, and I’ll mount some kind of defense of a generation that would reject anyone speaking for it.
Macomb, pop. 19,341 in the last census, is an isolated prairie/college town in west central Illinois, surrounded by a flat monotony of farmland that is almost sublime. At first glance, it could be lifted from Norman Rockwell—the town square with cupolas on the courthouse, ice cream stand on the corner, quaint library with “Carnegie” etched above its doors. On the surface, and for the first thirteen years of boyhood at least, it’s a sunny slice of Americana, preserved like can-filling cherry pie under a glass dish.
The surface of “Today” is also sunny. The major key, the undeniably upbeat chorus: “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known,” Billy Corgan sings. But under the cheerful exterior is a darkness and desperation: “I’ll burn my eyes out / before I get out.” I submit, and I have when reminiscing with fellow friends from Macomb in the years since, that under the surface of Macomb is also something dark: an evil magic, a forgotten curse of ancestors or ancients, a substrata of desperation and despair.    
I look back with some horror on the rebelliousness of youth, and though I feel that another story could be written from the point of view of those teachers and parents and less angst-ridden students, who, themselves horrified, tried to mollify and rein in what may have seemed to them the uncoiling of the devil in his antinomian splendor, it’s the kids’ story I want to tell. In hindsight, there was so much toxic sludge. But out of that sludge bloomed unknown, unrecognized, flora—beautiful in its own way—and perhaps through the beauty that complicates the irony of “Today,” I can make a case for it. A glass case for monsters.  
You know where there wasn’t glass? Macomb High School--a nightmare of brutalist architecture seemingly designed by someone who recognized teenagers as Lovecraftian horrors and was inspired by some Pirenesi fever dream to contain them. Key to this plan was the complete absence of windows from the classrooms. It felt like a penitentiary, a solid brick edifice without natural light, squatting in the middle of the windswept plains like a troll, heavy and grinning. Open campus lunch, when kids would flee amid shouts and gravel as one after another economy sedan or mud-specked pickup truck peeled out in a daily drama of escape, was a Dionysian vortex in the center of what felt like a sci-fi experiment in institutionalization.

Hearing “Today” for the first time in the little bubble of companionship that those crowded cars offered feels to me now entirely appropriate. The right venue for the pretty sound of perfunctory waiting and the narrowness of the constricted youth, all the narrower for all the space and infinite horizon limning it.

The second guitar: four measures in that opening jingle is buffeted by a wall of sound: all stops pulled, full crunch distortion. I-V-IV, a basic inversion of rock’s conventional spinal I-IV-V ascent. It is the same wait, you can still hear the jack-in-the-box pedaling. The waiting isn’t over, it’s louder.

And here’s the thing anyone or google will tell you: the central irony of “Today” is that, despite its seemingly positive chorus “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known!”, it’s actually an extremely dark song, apparently about surviving suicide and depression. It’s all right there when you look: “pink ribbon scars will never forget,” “I’ll tear my heart out / before I get out.” “A chirpy song about my suicidal thoughts that kids can sing along to,” Corgan once wrote of it. 
So “Today” is a contradiction. It is soft, quiet, ballad-like. And it is loud and huge and distorted. It is positive and celebratory. Desperate and suicidal. Ironic, like the generation that it has become associated with.
I was born in 1976. There were fewer births in the U.S. in 1976 than in any other year since. Gen X is not really a generation but a gap between them, a gap we are reminded of in every surviving shopping mall in the U.S. You knew that the Gap was named the generation gap, right? Before we were gen X, we were the gap. I’ll let you sit with that for a moment.
So there were fewer of us. Less buying power in an increasingly capitalist, market-driven world. Our music was “alternative.” We were known as slackers. Some of us adopted grunge which, in the most generous accounting, was a style based on not caring about market forces or what we were supposed to do. We are a generation of contrarians, for better or worse. Or maybe neither better nor worse. Don’t put your evaluative categories on me.
One avenue of escape: the garage band. I was in one of the several blossoming, no, fermenting, rock bands in the high school. There were several. Wal-Mart Funk Shop. Korn (named before anyone knew about that other band, Korn). Baked Not Fried. Dandelion Boy. Others whose names I have forgotten. At that time, I was playing in the Mystic Puppies. We played Alice in Chains, Offspring, Quiet Riot, but also maybe Van Morrison? And, am I remembering “My Sharona”? I’m not sure—it wasn’t like any of it made sense. But I am sure that we played “Today.” We played it in the wrong key, and we played it without the third guitar part. At Stunt Night, I wore a hat made of whipped cream that melted down my face, over my swim goggles, and left my bass sticky for months.

