Saturday, July 28, 2007

Guided by Voices' "Everywhere with Helicopter"

Guided by Voices, the brainchild of indie savant/graphomaniac/outsider artist/former grade school teacher Robert Pollard, performs "Everywhere with Helicopter," a song written "in the wake" of 9/11. Unlike most of their songs, which are wrapped in the postmodern mythos of Pollard himself--trash-compacting classic rock heroism into two minute nuggets of indie rock gold--this song is infused with the amphetamine high and blindness of righteous rage that so many felt after the towers were struck. Rock and roll has a way with dramatizing such feeling so much more easily than poetry, somehow, but great rock songs contain within them a kind of self-subversion, as this one does. When Pollard sings, "we know the answers," we know he knows we're lost.



"Everywhere with Helicopter"

Eyeline [I line] the driveway
Eye [I] black the door
Sky all around me
Levels life from roof to floor

Trees and knees are lovely
Seek it, find the core
I have grown to life
Like all in silence
Wait for more

Everywhere with helicopter
Hard to follow/swallow
When I'm slow
Everywhere with helicopter
Sending off where lightning goes
(censor of the lightning ghosts)

I will try to fight them
I will let them nowhere [know where] to go
Try escape the pace
I'll say "God bless you"
Let me know

We know the answers
We fill us in
I do not diminish
Start to finish
Front to end

Everywhere with helicopter...

No comments: