Crises in Non-Conformity, a Partial Timeline
1845 - Henry Thoreau, having lived at Walden less than a week, notices he has worn a path from his "door to the pond-side," and reflects, "how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves."
1975 - Writers for Lorne Michaels' Saturday Night Live, while attempting to create a show that subverts time-honored television standards & practices, come to find that the hardest thing to do when developing a skit that "breaks all the rules" is figuring out a way to end it.
1992 - Bob Dylan, ever the upstart, scorns modern recording technology and creates Good As I Been To You, an entire album of traditional folk song covers, in his garage. Sometimes to move forward, you have to go back.
1994 - Guided By Voices releases Bee Thousand, a twenty-track album of hissy pop rock fragments, quite likely a necessary foil to the slick, bedizened production currently ruling FM radio. Most bands who record in lo-fi do so for one of three reasons:
(1) it's all they can afford
(2) they enjoy the tinny, mashed-together sound
(3) they are being deliberately non-commercial
At one point or another in the career of Guided By Voices they subscribed to this scrappy aesthetic for all of these reasons. The problem is that much of its effect derives from the way in which it purposefully alienates itself from its audience's expectations. In other words, the novelty of a song that cuts out mid-lyric is entirely contingent on the belief that music should have recognizable structures with firmly delineated boundaries. Likewise, by cultivating this contrarian perspective, you run the risk of substituting one kind of fundamentalist rigidity for another. Once you don that rebel apparel, the mainstream garb becomes a bad fit and a worse look. Ultimately, I think this album is a noble exercise in devil's advocacy, a gadfly to keep the music community honest. There are funny lines and catchy hooks galore, even if they're embedded in texturally homogeneous songs that don't last long enough to imprint themselves on your memory. I'm not sure if sticking to your indie principles is a goal worth continually sabotaging such promising ideas for, but GBV didn't ask me. Grade: B-
