Pixies: Classic or Dud

What's so surprising about it? It's not like Killdozer or something.

Not exaggerating in the slightest, 95% of my female friends in high school and college were Pixies fans. Not just "I like that one song" but fans. To this day that is probably still true, but only 3-4 of them went to the reunion tour.

Well, them's the advantage of growing up middle of nowhere, I guess...

I always thought starting a Pixies cover band and playing high school dances would be a fun way to earn money.

This thread is making me want to listen to "No. 13 Baby" on repeat. That song is my jam!

Lots of people are mentioning Nirvana, but I checked out the Pixies because Blur used to talk about them a lot too! Possible girl connection? *shrug* They have catchy songs, we like catchy songs.

xp - well, not only that, but i also think it's a certain age of person (at least in my case with my friends, see also example above)
i went to high school 89-93 -- in the beginning the 80s were still happening and by the end everyone -- eeeeveryone, not just the weirdos -- was playing nirvana at their graduation bonfires and whatnot
different times. my friends who liked pixies were identifying as not-casual-nirvana people too.

They have catchy songs and KIM DEAL who is awesome.

And I reached them by going "hey I like Belly, I should check out this Breeders band" / "hey I like the Breeders, I should check out this Pixies band", which I guess is a pretty girl-friendly route for those of us catching up after the event, too.

I mean I sort of want to be all "can't girls just like bands too w/o it being a thing which needs special underlining and explanation" but on the other hand I do admit that sometimes it seems more unusual than maybe it should

(paragraph of inept sociology on this point removed on realising it was half nonsense and half tautology)

xp see LL, that's part of it; I knew LOTS of not-casual-Nirvana fans (tho most of them were metalheads)

never knew any girls into the Pixies until I got to college (ie after they broke up). got Doolittle when it came out, worked backwards from there. Didn't really like Bossanova apart from a couple songs, and never listened to Trompe Le Monde. nowadays... it's weird, I enjoy their stuff when I hear it but I am never really in the mood for it, I don't put it on. They were fun but they were not emotionally engaging really, definitely very heavy on the irony.

Feel like I have more of an attachment to the Breeder's Last Splash tbh - Black Francis' writing seems very opaque and gimmicky, very much a constructed "act" that doesn't require any emotional engagement.

^ OTM, except I'd replace Last Splash with Pod.

i don't know whether it's totally my own imagination, but i identified heavily w/ a lot of black francis' songs because they seemed to capture a distinctly southern california experience, which is where i grew up. which i know is weird -- they're thought of as a boston band, i guess. but he grew up out there and there are some tunes that just *sound* like socal to me.

I can see that (surfers + pollution = yep that's socal all right!) but there's sort of nothing there to identify with...? like there's no emotional content to Black Francis' writing, his songs have this odd POV that is bereft of thoughts and feelings and is more just a surrealist cascade of imagery. it's like he's more of a medium than a human being.

Do you have a similar problem with poetry, Shakey?

There is definitely a fondness for schlocky B-movie sci-fi and horror imagery that runs through those Black Francis lyrics. At the time, it seemed like a cool, absurdist gesture - but it's also kind of emotionally cold. Even when imitating the Pixies, Kurt Cobain wasn't capable of being as emotionally distant as Black Francis, which is partly why Nirvana lyrics seem more meaningful to me now, even though they traffic in similar kinds of absurd imagery.

yeah, i mean, he's definitely not a "confessional" writer, but there's an overarching persona that i can vibe with. or at least i did as a teen. "i live cement, i hate this street!"

I think their emotional content is p radical--they might be darker than Nirvana--but I think it's heavily refracted through surrealism, and only sometimes through irony.

I mean, these are fun and catchy songs but their main engine is an aggressive negativity esp. towards the self, so I can see how that approaches irony but not the usual sense of the word...

I don't see how you can listen to the delivery of Pixies lyrics and find them emotionally distant, personally.

to bring it back to nirvana v. pixies, i related a lot more to the b-movie absurdist schtick than the angst-o of nirvana (tho i know they had their own sense of humor). but that may have just been the kind of kid i was.

Do you have a similar problem with poetry, Shakey?

I don't see this as a problem per se...? Different works are engaged in different ways and that's fine, I'm just saying that I can engage with the Pixies on some levels (hooks, a great guitar sound, silliness/absurdism, childlike fascination with transgression) but not on others (emotionally, for ex.) This is not a value judgment. I do think it explains why their music doesn't resonate with me on a nostalgic level like some of the other music from this period (Smashing Pumpkins first two, Nirvana, etc.), because I didn't engage it in that way, there was nothing there for me to invest any emotion in.

I don't see what poetry has to do with this, really. I like some poetry. Cortazar, for ex.

