Excerpts from an Unfinished Dissertation
By Nolen Twinn-Johnson
There are only a few accomplished artists in any medium whose post-mortems of their own work have anything like the same authority of the work itself—and Robert Pollard isn’t one of them. When Pollard talks about the genesis of his songs, you’re often amused even as you experience the feeling that a lyric so alive and multi-dimensional is diminished by explanation. The analysis, the “meaning,” is—as it should be—an afterthought, no more likely to get at the affecting reality of the work itself than a critic’s exegesis or a fan’s two AM free associations. Pollard himself knows this. He’s simply saying what he remembers about writing the songs, offering anecdote instead of analysis: “I write them and analyze them later,” he readily admits. If, after his account of their origin, the titular birds of “Buzzards and Dreadful Crows” seem to the writer no more than images of waiting and opportunistic death, the song, for a moment, verges on the obvious, when, unexplicated, it’s nothing of the sort.
Still, it’s interesting to be admitted to the laboratory so we can have a behind the scenes glimpse at the process of making the songs. Art often blinds us to the homeliness of the simple stuff that the maker uses to construct his “dream domain,” as Robert Pollard calls it, but his anecdotes as well as the songs themselves make us aware of his raw material. We can still see these origins in the finished versions, in the same way we can see the edges of torn paper and the scratched surfaces in Pollard’s collages, but those origins have become rich and strange—or sometimes aggressive and unsettling—in the process of becoming a song. Because of Pollard’s ear for the sounds words make when they crush against one another, or his mastery at playing with cadence and wrapping syntax with melody, no reading, no naming of the source or stab at meaning, even if it’s the author himself doing the reading or stabbing, can permanently reduce the energy of his work, the live and untamed qualities that arrest our attention in the first place.
In an audience at a Guided by Voices show, more than a few drinks into the proceedings and the lyrics of, say, “Echos Myron” emerging in slurred majesty from the PA, you have the experience of being fully within a happy mystery, one that’s communal and uplifting, freeing. You forget yourself. The quarrelsome and unsatisfiable demands of the brain are squelched. Your body and your nervous system take over. It’s the contemporary equivalent—sticky cement floor and underground pallor of fellow revelers notwithstanding—of a Bacchanalia, the Roman rite for the god of irrationality meant to precipitate orgiastic release. Because Pollard’s lyrics so often follow a trajectory that bears no relationship to logic or even imagistic interconnectedness, we’re encouraged—frequently forced—to abandon any desire for rational explanation or linear meaning. The lyrics take their place in a long line of art that’s meant to unmake reason, from the Bacchic songs sung in the grove of Simila near the Aventine Hill to the absinthe-soaked poems produced out of Rimbaud’s desire for a dérèglement de tous les sens as well as the work of his twentieth century followers whose disenchantment with bourgeois mores led to Dada and Surrealism.
The wayward and Dionysian line Pollard draws with words is an inducement to achieving what the poet John Keats called “negative capability,” a state of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Think of the turn from verse to chorus in a song like “Tractor Rape Chain” where the song moves from more or less realistic relationship material to language that bears no logical connection to what went before it. “Tractor Rape Chain” retains some of the lyrics of “Tell Me,” an early version of the song which contains words that could have been written by an insecure high-schooler desperate to find out whether the girl he likes likes him too: the chorus is the simple plea “You’ve got to tell me how you feel about me.” In the transformation of that early song into something else entirely, Pollard reconceives the chorus and gives us a signature example of how his language can create an experience that is sublimely disorienting:
Parallel lines on a slow decline
Tractor rape chain
Better yet let’s all get wet
On the tractor rape chain …
The turn to the chorus forces us in two directions at once. The instantly unforgettable hook and the authenticity of the vocal delivery draw us close even as the words, as far removed from pop-song formula or generic rock bluster as they are from the plain-speak of the verse, threaten to break free from the song’s gravitational pull.
Even as the declining parallel lines are images that we can connect to the lovers and their problem, whatever it might be, with this brief conceit the song changes registers. It moves from easy realism—“Why is it every time I think about you / Something that you have said or implied makes me doubt you”—to metaphor: two people become two lines, parallel (therefore in a relationship to one another) but separate (parallel lines never touch) and failing, going down. But if we’re able to connect the slowly declining lines to the speaker and the person he’s addressing in the verse—if we’re able to shift registers, as this image requires us to do, yet still think of the lyrical progression as coherent—there’s no possibility of doing so once the song reaches the tide words in the chorus. We’re tempted to relate the phrase “tractor rape chain” to what’s gone before it, but we can’t finally attach one set of words to the other because the authority of the absurd here requires us to abandon that way of thinking.
We’re left to experience the vertiginous pleasure of the abrupt withdrawal not only of “meaning” but the possibility of meaning. The melody with its simple internal rhymes (line/decline; yet/wet) and a perfect regretful sweetness surges forward to fill the space abandoned by logic. We release our grasping after fact and reason and the result is a deep feeling of beautiful melancholy, an emotional reality that we could not have experienced if the lyrics had followed a clearer path. It is this kind of effect—disorientation leading to rich and complex emotion—that gives many of the lyrics on Bee Thousand their power and enables them to take up residence in us at a level that is deeper than logic.
