i'm not sick, but i'm not well

Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" feels more prescient with each passing year

Climate Change. Billionaires. Social Media. War (culture and otherwise). Every year your paycheck buys less and less. The rent goes up, and it feels like every day, I forget how to spell.

Doesn’t it make you feel fucking insane?

Let’s rewind.

I’m 15, sitting in the passenger seat of my mom’s 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee. She’s got JACK FM on the radio. They’re playing what they want. Suddenly, after like a commercial for roof repairs, the chainsaw guitars of Harvey Danger’s 1997 “Flagpole Sitta” roar through the speakers.

I had already fully entered my nu-metal, pop-punk, post-hardcore era after my parents gave me a cherry red Sony walkman with their combined iTunes library downloaded onto it. It included stuff like early Blink-182, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, and also stuff my dad liked like Weird Al, Alan Parsons Project, Steve Miller Band, and Megadeath. I was also fifteen - hormones were pumping, I was falling in love with girls, and I was horny. To say the pump had been primed for me to absorb “Flagpole Sitta” was an understatement. The catchy lyrics about angst, alienation, and jacking off resonated with me, and frontman Sean Nelson’s raw delivery of lines like “paranoia paranoia / everybody’s coming to get me” sell the picture of someone who is being pulled in every which way by culture.

Seven years later as I sit in the office at my full time job, “Flagpole Sitta” feels more relatable than ever.

When “Flagpole Sitta” was written, it came at a weird time in ‘90s rock music. Kurt Cobain had just taken has own life, and the Seattle rock scene that produced that era’s biggest bands was quickly becoming what Nelson called a “worldwide theatrical production of rock music of the alternative culture”. As he puts it so well in a 2015 interview with the AV Club, “You’re watching the land you are standing on get commodified.” The song talks about what it’s like to feel caught in the middle of a cultural upheaval, both as a participant and an observer. It’s about feeling insane as you try to participate in something and create something, wanting to do something that will make you feel alive, all while you tell yourself that it’s impossible, and that feeling of self loathing makes you feel insane and paralyzes you.

I’ve been feeling a lot of that right now. I just left college for a new job in a new city, and I don’t really have any friends. I’m not sure how to participate in a community and find something bigger than myself — every public space feels like it’s been commodified, and it feels like there’s no point in doing anything if it’s not popular or profitable. I know that I should just do something that I enjoy (like writing this blog!) but I feel almost like there’s nothing to it. I want to publish zines, to break out of the depressing news cycle, rebel, pierce my tongue and find something real in my life. But mostly, I want to find my way out of the brain fog of information overload. I feel sometimes like what I need is to turn my brain off until we can figure out what the hell is going on with…. everything.

I wanna publish 'zines
And rage against machines
I wanna pierce my tongue
It doesn't hurt, it feels fine
The trivial sublime
I'd like to turn off time
And kill my mind
You kill my mind
Mind

The one part that I really think about it is the last section:

Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody's comin' to get me
Just say you never met me
I'm runnin' underground with the moles
Diggin' holes
Hear the voices in my head
I swear to God it sounds like they're snoring
But if you're bored then you're boring
The agony and the irony
They're killing me, whoa

When we’re so overexposed via social media, so inundated with advertisements and news and the constant pressure to perform for others, it makes you feel like you’re being stalked everywhere by everybody. It leads to the feeling that everyone is thinking about you all the time, that you take up negative space in someone’s head. It feels sometimes like everyone is paranoid about everything, whether it’s about crime or conspiracy theories. It doesn’t help that since the pandemic, we’ve become more antisocial, spending more time alone than ever before. We increasingly viewing each other with suspicion, hostility and exhaustion. Couple that with the ironic, too-cool-to-care posture we all take in our online interactions, and we’ve created a perfect storm of cultural anomie.

Anomie is a societal state of derangement, one where moral values in a society have broken down and cause belief systems come into conflict. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, popularized the idea of anomie in his 1897 book Le Suicide. Durkheim was looking to understand why people committed suicide, and in one study, he compared suicide rates between Protestant and Catholic communities. He found that the suicide rate was higher among Protestants than Catholics. Protestants, Durkheim believed, place higher value on individualism (the Protestant work ethic itself and how it relates to capitalism was well studied by one of Durkheim’s contemporaries, Max Weber). Catholic faith, on the otherhand, instilled strong communal ties as a means of social control that gave people support systems to rely on during hard times. Durkheim called this concept “anomic suicide”, where people ended their lives because they had no support systems to rely on when they fell on difficult times.

A key part of anomie is that it happens when belief systems come into contact with expectations. In the religious example, people felt they had no choice but to commit suicide because their feelings told them they needed support, but their belief system instilled in them by the church told them to rely on their own hard work. That gap between what is expected of you and you actual circumstances is where anomie is created. It’s something that’s been studied in all sorts of real world applications such as war crimes, where soldiers are trained to do one thing but are ordered to do something in conflict with their values by a superior officer (this is something my old sociology professor, Stjepan Meštrović, discusses in his fantastic book The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor).

“Flagpole Sitta” really is describing the anomic derangement of the ‘90s that the narrator is both witness and participant in, and I think it can be applied to the present day. Consider the pandemic that’s still raging on - the messages we recieved from the federal government were in conflict with what our governors were telling us, and those guidelines were in conflict with what media, scientists, and our own communities were telling us. I think that people can be forgiven for turning to conspiracy theories that at the very least offered them some sort of explanation for what was going on, even if it was incorrect. In fact, we can take this thread to it’s logical conclusion: the entire health system of the United States is anomic. Your doctor tells you you need a procedure to remain healthy, but your health insurance company tells you that it’s not necessary? What do you, the individual, even do in that scenario? Today, our world is more deranged than ever. Mixed messages on social media. The feeling of obligation many people feel to support social justice causes without any actual recourse to fix problems in their own communities. Even now, online, we’re told by countless activists to organize in our communities, when we’re actually more alienated than ever. It’s enough to make anyone want to dig a hole and live underground away from their obligations.

Despite all the insanity of the current culture, I think “Flagpole Sitta” offers us an out as well - it advises us that the only real course of action is to do what you want and figure it out as you go along. There’s not going to be a clear answer about why anything is happening and there’s not a way to turn off your mind and drop out. Build social bonds, do what you want because it makes you feel happy, and try to live in the moment. Those things aren’t easy - they’re incredibly hard. I struggle every day to uncouple myself from the expectations of others. But when I do feel like I’m trapped on unsolid ground, I find solace in the fact that I’m not the only one who’s not sick, but not quite well, either.