the second round

(15) throwing muses, “not too soon”
knocked off
(10) pavement, “summer babe (winter version)”
270-234
and will play on in the sweet 16

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 17.

HEIDI CZERWIEC ON “NOT TOO SOON”

*Gasp*

There’s a gender gap in grunge.

Despite Hole and Sleater-Kinney and Liz Phair (exceptional, but exceptions, not rule). Despite Lilith Fair.

I know her. I knew it even then. Throwing Muses’ “Not Too Soon” on a mixtape I made myself in ’92 titled Girls With Burly Voices, a cassette full of Riot Grrrls, the word a growl, a girl in babydoll dress or vintage slip with shitkicker boots, walking contradiction, Vamp on my lips as I sang along—sexually-liberated—about blow jobs, my choker necklace an erotic asphyxiation; a time when I plucked my eyebrows and pussy bald as a baby, but insisted I wasn’t infantilized, attended strip clubs not for my own pleasure but to perform transgression, to prove to the guys I was cool with it. Back then I was fearless, desiring to be desired and feared, a bottom and a top, wrapped up like a doll in bad dreams and broken arms.

I know her, Tanya Donelly asserts, and she did. Some sensitive poet dude wrote “woman is muse or she is nothing,” and bandmates Tanya and her stepsister Kristin Hersh threw that right out, rejecting woman as projection for woman as projectile.

And they threw down, nucleus of the feminist punk movement – Pixies opened for Throwing Muses in ’86, and Donelly and Kim Deal would become Breeders in ’89 before Donelly left to grow Belly in ’91, a swelling that birthed girl band after girl band.

But first, I know her in ’92, a girl with a burly voice belting “Not Too Soon,” a song the BBC described as “probably the catchiest song she ever wrote, which is impressive given that the chorus is essentially her clearing her throat.” The singer knows romantic tropes, knows this guy’s a manipulator, and she is not having that shit. She recognizes and declines the role she’s supposed to play: the chorus growls I know herrrrrr before outright sneering, Neer neer-neer neer-neer. The bridge, spoken in hushed, halting tones à lá “The Leader of the Pack,” addresses whoever you is in quasi-romantic rock mode—The last time I saw you, you were standing in the dark—only to coldly mock and reject you: and with a freezing face, I watched you fall apart.

And yet. To return to that chorus, right after she growls I know herrrrr and sneers, her voice dissolves into a soft, girlish baby-babble, punctuated with a *gasp*, words reduced to sound, to silence.

There was a moment in the Nineties, as Riot Grrrls organized and wrote zines and formed bands, when it felt like equality, when I was fearless and loud and unafraid to use my mouth. In my mouth You might as well be dead…if you’re afraid to fall sounds like empowerment, but it’s a weapon in the wrong one. I fell for him. It doesn’t matter which one. He used that mouth to abuse me, he a weapon made of silence I wanted to fill with words. When a woman in another couple got her tongue pierced, he was fascinated. You should do that, he murmured to me later in bed. True, I had tattoos, as well as several piercings, some of which I’d inflicted myself. Why wasn’t I willing to alter myself further? Mark my tongue a tool for his pleasure, a swelling that swallowed my words, jammed with pearls and no nirvana, a clacking behind my teeth, cliché. Reduced to sounds, to silence. I couldn’t look you in the face/ And tell you that it turned me on/ It makes my stomach turn.

That moment may have felt, fleetingly, like equality. Or so we convinced ourselves. When I hear “Not Too Soon” now, I want that girl with the growl again, want the badass back, her gone to history both mine and changing times. But those sensitive slacker dudes, who wounded us with withholding, who led us to believe we were in charge—of saving them, or sexually so long as we pleased them—though they seemed kinder and gentler, still dominated. Since then, we’ve backslid: Gamergate doxing the doxies, gone from Riot Grrrls to Pussy Riot imprisoned and gulagged to grabbing pussies.

