the sweet 16
(16) local h, “bound for the floor”
drenched
(5) garbage, “only happy when it rains”
1263-632
and plays on 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 19.
“You’ll Get the Message By the Time I’m Through”: kristine langley mahler on “Only Happy When It Rains”
Fuck grunge right into the ground, like the freshman girls who sat at my art table in 2000, hornily bragging about how they were going to drive to Seattle and dig up Kurt’s corpse so they could have sex with it. A world-weary senior, I side-eyed them and internally scoffed what were they, like EIGHT YEARS OLD when Kurt died? I mean, I was at least ELEVEN, so. I could have been crueler if I’d been able to bolster my disdain by noting, “You know Courtney had Kurt cremated, right?” But like most grunge facts, that was one I didn’t know either.
All “grunge” ever meant to me was those dark phone calls from a “friend,” commanding me to recite the lyrics to “my favorite” Nirvana song, then messing up the line in “All Apologies” by saying “choking on the ashes of heredity” instead of “choking on the ashes of her enemy.”
Grunge was the flannel shirts I didn’t have, the second-hand Ralph Lauren corduroy pants I bought from Goodwill—like I was supposed to—but never wore to middle school because my mom told me corduroys were dressy pants and I didn’t know how to contradict her. I didn’t know what I was supposed to wear with them, but I knew it wasn’t a “nice sweater.” Grunge was Ben and Tate using Kool-Aid to turn their blond hair faintly pink, cool Amanda with low pigtails and dark lipstick in her 8th grade school picture, Jessie dubbing the classroom praying mantis Green Day when she won the naming lottery and me thinking her choice was super poetic until my “friend” scornfully informed me that Green Day was a band.
Grunge was a code word for all the things I didn’t know. Grunge was the perpetual feeling of never being cool enough, never knowing enough. Was every adolescent generation as plagued by insecurity as mine in the mid-90s? Was there ever a worse time to witness the collision of a cultural movement—where secret knowledge was the passcode—smashing into the age where a girl realizes everything she doesn’t know?
What a horrible time to be twelve: before the internet, when the only way to source information seemed to be through an older sister or brother who somehow, organically, had found it out and passed it down. A horrible time to be that older sister to two siblings. I didn’t know to read SPIN. I didn’t even know SPIN existed. I didn’t know how distinguish between the CDs in the racks at Camelot, to delineate between which bands were “over” and which ones were cool. I was too young to go to local shows, if there’d even been any (we still drove an hour to go shopping in the state capital). Grunge was defined by passwords that were constantly shifting, and when I think about grunge now, it only makes me angry. I suppose the anger is to mask the insecurity that never went away.
Grunge was nothing but sneering, and I swear it was worse than the disdain from indie band fans in the late 90s/early 2000s. Half the music I always thought of as “grunge” was rejected from this dang tournament. WHERE IS OASIS, I ASK YOU? Distortion and anger. That’s what grunge meant to me.
The only place I was ever able to enter grunge was through Shirley Manson.
Shirley Manson, the lead singer of Garbage, is wearing a satin black short-sleeve shirt in the November 1995 issue of Seventeen magazine, arms crossed behind her head, standing in an old-time elevator with the rest of the blurry band. Seventeen called Garbage the “band du jour,” and I can still recite the entire article, right down to the “Wha?” reaction, because I reread it so many times. Cool chick singing the bejesus out of a song you’ve never heard. You do the clueless and wait for the video’s postscript. But I didn’t learn about songs through music videos, I learned about them on the radio. If I wanted to watch MTV, which was forbidden in my house, I had to go to my friends’ houses. Which I did.
You decide the catchy pop-a-delic music is like the four elements.
I was intrigued by the idea that this perfectly-turned-out grunge girl with her dark black eye makeup and dark lipstick, posing like a prisoner, could control nature, harnessing all four elements—earth, air, fire, water—to bend to her will. In the photo, she was surrounded by three men—Butch Vig, Steve Marker, and Duke Erikson, her fellow band members in Garbage—but it looked to me like she clearly knew how to make those men fade out.
