Listener Response #14: Dennis O’Shea
The song that really touched me was “Ester’s Day.” Every Christmas we would visit my grandmother in the nursing home, and there is nothing more depressing then a nursing home on Christmas. I sat there looking around at the old folks, just humming that song to my grandmother: “Down and out”; “couldn’t bear to shout it out”; “to whisper in an ear”; “let’s just go get out of here.” I know it’s sappy but I still think of her whenever I hear that song or the album. Just a wish that I could grab her hand and take her out of that place and time.
Listener Response #15: Neal Agneta
I always got a huge kick out of being able to fit the entirety of “You’re Not an Airplane” onto my answering machine recording, thus providing GBV that much more exposure, not to mention utter bewilderment to anyone that chose to leave me a message.
Listener Response #16: Lane Hewitt
“You’re Not an Airplane”—I struggle to put into words how magical that song is. The wobbly piano intro begins and it sounds like a tape of a kid practicing that you found in a drawer in an old house you rented. Then Toby sings with the most guileless, sad sweetness imaginable. He sings “The race is yet to come,” the final chord rings, and you take a deep breath and listen to the silence. How many songs make you do that?
Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts
Part Five
We long for works of art that come not from will and submission to precedent but from an inner reality—an inner compulsion, even. These rare and unexpected works have the likeliest chance of being marked by the sublime, by an operation of the human faculty for making that is ignorant of socialization, beneath the ego. In Guided by Voices’ case, this sublimity is in part a product of impatience, but rarely is art this impatient at the same time so present, individual, and beautiful. Instead of working to become more patient, the musicians accepted their own nature and created by means of it rather than repressing it or mistrusting it. But this is a unique kind of impatience, distinct from that which is more often a result of anger, a rebellion against stale precedent and formula (think back to the first raging short songs released by Sex Pistols) that produces excitement because of its nihilism. In Guided by Voices’ songs, which can also convey a kind of recklessness, impatience is not defined by anger so much as a desire to lend the music force and clarity so that it doesn’t become diluted. It makes it more essential rather than seeking the emptiness of annihilation.
There’s also confidence, a quality that almost appears to be arrogance here (but, of course, that’s only convention talking—stripped of ego, this kind of power isn’t arrogant but original and simply self-possessed). The songs say there’s no need to play safe. There are plenty more hooks, images, impossibly catchy choruses to come so there’s no need to stretch them out as if you’re afraid you might never again write something as good. The kind of impatience we hear in these songs comes from the knowledge that you can’t hold onto real energy—you’ve got to give it away and find it again each time so that it’s fresh and real. The thrill of throwing away brilliance by cutting songs short, recording them in a messy, imperfect way, refusing to play up a chorus so that it becomes ingratiating is palpable on Bee Thousand. The thrill here comes not from aesthetic nihilism, but because the thing being treated so offhandedly is itself an example of self-knowledge, a positive rather than negative value.
Guided by Voices treats their music in a way we don’t often enough treat our lives—aware of the innate depth of experience, of being alive in a world as mundane as it is wondrous, pausing, but not for long, to register these facts. This band records in passing the sensations of our existence without holding onto them too tightly. And in that unwillingness to turn mundane beauty into something august and overblown, even if the songs are occasionally parodie or car-toonish, the music often parallels the world’s beauty and our relationship to it with uncanny precision. They contain the same depth, a level of loss, something melancholy, and at the same time generative that we all harbor. We can hear these elements as Guided by Voices songs offer and then let go of their brilliant and battered energies.
Encoded within the form of the songs on Bee Thousand—the way they’re played, sung, arranged and recorded—is the elevating and sad reality they bring us, however far they remain from the category of “realism,” while relating something undeniably real. Because these songs are full of art and life, because they register an acknowledgment of mortality and loss, they’re palpably beautiful. Though Guided by Voices can and does at times channel aggression and a kind of dark hostility, the music does not evolve from a conviction that all is lost, ugly, or worth destroying. The song-making here proceeds from a different premise: the world is strange, absorbing, equally happy-making and melancholy, and these qualities are always subject to time, diminishment, mortality. The songs of Bee Thousand—their hissing imperfect brevity—underscore the provisional nature of everything we love and want.