I know her. I’m not alone, lots of me in #MeToo.

*Gasp*

Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

NOT HERE, BABE! katie moulton on “summer babe (winter version)”

Note: Stephen Malkmus was born May 30, 1966. Twenty years later, on May 30, 1986, I was born. This is interesting only to me, and is included here as warning of big Gemini energy.

Summer Babe (Winter Version) #1

Spring semester, sophomore year of college, I had a crush on a guy in my art-writing class. He was the kind of guy who drove from Boston to Austin for SXSW over spring break, where he’d stumbled into a secret show with the Flaming Lips and Peaches. He was extremely tall and wore dark skinny jeans before it was mainstream (again). Based on my friend’s vantage point across from him in the circle of small desks, she nicknamed him The Bulge. When he friended me on Facebook (just two years old at that point and socially supreme), I clicked straight to his Music section. While my own page listed assorted 70s rock acts, 90s hip-hop, 00s emo, and the Garden State soundtrack, his was a single sentence:  

I pretty much only listen to Pavement now.

Oh shit. Pavement was a massive gap in my music knowledge. The name signified alternative cool, an arty punk that seemed to have nothing to do with Green Day, which was my foundational icon of northern California punk. I liked melody and hooks! I liked sweetness in my mosh pits! I could be arch, but never fashionably so. By naming Pavement—only Pavement—the crush signaled that he was 1) discerning, 2) into irony and messiness, 3) beyond trends, and 4) beyond time, considering we were five or six years old when the band broke out. Was Pavement also beyond me?
By the end of term, I ginned up the courage to invite him to a party thrown by my upperclassmen friends. First I had to prepare, so I logged onto LimeWire and found mislabeled songs from Pavement’s 1992 studio debut, Slanted and Enchanted.
“Oh, the summer of ‘’92,” Rob Sheffield wrote in the Rolling Stone album guide. “Nirvana was on the radio. Corporate rock was dead. The end of the Reagan-Bush era was so close we could taste it. We were young and in love and the world was changing.” I didn’t hold any nostalgia for the summer of ’92—or any real memories, other than a blurry clip of Bill Clinton playing sax on Arsenio Hall. But I recognized the irony in even Sheffield’s introduction to the band. If grunge-gods Nirvana were on the radio, then Pavement was the alternative to alternative.
The album’s opening track, “Summer Babe (Winter Version),” blows open with dense fuzzy guitars, a compressed squall with no starting point. The tempo is plodding and all over the place. But the palatably heavy drone is woven with skittering cymbal and undeniable melody. It’s just three chords. It’s got no hook, but it’s catchy. The guitar lines are pretty, almost wistful.
Then the vocals shamble through the side door, Stephen Malkmus in a laidback deadpan. Ice, baby, he intones—the very first line is a reference that points at the absurdity of our world. (It’s ironic, according to definitions found in the Jagged Little Dictionary.) The song sounds nearly mono, and Malkmus’s vocals are nearly monotone. He delivers increasingly free-form, imagistic lyrics in a laconic drawl: “My eyes stick/ to all the shiny robes/ you wear on the protein delta strip/ in an abandoned houseboat”—what the hell is that? Am I having a stroke?
