Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me

by Nick Attfield

  One thing everyone agrees on, after all, is the starting point, the exaggerated male-centeredness of hardcore scenes in Amherst or anywhere else in the US. This, in turn, seems to tap loosely into the straight-edge militance of some of those scenes, which rejected women (reduced to a single biological function) in the same way it rejected drink and drugs. Says Ian MacKaye, frontman of Minor Threat:

  I was interested in trying to create a culture. Sex was a diversion every teenager did, so I thought it was stupid… . Groupies were Rock & Roll. Fuck that – it had nothing to do with me.3

  Talking specifically about the New York hardcore scene, a regular – and, as a woman, an apparent outside observer – draws the inevitable conclusion:

  It was a real guy thing; I think it was a real gay thing, too. Girls weren’t involved whatsoever in bands. The appeal of Hardcore was as a high school for dysfunctional kids. There was that whole male bonding/sweating/being-naked/doing-that-dancing going on.4

  It’s difficult to know how literally to apply these kinds of comments to rural Western Mass (they’re about DC and NYC, after all – much larger, more diverse scenes). Still, a sense of extreme homosociality remains undeniable, and you can read into that whatever you like. In Amherst, Jon Fetler remembers the Deep Wound ethos as “guys hanging out with guys, being aggressive.” They went to see A Clockwork Orange a few too many times, and went out “looking for ultra-violence” (this latter meant in a tongue-in-cheek Stand By Me sense, the “effecting of a punk demeanor” confined “within an enlightened ultra-suburban setting”).

  And, if nothing else, their songs bear this kind of attitude out. As part of their generally contrary stance, they ditched the romantic entanglements of three decades of rock ’n’ roll songs entirely, preferring something less conventionally slushy. Insofar as their lyrics can be comprehended at all, they are not about love, or girls, or intrigues of any kind. Deep Wound stood for freedom, remember: whatever that meant, it definitely involved something higher-minded than pitching woo at the local skirt.

  Having said that, there is one song that targets girls. The title is Sisters, the second track from the EP. It’s one of the fastest and shortest numbers, 38 seconds emerging from a scream of feedback. Again, the most part of Nakajima’s frothing rant isn’t clear, but the song’s chorus just about comes across. Something like:

  She’s such a sleaze

  A printout for society

  She’s such a sleaze

  Sisters bug the hell outta me

  With this, and one or two other comprehensible lines, these boys seem to have turned their societal fury in a new direction, toward the older sister who, flaunting her wares at the neighborhood jocks, conforms in a way that sickens the brother looking on. But if there’s a mild puritanical misogyny here, then it’s intensified in full by the end of the song, which unleashes a disturbing surprise – the full force of the hardcore style matched to an ultraviolent pledge, and the first appearance of the unspecified “it” familiar from Dinosaur lyrics:

  Next time she sleazes me

  I’ll shove it through her face

  Nakajima spits it out like a bad taste; the song accelerates and grinds to a halt on a weird sound, metal against metal, all highmindedness degraded in a furious hardball instant.

  * * *

  Then they had sex. By the time of Dinosaur, things seem to have changed entirely. It might be said that the early indie kids of the post-hardcore era, having passively soaked up the cultural exertions of sixties and seventies feminist movements, began to meet cock-rock music and culture with a more ironic eye.5 Kurt Cobain, dressed in fine lingerie, would get up and sing about the arrogant, gun-waving Neanderthal who doesn’t understand the songs but likes their pretty tunes anyway (In Bloom, Very Ape). Likewise, Dinosaur weren’t completely oblivious to this. No (visible) lingerie perhaps, but Mountain Man from the first record pokes fun as much at the exaggerated masculinity of thrash metal bands and their music as at the kind of people who lap it up: “Gotta fight off grizzly bears/Gotta eat/So I’ll trap a few hares.”

