sweet 16 game

(8) Nirvana, “Sappy”
vs
(13) Ani DiFranco, “You Had Time”

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/21/26.

CLICK HERE FOR LIVE SCORES

jennifer gravley: Liner Notes (“Sappy” by nirvana)

If you kill yourself

The voice of your generation died in the cruelest month, your best example of how to save yourself. You assumed you would, one day.

If you fool yourself

You live in the honors dorm, an ivory cinderblock room with a roommate who doesn’t like you. Not one person likes you, including you. The voice of your generation has died inside a jar without breathing holes. Did he ever once think he was happy?
There is a difference between thinking you’re happy and being happy and thinking you’re happy.
You are decades away from a diagnosis in your ivory room in Marks Hall where the heat is an oppressive roommate. You set the fan to going.

If you kill yourself

The voice of your generation reflects back your deepest values—self-loathing, ennui, deep despair. It is for the voice of our generation to tell us what to rail against. It is ourself.

If you fool yourself

The spring of 1994 should’ve been the spring you discovered how beautiful and bright and green spring could be in a land of perpetually watered blooms and good weather, the light a quality artists talk about, but you were in too deep a hole.

If you cut yourself

Your jar is a hole you fall into. You cover yourself with grass.
Your floormate is raped in the night, stereo shattered. No one heard anything. You didn’t hear anything. You, like your floormates, like all good misogynists, question her poor decision making.
So many things shattered—your will, your potential, your floormate’s stereo—and already the earthquake that tilted bookshelves off desks, that shattered Eagles CD cases, that woke you in your extra-long twin.

If you fuck yourself

The voice of your generation says wallow in the shit.

If you fool yourself

In your ivory room, you blast cassettes from your alarm clock, louder than you should, louder than your floormates appreciate. You curl in bed and cry. There is nothing interesting about a person curled in their bed, weeping.

If you fuck yourself

When his death is announced, you are jealous.

If you fool yourself

But the 90s were a different time. You could talk out loud about your desire to die.
Just like the voice of your generation, you’d said out loud to your friends that you wanted to die. You wrote it down, this desire, this murky dream you didn’t know how to make true. You never made plans but thought it would happen. That you wouldn’t live, wouldn’t make it.
You probably felt some kind of happy, sappy, sometimes, but depression messes not only with your ability to feel but also with your memories. You probably laughed sometimes but don’t think of yourself that way, can’t recall a single time.

If you cut yourself

And yet—there is a photo, taken by a floormate and given to you, of you on your extra-long twin, shorts and an extra-large t-shirt, so any time of year, really, writing something (a letter, a bad poem, homework) and smiling in surprise if nothing else.

If you kill yourself

How many variants of “Sappy”? How many models, how many archetypes, of the voice of your generation, of you? How do you separate the voice of your generation from the voice of your mental illness? Is each alternative track equally valid? Does each fill some essential need of some particular audience? Is “Sappy” simply an amalgamation? Are you? Can you substitute, change, the lines to make yourself happy? Does what you repeat, replay, make you who you are?

If you heal yourself

All your memories are suspect. Did your sister teach you to pull the legs off daddy longlegs? Were you repulsed but tried anyway? Did you pull the abdomens off lightning bugs? The 80s were a different time. Did you ever put them in a jar? The summer night air smelled always of grass cuttings, your father home after dark, the rolled-up legs of his overalls shedding clippings.
There was no dividing line like a divorce. There was simply a slide or maybe a sudden onset, but memory blurs. There is a before time, so little you barely remember, memories that burst with the brightness of a camera flash. The fair outside Head Start, the summer sun burning. The polaroid of your blonde bowl cut in kindergarten. There’s a sense of being happy, of before. But even then there’s the Saturdays you wouldn’t get out of bed to watch cartoons. There’s you, eight, staying up and watching sitcoms about alcoholics in the quiet still dark of the living room without anyone else in it.

If you kill yourself

What does it mean to be the voice of your generation? How much did it weigh? What must it be like to never get old, to never have to see the teenagers who raged with you turn puffy and saggy and sick at heart to have done nothing?

If you save yourself

In the end, the choice to live wasn’t a choice at all. You just kept waking up.