Stunt Night is an MHS tradition. It is half pep-rally/half Jackass. It happens before Homecoming. The story was that after one famous stunt night where a band took sledgehammers to four console TVs in unison, puncturing the cathode ray tubes and deafening the entire audience the day before the homecoming dance, students had to have stunts pre-approved. That band, before my time, might have been the band that would later become the industrial 90s band, Stabbing Westward. They would become famous with songs with Macomb-like titles like “Shame,” and “Save Yourself.” “Westward” in the band’s name refers to west central Illinois, home of Western Illinois University, or, Macomb. 
The other recent claim to fame is Marcus Dunstan, a favorite at Stunt Night where he would show his homemade movies on VHS tape. “Captain Macomb” with its violent stunts brought the house down. Marcus has since become a recognized filmmaker in the horror genre, writing graphic movies about bondage and torture and painful escape, oftentimes with a dark wit that those of us from Macomb will recognize. He was also, I believe, a member of the Wal-Mart Funk Shop. Papers will yet be written on the Funk Shop and its influence on Saw VI. Do you see it yet? The dark undercurrent of the town? Some may argue with me, but I know I’m not alone in finding it gothic.
I’m not sure what students do today for Stunt Night, but when we were there it was an invitation to line step. Pushing the envelope of the acceptable to test authority. The rock bands did it by playing the Rage Against the Machine and breaking TVs. The Bomberettes (facepalm, do I have to explain that Macomb’s mascot was the Bomber, and that dancing female Bombers are Bomberettes?) did it by choreographing increasingly racy dance moves that pulled influence from Paula Abdul’s “Cold-Hearted Snake.” One number with folding chairs apparently caused much hand-wringing from the school board.
Eventually, though, the bands started playing shows on their own, away from parents and supervision. An entrepreneuring set of seniors would secure a venue—a vacant storefront or a cornfield, space was not hard to find—and high school students would gather, largely, perhaps totally, unsupervised. Bands would play. Moshing flourished. These shows, called Binky’s, were the closest thing to Lollapalooza that most of us would get to, and it was entirely organized by high school kids. It was the stuff of parental nightmares and it was lovely.

What has all this have to do with “Today”? I have to apologize, an earlier version of this essay spent more time analyzing the song, the impeccable and restrained arrangement, and discussing the band—so idiosyncratic, diverse, and, I believe, midwest in its goth/prog/metal/psychedelic sound. For there was always something about the obvious effort, the virtuosity and polish, in the Smashing Pumpkins that spoke to the Macomb in me. Most grunge had perfected the sound of careless rough drafts—take it or leave it, the angst was raw and the directness, true. In the Smashing Pumpkins, the rawness was polished, worked over, scrubbed until it glinted, turned ironic. It is what one does with time. 
Binky’s, Stunt Night, Captain Macomb, the proliferation of garage bands: though the 90s in Macomb could feel like an us/them battlefield against the control of parents and authorities, creativity coursed through the adversity. Life, compressed over eons, becomes energy. And even then, someone could point out: was any of it real or were they just acted out tropes from so many movies? From Children of the Corn to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (both Midwest films), generation X was defined as a problem, as an evil behind the corn or rebels who shirked responsibility. Never having power, why not internalize that identity? Rather than fix the world we would never have power over, why not build our own alternative one, declare it the greatest we had ever known?

The third guitar: counterpoint melody, subtle and threaded behind the other two parts. It is fleeting, an accompaniment and adaptation that deviates slightly, occasionally, from the melodic formula. Harmonic, absently fluttering among the gloom, as unoccupied hands will shape a straw’s wrapper into ephemeral braided sculpture, or ballpoint pens, like a medium’s planchette, will trace strange blue geometries, arcane constellations, while your words spiral down corded phonelines that stretch away across hollow train-whistle nights.

What if the wait were the destination?
This is the part of the essay that would recuperate “Today,” the generation. Because really, the song isn’t ironic, at least, not merely. It is only ironic if you take it too objectively, if you judge it from some predetermined site of value, of a concept of good and bad, of what you take to be greatness.
But decentered, rejecting dominant values, resisting projections, defiant and rebellious and creative and juvenile, the song floats somewhere between celebrating our own ability to define a personal greatness out of suffering and mourning that such greatness will always be nothing more than a moment receding.
Even in its truncated impatience the maligned millennial “yolo” signals the challenge of that generation: you only live once, so make much of time. Yolo, for better or worse, is about preserving time because it feels scarce. There is so much to do and only one life, so don’t regret what you didn’t do.
But this is emphatically not the message of “Today.” For the problem of gen X was not at all about preserving time. There was so much time, oceans of it. In another place, Billy Corgan sang, “my boredom has outshined the sun.” For a generation, or at least my midwestern corner of it, that had lots of time and little to do, “Today” is about making the mental flip to accommodating the wait, the failure, the endless and vacant afternoons. Starting a band.
This may be the greatest irony, that subjectively what “Today” expresses isn’t ironic: today is the greatest day because, according to the song, the rest will be worse: “Can’t live for tomorrow / tomorrow’s much too long.” In rebellion and rejection, the song defines a new form of acceptance. We accept our lack of satisfaction. Not in order to then become satisfied, but rather, perversely, to work with all the world seems to give. To live for tomorrow, to live for a positive future, to be the change you want to see in the world—these are all admirable propositions, but they are not what this song offers, nor is it what gen X did particularly well.