  This is the exception though. In general, the songs of the early Dinosaur records are over and over again about girls – and, like conventional rock, and unlike Deep Wound, these girls are no longer blood relations. They sometimes slide into the lyrics obliquely, ushered in by a crafty pronoun, even helping to clarify what these songs might mean: God only knows what Bulbs of Passion is about for most of it, but then with the final line (something something “flows from her eyes/the heated feeling going unrealised”), and Lou screaming the song’s title from the other side of the studio, the whole thing spasms unexpectedly into a kind of soft sex-focus.

  On YLAOM, much more so than Dinosaur, the girls are finally in charge, and this is another main contributor to the consistency of the record. “Twisted love songs,” Lou likes to call them: lyrically, J spends the whole record prostrate, a whining wreck of a man. The she-rabbit that keeps running away in Little Fury Things is pursued, more or less, through each song, from the tragic pleading of Kracked and the pathetic wheedling of Sludgefeast, which has all the rhetorical charm of the cranky toddler (“Please wanna/Hang around/You’ve got to wonder/What it is we’ve found”), through to the stunned stalker of Raisans. And J’s protagonist never wins out.

  It’s not exactly what you would call functional, or grown up. But misogyny it is not. In fact, for the majority of the record, J’s lyrics place him so utterly flat on his back, he is entirely emasculated by any traditional measure. In one sense, it’s all very early-nineties emo, pointing away from punk and forward to a world of floppy haircuts, skinny jeans, and people called Davey. It’s tempting, in fact, to throw all misgivings about exaggerated masculinity to one side, and say, Jesus, J, grow up and take it like a man. You almost get so far as to long for Deep Wound, not for the aggression, but at least for the backbone.

  * * *

  Murph’s drums skitter straight into it, a downhill slalom all the way to the bottom note of Lou’s bass. One critic wrote of the several “twang pop-songs”6 of YLAOM, of which this, In A Jar, is evidently one – the sound of the runaway Grabber comes as a little light relief after the heavier-than-heaven noise of Tarpit’s end, and is by far Lou’s finest few minutes on the record (and perhaps since Bulbs of Passion). It even indulges in some cartoon tricks: as J croaks a line about being patted on the head, five downstrokes of bass and drums make the same gesture – and then the whole thing pushes off again.

  Whoopee!

  The thing about these bouncing bass lines is, though, that (a very nineties emo touch) their liveliness tends to pull attention away from the lyrics, which, in complete contrast, describe new conditions of humiliation and stupor. Look at the beginning:

  I’ll be grazing by your window

  Please come pat me on the head

  I just wanna find out

  What you’re nice to me for

  And then the first part of the chorus:

  In a jar

  Where you fit me

  All I could do was lick your hand

  If YLAOM began in a pretty lowly position, then here it makes an unexpected descent down the food chain, from a teenager to some kind of grazing ruminant: sheep, goat, camel, llama, rabbit. And then another one, down into something jar-sized (but still, curiously, something tongued). All these metaphors inconsistent in all except for one thing, a general downward trajectory toward insignificance.

  Add in the other half of the verse, the bridge, and the chorus, and it really gets complicated:

  When I look up don’t think I don’t know

  ’Bout all the scabs you dread

  It’s hard to stomach the gore—

  I know you don’t have the patience

  To peel ’em off no more—

  In a jar

  The scars are plain to see

  I just hope somehow you know I understand

  These are weird vantage points – two people watching one another, certainly, but it’s not real
ly clear who has injured who, to whom the scabs and scars belong, and who’s stomaching the gore.

