GIRL IT'S SO GROOVY, I WANT YOU TO KNOW: Das Fork is now reporting green lights and grand plans surrounding a Pixies Reunion tour.
That bio/fan link back there (thanks Leo, whoever you are!) explains The Pixies' story and significance well enough, if anyone's unfamiliar. It also descibes their "taut . . . and demented songs", and there's a shade or a flavor of what is precious to me about The Pixies in that desciption -- the reassuringly certain arrangement of the songs, even when the "sound" was at its most innovative or *gulp* revolutionary, is a grounding counterpoint to lyrics that evade expectation and often leave sense itself torn asunder.
I live cement
I hate this street
it does to me
I must lament
this human form
where I was born
I now repent
Caribou!
Caribou!!!
Caribou!!!!!!!
And then, just when you're thinking "how pleasantly odd this tune is, in a jaggedly melodic way. . ." Frank starts shrieking Reh-pehnt! -- Reh-pehent! -- Reh-pehnt! with such an intensity and raw disregard for the longevity of his vocal chords that it seems possible he might mean it: This guy might actually wish he was a caribou.
Right there, blammo! The 80's are over, and it's only 1987. (As a matter of pop-culture physics, this is a fairly complicated effect. Succinct rigorous representation of the detailed temporo-aesthetic cascade is not possible in this limited space. But if you're satisfied with approximations and hand-waving, you might say that the force of Caribou balances and cancells a network of trends and tendencies that can be traced generally but reliably to the 1982 release of Duran Duran's Hungry Like The Wolf.) Not a minute too soon, if you ask me.
With 1987's Come On Pilgrim, The Pixies reformed punk and redeemed pop and launched "alternative" all at once, providing a palette of innovatively structured sounds hitched to enough chaotic energy to jumble all the parts around and make them more interesting, arbitrary, emphatic and free. Lyrics like a cat on a leash: tethered, spastic and justifiably out-of-sorts. Exactly how I felt at the time. The Pixies' whole package summed up to me in a sound the instinctive late-adolescent objection to conventional structures and established forms of doing and being (which seem arbitrary and oppressive before we learn to inhabit and own them ourselves). Their music was anchored, principled, heartfelt schizophrenia; more immediately credible and compelling than any "supposed to" that might be pressing down from other quarters.
And yet, The Pixies' music wasn't an objection. It didn't reject or deride, just did something else. Something better. Louder. Weirder. It celebrated itself, seduced us, and we roared on.
So, how will that sound as a reunion? Will it have the spark of spontaneous, unfettered creativity that made The Pixies such a liberating experience the first time around? If the songs sound like recitations, if they have themselves become rote forms of doing and being now that they have stood for years as established objects on our cultural landscape, then I suppose I will frown and shrug and settle for the expected nostalgia trip.
That would be a shame though, since it was The Pixies, at least in part, who taught me that I don't have to settle for the expected.
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