If you cut yourself

For years and years and decades, you wanted to die when your life sucked, and you wanted to die when your life was undeniably beautiful. You felt the same at heart, sick without a fever, just a way of existing.

If you fuck yourself

A week of celebrity suicides—a handbag designer, a chef—begins you being more honest with your therapist. You were afraid of being hospitalized, but you also badly wanted it. The rest, the break. You imagined nothing being expected of you. You had a fantasy it’d be you in bed all the time. You had no idea how these things worked. You didn’t want to get better. You just wanted to be able to sink into your depression further without having to worry about the people around you, work, bills, any commitment to the world or the people in it. You wanted to wallow until you died, which you felt you would.

If you fuck yourself

You never took yourself as seriously as when your therapist said if you didn’t do something, you were going to kill yourself. Somehow it was different being told as a premonition, as a promise, than it did when you thought of dying and it filled you with relief.

If you cut yourself

Every battle, you’re only fighting yourself. You’re fighting only yourself. Order and precision matter—all you have are words, the same source material as your thoughts.

If you save yourself

Press fast-forward and years later, the correct, the magic, pills stop your bad thoughts like a light switch flipped. It turns out that everything you thought was you was just a disorder. In the space where you hated yourself, there is only space. The pills inflate your body, wreck your blood sugar, hijack your heart rate, but you don’t care. You’ll take the space over the hole, the jar. It’s white space in your head, that time between chorus and chorus where the guitar plays. You don’t know what to do with yourself.

If you fuck yourself

Sometimes you think what gives you the right to write when so many people dream of hurting themselves, when so many people do. You’re just another dreamer pumped with good drugs.

If you kill yourself

You, (like) the voice of your generation, never thought you’d be happy.
It is for the voice of our generation to tell us now to live, what to hope for and rail against.
It is himself.

If you save yourself

Build a memorial to the voice of your generation through your midlife, medicated and screeching. Line the ground, the glass bottom, with grass from an untended graveyard which struggles.

If you heal yourself

And once you get well, you have to go on living by living for the first time. You have to go on living without many people, rock stars and friends and childhood bullies and your mother and your father.
There is only so much you can retrieve from the past. Less than there is nostalgia for. You are nostalgic for the girl who was depressed and anxious and washing her hands too much, the girl who sat on the floor of the laundry room. You didn’t know your brain was wired wrong—differently—you didn’t know that anyone or anything could help you.
You didn’t think you could be happy.

If you save yourself

The work of midlife is to redefine saving yourself, since you lived. You take your replacement hormones and go to therapy on your work computer. You say things like we’ll get through this and all we can do is our best, even though you have never thought you’d get through anything or that your best was good enough for anyone, including you.
Somehow, you’re fifty. You’ve saved yourself for decades, even when you didn’t mean to. So many things in life aren’t on purpose. So much craft is instinctual, is punishing, is pushing its way through you. You are perpetually surprised by how old you’ve become. You never thought you’d.

If you fuck yourself

The voice of your generation has been dead since adolescence. Since the ivory room of Marks Hall, the basement laundry room. Did his death mean the end of childhood? You couldn’t know this death meant death would keep coming for you, person after person after person, while you kept living.

If you kill yourself

The voice of your generation speaks from scattered ashes, from scratched technology, from the past. The voice of your generation still speaks to you from scattered ashes. The past is a skein overlaying every moment you move through.

It would be a mistake to say

Conclusion came to you

Jennifer Gravley is an assistant director at an academic library during the day (and occasional evenings and weekends). At night, she reads and writes and eats snacks and sleeps, the usual stuff. She has recently acquired a "Maman" pin and hopes to scare people with it.