I know what you’re thinking. “How the hell are you gonna take BUTCH VIG, who produced Nirvana’s Nevermind—a credential which, since we’re not handing this championship over directly to Nirvana and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” should arguably mean we’re handing the championship to the man who produced it—and relegate him to the role of a background boy? Garbage was Butch’s PROJECT! Butch, Steve, and Duke had a whole thing going long before they called in Shirley!”
Maybe because, in a SPIN interview for the 25th anniversary of Garbage’s self-titled debut, Shirley spoke about her early days with Garbage, saying “I was shocked when I got to Madison and realized what a hot mess they were. I had come from bands that were very self-disciplined. But when I got to Madison, these dudes were so laid-back, drinking beer in their Green Bay Packers baseball hats. I’d never spent time with people like that before in my life.”
Shirley met the dude-bros in her new band where they were, but my Queen of Discipline and Control didn’t change herself to fit in with their lax-AF, just-keep-it-chill approach. I saw Shirley as a girl who had learned the things I wanted to know.
I saw Shirley in Seventeen magazine in 1995, but it wasn’t until the following spring when I finally saw Shirley in action, kinetic on the television at my friend’s grandma’s house in Buffalo, New York, where my friend and I had been dropped off for spring break.
Spring Break in Buffalo was about as popular as you might imagine—no one travels to Great Lakes New York in March, especially not when your actual home is only an hour from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but there we were, nevertheless. I was thirteen years old in March 1996, and my mom had allowed me to use a 7-10 day Clairol kit to dye my hair for the first time. With my freshly red hair, I sat in the backseat as my friend’s dad drove us up the inner Atlantic seaboard, away from my cooler peers who’d headed out to their families’ beach houses, and deposited us in the elderly, icicle-laden home of my friend’s grandma.
My friend and I slept in a small basement room, furnished with two blow-up mattresses which barely fit inside. The walls were whitewashed, and so we chalked it with messages like “Who’s the bomb? We’re the bomb!” We played Yahtzee. Walked to the neighborhood library and checked out books on temporary library cards. Took the train downtown to go shopping at DEB, where I bought a baby-doll ringer tee with yellow smiley faces pooling at the hem. Went to bingo with my friend’s grandma. Talked about Gone with the Wind, which I was obsessed with—a fact that tickled her grandma, who thought it was charming that a teen girl knew the same embarrassingly vast quantity of facts about the 1930s movie and book as she did.
In that TV room where we watched Gone with the Wind with her grandma, my friend and I also watched MTV. It was there, in Buffalo, that I saw the music video for Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” for the first time.
It surely was moody, gray, and rainy that spring break in Buffalo, but I don’t remember that—what I remember was how the brilliance of Shirley Manson, in her bright blue dress and blue eyeshadow, her pink dress, her knee-high black boots, outshone it all.
“Captivated” isn’t the right word. Do you remember what it felt like as an early teen, when you saw a person and thought that is who I have been waiting for? The way your mouth went dry and your heart rate sped up and you weren’t sure if you had a crush or a complex? Where your aspirations crystallized into a projection: if I were as cool as her, _____ would happen (_____ would never happen)?
I am here to defend a song—and as a Garbage devotee of nearly 25 years now, able to quote from all but the most recent album, I can crack the whip at my waist and harness plenty of textual/musical praise—but my love of Garbage’s actual music came way, way later.
I know I have to stay on topic.
Here: I never thought the lyrics to “Only Happy When It Rains” were making fun of grunge, the way some people have interpreted them. I thought they were a directive, a lesson plan. This is the method to belong, Kristine: only smile in the dark. Your only comfort is the night gone black. Now remember to make sure people know YOU DIDN’T ACCIDENTALLY TELL THEM THAT.
Everything was intentional.
Come on now, go ahead and tell me how you saw Garbage perform at a local show in 1995, just after they cut their album, before anyone had even seen the video for “Vow,” not a year-and-a-half later on an antennaed TV in Buffalo in a music video for their second damn single. I’m not surprised. Everyone has always had cooler grunge stories than me. The first time I saw Garbage live, I paid $22 to see them perform with Lit on the 1999 MTV Campus Invasion Tour. Yes I said 1999.
