Harvey Danger was the alternative to brutish alternative rock, guys too smart to be in a band during the 1990s, who somehow produced some of the best music of the era. Yet, “Flagpole Sitta” became one of the most famous alternative rock songs of the ’90s, and the band seemed powerless to stop it.
Just why is a “flagpole sitta” up there, and what’s the story of this iconic song? What do the lyrics mean, and how did the song end up being used on one of the greatest British comedy series of all time?
Nervously and anxiously, these are the questions that I’ll be trying to answer in this modern zine.
Harvey Danger’s Journey to Making “Flagpole Sitta”
Cynicism. That’s the thing that often separates the great bands from the ones that merely want to make enough money to buy houses out in the country.
Harvey Danger had as much cynicism of the music world as The Sex Pistols, and as much tenderness to their music as Joni Mitchell. How would they survive in the testosterone-filled universe of melancholy-pretending rockers of the 1990s? By not fitting in, of course.
I love Harvey Danger. Many other fans share that sentiment. This has helped the group to stay on the outside, even of corporation-approved underground music. Quite an achievement! And although the band members would scoff, “Flagpole Sitta” is the icing on the proverbial cake.
Indeed, I suppose, that blessings and curses always followed Harvey Danger around. The group was formed in Seattle, at the very height of grunge.
Although inspired even more by Pixies than Nirvana was, the fact that the world’s media was focused on the rain-soaked American city meant that Harvey Danger soon went from playing college parties to being courted by several cool, underground record labels.
The band signed to Slash Records. And by the time of the group’s debut album, the quasi-legendary “Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?,” Harvey Danger already had accumulated a loyal following.
And then came the hit, and things, despite the band’s protest, were never the same again.
Meaning of the Lyrics to Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta”
First of all, yes, “Flagpole Sitta,” I reckon, is quite the earworm. That’s what everyone, to be fair, seems to think of the song. It first gained recognition when local DJs began playing it incessantly. That interest spread to other radio stations, to MTV, which played the hell out of the video, and, eventually, to the charts.
How did such a catchy song come to be? Well, I suppose you’d have to blame it on the band’s dark sense of humour.
It’s no coincidence that the song sounds the way that it does. The band was deliberately blending beautiful power-pop melodies with alt-rock dynamics. Their city, after all, was known for launching the distorted, dissonant riffs of Alice in Chains and Nirvana on the world.
And, in many ways, “Flagpole Sitta” is a protest song, an “anti-anthem” if you will. Singer Sean Nelson’s lyrics point fingers and mock Gen Xers and their love for easy-to-manufacture rebellion. “Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding/The cretins cloning and feeding/And I don’t even own a TV.“
It’s a rage-filled song, but one sang as gingerly as a hit by The Cars. Maybe this is why so many listeners missed the song’s essential meaning. For example, while the line “I wanna pierce my tongue, it doesn’t hurt, it feels fine,” was delivered with sardonic humour, it had a different impact as the band’s Evan Sult remembers:
“Literally hundreds of kids came up to me and said, ‘I got my tongue pierced because of that song.’ And they would show me and I sort of thought, ‘Well, that was not my intention. I wasn’t trying to give a boost to the tongue-piercing industry – I just thought that the idea in the song was that people are letting these sort of outward signifiers stand in for real kinds of rebellion, and isn’t that silly?”
Flagpole Sitting
And what does the song’s famous title actually mean? Well, I suppose that it’s a combination of a few ideas. The “flagpole sitters” created a trend in the 1920s by climbing to the top of flagpoles while trying to maintain their balance for as long as possible.
Nelson told Stereogum in 2017 that remembering this fad made him think of the times he was living through.
“It was sort of about people wrestling with the idea of wanting to be authentic while both not being authentic and expressing themselves in a way that made authenticity sound idiotic. So I thought, what is a conspicuous example of a trend that once existed and exists no more?”
Nelson also explains that the spelling of the title is a humorous homage of sorts to N.W.A.’s vitriolic “Straight Outta Compton” record.
But little of this actually made sense before the singer came up with the song’s most famous line, the chorus part, “I’m not sick, but I’m not well.“ Luckily, the singer had the good sense to remove this from a different song, stick it in this composition, and, in this way, turbocharge the writing process.
Music Video for “Flagpole Sitta”
Harvey Danger’s musicians became unlikely rock stars as soon as the music video, the biggest promotional tool of the time, became a hit on MTV.
Liz Friedlander, who had worked with Alanis Morissette, directed the promo. Cleverly, the music video sees the band return to playing college parties. But, as they carry the musical equipment inside, party-goers are turned into various hipsters representing various passé trends. Some are goths, some ravers, some smoke pipes and drink martinis.
The song became a mainstay on MTV. This helped it crack the Top 10 Modern Rock chart in the U.S., reaching #3. Just how happy were the band members? Nelson explains:
“The thing that makes me most comfortable about the fact that ‘Flagpole Sitta’ has stuck around is that it is really conscious of the fact it is a piece of garbage in the same way that everything in pop culture is a piece of garbage.
I don’t mean to say our song that we wrote in our practice space in 1996 is a piece of garbage, because we loved it. We took what we did pretty seriously, maybe more seriously than we deserved to, but, like, once a thing is on the radio and on MTV, it’s a piece of garbage, because that’s how it is consumed.”
The Legacy of Harvey Danger and of “Flagpole Sitta”
Harvey Danger, largely, refused its own success. But, unlike The Sex Pistols or The KLF burning a million pounds, the Seattle group didn’t make much of a fuss about things.
For a long time, “Flagpole Sitta” was unavailable on streaming services, and the music video wasn’t on YouTube. Still, this never stopped it from being one of the most popular songs of the 1990s.
Personally, I think that the fact that the song was the intro to the cynical, irreverent British comedy, “The Peep Show,” throughout its five seasons might be the best thing that ever happened to the song.
It’s been featured in a lot of media besides, of course, including the dreadful”American Pie,” “Edtv”, and “Dawson’s Creek.”
The band did some other wonderful things musically. “King James Version” and “Little by Little…” are fantastic albums. But they’re the band’s only albums, sadly.
Remember when I told you about the deal with cool indie label Slash Records? Well, that didn’t quite work out. Slash’s parent company on the other side of the Atlantic was London Records. A complicated merger left the band’s second album in a state of limbo.
This all meant that the group never had a chance to duplicate its sales numbers. But it matters little. Critics and loyal fans rightfully love the band’s final two albums. And when the group officially announced plans to pull down the blinds and disband in 2009, its activity felt like a triumph, and not just some one-hit wonder story.
But, just what did the musicians feel about Seattle, grunge and hipsters now that it’s over? Sult told The AV Club in:
“I think it’s a really true version of what it felt like to be alive, at least in Seattle, when we actually wrote it. The ironic remove and the innate suspicion of both the mainstream culture and the alternative culture, and the yearning to be part of something, but not being able to get around the suspicion and the self-loathing. And then the ‘bah-bahs’ are just also the joy of being alive. It resonates with a frame of mind that turns out to be more universal than I would’ve thought. It’s both really upbeat and kind of savage and snarky at the same time.“