I Know You’re Going To Look at Me That Way: susanna donato On Ani DiFranco’s “You Had Time”

Before you even know if it’s sad, “You Had Time” starts with the piano, two full minutes of noodling. It isn’t until 2:07 that the guitar comes in, somehow sacred, organ-like, the snik of DiFranco’s fingers on the strings dotting the mellow, melancholic sound. Maybe it will be OK, you think, but then, twenty-five seconds later, DiFranco’s voice starts softly, asking:

How can I go home
With nothing to say?
I know you’re going to look at me that way

DiFranco didn’t know how to play piano when she recorded the song, “but that wasn’t stopping me at the time,” she told Rolling Stone in 2024. Later versions of the song don’t include the piano, but the song is better, sadder, with the hesitation in those keys. She’s pretending to be a pianist playing around with writing a tune, but in actuality, she just doesn’t know what she’s doing. The pianist is a carefully constructed façade, like the person the lover thinks is coming home.  
“You Had Time” does something essential for a sad song: it’s impossible to hear it without surfacing your own heartbreak. Writing about it, I’ve found myself putting words to why two people I once loved very much decided not to love me anymore. The stumbling keyboard at the beginning provides, as advertised, time to consider the pain of an off-key relationship. And you can do a lot of thinking in two and a half minutes.
The piano intro, and then the guitar, haul us in by the nape of our neck to hear a love song. Then it comes into focus, a role we’ve played on one side or another: the panicky anticipation of heartbreak.
Ani knows the “you” so well that she predicts what they’ll say, but it’s all in her head. We accompany her from the station to the car, the luggage being loaded, the rolled-down window, the jokes about whatever the vehicle is passing, in a shared limbo. Maybe, in real time, she’s backstage, in the shower, on the bus, or sitting on her suitcase on the curb waiting for her ride. Regardless, none of this is real. Not yet.
A narrator should be culpable, and Ani is culpable. She has decided but wishes she hadn’t. We feel the sickening weight of knowing the faithful Labrador of a partner—so happy to see her, so willing to carry the heavy stuff—is going to get kicked, and we’re the ones to kick it. The only question is when.  

To talk about Ani DiFranco is to consider two personas. There’s DiFranco, the celebrated folk singer, noted guitarist (especially as a woman guitarist), and record-label entrepreneur. But her fans usually call her Ani. Ani the bravada legend with, as Jonathan Van Meter put it in his August 1997 Spin cover story, “an essential brattiness that’s the key to her appeal.” Ani the stand-in for our best friend or ourselves, brave, a bit cocky, impassioned. Ani the autobiographical truth-teller, the person we imagine we know, who told an interviewer in 1995, “There is just nothing that is too private or too personal, [that’s] just an excuse that people use for not talking about the difficult shit.”⁠
“You Had Time” is the third-to-last song on DiFranco’s fifth album, Out of Range, released in March 1994, when she was twenty-three and I was twenty-one. I only saw her play live once, November of that same year, at the Mercury Café in Denver, a hippie coffeehouse that served heavy vegetarian food and maxed out at 500 attendees in its dancehall that also hosted jazz bands and swing dance nights. She laughed a lot. I don’t remember whether she played “You Had Time,” although reviews of other 1994 gigs laud her live renditions of the song as “vulnerable,” a “lovely ballad,” “moving,” “somber.” At that time, she was playing around 120 shows a year, many at colleges: Mount Holyoke, University of Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, Duke, Evergreen State. The next year, when she returned to Denver, she played the opulent, 1,900-seat art deco Paramount Theatre—no more hippie attics for her.
Surely I’d heard of DiFranco when she was launching her career in New York City in the early 1990s, where I was attending Barnard College. The Barnard Bulletin reports that she performed on campus sometime in 1990 and again at Columbia’s Postcrypt Coffeehouse in 1991, in the same tiny room beneath St. Paul’s Chapel where my writing group met every week or so over bottles of purloined wine. 

In 1994, though, I was back in Denver, an Ivy League dropout supporting myself as a receptionist and listening thirstily to the women artists who were becoming more prominent on the edgier side of popular music, Ani but also Liz Phair and PJ Harvey. Ani had a hard edge, a ferocity I could relate to. We were both from unhappy families. We both came from steel towns, she from Buffalo, New York, and I from Pueblo, Colorado. We both were on our own early: she became an emancipated minor at fifteen, while I left Barnard at nineteen to work my way through my last two years of college at an uncool outpost of a state school, the first among my friends to fly without a net. She was a girl who knew what she didn’t want. I was a girl hoping someone would want me. 