The effect, if I’m describing it correctly, is not the result of Pollard manipulating his words with this or any other particular end in mind. It’s not intentional—or at least not intended. Instead, it’s the result of one rule he sometimes follows when making songs—to “fuck up” what’s “creamy.” This goal might be accomplished by adding dissonant noise over an otherwise clean recording, writing a sweet melody for a rough-sounding song, or, as is the case with “Tractor Rape Chain,” offering words that challenge logic by means of a pretty hook. There’s something aggressive about this tendency. The image itself, when we think about it separately from the melody, is disturbing, even ugly. It works, at its most benign, to surprise us, and, at its most confrontational, to shove in our faces its unseemliness, a move all the more disorienting because the chorus is carried by an affecting and unironic vocal delivery. For a moment, you may try to take refuge in attaching the words to something concrete in the world, the writer coming up with language for what he’s seen during a drive in the country (is “tractor rape chain” invented slang for a farming implement dragged behind a tractor? Yes? Well … no). But these three words, connected by a spontaneous impulse of the imagination, are more or less meaningless in any concrete way even if they still hit a nerve in us. The suggestion that we “all get wet” on the “tractor rape chain” adds sexual slang to the scenario, complicating the connotation of “rape” in the chorus. The image of a sex-act involving an aggressor and the unwilling flickers briefly, unsettlingly in these lines. Yet at the same time the words give off a decidedly up-beat possibility of community—“better yet, let’s all get wet” (emphasis mine)—that’s nowhere more in evidence than when the song becomes a high energy sing-along at a Guided by Voices show, a strange moment if you have the presence of mind to think about the words you’re singing.
If the desire to leap beyond realism in �
��Tractor Rape Chain” takes a full verse to realize, “Hot Freaks” begins its flight from predictability with its very first words. There’s authority in the cocky and sometimes nearly effete way Pollard sing-speaks the verses, maniacally certain of the lush and lurid dreamscape he’s articulating. He’s feeling his oats, both as a singer and as a lyricist. We’re in the company of a writer tossing off absurdities with a mad belief in what he’s making out of words—and his authority is infectious. It is the voice—both the writer’s and the singer’s (the two identities are distinct even as they reinforce one another)—that makes the song cohere not through meaning or idea or even by virtue of a definitive emotional atmosphere, but by the will of an artist insisting it all goes together, image after seemingly unrelated image:
I met a non-dairy creamer
Explicitly laid out like a fruitcake
With a wet spot bigger than a great lake
She took me to the new church and baptized me with salt
She told me, “liquor”
I am a new man
Hot freaks
There’s sex here and sanctity, ritual and Americana all coexisting in the song’s skewed superabundance of images. It serves less to make sense of the salacious nonsequitors of “Hot Freaks” by referencing Pollard’s model for the song—lyricist Pete Sinfield’s “Ladies of the Road” from King Crimson’s 1971 album Islands—than it does to suggest how light a touch Pollard’s polysemous perversity exhibits by comparison. The American supplicant’s brand of mid-American fantasy trumps the imagination of the English prog-rock prince every time. Where Sinfield is heavy-handed, even loutish, as he lays on the dirty-joke tableaux—“Stone-headed frisco spacer / Ate all the meat I gave her / Said would I like to taste hers”—Pollard is incapable of anything so one-dimensional even when there’s nothing prudish about his innuendos.
Despite the presence of the word “explicitly” in “Hot Freaks,” the song’s lyrics, even at their most suggestive, never become explicit. They’re moving in too many directions at once for that. The language, pulsing with offered-then-with-drawn possibilities—“laid out like a fruitcake,” “baptized me with salt,” “She told me, ‘liquor’,” “took me to pie-land”—are more provocative because Pollard never lets the connections become inevitable and static. We’re left to supplement his words with our own imaginations, meeting the song half-way instead of, as we do when listening to “Ladies of the Road,” feeling incidental to, if not put off by, the single-minded and self-sufficient language Sinfield offers up. In the contrast between the King Crimson precedent and the Guided by Voices masterpiece we get a look at the defining element of Pollard’s writing: the intensely private and the undeniably strange draw us in in a way that more accessible or intentional work doesn’t. Not only does the solipsistic illogic draw us in, it compels us to participate. There’s such a fine verbal sensibility at work here that even at its coarsest and most provocative, the writing is full of joy and a command of idiom and image that’s tactile.