In an interview before Garbage’s 2017 tour, Shirley said “We’re exploring the idea of pulling out our Bond song because we haven’t played it in a long time and very few people have ever gotten to hear us perform it.”
And yet I had gotten to hear it live, eighteen years earlier. Trying to sound cool later, listing my concert attendances to my college friends, I mocked MTV’s poor choice of “campuses to invade”—they invaded ISU? In TERRE HAUTE? But at the time I was grateful, because I was only seventeen and even though it was a school night, my parents had allowed me to drive down to our basketball arena—the one where Larry Bird had famously played twenty years earlier—to see my dream girl. The arena was set up much like it had been when I’d gone two Octobers previous, in 1997, to attend the Harvest Moon dance (unfortunately escorted by my best friend’s brother, not my actual crush, Ryan): the fabric wall was up at half court, because Hulman Center wasn’t going to fill up that night.
Garbage opened with “#1 Crush”—a dreamscape of orgasmic sighs—and then tore through the entire first half of Version 2.0, layering in the radio hits from their first album, before devastating with the last song of the set, “You Look So Fine.”
It still sticks with me, all these years later, the way Shirley left the stage first during the outro for “You Look So Fine,” followed by all of the band members slowly leaving, one by one, as their parts ended. Shirley said what she’d wanted to say before leaving us all there, breathless, waiting. In October 1999, my boyfriend had recently broken up with me and I could hardly bear it. My best friend and I were seated pretty high in the bleachers, but there were a few filled rows behind us, where Ryan (my ’97 crush) and Ben were seated, but I was too focused on watching Shirley emote my pain for my ex-boyfriend to care; Ryan’s presence was, momentarily, negligible.
After Garbage played the encore, including their Bond song, “The World is Not Enough” (it never is) and—of course—closing with “Only Happy When It Rains,” my best friend and I stayed in our seats, unwilling to leave. Ryan and Ben came down the stairs and stopped beside us, saying something about my dancing during the show. As I turned to face them, so surprised they had noticed me that my heart was still in my teeth, I didn’t have time to disaffect—tell me you aren’t going to make fun of me and that, instead, you thought I was beautiful—and the thing was that they did tease me anyway, but I think Ben saw something in my face that must have made him soften because it was gentle, gentler than he’d been in school.
My best friend and I stopped at Taco Bell on the way home and Ryan and Ben were, surprisingly, there too. We would have never hung out together in the daytime at South—Ben was cool, Ryan wanted to be—but we had shared an experience together. So we shyly waved, and the boys motioned us over to their table, and we ate our post-concert bean burritos while making small talk. Ryan mentioned my dancing one more time, kindly, and as my best friend and I drove home, it occurred to me that I’d made an impression. I had been someone he hadn’t expected me to be, and he was still stunned by it.
That was power.
Garbage gave me the language for a tormented kind of longing, the sort of crushing desire that makes you crawl on your hands and knees across the carpet to a ghost. As a teen, I was frightened and exhilarated by the intensity of my emotions. I was confused by how badly I wanted to fit in and, simultaneously, how badly I wanted to be seen. Those years were a fluorescent-lit smear, every mistake highlighted and yet indistinguishable, at the time, to anyone other than myself. I was only happy when it was complicated. I carefully listened to the lyrics of Garbage songs, deciding that I could actually brandish power by basking in my obsessions, as the bittersweet pleasure of unfulfillment became an obsession.
Shirley was a give-me-what-I-want-or-I-will-take-it revelation, the Dark Princess from “Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealers” brought to life, a flame-haired, black leather siren. I didn’t even realize how much I’d idolized the Dark Princess until I saw Shirley.
I dyed my hair red for decades, starting in summer 1998 (right before Version 2.0), trying to mimic the prominence Shirley innately carried with her presence and I wanted to believe I could still grow into. At Prom 1999, I wore a gunmetal gray dress, and for years afterward, when I would describe how I looked that night, I wrote “flame-haired and ready to fuck someone up, just like Shirley.” If I’d owned the black Doc Martens I would buy that summer (I have always arrived at the party too late), I would have worn them that night as well. There is beauty, and there is power. I wanted both.
