GChat: Me & Cory Argue About GBV

Sometimes at work (OK, all the time at work) I like to log into Gmail and argue with Cory about music. This time, it was Guided By Voices. Here’s the raw transcript:

Cory:  you don’t like GBV? Really?
Oswald:  eh, they’re ok
Cory:  I mean… to me, it’s just bizarre that you don’t like them.  Like… they’re the most potent embodyment of pure rock and roll that I’ve ever seen. I didn’t think their live show was amazing, but I was only one that wasn’t completely hammered. and they do it all. plus the songs are often amazing. To each their own I guess
Oswald:  see, this is why i don’t like them. it’s not enough for them to be a decent rock band with a few good songs on each record. they have to be jesus fucking christ. they just aren’t that good. too inconsistent.
Cory:  I dunno man… their thing is not editing- and it’s not like you ever had to wait for the next release
Oswald:  i’m not gonna dig through five thousand songs to get three or four good ones. asking people to actually pay money for that shit is offensive. i don’t LIKE bands that don’t edit themselves. it’s lazy and disrespectful. (Reader’s note: I am aware of irony.)
Cory:  I dunno.  He’s so frequently brilliant that I can live with the duds
Oswald:  if a band is not even gonna try to make a good album, i’m not gonna try to convince myself it’s decent just so i can fit in with the hipsterati.
Cory:  when they put like… 25 songs on a record, I just don’t feel ripped off. plus they have several top to bottom classics in Alien Lanes, Bee Thousand, and Isolation Drills
Oswald:  if you think alien lanes and bee thousand are “top to bottom classics,” congratulations, you’ve successfully ingested the hipster kool aid. guided by voices are the most nefarious hipster hoax ever perpetrated on innocent music fans
Cory:  eh, I liked em before Pitchfork existed
Oswald: there were hipsters before pitchfork, too
Cory:  but I was like… 15- I didn’t know any
Oswald:  yeah but how do you think you ever were in a position to know who guided by voices was? from the radio? mtv? i sincerely doubt it, broham.
Cory:  I mean, I checked out do the collapse from the library and one of my teachers was like “oh if you like that, check out alien lanes”. word of mouth
Oswald:  exactly. how do you think the hipsters spread their poxes before the invent of pitchfork and the greater internet? THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A SECOND
Cory:  sorry bro, you’re never going to convince me that guided by voices are a bad band.  Bob Pollard’s songs are way too good, even if they’re slapdash, to dismiss.  If any of these supposedly more consistant bands you’re namelessly referring to ever had a song as good as “Game of Pricks” “I am a scientist” ‘as we go up we go down” “my valuable hunting knife” ect on their hodgepodges of perfection, I might consider it. I mean… maybe… maybenaut.
Oswald:  the only legitimate way to hear about a band is when their pr company emails you. oh you gotta make everything about the maybenauts. i’m not trying to convince you gbv are bad, i don’t care if you think they’re great.
Cory:  ok then
Oswald:  but i will tell you this: I AM NOT MISSING ANYTHING. i have heard the records, i have given them their chance…
Cory:  stop making everything about hipsters
Oswald:  that’s all there is. hipsters make everything about hipsters. i can’t control that. they have a stranglehold on the global music community…i can’t sit back and just watch them destroy everything i love.
Cory:  haha whatever. I’m a nerd anyway. you said it yourself
Oswald:  and i’m not? i forgot i only listen to creed and nickleback. see, it’s always superiority with gbv people. we’re nerds, we care more, we’re smarter…whatever. there’s too many good bands to waste untold hours on mediocre ones
Cory:  Also you just described how I feel about every Hold Steady album.
I don’t care how much Craig Finn means it, there’s three solid songs on every record
Oswald:  well the hold steady actually write decent songs, i can see why you wouldn’t like them.
Cory:  because they’re not very good.
Oswald:  “uh, could you guys make it sound less like a real band playing actual songs, and more like me and my dickhead friends fucking around in the garage?”
Cory:  But that’s what they were.  They never hid that.  They’re just being themselves. and I mean, they eventually made like… full studio records.
Oswald:  yeah and those ones NOBODY liked
Cory:  Oh well dude.  Sorry you don’t dig.  Didn’t mean to hit such a sore point.
Oswald:  because the songs just couldn’t hold up once you scraped off the fuzz. it’s not a sore point. i just find it hilarious
Cory:  glad I could be of such amusement
Oswald:  oh shut up. don’t be a little girl. you’ve savaged all my favorite bands. did it hurt my feelings? maybe. maybenaut.
Cory:  you’re not hurting my feelings.  I would literally give my left nut to be able to write songs that are as good as Robert Pollards

After that, the conversation devolved into me claiming that I have written “dozens” of songs better than “Game Of Pricks.”