I mean, I listen to the acoustic demo of "Break My Body" on Frank Black Francis and it sounds like the lament of somebody dying painfully of lust. And I mean that's there in the lyrics but BF expresses it through dissociated images raher than head-on. But I mean there's an almost operatic intensity...

their main engine is an aggressive negativity esp. towards the self,

yeah the only emotional underpinning I can detect in most Pixies stuff is one of self-loathing. But even there it's diffused and distant - Where is My Mind, for ex. literally references being dislocated from one's own thoughts/body/mind.

xp

A lot of poetry is built around using allusion and impressionistic phrases to build images rather than straightforward narrative, like a lot of Pixies lyrics. I was wondering if you make emotional connections via straightforward narrative rather than oblique impressionism.

I dunno if I could draw that conclusion, the media are so different - I feel like reading and music engage completely different parts of my brain, if that makes any sense

I can dig that, I was mostly just curious. To me, pretty much every Pixies song up through Doolittle is a variation on a visceral punch to the face so I don't really understand how one could feel distant from them. (Latter material is just as emotive to me, I just don't like it as much.)

taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame

the day is like a warm night
salt rusts the cold line

Just as I think Albini gets a little too much credit for "Surfer Rosa," I think Gil Norton gets too little credit for shaping those later albums into an illusion of order amidst all the jagged chaos.

I don't see how you can listen to the delivery of Pixies lyrics and find them emotionally distant, personally

There is emotional intensity there, but it doesn't seem to be connected in any rational way to the content of the lyrics. When Francis shrieks and hollers, it's like watching some Appalachian, snake-handling Holy Roller - there's an emotional intensity, but it's hard to relate to.

To indulge in some armchair psychoanalysis, based on suggestive Wikipedia details, I think maybe the "Rosebud" key to Francis's lyrics is his need to internally reconcile the bar-owner father and the holy-roller stepfather. In many of these songs, Francis seems to be acting out some bizarro-world version of an apocalyptic prophet whose crazy rantings conceal secrets of impending doom.

It's barely a secret in some of those songs!

I can see that (surfers + pollution = yep that's socal all right!)

forgot to throw in Francis' semi-frequent interjections of Spanish, which also fit here. always struck me as an odd thing for someone from Boston to do

I believe the epiphany to form the Pixies came when he was spending a semester in Puerto Rico?

isla de encanta

I've never been able to connect with Pixies. I feel this as both a lack and a shortcoming.

Yeah, Frank Black's Spanish on the early records is always Boriqueño affected and slanged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackity_Jones

Frank's sci-fi lyrics feel very emotional - perhaps you could put this yearning for space and extra-terrestrials down to a kind of self-loathing, a desire to get as far away from the Earth as possible, a need to connect with people who aren't vile humans. Regardless, Motorway to Roswell, The Happening, Velouria, are all very affecting for me.

only one of those songs I recognize is Velouria, the meaning of which I never bothered to decipher.

velouria is about being in love with some kind of interstellar traveling alien. with lemur skin, i think.

First Pixies I could lay my hands on was a cassingle from the library - Velouria, the Happening and something else IIRC.

Yeah Velouria is a pretty strange mix of alien/superbeing conspiracy theories, space/time travel, and fabrics. Motorway to Roswell is ultra-straightforward sympathy for the alien, also AMAZING.

does the velouris single have the neil young cover on it?
man, the pixies had some amazing b-sides.

Here's my challops for the thread:

Pixies were more connected to that angular/weird PacNW sound that predated grunge (Greg Sage/Wipers) than Nirvana was.

hmm, doesn't look familiar to me. Damn! I've no idea and Wikipedia didn't help me, pretty sure it was just 3 tracks.

cd single had these tracks
1."Velouria" – 3:40
2."Make Believe" – 1:54
3."I've Been Waiting for You" (Neil Young) –2:45
4."The Thing" – 1:58
dunno about the cassingle

yeah that's what I was just looking at - it was The Thing, not the Happening - I guess the lyrics are the same or at least the second half is, which threw me off.. I just remember that great groove and the 'driving doing nothing..' bit. I guess it did have the Neil Young cover! Who knew.

http://www.4ad.com/releases/1726

You don't know The Happening, Shakey? That's like one of the major candidates for the best post-Doolittle song!

apparently one of the many songs on Bossanova I've completely forgotten. I never liked the sound of that record. Apart from Velouria and Stormy Weather I didn't like it at all.

Frank's sci-fi lyrics feel very emotional - perhaps you could put this yearning for space and extra-terrestrials down to a kind of self-loathing, a desire to get as far away from the Earth as possible, a need to connect with people who aren't vile humans. Regardless, Motorway to Roswell, The Happening, Velouria, are all very affecting for me.

― antiautodefenestrationism (ledge), Tuesday, October 25, 2011 3:19 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

otm about motorway to roswell "last night he could not make it", the way it's repeated in different registers, such a plaintive note, and the outro

I don't think Velouria's about an alien - isn't she from Atlantis or something? Actually, probably Lemuria based on that lemur line.