You are a china shop
And I am a bull
You are really good food
And I am full

When I hear “You Had Time,” it summons the two most powerful relationships in my life up to the time I first heard it, in 1994. My best friend, whom I’ll call Annette, and C., whom I’ll call my college boyfriend, a term that simplifies and understates (or is it overstates?) the situation between us.
C. and I met in high school, then again at Columbia. An odd array of synchronicities bound us together with an understanding deeper than words, from our parents’ marrying on the exact same day to being fish out of water at a fancy college, both from humble backgrounds. I wanted to believe I possessed enough “inner brattiness” to not be completely transparent. But, mesmerized, I spent two years waiting to see if he would decide I was what he wanted while he came and went, dropping in from out of town or from another relationship. This sounds like I could see it objectively at the time, which is not true. I was a wagging tail, perpetually awaiting his return. I could catch his scent from miles away. I was young enough to believe I could love him so hard he would stop being confused about why he almost loved me back.
When Out of Range arrived, I was sharing an apartment with Annette. After meeting in seventh-grade homeroom, she and I were inseparable through middle school, high school, and straight into our twenties. We drank our first illicit beers together, smoked a zillion clove cigarettes, wore men’s white V-neck Ts and the same oversized, broken-in 501s that Ani is wearing on the cover of her next album. After I dropped out of Barnard, Annette wound up following me back to Denver from her own college. After work and evening classes, we’d eat dinner on my futon while watching Northern Exposure. We roadtripped to Carhenge and the Grand Canyon and to pick peaches, slept back-to-back like puppies, laughed until we got hiccups, cried until we laughed. Throughout our friendship, I wrote off Annette’s adolescent aggressions: telling a mutual friend I was a bitch; sharing secrets with others, knowing the information—and my exclusion from it—would get back to me; dismissing my loyalty when I cut off a mutual friend who called Annette a vile nickname of her own creation. Each betrayal devastated me, but I didn’t know there could exist a kind of love that allowed me to be an equal. I’d been conditioned to understand connection as ultimatum: I would take whatever love was offered, and I would like it.

Also, the drama of love can be deliciously painful when you’re young. In 1993, leaving New York again after visiting C. for a few days, I wept most of the way across the country, leaning against the airplane window. I felt more real for our separation’s torment.
Our relationship lasted six more months. Always, there was tenderness between us, private jokes and swapped mix tapes and a shared sense of beauty; we spoke for hours about art and music, books and films, the way we saw the world. But we were 1,600 miles apart. Video calls were still science fiction, texting didn’t exist, and email wasn’t yet commonplace, so the last year of our relationship was often telephonic (with long-distance costing at least 16 cents a minute, a penny less than I earned) or epistolary. At some point, my ultrasonic hearing suggested that his off and on was leaning off again. Because I was more articulate on paper, where I had time to think, I wrote him a letter explaining that I could no longer bear the uncertain back-and-forth amid the chaos of our burgeoning adult lives. Too chicken to call it off—well, I didn’t want to call it off—I ended with, “The ball is in your court.”
I dreamed that he wrote back, “How would I answer a letter like that?” In reality, he never responded at all. At the time, I thought this meant he was unconcerned about things ending, perhaps relieved to be rid of me, and perhaps he was. I struggled to believe I was worth more than I was getting. Anyway, our situation was impossible. He was working toward building a career in another country, where he was born; we’d talked around that eventuality but never found words to address how it might work between us. I wanted marriage and kids in my life someday and still felt the burn of the time he’d said, “I know what marriage means: no more fun.” In the end, the reverberation of his silence amounted to an agreement. The ball was in his court, but its rebounds dribbled away; it rolled into a corner; dead leaves clotted around it. How can I go home with nothing to say? One option is simply not to return. From afar, you can’t hear the other person’s silence. You can tell yourself they understand. You can convince yourself everything is fine. Or so I imagine.

You’ll say,
Did they love you or what?
I’ll say,
They love what I do
The only one who really loves me is you.

