Songs from the End of History
by Joe Hoeffner
Dave Matthews Band: “Ants Marching”
I’ve seen DMB live a few times, but the performance of theirs I’ll always remember was April 9th, 2005. The Penance Show. About a year earlier, their bus was driving over a bridge in Chicago and emptied its shit tank through the metal grate all over a boat full of sightseers. It sounds funny when you describe it like that, but imagine it was you getting drenched in brown slurry, your clothes and hair and eyes and teeth sloppy with filth, your nose carpet bombed by ammonia and scatole and the history of Boyd Tinsley’s bowel movements, your screams gargled through mouthfuls of dehydrated piss and watery muck and the revolted bile surging up your esophagus. You’d be pretty upset too, even if the piss and muck did come from a beloved jam band institution. There was a real appetite for punishment, and that’s exactly what the judge gave us.
It was Dave Matthews and the rest of them in Millennium Park, not too far from where they were building The Bean, and they were all wearing diapers. This was already pretty funny, but Dave Matthews was a skinny guy and I guess they didn’t have any diapers that fit him so he wore a sort of canvas belt around the top of his, which made it funnier. They wore these laminated placards hung with twine around their necks, saying “MY NAME IS [insert band member here] AND I BEFOULED CHICAGO’S LITTLE LADY AND HER PASSENGERS.” They had to play “Ants Marching,” the one DMB song everybody knew, nonstop for twelve hours while people shouted at them and hurled squishy vegetables someone set out in a big wooden crate.
Aside from the diapers and squishy vegetables, DMB were under strict orders not to jam: they had to perform “Ants Marching'' exactly how it sounded on Under the Table and Dreaming, and the second Stefan Lessard tried to channel Jaco Pastorius or Boyd Tinsley threatened to whip out a chromatic fiddle solo, a cop would scream “back in line, fuckos!” into a megaphone. The band took it all with great dignity, though, especially Dave Matthews. I can still see him, face spattered with old rutabaga, placard dangling across his guitar strings, with the same expression I imagine was on Joan of Arc’s face as they put kindling under her feet.
Here’s why I’ll always remember the performance. The crowd was vicious, ravenous, desperate for their pound of patchouli-scented flesh. But every time the band launched into the bridge or whatever it is - where the music swelled and Dave Matthews sang in his soulful goose honk about cars and ants and black-and-red antennae and how they all do it the saaaaame - the jeers stopped. The vegetables moldered in their crate. Just like in the ‘90s, the crowd accepted stupid, tacky transcendence.
Then Dave Matthews would start doing that quasi-rap verse about candymen and weight loss and someone would throw a zucchini at his head.
The Cardigans: “Lovefool”
That was the summer of ‘97, when I had my first job as a lifeguard at the Aquamania! wave pool and I had a crush on the girl made of cotton candy. The music they piped in over the PA system was spaced out enough that you couldn’t tell there was a pattern unless you really paid attention, but I didn’t have anything better to do so I twigged to it pretty quickly. They would play “Lovefool” every hour and forty-six minutes, after “Backwater” by Meat Puppets and before “Pump Up the Jam” by Technotronic.
The third “Lovefool” of the day marked the start of my lunch break, and thus the start of my daily dates with Rosa, the aforementioned girl made of cotton candy. I was the one who named her, actually. I came in one morning and saw the concession stand workers gawking at something shapely and pink curled up asleep in the cotton candy machine. Her curtains of hair were dense and shaggy and covered her face, with only her eyes peering out, like a Muppet or something. They didn’t know what to do with her, but I did. “She looks like a Rosa,” I said. “It’s probably Spanish for pink. Hi, Rosa.” I reached down and poked her right in her hip; when I pulled my hand away, a little wisp of sugar clung to the tip of my finger. I immediately felt embarrassed, but she didn’t seem to mind.
Aquamania! gave her a job pretty quickly. Quicker than I got one, anyway. They set her up in a kiosk where she handed out maps and brochures, which kept her out of the sun and helped her learn English. Everyone was really decent and patient with her, even Shelly from payroll. Soon enough, the shock wore off with the other employees, if not the park guests; she stopped being Rosa The Cotton Candy Girl and became Rosa Who Hands Out Maps And Brochures. But every time I heard someone say her name - “make sure to restock, Rosa”, or “Hey Rosa, do you have a minute?” - I felt a jealous twinge. I gave her that name. Me, not you. She wouldn’t be Rosa without me.