When Kurt died in 1994, I was eleven years old, listening to R&B like SWV, although when pressed by a waiting circle of kids at a middle school church lock-in that fall, I would claim my favorite song was “Tomorrow” by Silverchair. Later that night, as the other girls who already knew each other pulled their sleeping bags closer and loudly whispered and giggled about things I could never know, I slid across the cement floor of the social hall to lie near my mother, a chaperone, because I was homesick for someone who knew me. Within the week, after the sort of pre-teen fight that loses its reasoning over the years but felt so important at the time, what I remembered most was my mother throwing my lie back in my face, telling me she didn’t even know me anymore, didn’t even know the song I’d claimed was my favorite. But my mother did know me—the me I was, not the me I wanted to be—because my true favorite song was “Something in the Way She Moves” by James Taylor, the first song on the first side of the white cassette we listened to in the minivan after church, driving the rural highways of Pitt County, my mother and sister harmonizing as I tried to stay on key.
I was only happy when it rained, but not for the dramatic reasons you might expect from an adolescent. I was still homesick for Oregon, where I had lived before moving to North Carolina, and where the rain was a constant moody drizzle. When I grew into moodiness as a teen, it felt like a return to the person I had meant to be. No, that is not true. I was not morose when I lived in Oregon. The weather was morose, but I didn’t know any different. I was happy when it rained in North Carolina because it reminded me of something I actually knew.
I am sitting in a yurt in rural Nebraska now, cows in the fields surrounding me, wind battering and pattering rain against the canvas walls. I packed a Shirley-like outfit to write in, a cropped mauve furry sweater and pleather leggings. I brought the red lipstick I seldom wear, black eyeliner, and the pot of *jane eyeshadow I have had since high school. I didn’t use a brush to apply it, because I didn’t have a brush in high school. I didn’t know I needed a brush, because no one ever told me or showed me. I always used my ring finger on my right hand, so when I applied it to my eyelids this morning, it was a sense memory, knowing how much to pat, how to smear, remembering the residue that I always wiped against the inner palm of my hand instead of on a tissue.
I am as Shirleyfied as I can be, at 38. She was 29 when “Only Happy When It Rains” came out, which means that 25 years later, she must be 54. Duke Erikson (Garbage’s bassist) is from Lyons, Nebraska, a tiny little town up in the northeast corner of my state. He is 69 years old this year; will be 70 by the time this essay comes out. Butch (drums) is 65, Steve Marker (guitar) is nearly 62. We have all grown past who we were in 1995; our cells have regenerated through at least three selves by now.
I tried to co-opt Shirley’s style for years, listing her as my icon in countless email questionnaires. In that viral 2010 commercial for a glasses brand, where Shirley and Elijah Wood are bored on Sundays, it felt like validation, because for many years, I had been told that my husband looked like Elijah Wood. In 2013, I chopped off my hair (very “Androgyny”-era Shirley) to take control over what I admired in men, realizing I could actually embody it in myself.
After all, Shirley modeled the power in growing beyond who others thought we were meant to be. “I think of how different I was as a person, compared to who I am now. I was so young and so afraid.”
Garbage is not the grungiest band in this tournament. And “Only Happy When It Rains” isn’t nearly grungy enough to define the era; it’s a pop song with grunge sensibilities and grunge cred, thanks to Butch. I think it’s pretty remarkable that Shirley was able to call out all the tropes of grungedom in that song—you fucking sell-outs, you’re “only happy when it’s complicated”? Fine: here’s your song—while simultaneously embodying them. I’m telling you that Shirley was the representation of grunge that brought me in, showed me the girl I could become: a girl who didn’t give a fuck whether or not she belonged. So fuck the best grunge song, fuck the way grunge made me feel. The only thing that matters is how Garbage and Shirley made me feel. Like I could finally say FUCK GRUNGE.
MAHA Music Festival, August 11th, 2012. Shirley has a high ponytail, ripped black tights, black shorts, short sleeved black shirt, black wristbands. Rain starts to fall just as Garbage begins to close their set with “Only Happy When It Rains.” Shirley smiles and calls it a “precious moment,” says this has never happened before.