We often make up names for and tell ourselves stories about the things we care about as if we can hold onto the pleasure they bring us in the same form over time. This desire to still our experiences so we can re-experience them is doomed to fail and rejects the basic premise of flux at the heart of the way we move through the world. The longing we feel in these songs is defined by an understanding of this truth. In the way they absorb and then release the states they represent, these songs remind us that there is finally nothing we can hold onto and if we try to do so those things we wish to keep will die. Instead, in their myriad voices, in their sweet, crazed noise, these songs say, “Take it in—and then let it go.”
When there was nothing else—no acclaim, no contracts, no phone interviews, no films—when there was dismissal, anger, even contempt leveled at the desire to write songs, to play and sing and record them, there were still the songs themselves—tangled skeins of words, bright melodies floating over hard chords. They ordered the world even as they were born of a maverick aesthetic of disorder. They kept alive something that may well be nascent in all of us, but which does not always develop, or, if it does develop, is later ignored and forced to atrophy. For all the bravado, for all the beer and vulgarity, the ego and id, there is something tender here in this story of necessity, survival, and, finally, recognition. It is—this tenderness—the thing that draws us in most, that touches on what this story has to do with us. We all want something to redeem and amplify our lives. We want it to come from our deepest selves. It is a desire an old as animist religion, as current as the popularity of yoga, or the filling of mega-churches with seekers after salvation. It is a desire embodied, too, in rock and roll, music as a kind of religion. All of these pursuits are forms of spiritual seeking, of the self needing to be filled up so the self can be consumed by what’s greater than the self. This desire has nothing to do with what’s hip, with finding favor in a particular culture with its expectations and stated or unstated aesthetic criteria, though the expression of this need may end up finding a home in just such expressions. It exists in a pure form within and beneath every kind of impurity—the impurity of animus between former friends, the machinations of the “entertainment industry,” an untoward grasping after success, of familial love and familial sorrow—and we can tell ourselves about it by considering a story like this one, the story of the hidden spirit that is operating with fevered animation until it improbably and with a weird kind of grace emerges. So an album like Bee Thousand, which is just an album, after all, is also, if we dare to say it, a little benediction. It is the record—in both senses of the word—of a longing confirmed, of an emptiness embodied and partly consoled. It is our own life as we dream it offered up as the proof of another life’s redemption. “Making records is a spiritual thing,” Robert Pollard notes, in passing, without elaborating. The elaboration is in the story and in the songs.
Acknowledgments
For assistance and encouragement, without which this book would not have come into being, I’m grateful
to:
David Barker at Continuum, Marc Beck, Ben, Lucia, and Katka at Next Apache Café & Bookstore, Josh Chambers, Greg Demos, Bill Duffy, Kevin Fennell, Robert Griffin, Nora Hlozekova (and her staff), Lewis Khlar, Bela Koe-Krompecher, Last Vestige Music Shop, Mike Lipps, Eric Miller at Magnet, Jim Miller, Rick Moody, David Newgarden, Kate Newburgh, Chris Ott, Deanne Palmer, Mary Parliman, Jocelyn Polen, Robert Pollard, Jack Rabid at The Big Takeover, Professor Bart O. Roper, LLD, Charlotte Ross, Judith Schaechter, Yolande Schutter, Rachel Silverstein, Tobin Sprout, Chris Slusarenko, Mason Stokes, Dan Toohey, Don Thrasher, Nolen Twinn-Johnson (in memoriam), the Twinn-Johnson family, Rich Turiel, Gary Waleik (who introduced me to Guided by Voices), Jeff Warren at GBVDB.com, John Wenzel, Bruce Woodworth, the fans of Bee Thousand who took the time to write about their responses to the album (a longer book would have included many more), my students at Univerzita Komenského, Skidmore College, the Fulbright Commission, Guided by Voices et al. for all the music—and Emma Dodge Hanson (who would have preferred this book be devoted to Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown) for inception, belief, false deadlines, and much patience.
—Next Apache Café, Bratislava, Slovakia, 19 May 2006
* Called the “reigning proponent of cut and paste” by critic J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, master collagist Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental films and cutout animations which have been screened extensively in the United States and Europe.
* The lack of footnotes is most lamentable. Mr. Twinn-Johnson’s citation files appear to have been destroyed by a computer virus.
Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand Page 15