I would associate “Lovefool” with Rosa even if it didn’t play at the start of my lunch breaks. It’s a naturally pink song, like how “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is amber or “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” is kelly green. The sleek guitar sound at the start, the chord progression before the chorus, the singer’s coy curlicue of a voice, the perfume-spritz chorus: macaron pink. Rosewater pink. Cotton candy pink.
Something I didn’t notice until after I was fired for yanking Rosa out of her kiosk and trying to eat her hair: “Lovefool” is a sad, pathetic song about a woman so desperate for affection that she begs an unfaithful boyfriend to lie to her and say he loves her. Maybe it was a bad omen from the start. But even now I can’t help but feel a gentle pink mist whenever I hear it: the mechanical churn of the wave pool, chicken fingers with ketchup, a lingering sweetness in the air, a breeze tingling my chlorinated legs as I hum my way to her kiosk.
Los Del Rio feat. Bayside Boys: “Macarena”
“Today,” said our high school principal, Mrs. McNulty, peering out over the top of a lectern as she addressed the full gymnasium, “we will do the Macarena.”
Some students cheered, welcoming any escape from classwork. Others groaned and lamented the intrusion of that fucking song into another corner of their life. Nobody was particularly surprised. It was, after all, 1996: to do the Macarena was simply to acknowledge that another hour had passed. I often found myself waking up in the middle of the night with my arms extended in front of me, or with my hips grinding against my mattress in a sleepy imitation of a sway.
But we expected some sort of preamble. Was this for charity? Were we trying to break some kind of world record? Did someone call in favors and get the two old Spanish guys from Los Del Rio to appear in person? I glanced over at my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Brashear, and opened my mouth to ask these questions and others like it, but I didn’t get the chance.
“Up! Everybody up!” Mrs. McNulty bellowed into the microphone like a bank robber, her beady eyes flashing behind the thick glasses that made her look like Billie Jean King. As the student body clambered to its feet, she pulled the microphone free and shoved the lectern aside, and the song’s intro made the bleachers quake. Eight synth pulses, a distant “ohhhhhh,” a ghost’s laughter, then 987 pairs of thrusting arms.
Us students could tell from the start that this was different from the average mass Macarena. Like I said, this was usually a formality: arms forward, hands on the shoulders, hands on the hips, sway, “heeeeey, Macarena!”, jump. Nobody wanted to do the Macarena; it was an obligation, an unwritten clause in the social contract. But usually it was done with an indulgent eye roll, an oh brother, this again, might as well. It was one of those fake little problems we made for ourselves in the ten year stretch when we thought we’d solved all the real ones.
It was different this time. After the first few loops, the casual smiles left the teachers’ faces, replaced with grimly determined scowls or gunpoint rictuses. The students started glancing at each other, mouthing “what the fuck” to their friends, who answered with uneasy shrugs. Mrs. McNulty perched herself on the toppled lectern, sweating profusely, arthritic limbs flailing with authoritarian zeal. She looked simultaneously as though she could drop dead at any moment, and as though she could dance for centuries more.
After the first hour, the song started to blur into itself. The synths, the rhythm, the old Spanish men, the bratty girl cheating on her loser boyfriend Vitorino, the laughing ghost woman: every noise was the same noise, repeated until it became gibberish, then repeated some more until it became torture. Two hours in, and most of us were too exhausted to move in rhythm. A few students had fainted, and their teachers splashed them with lukewarm water from the fountain. My lungs burned, and my legs felt like rotten wood, but I had the misfortune of being right in Mrs. McNulty’s line of sight, which meant she fixed me with her bug-eyed Mussolini glare whenever I looked like I might stop. At a certain point, I genuinely wondered if she was God.
Then again, if she was God, that would mean Mr. Tarkanian, the woodworking teacher, decked God in the head with a folding chair.
The whole gym collapsed into bruised, sobbing heaps; after five hours of the Macarena, this was our way of cheering.