I was at that concert, four months pregnant with my third daughter, and when Butch pounded the drums, my daughter pounded on my stomach. I took my Elijah Wood-alike husband’s hand and made him feel how our daughter moved only when the beat thumped. I am reporting a fact: when Shirley demanded “pour your misery down on me,” God himself responded. Shirley said, “I’m only happy when it rains,” and the air thickened, condensed into water to put out a flame on earth, all four elements wanting to please her. Power.
Kristine Langley Mahler wants to hear about your new obsession. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie of Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine's previous Xness essays include an impassioned defense/condemnation of NKOTB's "Hangin' Tough" for March Badness, an extracurricular on Stabbing Westward and goth confusion for March Vladness, and a link-laden essay on Great White's "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" for March Shredness. Non-Xness work can be found at kristinelangleymahler.com, and you can always find her on Twitter at @suburbanprairie.
JOHN MELILLO ON “BOUND FOR THE FLOOR”
This is an essay about Local H’s most commercially successful song, “Bound for the Floor.” It was the first single from the album As Good As Dead, released in April 1996. Local H, at the time an interracial duo composed of singer-guitarist Scott Lucas and drummer Joe Daniels, was founded in 1990 in Chicago. The band—really Lucas’s project—continues to make music today. Local H are the last grunge band.
But this is an essay, really, about this particular Local H of 1996, of “Bound for the Floor.” Listening to this Local H again makes me wonder about what it means to persist in ruins, what it means to linger in the coming after. Listening to this song and this album again, I realize that this song asks me (and all of us) to reckon with debt and mourning and influence.
Local H in 1996 work in a deeply Nirvana-esque style. I say this as a matter of course: the total internalization of quiet-loud-quiet; of textured guitar distortion; of melodic screamed sickness unto death. Local H kill their idols with the kindness of repetition. This is absolutely a compliment.
That’s because for Local H in As Good As Dead this mastery and retransmission of Nirvana’s style produces a kind of newness, even in its fidelity to a previous model. Style as knowledge and homage is something I want to dwell in here: it’s what makes the repetition a swerve, a slight difference. It’s what composes Local H’s afterness and lastness: their continuation.
“Bound for the Floor” and the other songs on this album take up grunge as an idiom in a way that is both totally inside of and removed from it. Mastering grunge (Nirvana’s grunge) as musical style—as a duo no less!—means opening up a gap between recognition and rehearsal, between the enraptured first listening and the task of taking apart and making sense of that listening. This gap shows a band giving in to the power of a style, doing it again not because it is an emotional territory to be misread and mined but because one can continue to work in its nuances and possibilities. Local H represent, for me, how the minor swerve works just enough to manifest a concrete feeling, rather than something tired, cliché, and embarrassing. There is a clear contrast between Local H and the insipid irony-free post-grunge masculinist tragicomedy that filled rock radio in the second half of the 90s.
On a purely technical level, they simply sounded better—more interesting sound textures, better drumming—than the many other Nirvana-esque bands. Their transformation of the power trio into a power duo was inspiring. They worked out an even more efficient system for reducing rock to rhythm and noise.
But the afterness and lastness of Local H—their ability to straddle the abyss between grunge’s operative moment in rock and its cultural exhaustion—goes beyond the technical details of their music. On this album—and in this song’s style and delivery—they are aware of their belatedness. That belatedness neither silences nor alienates them. Rather, it grants them voice. “Bound for the Floor” emerges in the wake of a double death: a death that is actual—Kurt Cobain’s—and another kind of dying: a loss and resolution of the vividness and ongoingness of the past into the concluded fact of the object, the photograph, the status update, a conclusion. The end of Nirvana froze grunge into a death mask. Alice Notley describes this feeling in an essay on Frank O’Hara: “I discovered a curious thing: … Frank O’Hara’s poetry had frozen into art for me. It, like my own past, wasn’t my life, a vivid motion-filled thing; it had died into artifact.”