What this song offers is a reason for living not grounded in purpose. It is hedonistic—“I want to turn you on”—but even then it isn’t about being turned on oneself. It is about giving pleasure, giving the feeling of meaning within a meaningless universe. Pessimism does not mean that you can’t have a good time.
So what I take this song to say is: we do not live because we will do good. We do not live even to enjoy ourselves. We live to turn others on. We will not redeem the world or prove a worth beyond ourselves. We accept suffering and in that acceptance convert hopelessness, not to hope, but to creative arousal. To the Wal-Mart Funk Shops. To dances with folding chairs. To homegrown music festivals in muddy cornfields. To elaborate brackets of songs and nostalgic essays.
In its best moments, and I do not deny all of its selfishness and myopia, such a message turns the long frustrations of life, the periods between our moments of joy, into the occasions for fellowship. The jostle of your body against mine in the back of a car, uncomfortable, listening to music alone together.
Today is the greatest day. Gen X, the greatest generation. Macomb, the greatest hometown.

Paul Hurh researches and teaches 19th century American literature and the gothic. He sometimes writes reviews of horror movies at rockpaperhatchet.com but not lately.

stephanie austin on “got you (where i want you)” 

Hey, summer 1998. We were fucking again, and I lied to all my friends about it. When I say I lied, I mean they knew because I told them through tears or alcohol or both or because it was Wednesday. I tried to make them all understand.

Hey, what is the point of this? Let’s close our eyes and be lulled into the slow build of the Flys’ song Got You (Where I Want You). The pick-up of the drums. Oh hey, the way you weren’t paying attention then suddenly you’re in one of those small talk conversations getting hot because you’re super attracted to the other person. Can we agree small talk often becomes foreplay?
What’s your favorite song?
Tough one. I like the Beatles and certain levels of pop music and Fiona Apple.
     Tell me your sign.
Gemini. It means I’m dual personality. Haha. It means I’m crazy. Haha.
     I think you’re smart, you sweet thing.
He shushed me once after we got high because I wanted some chocolate cake. I kept saying chocolate cake over and over. His brother got mad, I guess, at the loudness, and so I got shushed.
     I told my best friend how he got me high for the first time. I said, he inhaled the pot into his mouth, and then he blew the smoke into my mouth—shotgunning—and I’m obsessed with his voice and she told me she thought I might be turning into a drug addict.

The Flys released their seductive hit Got You (Where I Want You) in 1998. The song peaked in the top five, according to Wikipedia but a Billboard reference has it listed as peaking at number 7. Got You was their closest brush with a number one song and though they put out a few more albums with varying but similar sound, they could not replicate Got You’s chart success.
I should note you can’t through a single blurb or article about The Flys without reading that Adam Paskowitz, their lead singer, is from the “first family of surfing” and if you read farther, Paskowitz and his wife run a non-profit that seeks to clean up and eliminate plastic from oceans and beaches. I digress. Back to the 90s and youth and no accountability.
The Flys are categorized as “post-modern alternative” and “post grunge” though most often cited with the catch-all “alt-rock” label. SPIN magazine arbitrarily ranked Got You as number 28 out of 88 best alt-rock songs of 1998. Kurt Cobain had been dead four years when Got You came out.
I dug up an old MTV article called The Flys’ Sound Attracts Swarms of Listeners by Jon Vena. In the piece Vena states, “Paskowitz, the lanky, tattooed singer for Hollywood natives The Flys, has something most others his age don’t: a debut single that’s creating a national buzz.”
     Oh, was it a swarm? Oh, there was a buzz? Fly puns, man.
Also, there’s this line I enjoy both in and out of context: “Since then, Trauma has taken charge of the Flys fly-by-night fortune.”
     (Trauma was Trauma Records, a record company who signed several of the 90s biggies like Bush and No Doubt. Nevermind. Doesn’t matter. Trauma is trauma.)
The rest of the MTV article talks about Paskowitz’s takes on the bands’ new fame, and at one point, he mentions how he doesn’t mind all the screaming teenagers because teens are how you live or die on the charts, and then he says his own girlfriend is a teenager. (Wait, what?) I am sure he meant she was 18 or 19.
     The pleading lyrics and reggae-jam-funk-hard rock sound of Got You flew into our vulnerable consciousness and landed with a quiet yet noticeable thunk onto our hearts that we simply could not swat away. (Heh.)