  It is a text that, in fact, unlike anything else on the record, seems to describe a more mature, if more fundamentally dysfunctional relationship: a curious dead-end domesticity rather than a messy teen fling – open wounds and scabs, sure, are signs of ratty violence, but they (as many a bored suburbanite wouldn’t dream of admitting) are also the result of prolonged addiction, to crystal meth, perhaps. And, funnily enough, only a few years later, Kurt Cobain would record a song (first called Sappy, later Verse Chorus Verse and other names) that outlines a similar predicament, using exactly the same In-a-Jar metaphor, and setting its chorus in a laundry room – a reference to the well-known Seattle recording studio, perhaps, but also to just about the most mundane domestic scene imaginable. Nominally from a woman’s point of view (“And if you save yourself/You will make him happy”), there’s something tragic about this song; like J’s, a kind of grunge grown up.

  But where Cobain’s song is monotonously and inescapably verse-chorus, and poignant because of it, J’s suggests a solution, the leverage for which is provided by another of his characteristic change-ups halfway through. In the middle section, after a bridge of open-shut chords, Murph sits slightly forward and hits slightly harder, while J’s lyrics turn, for the only time on the record, into scrutinizing, threatening mode:

  I watch you fall apart, babe

  (you know it)

  You know I’m young and starving

  (don’t blow it)

  Just unscrew the top, yeah, pick me up—

  His guitar, unusually subordinate to Lou’s bass-lines up to this point, suddenly goes up like a flare; his voice, equally unusually, shrieks (“just can’t stop”) and then cowers away from the noise. The whole thing explodes into one of the record’s fullest eruptions, a riotous solo section that sounds like a jam. For once, Lou’s bass climbs out of its primordial soup into its upper registers, dovetailing out of a communal riff that is as tight in rhythm as it is fantastically erratic in pitch. And the old man in the bath starts screaming again.

  In these few seconds of J’s last song, then, things get tied up into a messy bundle: like the end of Deep Wound’s Sisters, explosive musical aggression is finally matched to vocal fury – or as close as this singer is capable of getting to it. Musically and lyrically, the lid finally comes off the pressure cooker, or the jar; the tarpit finally boils over. And, to match this, once the whole thing has calmed down and gone back to the opening music, there’s also a little lyrical change by means of which the song grinds to an early halt. It’s muttered so nonchalantly against the music that it’s difficult to make out accurately; you wouldn’t necessarily even notice it. Something like:

  Scabs collect beneath your bureau

  From the knife wounds you got

  These are J’s last words on the record, and they are, taken in the context of the rest of it, remarkable. Again, scars, domestic furnishings, but now – surprise – not pattings on the head, but, it sure sounds like, knife wounds.

  So there is an anger about In A Jar, something that might be just a little of the old Deep Wound I’ll-shove-it-through-her-face; it seems to balance between hardcore and horror punk, which could be provocatively hateful, and later emo which, under a thin disguise of nerdiness and musical niceness, thought it had the right to be more misogynistically damning still: girls burning up in the wreck, or drowning in the sea, just because they broke up with you.7

  But still, it’s not this, and it’s not Die Die My Darling, like the Misfits sang. It’s more vague than that, because, apparently like J’s teenage emotional life as a whole, it’s in the passive voice. If someone is getting stabbed at, it’s not clear from where, or by whom. And it’s croaked so calmly, with one final waggle of the tremolo bar, that it seems completely matter-of-fact – addressed to no-one in particular, like the murmurings of the drunk in the crowd, as J backs away from the microphone and the record, whining Jazzmaster still round his neck.

  * * *

  I asked J for a comment on the lyrics of In A Jar, and specifically on what I hear as the violence suggested by its last words. His response was, on reflection, to be expected. “It’s not that specific – it’s just about life’s scars piling up,” he says. “I don’t say ‘knifewounds,’ by the way.”

  Girls

  1. Quoted in Blush, p. 43.

  2. See Erik Davis’s interview with Dinosaur in Spin, August 1989, 54–5.

  3. Quoted in Blush, p. 34.

  4. Holly Ramos, quoted in Blush, p. 34.

  5. Compare Bannister, p. 92.

  6. Quoted from Chris Ott, at http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/5882-top-100-albums-of-the-1980s/7/, accessed 31 January 2011.