Sheryl Crow: “If It Makes You Happy”
My ex-girlfriend said this was her go-to karaoke song. She went by Sheryl too, but that wasn’t her real name, which was Judith; she also insisted she didn’t name herself after Sheryl Crow, but after Sheryl Lee, the girl who played Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks, as though that was a more normal thing to do. “The key to doing that song,” she said on our second date, stirring her Long Island Iced Tea to hear the ice cubes clink, “is in the chorus. It’s in one word of the chorus.” Then she sang the first line of the chorus, not at full volume but at full intensity. When she hit the word “makes” - as in, “if it MAKES you happy” - she barked it out with such pained ferocity that the corners of her mouth were driven back towards her ears, as though she stepped on a Lego or got stuck with a cattle prod.
“It’s how I killed my ex-boyfriend,” she said. “I didn’t do it on purpose, even though I kinda hated him towards the end. I just got up there on karaoke night and belted it out, you know? And when I hit that word, he just keeled over. It was like it just stopped his heart or something.” She smiled and brushed her hair behind her ears. “Don’t worry, though. I won’t do that to you, not even by accident.”
Which ended up being true, by the way. We lasted two years and parted on good terms.
The Smashing Pumpkins: “1979”
The high point of my love affair with The Smashing Pumpkins, as I’m sure it was for everyone else. I actually got turned onto them a couple years earlier by my cousin, who either dated D’Arcy Wretzky or really wished he could have dated D’Arcy Wretzky, and I spent the summer of ‘94 swimming through Siamese Dream: “Cherub Rock”’s magenta churn, the silver-bell guitar that introduces “Today,” the mighty split-second squeals between the chords of “Mayonaise.” I knew what I’d have to do to Billy Corgan the second I first heard his adenoidal sneer, but I wasn’t in any hurry.
While biding my time, I listened to Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which I loved despite the best effort of its title. I felt pretty good about myself as a teenager, so I didn’t relate to the self-loathing rat-in-a-cage stuff, but I could glom onto the dizzy grandiosity of “Tonight, Tonight”; the sludge-fucked distoro-snarl of “Zero”; and of course, “1979,” with the guitar loop’s peaceful sigh and its palpable yearning for a time I never knew. My cousin, who by this point had either broken up with D’Arcy Wretzky or was served with a restraining order, thought the whole thing was faggy, but I listened until both discs looked like they had been scrubbed with Brillo pads.
The night before I killed Billy Corgan, in the third month of the new millennium, I played “1979” on loop. It was a way of making peace, I think: as I listened to this famously prickly malcontent embrace the gentle arcade glow of his childhood, I felt myself soften alongside him. This would be an act of violence, but not an act of hatred. I would sneak backstage, crack the pale eggshell of his scalp with a broken microphone, and return him someplace simpler, someplace quieter, someplace that felt like this perfect song.
I knew I made a mistake the next morning, when I saw the Smashing Pumpkins show up at an MTV studio to perform a few songs from their upcoming album, Machina. If I killed Billy Corgan, who was that on stage, bald head glowing like a beacon, radiating the sour vibes from which I tried to free him?
Corona: “The Rhythm of the Night”
There’s a French movie called Beau Travail that I ended up watching when I worked at an indie movie theater in college. (We had to put our favorite movies on my name tags. Mine was Point Break; my co-workers’ were Andrei Rublev and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.) It’s about a guy with a weather-beaten face in charge of a group of soldiers in the Foreign Legion somewhere in Africa, and the handsome guy in his group who everyone but the guy with the weather-beaten face likes. They spend most of the movie keeping each other at arm’s length, circling each other without wearing shirts, until finally the guy with the weather-beaten face tricks the handsome guy into getting lost in the desert. He doesn’t die, because a bunch of desert people pick him up in their van and give him water, but everyone thinks he died, so they kick the guy with the weather-beaten face out of the Foreign Legion.
