the sweet 16

(4) beck, “loser”
lost to
(9) veruca salt, “seether”
446-252
and “seether” will play in the elite 8

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 18.

JESSICA HANDLER ON “LOSER”

Here’s what happens when you agree to write about a song you haven’t been able to get out of your head in twenty-six years. You freeze. You wonder why the song’s been a squatter in your mind for so long, changing locations in your memory but never packing up and leaving. 
“Loser” is an earworm. It’s indestructible, a mental cypher that must be given its due.
Some things that have happened in the two and half decades since “Loser” was a hit; you quit being a television producer, and after giving up on a few choice alternative career attempts became a very good college professor, although back in the day you hated nearly every minute of college and briefly quit that, too. You quit a three-pack a day cigarette habit, grounded your frequent-flyer level recreational drug use, were shamed into getting new front teeth. You married someone actually nice, who didn’t make you cry or break things. You went to graduate school, wrote three books. Forgot how to play guitar, but learned to play drums. Your hair began to gray. You acknowledged that you are fragile.
And you think about how, in 1994, you laughed in the face of soy en perdedor because you knew that the message in the lyric’s in-your-face defiance was true.
     The year that “Loser” was everywhere on the radio, with the lyrics kill the headlights and put it in neutral, I did just that, driving home from my local after having had my usual too much to drink. My gut reaction to the blue lights gaining on me in my rearview mirror was to gun the accelerator and outrun the cops. I killed my headlights, put the car in neutral, and let physics hurtle my Honda Civic up my driveway. And there I sat in total darkness, engine off, as the blue lights sped down my street in pursuit of nothing. I was stupid and lucky and I knew it. Soy un perdedo.
Beck’s first hit went to #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart in 1994. [1] The single was certified Gold that year, and the song continues to hold a place on alternative playlists. That bouncy, goofy, rubber-band boing sound of the tremolo guitar is relentlessly catchy, the number-one character trait for an earworm. The lyrics tumble together in nonsense clusters. Spray paint the vegetables. Beefcake pantyhose. Burnin’ down the trailer park. Fun to say, those bizarre phrases rolling around my mouth like marbles. Fun to bop along, to wait and hold for the pause just before the chorus, and launch back in..
It's not his best song.
Looking now at a video recording of a performance on BBC’s Top of the Pops from 1994, a sitar player who’s a dead ringer for a garden gnome sits stage right, playing the hypnotic, slightly weird to the Western-ear notes. The sound threads through the song’s signature drum and slide guitar, stomping out a hypnotic nod. Center stage, Beck looks nervous and very young. He seems to have a zit on his chin. The dancing crowd, a la “American Bandstand” explodes into cheers at the refrain, Soy en perdedo/I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me. The musicians are playing to track, professionally miming to a recording. During the spoken-word audio clip before the last chorus, Beck gamely and somewhat awkwardly tumbles to the floor and briefly breakdances.
The chorus is a chant, its repetition a reassurance, words in Spanish then English (with the first-year German class question, “speaking German?” thrown into the final chorus), its arrival a relief after the pause—a fermata? caesura?—at the end of the lyric line. (Perhaps, in the spirit of the song’s relentless wordplay, I could call that pause a “stigmata.”)
The year I sang along to Loser was two years after my beloved youngest sister died of a congenital illness that had lurked in her, like the forces of evil in a Bozo nightmare, since her birth. Our other sister was two decades dead of a childhood cancer. I had become the only one left, estranged from our abusive and mentally ill father, clinging emotionally to my intrepid mother, and burning off my days and nights churning on the hamster wheel of a cruel and demanding job in which I was required to shoulder everyone’s troubles but my own. In doing so, I was trying to prove myself immune to the relentless destruction taking my family down.
In the official music video for “Loser,” Beck or someone like him appears to drag a casket on a rope before it scoots along on its own power. A death’s head mask waves into a car windshield, and solarized cheerleaders dance in a cemetery.