  7. Paraphrased from Greenwald, p. 136, which quotes a song by Brand New.

  Pressures

  So back in the Deep Wound days, Lou had written a song. Just under a minute in length, it has a child’s play riff – down-down-down, up-up-up – supporting a shouted hardcore sonnet of existential angst and enthusiastic self-hatred:

  Things are coming at me

  They’re not even real

  I cannot grasp their existence

  If they’re things I cannot feel

  And:

  Labeled as inactive

  What the fuck can I do?

  I’m not your savior

  I’m only more confused

  At the beginning and end, cutting right across the rhymes, Charlie Nakajima screamed “Pressure!” somewhere around the medically recommended volume for serious pulmonary contusion, and this provided the name of the song.

  It’s not the band’s finest minute, to be honest, nor their fastest. And its lyrical pretensions were doubtless a bit suspicious. Still, Pressures represents one central aspect of hardcore punk in a perfect nutshell: an utter inability to make sense of the world and the powerful self-hatred that came as a result. All in all, an aural image of the Black Flag fist punching the mirror, and an opener for the American Style cassette that Deep Wound made all by themselves in 1982.

  By the following year, though, and the Radiobeat release Deep Wound, something had happened to this song. The lyrics are the same, but the title isn’t: Pressures has become Lou’s Anxiety Song. Anxiety? The word makes Lou, a fledgling hardcore punk, sound more like a 1950s homemaker on the therapist’s couch. And “Lou’s”? It’s obviously been handed over by someone else (“my condescending bandmates,” he sighs) – yuh, that song that Lou wrote all about his anxieties, or whatever. And if that weren’t enough, making matters worse in this new 1983 cut is that Nakajima doesn’t scream “Pressure!” anymore. Now, as the song grinds to a screeching halt, he exclaims “Oh, the Pressures!” in an affected voice, as if, back of hand to brow, he were fumbling around for Prozac and the bottle of Beefeater. Hearing this, it doesn’t take much to imagine Lou, head turned down, spectacles fogged with rage – now the writer of a song that didn’t so much punch the mirror as strike a pose in front of it.

  It’s a typical episode in Lou’s association with J Mascis, a relationship that has had no end of words written about it. In fact, owing to Dinosaur’s infamous implosion after the release of their third record, it has become one of the most commented-on things about this band, and has frequently been cited as the root cause of YLAOM’s fizzing intensity. We all love a good vitriolic break-up, I guess, particularly if we fancy we can hear it in the music; and all the more so if it involves, as with Lou and J, harsh words, insinuating lyrics of later songs, lawsuits launched to recoup money owed, and an infamous onstage fight.

  So Michael Azerrad, in his book chapter on the band, is far from the only one to wonder why it all came to this. Inevitably, though, his conclusions have filtered down into other rock criticism with a certain cachet. It was partly financial, he suggests: J, the payee on all the royalty checks, was allegedly a little reluctant in distributing the cash out to Lou and Murph – which would be annoying, bearing in min
d all the hours they had spent, in J’s absence, to pull the YLAOM songs together.1 Second, sex. In those emotionally primordial days, Lou’s obvious veneration for J, Azerrad suggests, shaded into something like homo-erotic fixation, and J didn’t exactly react compassionately. They have acted surprised about this in a recent interview (“The first I ever heard of that was [Azerrad’s] book,” claims J; “I don’t know how homophobic [J] really was,” adds Lou, “He was just a jerk … pretty much just phobic”),2 and this is an appropriate reaction, since it seems to be argument by innuendo only. Lou may have been, as he told Azerrad, of “indeterminate sexual preference” at the time, and he may, much to J’s irritation, have chosen “to put everything in his mouth,” but I don’t see how that sets them apart from any other pair of teenagers in the world – and it’s definitely going too far to distil any distinct sexual preference or phobia out of it. Still, I love it anyway. I wonder if he got the Grabber in there.3