After a February 1994 show at Wetlands, a small, psychedelic venue near the Holland Tunnel, Ani was interviewed by Harold Channer for his TV show on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. It’s surreal to see her in the faded-out video, against the graffiti-muraled walls where, while attending Barnard, I’d seen acts like the Dead Milkmen and River Phoenix’s band Aleka’s Attic.
The week she played was six weeks after I wrote to C. Back in Denver, I knew nothing about her performance. According to my journal, I was having a week that sounds like a movie montage of being a Gen Xer in 1994: I saw Reality Bites. I heard Beck’s song “Loser” for the first time. I went to a Mardi Gras party where we played spin the bottle, and I danced with a friend in his kitchen, hydroplaning on the wet tile floor, laughing so hard I thought I might asphyxiate; the next day, I seemed to have pulled something in my elbow. Some musician friends took me to see the acid jazz guitarist Ronny Jordan, and when I came home, I found one of C.’s hairs in my blanket. Through it all, I was trying to convince myself I would not die if I never heard from C. I was missing C., and trying to resist missing him, but also delighting in it.
Ani felt like me, passionate and interested, able to experience the missing and the pain and the delight in the pain, curious about what came next, even if she was braver than I. She was the inverse of a slacker, with the earnestness of a folkie rather than the sardonic, cynical aesthetic that characterized the emerging Gen X culture. In the interview, between politely waiting out Channer’s mansplaining, Ani expanded on the idea of telling her story “as a form of political work …. I think that there’s a lot of people out there who feel that their story—and rightly so—that their stories are not being told on TV or, you know, in history books, who feel that their voices aren’t included.”

Watching back this interview and her performance reminds me that it cannot be overstated how important Ani was to me and many of us girls. She felt like a defender and a megaphone. Fifteen years before #MeToo, she validated that we weren’t crazy, that a lot of men were, frankly, bad. She put voice to our suspicion that there is no winning while being a woman, like the time my parents scolded me for looking like “a tramp” when I was eleven years old (the same age as the girl in “Letter to a John,” another song on Out of Range), because I’d purchased a cropped top and dared to think it looked cute on my pubescent body, trying to be the girl the world wanted me to be. Songs about having been abused, about an abortion, about hitching a ride with a friend who has your back—we hadn’t really heard that, let alone seen someone our age turn down a record deal, launch her own label, and release a song about leaving a period bloodstain on the music execs’ fancy chair. All while using fake nails, not for beauty but as taped-on claws, enabling the distinct, percussive playing that has even spawned an instructional article in Guitar Player about how to mimic her sound.
Listening anew, I hear the attitude that Van Meter called brattiness, and I marvel at how wise, and careless, a twenty-three-year-old can be. My journal harbors my realization that I would no longer be responsible for bolstering C.’s self-esteem, as well as my encounter with a guy at my favorite coffee shop who interrupted my writing to ask what I was writing and offer to read it, then, when I said no, told me I would never get anywhere with an attitude like that. I was trying to convince myself I could live without focusing on a man while still being open to loving someone, evaluating a carousel of boys at a pace that shocked friends accustomed to my reserve and intense loyalty. In hindsight, I wanted not to care because look where caring had got me at an age, a time, so full of not-caring. All this makes “You Had Time” sadder still, because it’s about someone who bothers to know and love you.
Just as intensely as with C., I remember the last beats of my friendship with Annette, a few years later, when we were twenty-five. There was an evening when we ripped off pieces of a fresh-baked loaf of bread. I smeared mine with butter and felt somehow affronted that she opted to eat hers bare. Around that time, she called late one night, sobbing that her seven-year relationship had ended. The news meant the end of an era for me, too. Through those seven years, Annette and I, her boyfriend, and a couple of other friends had knitted tightly together. I’d imagined our friendships could last a lifetime, weaving in other partners, children, pets, life. The breakup killed that dream, a grief I did not let myself acknowledge as I instinctively leapt to comfort Annette. In the next days and weeks, I left message after message on her machine. Weeks passed. Months. She never called back, never at all. That spring, when I ran into her at an event, she glanced at me and then looked away, like I was a stranger.
What had I done to end thirteen years of friendship in a heartbeat? Was I too leashed, in her mind, to memories of her ex? Had I been too impassioned in my readiness to defend her? Looking back, I recognize that I was prone to loving people who never gave themselves completely. People like the Ani of this song, who’ll tell you how wonderful you are while dumping you. At the song’s start, I’m allied with Ani, sympathetic to her ambivalence. But partway through, I feel for the oblivious waiting lover, that idiot. Why can’t you see what’s happening, you chump? They’re beside me at the bar where I got drunk one night, deep in my grief over Annette’s disappearance: my elbows on the elbow-worn spots where the finish had rubbed off, my forehead on the old wood, sobbing while a girl I barely knew rubbed my back. 