Malkmus said he wrote the song after college while living in New Jersey but included some imagery from his native Stockton, California. (This was around the same time he was starting Silver Jews with David Berman. See? BIG Gemini energy.) Let’s take his word for it! Besides, if I was going to get it, to be a truly cool listener, I needed to abandon my primitive need for narrative, identifiable image and emotion. I would detach!
Detachment, after all, was what I’d been trying and failing to achieve since elementary school, when I first realized that I was not a kid but a loose jumble of sharp feelings clanking around inside a paper bag. Painfully shy, easily wounded. When “Summer Babe (Winter Version)” was released, I was a quiet, skinny try-hard, playground gravel scarring her knees, fingers chewed bloody. Later, detachment was what they told us to practice in those grim and cheesy Alateen meetings. Under flickering fluorescents at the YMCA, they told us that detachment “did not imply judgement or condemnation.” Detachment—“neither kind nor unkind”—would help us separate from our alcoholic parents. In our minds at least, we could “let go of our obsession with another’s behavior.” We would not allow ourselves to suffer because of someone else’s choices.
The thing is, detachment totally implied judgement, and I was always suffering because of other people’s choices. I couldn’t change what they did and I couldn’t make myself stop feeling it, but I could make wry jokes. In adolescence, irony helped me stand apart from my uncertainty and anger, my all-consuming vulnerability, and sometimes it even made people laugh. (Once, under a pool table, the most popular boy in middle school called me “Jerry Seinfeld” as a compliment, and then put his tongue in my ear. What's the deal with that?)
By the night of the party with the college crush, I got it: Pavement was cool because it sounded tossed off, because it dabbled in discord, because the frayed edges pointed to its own artifice, and the artifice of the whole endeavor. In “Summer Babe,” the closest we get to a refrain arrives at the end of the song: the off-kilter, unharmonized “Every time I turn around I find I’m shot!” Yet the guitar riffs are catchy as hell. They bobbed through the current in my head, humming through the day. I was ready.
However, the most I remember from that night is the boy doing a pull-up from a bus stop pavilion, his skinny jeans belted precariously at the far end of his torso. And crowded into some dim smelly apartment, he mimed highdiving into someone’s cleavage. The Bulge, truly. We weren’t a love match, all right? I realized that not giving a fuck what most people think often means that you give too many fucks about what a smaller group of people think.
I realized that sometimes disaffection is not a pose for deep feeling. And worse than feeling too much—in this case, I didn’t feel a thing.
But all was not lost. The next week Pavement-Only invited me to the campus radio station, where I had the duration of his DJ set to browse the music library and burn as many CDs as I could onto my Dell laptop. I sat on a cracked sofa and smashed-and-grabbed the ABCs of obscure-to-me indie pop and rock from the previous fifteen years: Afghan Whigs, Blonde Redhead, Breeders, Butthole Surfers, Cocteau Twins… The thing about cool guys is that they’re the unwitting gateways for folks like me to get very geeky and uncool about the very things they’re hip to. 
The Bulge and I didn’t keep in touch. By the next semester I noticed the Music section of his Facebook page had changed. It read: I pretty much only listen to The Cars now.