The last scene in the movie happens right when it looks like the guy with the weather-beaten face is about to kill himself. (Denis, I think his name was Denis.) The music fades in slowly, and soon enough we’re on an empty dance floor with Denis, the mirrors on the wall behind him creating a sort of ghost of himself. The song is “The Rhythm of the Night,” which is totally out of place in a movie about a bunch of military guys in the desert, but it takes a strange new dimension on this empty dance floor. First Denis is posing all masculine with a cigarette, trying to ignore the way he spins and twirls in time with the music. Whenever it looks like he’s about to break out into a dance number, he stops himself, getting self-conscious about it. But then the synth break happens, and he starts swishing his arms and spinning some more before standing still, listening to the vocals that ache more than Eurodance vocals have any right to ache. Finally, he jumps, landing hard on the floor before dancing so intensely he looks like he’s trying to throw his soul across the room. Maybe it’s a dying dream, or maybe he didn’t kill himself after all, but whatever’s trapped him his whole life, he just might’ve cut himself free.
That’s the first thing I think about when I think about Corona. The second thing is the virus. The third thing is, of course, the beer.
New Radicals: “You Get What You Give”
My New Year’s resolution in 2001, for reasons that made perfect sense at the time, was to find the four music figures Gregg Alexander, formerly of New Radicals, called out by name in the outro to his 1999 masterpiece, “You Get What You Give,” and defeat them in combat. He later regretted including that verse, saying it distracted from the rest of the song, but if I knew that at the time, I didn’t care. Here is my fight record:
● Beck: Draw. When I fought Beck, he was in the middle of making Sea Change, a collection of melancholy folk songs written in a state of emotional desolation. Listening to that album in 2002, it made perfect sense to me: he fought like a man who suddenly realized he didn’t want to die. A minute or so after I ambushed him outside a Los Angeles health food store in March, he had his knee on my Adam’s apple, punching me in the face with feral intensity, eyes obscured by the brim of his hipster fedora. Luckily, I managed to move my head at just the right moment, making his fist crack against the pavement and buying me enough time to wriggle out from underneath him and make a hasty retreat.
● Hanson: Loss. The three Hanson brothers were in their late teens to early twenties when I fought them, which I felt kind of bad about. It had been four years since “MMMBop,” but I still pictured them as a bunch of fresh-faced, flaxen-haired kids. Shows what a sucker I was. It wasn’t a fair fight to begin with, since it was three on one, but that didn’t stop them from rubbing as much salt into my wounds as they could. Have you ever had the seventh-youngest Grammy nominee in history put a cigarette out on your forehead? I have, and by this point I was starting to wish Gregg Alexander had, too.
● Courtney Love: Loss. Once again, I was brought low by my own hubris. I was given to understand that, all things being equal, an average-sized man would beat an average-sized woman in a fight most of the time. I’m pretty tall, and was in good shape back in 2001, so I assumed I stood a better chance than, say, Kathleen Hanna. Pfhah! I surprised her in June outside the recording studio where she was trying to make a record with the Veruca Salt lady, and by the time she was through I lost three teeth, a chunk of flesh from my cheek, and however much blood I pissed out in the following days. It wasn’t my finest moment, but it’s not like that bald fuck in the bucket hat would do any better.
● Marilyn Manson: N/A. This one hurts. I had been trawling message boards for information on his whereabouts, and I received a tip from someone who assured me he was in the know that Marilyn Manson was recovering from a very specific kind of surgery that would leave him vulnerable for a good chunk of time. I realize that attacking somebody incapacitated by a medical procedure might seem cowardly, but my pride had been ground to dust beneath the heel of Courtney Love, and I would take a victory anywhere I could find it. Unfortunately, by this time it was early September. I canceled my flight to L.A. the day after booking it.
Smash Mouth: “All Star”
There is a theme park somewhere in upstate New York where one of the most popular attractions is Steve Harwell, the lead singer of Smash Mouth. There are other mascots and actors in the park, college kids who dress up as Kurt Cobain or Amy Fisher or Francis Fukuyama, but this is the real Steve Harwell. Every year, millions of people my age, some of them even younger, line up after riding the Pogscoaster or buying their own piece of the Berlin Wall to spend a minute with Steve Harwell. Some of them talk to him about “All Star,” or Shrek, or even “Walking on the Sun.” But most of them just rest their heads on his shoulder, sighing or laughing or weeping for reasons they can’t explain. Steve Harwell hugs them, gentle as a teddy bear with a soul patch. “Sssshhh,” says Steve Harwell. “Sssshhh.”
Joe Hoeffner is a writer, editor, and critic who lives on Long Island. He completed his MLitt at the University of Stirling in 2023.