Old Hat Flagpole Sitta Wrecking Ball Harvey Danger

Old Hat Album: Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? (1997)
Flagpole Sitta Album: Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? (1997)
Wrecking Ball Album: Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? (1997)
by Harvey Danger

Lead singer Sean Nelson wrote Old Hat about one of his ex-girlfriends who he thought he was in love with. He writes about how he thought he had already gotten over the relationship but in reality she still has a hold on him.

Harvey Danger was a Seattle-based alt-rock band, fronted by singer/keyboardist Sean Nelson, whose claim to fame was the ubiquitous 1997 hit "Flagpole Sitta," from their debut album, Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? The anti-anthem is a biting commentary on the commodification of Seattle's alternative scene in the '90s. Evan Sult, Harvey Danger's drummer, told The AV Club:

"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."

Flagpole Sitta takes its name from a popular trend of the 1920s, where folks sat atop flagpoles for hours in a show of endurance or protest. Nelson explained the significance of the title in a 2017 Stereogum interview.

"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?" he explained. Flagpole sitting came to mind when he remembered a reference to the trend in the 1930 Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers.

As for the slangy spelling, that was an homage to some of the band's favorite records. He continued: "And then having the 'sitta' S-I-T-T-A was just because the song only existed for us, in our room, we thought it was funny to spell things that way because you know two of our favorite records were always [Pavement's 1992 debut album] Slanted And Enchanted, which had 'Fame Throwa' on it, and [N.W.A's 1988 debut album] Straight Outta Compton."

The tune really came together when Nelson came up with the chorus after pulling the memorable lyric, "I'm not sick, but I'm not well," from another song in his notebook.

"And then I basically just sang it and made up the other words on the mic," he told Stereogum. "And I'm glad that I did, though I wish I had had the f--king sense to change the name of the song. 'I'm Not Sick But I'm Not Well' is what everybody calls it. And if I had done that instead of thinking it was somehow less artistic, less honest, or whatever, to change the name of the song after we had already played it in front of the 87 people we were playing to in those days, we'd be having this conversation on my yacht."

Flagpole Sitta also mocks edgy hipster trends like pierced tongues ("I wanna pierce my tongue, it doesn't hurt, it feels fine"), but the sarcasm went over the heads of young fans who took the lyrics literally and proudly showed off their studs at the band's shows. Sult recalled:

"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?"

The music video, directed by Liz Friedlander ("You Learn"), follows the band hauling their equipment through a party whose crowd adopts different hipster aesthetics - from aloof martini-drinkers, to sullen black-clad goths, to glowstick-adorned ravers.

The clip was in heavy rotation on MTV, which helped propel the single to #3 on the Modern Rock chart, but also tarnished the song's legacy in Nelson's eyes.

"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," he told Stereogum. "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."

Flagpole Sitta also got a lot of attention when it was featured in the popular teen movie American Pie, although it wasn't included on the soundtrack album. It was also used in these movies:

Do Revenge (2022)
My Dead Boyfriend (2016)
Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star (2003)
Edtv (1999)
Disturbing Behavior (1998)

And these TV shows:

Superstore ("Blizzard" - 2019)
Psych ("Tuesday the 17th" - 2009)
October Road ("Best Friend Windows" - 2007)
Undressed ("The Ex-Files" - 1999)
Dawson's Creek ("Alternative Lifestyles" - 1998)

From 2004 to 2015, Flagpole Sitta was used as the theme song to Peep Show, a British sitcom about a pair of dysfunctional roommates. Nelson was pleased with the placement, saying, "It's a joy to be affiliated with something that's so smart and so funny and so kind of rude and weird."

After their out-of-the-gate success, Harvey Danger's momentum was stalled when their label, Slash Records, and its parent company, London Recordings, were swallowed up in a merger, and it became unclear which entity had control of the band's contract. The corporate reshuffling delayed the release of their follow-up album, King James Version, and forced them to turn down a tour with The Pretenders. When the matter was finally sorted, with the band attached to the newly formed London-Sire Records, the album was released to critical acclaim but little commercial success. The reception was particularly disappointing because the band wanted to escape the shadow of their catchy breakthrough hit.

Nelson told PopMatters in 2014: "The first record, it requires less intense focus. It grabs you. Even though we were very serious about what we did, it wasn't at the cost of having fun. We were never particularly fun people. As we interacted with the music business, we were told all the time that we should be writing songs that were more like 'Flagpole Sitta,' but we didn't really either know how to do it or want to do it because what we really wanted was to be taken seriously, which is a fatal flaw for a band."

Harvey Danger went on hiatus in 2001 and reunited in 2005 to record their third and final studio album, Little By Little… They officially disbanded in 2009.

Wrecking Ball is about how when Harvey Danger began getting popular, lead singer Sean Nelson became more and more detached from the people he loved. "Wrecking Ball" is a reference to how he was obligated to continue doing shows.