The Pitchfork Project #006: Relaxation of the Asshole

For such a fickle website, Pitchfork’s rating of Bob Pollard’s Relaxation of the Asshole (a 10.0 or 0.0) may come across as neutral. I’m guessing though, the rating comes not from neutrality but from sheer confusion. It’s accurate too. The album is barely listenable, yet absolutely terrific.

Listening to RotA was pretty awesome for me, but I *like* GBV[1] and What They Stand For. GBV is a band from Dayton, Ohio and you’ll know this when you listen. Almost certainly Bob will say “We’re from Dayton” (as he does several times in RotA). But it’s also evident in the songwriting. Bob, as a lyricist, uses a kitschy, low-brow, Midwestern vernacular and through this vocabulary, weaves nostalgic but unspecific imagery. This is the success of GBV. When other bands write songs that recall high-school or better times it’s laughably unbelievable and contrived, but when GBV does it, it not only seems sincere, but prompts the listener to “…’member when” right along.

Bob Pollard is a raspberry in the face of relevance.

There’s not a music critic on earth that can question the authenticity of what Bob Pollard has done. His work is the purest example of American rock-and-roll in the last 30 years. There are countless stories of the lore surrounding GBV[2], but ‘getting it’ is a matter of realizing that there is nothing to get. It is literally five guys who went to high school together, from Dayton Ohio playing rock and roll music, smoking cigarettes, and pounding Miller lights.

That’s where this album comes in.[3]

This album, though it’s only Bob solo, is everything about Guided By Voices that isn’t on the records. It’s the in between. It’s where one can understand that there is “nothing to get.”

It’s just stage banter. Drunken stage banter.

So that’s why it’s kind of unlistenable. It’s purely data, collected and sorted. It’s the Similarion of the Guided By Voices epic. Pitchfork’s rating is in a way…dead on (though I’d rather an “N/A” than a 10/0).

Relaxation of the Asshole, by its own existence proves it’s worth.

---

[1] Technicalities aside, “GBV” “Guided by Voices” and “Bob Pollard” are going to be used interchangeably…

[2] http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/124274-new-theories-of-everything-prompted-by-guided-by-voices-appreciation/