What did you do out there?
And what did you decide?
You said you needed time
And you had time 

In “You Had Time,” the narrator has gone blank. Pre-emptive grief creates a void, and if DiFranco understands one thing, it’s how to manipulate voids. She explains in her memoir No Walls and the Recurring Dream, “An acoustic guitar’s ability to make sound and silence sit right next to each other is at the core of its power. As with any rhythm instrument, the spaces are essential.”⁠
The space of time. The space between knowing and not knowing how to play the piano. The space of your long future unfurling after you break someone’s heart. The space after I dropped the letter to C. in a mailbox and before I deeply understood that he wouldn’t write back, that we’d never talk again, that I would fall in love with someone else, a different love growing its own strong roots around the lacuna of that heartbreak.
Again, for all the things the “you” in this song tells Ani, they never actually get a chance to speak—it’s all a projection. Beautiful, poignant, even real. But how does the “you” experience this episode? The more I think about it, the uneasier I feel. What imagined voice narrated my absence from C.’s or Annette’s lives? How much—or how little—does that construction align with who I really am?

Nick Hornby writes that “You Had Time” is “perhaps the gentlest and most generous-spirited breakup song I know.” Of the china shop and very good food, he asks, “How many of us wouldn’t have felt better about being dumped if someone said that to us?” Perhaps he’s right.
A week before I got married, a mutual friend happened to run into C. in New York and told him the news. She reported that he was so shocked, his hands were shaking when they exchanged numbers to “catch up soon.” To my surprise, I realized he might have actually loved me. A gratifying insight, years too late. All along, I’d thought I was the Labrador, but maybe we both were.
Later still, one evening in my early thirties, I popped into the grocery store for a pint of ice cream and ran into Annette and her husband. Warily, we said hello; we made plans to meet. Over the next five years, we regained some of our closeness: having dinner, spending New Year’s Eve together with our families, thrift-shopping like the old days but this time for maternity clothes when she was newly pregnant with her second child and I felt sure I’d soon conceive mine. I told her, tentatively, how painful our split had been. True to form, she didn’t really have an explanation for dematerializing the way she had. I didn’t want to push; for me, our reunion felt like fitting a lost rib back into place, too fragile to dislodge. When I look back at our emails from that time, my voice sounds stiff, a stenosis lingering where the fracture had occurred. Once, I asked about our old letters, hoping to draw on them for the memoir I was writing. She told me she’d thrown them into the Burning Man pyre. It felt perversely good to know I had mattered enough to require purging. After a few years, she fizzled into silence again. I can’t imagine we’ll ever reconnect; ghosts shouldn’t be chased more than once.
Listening so intently to “You Had Time” lifts the veil between the me I’ve become—comfortable or at least resigned to people vanishing from my life—and the me who loved so hard, I could hear voices that weren’t even speaking. The young me thought Ani was unfair. Now, I have more insight into how C. or Annette may have struggled with what to do about me. I loved ferociously, but I demanded much of two young people trying to feel their own way into the world. Maybe they didn’t want to bear my flawed love along as they peered through the dark, or maybe they were not strong enough. For me, the outcome was the same. The Ani of the song relegates her partner to being a voice from beyond before their relationship is even over. Now, I credit her for knowing her own mind, and I see a sort of compassion there. I hope she had the courage to speak, but if not, I hope the song fulfilled its purpose; I hope that, one day, her partner could hear how much she loved them.
Looking back into my own shadows, maybe Hornby’s assessment is right. My pain might have been lessened if I’d known that C. and Annette left me, not because they did not love me, but despite it. After all, having someone see all you are and still not want you is devastating. But not wanting someone and not loving them are two different things.  

Susanna Donato’s work has appeared in the anthology A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska, 2021), Electric Literature, Redivider, Entropy, Proximity, and elsewhere. She is completing a memoir, The Only Girl in the Record Store, about growing up as a music-obsessed, Gothy, redheaded preacher’s kid.