In July of 1998, I was drunk at a cabin party resolving to call him again, and for real this time be ok with the arrangement I didn’t know was an arrangement because no one at that party wanted me, and I wanted someone to want me, and the want to be wanted made me sick but in a way that made me whole and the Got You part is fine—just fine—but the parenthesis (Where I Want You) is where I crawled between and stayed, trapped, begging to be consumed.

The Flys: wrong plural but clever and in their video for the song, they have slow-motion Katie Holmes smiling, running, pushing all those kids into the water. I told myself I was Katie Holmes. I told myself I was the one pushing.

Small talk.
Maybe just a smile.
He said he wanted to brush my hair. He wanted to go get a brush, and brush my hair, and when he said this, I sat in his lap on his bed in his dark room, and we hadn’t kissed or anything yet, and I thought what a crazy fucking thing to say someone I want to brush your hair.
     Could we talk for awhile?
We talked about his roommate who’d been paralyzed in a motorcycle accident and who sat in front of the TV and smoked a lot of pot and never opened the curtains. We talked about how when I pulled the door closed on his truck, I did it too hard. He told me to stop slamming his truck door so hard.
     I’m dying here.
The dying part means struggle. I’m struggling here. But the dying part is also the poetry, and the poetry is all I’ve ever wanted.

I Googled the lyrics because for twenty years I thought Adam Paskowitz was just rapping nonsense in the middle, which was cool I like nonsense, but there are actual lyrics:

(rub it up, baby girl, torture me like no other.)

Here’s what happened. The guy I thought I loved from 1997 to 1999 taught me how to give blow jobs. I hesitated on the sex for a long time because I was a virgin and thought it should be special, but then if he didn’t like me he wouldn’t take me out to look at the stars on the island and pee off the back of his truck while telling me he thought we should go back to his parents’ house because surely they’d left by now.

(suffer, suffer me don’t get no rougher)

I wrote him a letter and I told him I loved him, and he called me to come over after he got it, and I sat in his bedroom and told him I thought we should maybe try going out in the daylight, and he said he was a fucked up person, and I asked why he called me after I wrote him a letter where I told him I loved him, and he said he didn’t know, and he showed me to his door, and I walked outside right off a cliff.  

I wrote a draft of this essay with a heavy focus on the history of The Flys then scrapped it. I wrote a draft of this essay in second person then scrapped it. The first draft felt too faux music critic then too many feelings and too much story in the second draft.  
I’ve spent months chasing the feeling Got You gives me. I want to capture the want.
I listened to Got You so much since the summer I had to take a break. I dug out my old journals about that guy I thought I loved and read a few pages looking for a sad, angsty, lonely end-stage teenager but instead found a girl who was a little more optimistic. Yes, she was a mess, running headfirst into self-destruction holding a big red flag over her head but more upbeat than I remembered. Why? She was at the beginning. She had a guy who liked her (he did, at first), who she met on the beach, who asked for her number after they talked about what they liked to do in the godforsaken town they lived in. He was her first of everything. She hadn’t been through a failed marriage, three years of infertility treatment, job losses, financial losses, pet loss, cousin loss, father loss, grandma loss. (And bonus not a bonus? That girl could binge drink all night, wake up and drink a Coke and smoke a cigarette and go about her damn day.)
The Flys’ Got You (Where I Want You) represents the beginning. Or maybe a beginning. A possible beginning. It’s that infatuation that’s not yet sickness that masquerades as hope and maybe could even be hope. It’s that half beat when you meet someone new, and you don’t know their shit, and they don’t know yours, and the world is open. Got You (Where I Want You) wiggles in and settles into your body, lifting it for half-a-fucking-blessed second as a representation of what could be, not what will be, and not what is. The song that tells your body to use its own serotonin, the song that tells your body hope feels good and so we will close our eyes and hum along.

Stephanie Austin writes fiction and memoir and lives in Phoenix, AZ. Her essays have been published in The New England Review's Web Series, Spry Lit, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Sun. Her short stories have been published most recently in Carve, Pembroke Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, Jellyfish Review, and Pithead Chapel. She has a story forthcoming from Bridge Eight. You can find her on Twitter @lucysky or her website stephanieaustin.net