The c’mon and dare-me sarcasm in the chorus lyric obscured something real, an in-joke for the grim. Sarcasm, doing its job. Beck told Allen Ginsburg in a 1997 interview in Shambala Sun that the irony in the song “isn’t obvious to everybody.” [2] Beck also discounted the idea that “Loser” is a slacker’s anthem. [3] The slacker’s unwritten creed advocated conspicuous underachievement as the pinnacle of cool. For me, hyperachievement was the Butane in my veins. My first taste of Châteauneuf du Pape occurred in first class on a flight from Miami to Rio de Janeiro, courtesy of my media conglomerate employer. That was me with acrylic nails and a designer shorts-suit (bought at a discount at Loehmann’s) on the way to weeks of deadline-driven celebrity-wrangling-in-a-hotel-ballroom-makeshift-newsroom (this is Beck-level linguistic phrasing, now that I think of it.) That was where a very pissed off Senator from Tennessee inconveniently and untruthfully bawled me out for not booking him on a television show, and I later found myself waylaid at U.S Customs because I honestly did not know what was in the suitcases I was carrying for my gone-to-find-herself-in-the-jungle media personality boss. No one ever did find the sandwich bag of pot in my own garment bag, so I guess I do get some slacker cred there after all.
Someone keeps saying I’m insane to complain. I fought every day to prove to myself, to the world around me because I was a woman in a job usually held by men, to my parents, to my sisters’ legacies that I was no loser. I was indestructible. Nothing would make me fail. And so, I bounced along to “Loser,” the sunny repetitive sound absorbing my own anger and loss. Overwhelmed by life and work and barely past thirty, I courted risk on a daily basis. The song was an extended middle finger to the world, a “fuck you” obscured by a smile. My survival was my defiance.
Earworms don’t spring sui generis like Athena from the head of Zeus. “Loser” has musical parents. The drum track & the slide guitar are call backs to Dr. John’s “I Walk on Gilded Splinters,” although the tempo is hopped up in a big way. Humble Pie covered the Dr. John tune, so did swamp rocker Johnny Jenkins.  
     The lyrics are nonsense rhymes, white-boy rapping, images of destruction and recklessness. The song is pop because it’s fun, but it’s grunge because it’s sarcastic. If grunge was what Rolling Stone magazine tried to codify as a “hybrid of hard rock, metal and punk (with a sprinkle of Neil Young…),” [4] seventies rock—Led Zeppelin, Neil Young—are grunge’s great-grandparents. Bass and tom-heavy drumbeat meets distorted guitars, and emotion is born. The 1970s have an imprint on Beck, or he on them, retroactively. Beck was, for a while, married to Marissa Ribisi, who appeared in the film Dazed and Confused. That film is about a high school graduation weekend in the 1970s, and launched the career of Matthew McConaughey as a fading high school swain aging into—you guessed it—a clueless loser. This connection to the song is spurious at best: Beck wasn’t married to Ribisi when he wrote “Loser” in 1991, although Dazed and Confused came out in 1993.
… time is a piece of wax fallin' on a termite. Seventies rock is the music that delivered me into alt-punk and grunge, which screamed of indestructibility, flailed against fragility, and gave voice to my anger, my sorrow, my fear. My ability to love. And that what was indestructible, it turned out. That’s what waited, like a squatter in my mind, for me to welcome it home. The nineties me who deliberately broke someone’s finger in a handshake, who threw a stapler at a co-worker, whose workday was not complete until I had made someone cry, understood that just singing along to “Loser” was a secret admission that I could fail. But a slacker fails with bravado. Me? I was chokin’ on the splinters.
That pause before the chorus in Loser, the fermata, caesura, stigmata, it’s a thrill, though. A pause like that mimics a bounce on a diving board before soaring, cutting the water, emerging in the sunlight. A pause like that is the same as watching the turning rope in Double Dutch, watching the arc above and knowing exactly when and how to step in, challenging the moving rope, and jumping out, victorious. The music after a pause like that courts risk and grabs defiance by surviving the dive, the jump rope, the job, the losses. The sound coming back from that silence is a release into the joy of being alive. The cheerleaders are no longer solarized, the singer walks into the sun.
Like “Loser,” I’ve grown another twenty-six years, and I’m still in heavy rotation.

[1] So says Vulture magazine. https://www.vulture.com/2014/02/dave-holmes-modern-rock-hits-1994-beck-loser.html . Even after working as the music coordinator on  the television show “Name that Tune” in the 1980s, I can’t figure out the Billboard charts. Give me a Phonolog Reports any day.

[2] See Woodworth, “How to Write About Music,” pages 134 & 135, “Allen Ginsberg with Beck: A Beat/Slacker Transgenerational Meeting of the Minds.”

[3] Rolling Stone, un-ironically elevating Slackers

[4] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/50-greatest-grunge-albums-798851/  (And the very fact that Rolling Stone answers this question takes the outré out of grunge.)

Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Booksellers’ Association “Okra” Pick. Her memoir Invisible Sisters was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. She teaches creative writing and directs the Minor in Writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing.

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.