All over As Good As Dead it is hard not to hear this process of grunge dying into artifact. But to be in that process, to demarcate it as it happens: that is the magic of Local H on this album. This happens in both sound and lyrics. Throughout the album, it’s hard not to hear Cobain as the “you” addressed by Lucas. For instance, on “O.K.” he sings:
Drawing a collective breath
I could cry myself to death
And wash this all away
In a flash, you were gone
Leaving me a couple of songs
That I listen to everyday
And I don't even care
That you were so unfair
Or on “Manifest Density (Part 1)” we hear:
You're on to something good
But I can't believe it's all
That matters to you
A foolWho never seems happy
When things are great
It's too late…
Fidelity—to the call, to those other songs—grants the possibility of speaking to the dead. Your voice both is and is not their voice. The other popular single from As Good As Dead, “Eddie Vedder,” expands on this attitude. It is an angry turn on the one who has left, the one rejecting the singer (and the world): “You go ahead as good as dead / That’s it / I quit / I don’t give a shit.” The one who is dead and gone was always “as good as dead.” The pronounced semblance of death now precedes the actual loss of death.
Such a projection seems to be the power of afterness: the ability to warp time and remake causality.
I should say that this structural atemporality was also part of my lived experience of this music. At the time As Good As Dead and Nevermind were co-emergent in my adolescent brain: my summer ’96 awakening to grunge (brought on by a chance radio listen of Nirvana’s “Drain You”) manifested as a near constant desire to listen to and make these sounds. To hear Local H was to hear the possibility of the reproduction and continuation of not just grunge music but music. Even in the act of repatterning my brain by listening to Nevermind on a nightly basis, I was also hearing other “Nirvana” (i.e. Local H) songs that could distance and somewhat displace the Nirvana-idol-sound-image. That little bit of separation in the music—what at the time I heard (and still hear but less intensely) as distinctions in presentation, in voice, in texture, in attitude, in the sounds of the songs themselves—granted me futurity. The music seemed to be saying: “Can’t go on, must go on.”
All this time passed and passing. So much repetition and difference. “Bound for the Floor,” with its intensely repeated lines of “You just don’t get it / you keep it copacetic / and you learn to accept it / and oh it’s so pathetic” is on the surface a mantra of alienated self-hatred. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the tone of the hatred here: does the singer hate himself as the one keeping it copasetic, hate others for keeping it copasetic, or hate a particular other for going too far? Is the “you” another way of saying “I”? Is the “you” the quiet seeker of a false normality? Is the “you” the potential suicide who holds back and sustains their dread, until the end?
The mantra becomes a magic spell, simultaneously undoing itself and reveling in its failure to undo a single goddamn thing, to change that “you” it calls to. The song seems to be telling us: “Don’t keep cool! Get the fuck loud! Scream!” while also freezing in place, stuck in its own cycle. The song battles an affectlessness that I can’t but hear as a particularly Midwestern take on grunge. I flash to my sophomore year of high school, the commute with my father across the city of Wichita in the blue Chevy Astro van to the high school where he taught and coached football. What were the effects of hearing this song nearly every morning on the radio? Was I hearing myself hate myself or hearing myself hate my dad? Or hearing myself hate the self that dad, school, football, world were making of me? “What good is confidence.” Or hearing myself hate the very emptiness of a self that would admit to such influence? Or hearing myself hate the afterness of adolescence, the irredeemable fall into desire, responsibility, compromise? “Bound for the floor.” Or hearing myself hate already death? “Born to be down.”
All, none, others.
There is something about minor voices, the voices that are perhaps underrated or forgotten by the mass projections and delusions of immense popularity, that helps answer the question: how do you survive this shit? Debt, mourning, influence. To come after grants the possibility of survival, the grace of keeping things going. To call to Cobain and to recall Nirvana’s sound both freezes and animates the object. It remains there as immovably movable as the stars. We pass into the afterness—which is, at least, still passing.
John Melillo is a professor, writer, and musician who lives in Tucson, Arizona, and St. Joseph du Moine, Cape Breton. His first book, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk, was published by Bloomsbury in the Fall of 2020. Melillo teaches/researches at the University of Arizona and performs under the name Algae & Tentacles.