Summer Babe (Winter Version) #2

 In my mid-twenties, I met a guitarist from a band-on-the-rise that all the blogs kept comparing to Pavement. Critics cited the band’s “’90s sounds fueling the fires of 21st-century paranoia”: its mix of art-punk influences, discordant anthems, imagistic lyrics, and the vocal delivery—dryness belying emotion, with a surreal, quotidian humor. Anyway, the blogs were always divining who would be the next Pavement.
When the guitarist learned I’d been a music critic, he asked, “Have you ever thought about writing for Vice? We did a thing with them in Mexico last year.” I said, “I think I’m too sincere for Vice.”
At a summer festival, I hung out with the band in the backstage areas. I liked the guitarist, liked his collared shirt rumpled in the humidity, his long fingers, and his wit, which moved at a tempo I could never quite match. He seemed super talented at detachment. I met other musicians, there to play or just hang out, left sweat marks against a brick wall. A dude told me about running shit at some tentacle of Vice, and how everybody should move to Toronto. I watched the Breeders from a side stage, and nearly touched the hem of Bjork’s gossamer cape. But when the band went further backstage into the artist area, I was turned away. I was kind of cool, but I wasn’t that cool.
After the festival, we took MDMA and at first, I was embarrassingly bad at it. The lead singer kept showing me stark line drawings in his sketchbook, his fingers taut, saying, I saw this. A thick orange horizon, an underground mountain. I saw this. His eyes rattled; my vision went womp womp. Am I having a stroke? Anxiety made my heart lurch into my throat, but when I crashed through into the high, it was like stepping under a waterfall on a glacier.
Rather, the high was also like that singular moment at the center of “Summer Babe (Winter Version).” Throughout the song, Malkmus refuses to emote, sometimes sounding like he’s reading Mad Libs cue cards, finding as many ways as he can to fit in syllables that sound like ice. But after a long guitar solo, just after the two-minute mark, Malkmus stumble-sings, “Drop off the first shiny robe”—and can’t help but laugh in the middle of the lyric. What’s funny about it? Some inside joke, somebody off-mic pulling a face. Maybe he too thinks the lines are ridiculous and nonsensical, and for a second, lets it slip. But the laugh drops as he sings the next line, “I’ve got a lot of things I want to sell, but—” and there’s that flash of intimacy, uncertainty, that but. A micro-pause. But—“Not here, babe!” He immediately undercuts that fleeting vulnerability with a flamboyant, almost sarcastic, shout.
But then Malkmus switches tones yet again, and sings, really sings, for the first time: “You took ’em!”—launching the last note for several measures, holding it in a howl of longing. It’s the most melodic instant of the whole song, and it’s the instant he breaks into true, desperate feeling. What a rush! I believe that emotion. Not because the song insists on it, but because it can only crack open an inch to show it.
The guitarist and I walked slowly around the shady squares of a city neither of us knew. I listened to the cool air moving through every hair on my arm. We traded sketches of our major tragedies, but then talk turned—blessedly—to music. I talked about how, typically, a song called “Summer Babe” would spend verses outlining the particular charms of said babe, building a roomy enough simulacrum for listeners to deposit our own ambivalent romances inside. But with Pavement, “Summer Babe” points to that empty shell—a joke, but not a mean one. I talked about how I always misheard that one long note, that brief break into emotion, as “Don’t gooooooooooo!” because we hear what we’re listening for.
Irony is not the replacement for vulnerability. Detachment doesn’t evacuate feeling. Instead, that gleaming ironic edge points to the sloshing emotions it contains. That edge—the lark of not caring whether we can pull something off, or in front of whom—rescues us from melodrama and from self-seriousness. It also saved Pavement from the limits of genre or era. Despite its popularity and influence, Pavement got to exist outside of grunge. In not trying to fit the sound of the time, they ended up defining it. Malkmus seemed to carry little baggage as he moved on, kept making good albums, whether experimenting or sounding just like the smart-ass slacker they pegged him for in ’92. He called Slanted and Enchanted “probably the best record we made because it’s less self-conscious and has an unrepeatable energy.” It was an amateur recording in a garage, done for a laugh. With “Summer Babe (Winter Version),” Pavement was un-self-conscious, and therefore free to be whatever.
These days, I get accused of being cool because I “know about music.” But the uncool truth is that I talk about music so I can talk about the gaping hole in my chest in polite company. And so I can talk about the gaping hole in your chest without, you know, being weird about it. Look, we’re doing it right now. It’s going all right, isn’t it?
When it was time to go, that summer night after the festival, the guitarist waited for a cab with me in the center of a wide dark boulevard. I told him I’d caught feelings; he said it was just the molly, and we were both right. He said, “You are too sincere for Vice,” and I said, “I can’t believe I took ecstasy and I’m not going to have sex,” and we laughed. Because even though it wasn’t really a joke, it pointed at the frayed edges of the whole thing—the night, the comedown, a version of whatever there was for a minute between us, in parentheses.

Katie Moulton used to have a radio show that opened with audio of Thurston Moore encouraging kids to "destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture." Her writing about music & culture has appeared in the Believer, Oxford American, No Depression, Consequence of Sound, Village Voice, and other places. This spring, she'll be the alum artist-in-residence at Art Omi and a MacDowell fellow. She teaches at Goucher College in Baltimore. Her music-centric audio memoir, Dead Dad Club, will be published by Audible in late May 2021.