The writing on Bee Thousand frequently internalizes an aesthetic of disorientation, the way that Pollard prefers, as he says, “to turn a 90 degree corner; to take it in a completely different direction where you say, ‘no, now you lost me.’” Moving at a pace sympathetic to his jacked-up nervous system, responding to the requirements of his notorious impatience, Pollard dispenses with what’s expected or mundane. The direction he takes to accomplish this escape from the obvious is most often a downward one. A song like “Big Fan of the Pigpen,” perhaps the purest example of the impromptu spirit that pervades Bee Thousand, is in its unpremeditated way an ars poetica for a writer whose love of the grit and pulse of language for its own sake turns him time and again away from clean cliché and pristine abstraction. As Pollard notes, “The pigpen is not perfect. It’s low-down and dirty. That song encapsulated our lo-fi aesthetic at the time”:
Oh, to speak on one’s feet
To beat on one’s brain
The popular mechanics are at it again
A tenement filled with sideshow freaks
Assembled to downgrade
An impeccable arrangement by the soft rock renegades
And give me time to light
A sentimental torch tonight I’m a big fan of the pigpen
The ideal is to eschew ideals, to “speak on one’s feet,” relying not on careful forethought, but on instinct, preferably making a compelling or at least provocative mess in the process. It’s this kind of aesthetic Pollard follows in order “to downgrade / An impeccable arrangement” and thereby implicitly refute what’s tidy. Impeccable art is dead art and therefore, in the language of the song, needs to be “downgrade [d].” That downward motion—a tendency for dirt, for what’s beneath the pretty and the false surface—is everywhere in Pollard’s lyrics, from Bee Thousand’s opening song, “Hardcore UFO’s” with its refrain of “falling / Up and down from broken down buildings” to Alien Lanes’ anthem of opposing motion “As We Go Up We Go Down” and the title of Under the Bushes, Under the Stars. What’s unexpected, irrational, even freakish brings us down to the dirt where disorder levels us out and makes things interesting, if not entirely “real” (a complicated concept in an artistic project as chimerical as that of Guided by Voices). The pigpen is a place where disorder reigns and prettiness doesn’t stand a chance, but it’s there that we find palpable energy.
The aesthetic credo implied by the lyrics of “Big Fan of the Pigpen” is embodied in its skewed and jagged echo of a cabaret number from an early decade of the last century. It’s almost like we’re listening to a wax cylinder recording of a performance at a Dada soirée. The primitive booming bass notes (breaking up as they repeatedly enter the red zone) and the would-be jaunty acoustic guitar runs create an atmosphere of avant-garde recklessness so much more engaging—in large part because it threatens to go out of control at any moment—than a polished performance would be. We can even hear an example of “impeccable” speech, the kind the Soft Rock Renegades themselves might use, in the stuffed-shirt English evoked by the presence of the word “one” in the opening lines of the song. “Pigpen’s” stated desire—“to speak on one’s feet / to beat on one’s brain”—is to find spontaneity and kill off rational thought. The voice’s brittle timbre seems to long for that kind of release while it’s stuck in its proprieties for a moment before abandoning them to a slippery run of words. “To speak on one’s feet” could be an American surreal version of the Dadaist poet and penseur Tristan Tzara’s famous claim that “Thought is made in the mouth” (“La pensée se fait dans la bouche”). If language, as Tzara held, had become debased and meaningless, stripped of its power and purpose, even made morally culpable because of its complicity with the atrocities enacted by the culture of which it is a part, then better to substitute the unpremeditated sounds that the mouth makes, and recover the hidden life of words as they relate to the subconscious.
“Big Fan of the Pigpen” picks up its first line’s stated desire and becomes an example of speaking on one’s feet, of making thought in the mouth. When you beat on the brain long enough, there’s nothing left but mouth-noise anyway. As the song takes its skittering course, it moves into disjunctive flourishes of language spanning a variety of dictions, from a brand-name (Exacto knives) to starchy Latin legalese (ex post facto). A whole world comes into the song on these “hooked atoms” of language, as Coleridge called them. The Exacto knife suggests art-making. We think of Pollard’s twin passions, songwriting and collage-making. He’s there on the floor, magazines spread out in front of him, choosing images and cutting them out. In a song that speaks in its telling if indirect way about songmaking, this reminder of a visual artist’s working method—the cut and paste of collage—reinforces the presence here of an avant-garde aesthetic from the last century that governs the appearance of words in a song. Like images in a collage, the language of “Pigpen,” like the language of many of Bee Thousand’s songs, is chosen more by virtue of shape, color, and texture, than be
cause of any particular meaning it carries. The appearance of the Exacto knife along with the phrase “popular mechanics”—the title of a mass-circulation magazine that Robert Pollard likely cut up at some point in his long career as a collage-maker—reinforces the idea of creating art through assemblage (there’s an echo of that method in the phrase “assembled to downgrade,” however subconsciously it rises up in the song).
The presence here of “popular mechanics” also gives us a chance to consider one effect of Pollard’s penchant for making language fresh by promoting a freedom from familiar meaning even as it plays on that familiarity. We recognize “popular mechanics” as a title at the same moment that these words are freed from the inertia of an instantly recognizable and therefore quickly processed and forgotten, phrase. In making “popular mechanics” into the active subject of the sentence, rather than a passive reference to a magazine title, Pollard turns the noun “mechanics” from one sense of the word—“of or relating to manual work or skill”—to another, “a manual worker or artisan.” By making Popular Mechanics into “popular mechanics” (let’s say that this shift from upper case to lower case is another example of performing a downgrade), Pollard has transformed the phrase from the magazine title’s abstraction to what’s human and real—an actual person working and making something.
Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand Page 9