Oswald Vs. Aquemini

I thought I was done with hip-hop. I really did! There was a brief period during my freshman year of high school when I desperately wanted to get THUG LIFE tattooed across my stomach, but it passed, and ever since then I’ve been a mere dabbler in the rough art of rhyme-spitting. Some Wu-Tang here, a little Outkast there, and a quick dose of Eminem when I feel inexplicably nostalgic for times when I was truly miserable. (I used to blast The Slim Shady LP while falling asleep at night with zit-cream smeared on my face. No joke!)

But then a funny thing happened recently: I got really, really sick of rock ‘n’ roll. Sick of listening to it, sick of arguing about it – I’m confident that this, too, shall pass, but at the moment I can’t hear an electric guitar without gagging. Part of it is what Cory touched on in his Happy Birthday post – the sound of modern rock is ridiculously synthetic. I’ve heard otherwise good records marred by overzealous production that eliminates the thrill of actually hearing a band bash it out, and my slowly worsening tinnitus worsens a little bit faster with every super-compressed guitar riff. If I can’t blast your record, it’s going in the recycle bin – that’s just the way it is.

So I decided to focus my attention for a little while on hip-hop. And the first thing I turned to was Outkast’s Aquemini, a record I listened to probably a hundred times when I was seventeen without ever once getting it. Part of it was just being white and suburban – while everybody in the mainstream press was tripping over themselves to shit accolades on this thing for being “conscious,” I was wondering why so many of the lyrics trafficked in decidedly boneheaded misogyny and drug talk. I mean, conscious? What the fuck kind of thing is that to even say about a record? It oversells the intellectual aspect while undercutting the very real shit these dudes are rapping about.

The realest shit in effect here is personal responsibility. “Pay your beeper bill, bitch” may not rank with anything from Aesop’s catalog of fables in terms of moral lessons, but it is a refreshing step up from the smash-n-grab mentality of all those awful gangsta rap records my generation was weened on. Similarly, in “Da Art Of Storytelling (Part 1),” Big Boi might receive illicit fellatio in a mall parking lot from a loose woman, but he refrains from giving her the full cut-up because his baby mama keeps paging him. The greatest aspect of Aquemini is that it finds two dudes actually keeping it real – they do shady shit, but they evidence a bit of guilt and try to compromise whenever they can to stay somewhat straight.

Or, that’s Big Boi’s story. Andre 3000 is on some whole other shit – his half of “Da Art Of Storytelling (Part 1)” concerns itself with ecstatic moonlit puppy love before detailing, in strong and sad strokes, the tragic fate of the other party. (She hooks up with a guy who doesn’t treat her right and is found dead of an overdose at the verse’s end.) That’s Andre in a nutshell – he’s the sensitive dude so wrapped up in his feelings and perceptions that he becomes – at least a little –  complicit in the degradation around him. Obviously it’s not your responsibility to micromanage your grade school crush’s life, but he has undeniably removed himself from the situations that he so painstakingly describes. This is its own little crisis of conscience, and it’s absolutely compelling.

Aquemini achieves what most rock records can’t: it’s serious music that you can vibe to. I got a lot of mileage out of it all those years ago without understanding the first thing about its themes. Obviously this isn’t the best way to experience any music, but hearing the record again now, driving home from my degrading retail job while worrying about how to pay the rent and advance my life in some way and maybe even be a decent person, gave me a jolt of pure satisfaction – it was the past come back to find me, but with all these new colors and shadings where once I only heard amazing beats and a few pungent one-liners. It’s the kind of charge I didn’t think I could get from hip-hop anymore; frankly it’s the kind of charge I didn’t think I could get from anything anymore.

But Aquemini reached into my chest and squeezed my heart so hard that it started really pumping for the first time in ages.  - OSWALD

Just To Annoy Cory

I know he’ll hate this. So I can’t resist it:

I would argue that even Interpol have never written an Interpol song this good.