Guided by Voices
“Teenage FBI” b/w “Fly Into Ashes” and “Tropical Robots”
1999, Creation Records
I’m the last person who should give advice about how to promote anything. This site’s view statistics are evidence of that. I couldn’t sell cocaine to Fleetwood Mac in 1975.
I’m the opposite of a good salesman; I’m the dumbfuck who gets convinced to buy stupid shit.
So maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about when I say that I don’t get why TVT Records didn’t pick ONE song on Do the Collapse and then pound their money hammer on that. They didn’t choose a single champion horse. They never figured out which new GBV song smelled most like teen spirit in 1999.
The album gave them two obvious singles that were groomed for radio. There was “Hold on Hope” if they wanted to go ballad and there was “Teenage FBI” if they wanted to go bubblegum catchy. WHICH TO CHOOSE?
Nobody at the office could figure it out, I guess.
I can’t figure it out, either, to be honest with you.
So, TVT never really committed. They tried to promote both songs to the point that they didn’t even make a video for either one, which is still odd to me. Even Matador made videos!
More honesty: “Teenage FBI” is not one of my favorites. In this home, it’s another “Bulldog Skin“. It does its job as a pop song. It’s infectious as all get out. I can’t hate it.
But it’s not in my top 100. It might make my top 200, but at that point, I’d get bored making the list and would put anything on there just to get it over with. My top 200 Pollard songs list would accidentally have two Human League songs on it just because I was tired.
“Teenage FBI” is a song from way back. Its inspiration at least is from Robert Pollard’s schoolteacher years when one of his students caught him picking his nose and made a big deal about it (as related in Jim Greer’s 2005 book, Guided by Voices: A Brief History). The embarrassment hatched a pop song with a universal theme.
“Someone tell me why/ I do the things that I don’t want to do/ When you’re around me/ I’m somebody else”.
BEEN THERE. I relate to that.
I bet millions of other dorks out in radio land might have also related (and they probably would have called the song “Someone Tell Me Why” because that’s the line that sticks in your head). With that surging Ric Ocasek production, Guided by Voices never sounded more like Weezer. Even in the quiet moments of the song, you can feel it dying to get to the loud parts. It’s all tense in the shoulders.
But I never liked Weezer, so the sound of this thing makes my balls uncomfortable. However, I do appreciate the craft of it. Everyone wanted a hit song and I don’t think Ocasek or the band could have done a better job at shining up this one. It’s one fizzy sip o’ soda pop.
It really should have been a hit. It deserved more than a thoughtless slot on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer soundtrack CD.
Still, the best version of “Teenage FBI” came out two years earlier on the Wish in One Hand 7″ EP. There, it’s even more simple. Basement rock. It’s a solid minute shorter because the arrangment is a skeleton. No guitar solo, no synthesizers. It’s just a li’l pop song saying “Hi” and then gettin’ out of the way.
When a “Best of Guided by Voices” compilation came out in 2003, with a tracklist personally selected by Pollard, he chose that earlier take over this new one.
On the B-side of this 7″ put out by the band’s British label, Creation, our old buddy “Fly Into Ashes” from the “Surgical Focus” single shows up again, still sounding sweet. Same recording. Because Creation are good guys, they squeeze in another song, the 51-second “Tropical Robots”, a sweet little piece of acoustic candy about retiring to Florida. It’s one of those classic Pollard shorties. It’s raw melody. A lovely little sketch.
I’m not sure why “Fly Into Ashes” got used as a B-side twice because there are several killer songs from this time–produced by Ric Ocasek, even–that didn’t make the album.
It’s all coming out soon, though. TVT had a jam-packed “Hold on Hope” EP in the works that unloaded almost everything (that made it to the studio, at least). We’ll get to that in about three entries, I think.
1999 and 2000 were crazy years for GBV. There are several scattered moments of greatness in odd places.
Your humble reporter at The Constant Bleeder intends to tell you all about them.
Yup, super weird they didn’t try and make a video.