‘Touch Me I’m Sick’: did Mudhoney create the true definitive grunge song?
With years removed from the Seattle scene, it feels like we still don’t have a clear answer for what the term ‘grunge’ actually means. Even though most people would say that it brings to mind the visuals of rainy Seattle circa 1991, it’s impossible to pinpoint what made Nirvana similar to Soundgarden or Alice in Chains any similar to Hole. So, with that many dissimilarities, how the hell is someone supposed to narrow down the definitive grunge song?
Well, it’s not exactly an impossible task. Despite every member of the Seattle scene having their own signature sound, there were normally a lot of details that they shared. All of them didn’t like the idea of being famous and, more often than not, talked about their own personal turmoil in songs as if to expel the demons they had inside of them. Even if Kurt Cobain wanted nothing to do with Pearl Jam, you can listen to ‘Alive’ and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and still hear that same level of anger and existential angst.
But to narrow down grunge to Pearl Jam and Nirvana would be grossly underestimating what the scene was all about. While Soundgarden had been there since the beginning, the early stages of what became grunge normally came down to what bands like Melvins and Green River were doing in the mid-1980s. Since there was no way their songs were getting on the air next to Winger and Warrant, everyone in Seattle was free to do whatever they wanted, which meant having more than a few strange tangents in their tunes.
Although Green River may have embodied the scene better than any other band, they weren’t really meant to be together for too long. ‘Swallow My Pride’ may have been one of the better songs from this early period, but considering how much Mark Arm and Jeff Ament were clashing artistically, it’s easy to hear their disagreements through the music, as if a stadium-rock band hired a hardcore punk as their vocalist.
Once the band got fractured into Mother Love Bone and Mudhoney, Arm was ready to do things on his own terms. No more would he have to rely on making everything sound too polished, and by the time ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ came out, he found the kind of music that finally worked for him. When looking at the song on its own, though, it’s hard not to see it as a blueprint for everything grunge was supposed to be.
Outside of the vague allusions to sex, the whole mentality of the song feels like an amalgamation of everything people talk about when they discuss grunge. Whereas most people like to write about the Seattle scene as being a bunch of people in their basements playing loud music because it’s too rainy outside, this is the first song that makes you feel that mindset, especially with the guitars sounding like they’re being performed underwater.
But it’s also important to look at the way Arm sings, or anti-sings, depending on how you look at it. He wasn’t looking to impress anyone with his vocal prowess, and even though many of his peers had proper singing voices like Cobain and Layne Staley, it’s no surprise that the Nirvana frontman ended up taking a few cues out of Arm’s playbook on In Utero when he wanted to get back to something more authentic.
Most of ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ might be more than a little bit off-putting at first, but that was mainly the point. A lot of the biggest bands in Seattle were looking to make the most dissonant possible during its inception, and by making a tune that got all of its hooks from being so ramshackle, Arm hit the nail on the head for what Seattle was all about. It could be messy and more than a little bit unpleasant, but every so often, there’s something beautiful behind the chaos.
