Seether—Veruca Salt
#365Songs: February 28
It takes a lot of moxie to name your temper tantrums. But apparently that’s exactly what Louise Post did.
To be more specific, she externalized and personalized her anger, and gave the character a name: The Seether.
At least, that’s how one version of the story goes.
Confronted with said story, Nina Cordon offered a rebuttal:
“She doesn’t have a bad temper, no worse than anyone else in the band, including myself … Seether was a song about being a girl and being told by society that expressing anger outwardly is unacceptable. It was about trying to beat down my own temper to no avail.”
Whichever version you choose to believe—or whatever you may yourself intuit about the lyric—anger is clearly the fuel Seether’s car runs on:
Seether is neither loose nor tight
Seether is neither black nor white
I tried to keep her on a short leash
I tried to calm her down
I tried to ram her into the ground
The 90s were a beautiful time for indie and alternative rock, and there was a kind of newly liberated sensibility to how rock and roll tackled its canonical subjects of sex, anger, death, and rebellion. The anger got a little more real as bands started to take on increasingly heavy subjects like rape and child abuse, while the irony got simultaneously richer—perhaps as a counterbalancing measure.
This balancing act between earnestness and irony—and the tensions it begat—occasionally lilted into the ridiculous, so much so that it was even lampooned by The Simpsons:
Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He’s cool.
Are you being sarcastic, dude?
I don’t even know anymore.
But the bands and songs that go it right made history—and rightfully so. Was Nirvana being ironic? Hard to tell with lines like:
I’ve been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap
I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black
Or with songs like “Rape Me”:
My favorite inside source
I’ll kiss your open sores
Appreciate your concern
You’re gonna stink and burn
Rape me
Rape me, my friend
Rape me
Rape me again
One of the most important musical and culture developments of the 90s was the emergence of a new wave of female rock and rollers, punks, trip-hoppers, and more. The decade kicked off with I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, and proceeded to deliver gem after gem in its wake. Just a few of the highlights include:
Last Splash, The Breeders
Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair
Under the Pink, Tori Amos
To Bring You My Love, PJ Harvey
Tidal, Fiona Apple
Debut, Bjork
Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morissette
Live Through This, Hole
And so many more.
And this was all happening while R&B, Rap, and Hip-Hop were changing radically as well, as albums like the following were dropping seemin:
Funky Divas, En Vogue
Crazy Sexy Cool, TLC
Janet, Janet Jackson
My Life, Mary J. Blige
The Writing’s on the Wall, Destiny’s Child
Baduism, Erikah Badu
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Lauryn Hill
Supa Dupa Fly, Missy Elliot
Veruca Salt was a bit of a curiosity amid all this activity. They were named after a rich and spoiled female character from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Their debut album title (American Thighs) was satirical feminism at its finest. Their first and most successful single—and possibly their angriest—came out on a label called Minty Fresh Records. They got signed to Geffen Records immediately after—a rock and roll dream come true. Then they flexed. They didn’t like the video for their second single, so they pulled it from MTV. Geffen responded by withdrawing support for their album. So they did what all good rebel rockers in the 90s did—they recorded with Steve Albini and gave the EP a name guaranteed to subvert anything resembling mainstream success: Blow It Out Your Ass It’s Veruca Salt. End of story? Hardly. They turned right around and did an album with Bob Rock at the helm, and ended up with a hit song on a Hollywood movie soundtrack (Jawbreaker).
Things get complicated after that, with lineup changes, disbandments and reunions, and more.
But they’d made their mark, and “Seether” still comes pouring out of radio stations all over the world all the time, and it’s notched well over 26 million streams on Spotify alone.
That tension I was mentioning above? Between earnestness and irony? I think that’s a big part of why “Seether” works so well. Unlike Nirvana, who repeatedly relied on their clean-distorted-clean-distorted guitar patterns to embody inner conflict, Veruca Salt does it with their voices, managing to sound simultaneously like 6-year-old girls and deranged and drunken aunts. The 6-year-old timbres verge on creepy—they remind me of Carol Anne Freeling’s infamous “they’re here” from Poltergeist. As to the drunken aunt side, well, let’s just hope she’s not babysitting Carol Anne:
Keep her down, boiling water
Keep her down, what a lovely daughter
Oh, she is not born like other girls
But I know how to conceive her
Oh, she may not look like other girls
But she’s a snarl-toothed seether, seether!
Final note: “Seether” came out three years before Blur’s “Song 2” and seven years before “Hate to Say I Told You So” from The Hives. So if that riff sounds familiar, give credit where credit’s due.
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