C or D : Guided By Voices.

there's nothing to argue about
of course you can be both!

That particular intersection is much narrower than you guys are making it seem, ime/imho.

I was worried for a while that he might be a Trump guy, but then he was sending videos to Beto O'Rourke saying "we are with you in your anger" so I feel a little better now.

If a 'sports bar schlub' just means a guy who likes drinking beer and watching sport then that's not all that narrow an intersection tbh.

xp what in the world would ever make you suspect that?

Those Cash Rivers records leaned pretty heavily into his "it's politically incorrect and if you don't like it don't listen to it" shtick that seems to pop up here and there. Just a bad vibe. More than happy to be wrong!

I didn’t know Beto was a GBV head

Re: his politics, I've never gotten bad or edgelord vibes except from some lyrics that use homophobic slurs and some pretty, uh, questionable lyrics that could be construed as misogynist...but the former instance is singular ('coming into town with the giggling faggots') and the latter is just sort of a thing that I think pervades most of cis male fronted guitar music.

he also said he would allow "no girls in the clubhouse" and that tipped me off to his particular brand of misogyny. most people at least pretend.

aw I don't think that's misogynistic—any more than the No Boys Allowed! thread. Just a bunch of married dorks watching basketball.

I think Tobin Sprout is a conservative

^^ he is
and i disagree Hadrian. the power dynamics are different with no boys allowed and i think that's pretty obvious.

not to mention "no girls in our band" is pretty weird when you make as much music as this guy does

every thread here lately

what a total drag this place has become

Personally, I hate that kind of thing—I'm a little skeeved by any puropseful gathering of just men or just women. But I do know men who do this and would be be reluctant to characterize it as misogynistic. My take on it is a kind of retreat to presexual boyhood—days of "cooties!" yore.

xp yes

whatever
if you think this is a drag for you, imagine what a drag it is for me
bye

aw I don't think that's misogynistic—any more than the No Boys Allowed! thread. Just a bunch of married dorks watching basketball.

― singular wolf erotica producer (Hadrian VIII)

hadrian i would strongly urge you to reconsider this notion

i am also not really feeling like explaining how they are different in detail right now

i'll just say that that doesn't accord with my experience as someone who has been in male-only spaces as well as female-only spaces.

I'm sorry, I don't think it's fair to accuse a bunch of guys who have known each other since they were kids of hating women...because they like to go into a garage and fart and watch sports together or whatever. I also think "no girls allowed" is too obviously stupid to be anything but ironic.

Not my trip either, but I'm not down with making character assessments like this.

to be clear—yes, I do understand the different power dynamnics and that the comparison is not equivalent.

I also know—and respect!—the fact that this *kind* of exclusivity allows for comforts, e.g. an arena to talk freely and more comfortably about personal gender and body stuff that might inhibit people on other kinds of mixed company.

"no girls in our band"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1_1ptzs0FM

Credited Musicians
Vocals/Guitar: Robert Pollard
Vocals/Drums: Kim Deal
Vocals/Guitar: Kelley Deal
Guitar: Tobin Sprout
Guitar: Jim Pollard
Bass Guitar: Jim Greer

Again, I'm grossed out by men-only stuff—including widely accepted therapeutic practices, retreats etc. that are meant to sensitize men, liberate them from stereotypes, etc. But I'm not willing to paint every gathering of "men only" as harmful to women. I mainly think it's embarrassing, but obv. for some people it's healthy

No chicks in the tree house! That’s what I told Kim Deal. We were touring with The Breeders, and Kim asked me, right after Last Splash, “Why don’t you let me play bass?” And I thought for sure she was just fucking with me, so I said no. And I probably would have let her, but then I told her that we have a policy that there are no females allowed in Guided By Voices. It’s like when you’re a kid and you have your tree house and there’s no girls allowed in it. Then she did an interview in some GIRL magazine and she called me over and she goes, “Explain your philosophy to her!” And I said, “No chicks in the fuckin’ tree house, OK?”

― brimstead, Thursday, June 22, 2017 3:23 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

here you go http://ink19.com/2001/04/magazine/interviews/guided-by-voices-9

― brimstead, Thursday, June 22, 2017 3:23 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglin

It’s like when you’re a kid and you have your tree house and there’s no girls allowed in it.

this is exactly what I meant by presexual retreat

in the annals of male slights towards women, "not letting" them into your AOR fanclub for alcoholics ranks pretty low imo

Kim asked me, right after Last Splash, “Why don’t you let me play bass?”

Lolllll, that's quite a subtle dig at her then-husband haha. I'm pretty ambivalent on GBV outside of 92-95, but Kim is the best.

Again, I'm grossed out by men-only stuff—including widely accepted therapeutic practices, retreats etc. that are meant to sensitize men, liberate them from stereotypes, etc. But I'm not willing to paint every gathering of "men only" as harmful to women. I mainly think it's embarrassing, but obv. for some people it's healthy

― singular wolf erotica producer (Hadrian VIII)

see, again, having been in some of those men-only spaces you are "grossed out" by, i don't find those spaces to be particularly harmful. it didn't do much for me, for reasons which are in retrospect glaringly obvious, but i think the _idea_ is not necessarily "gross".

Another life ago, when I was married, my then-wife would regularly attended a "ladies' night" party thing in the town where we had recently moved. And then their husbands started doing the same thing, on the same night, out of boredom or jealousy or whatever.

Anyway, I went a couple times and yeah I was kind of grossed out...they were trying their best to bro it up in a kind of forced way...and yeah, it just seemed really stupid and I found it embarrassing, maybe "grossed out" is too strong. I never went back.

On the other hand these were all very old friends who were able to comfortably talk about their erectile dysfunctions or whatever in way that no doubt some would not have been in the company of each other's wives. And I wouldn't begrudge them that.

GBV actually started as an ED support group

As We Go Up We Go Down

orginally "the ED guys" but they decided on something subtler

Is that what Bob and the guys talk about?

That's my understanding, yes. Mainly erections.

Those women don't know what they're missing.

Based on the few times I’ve seen Kim Deal in a live / stage-patter setting, she seems like she could hang with a bunch of belching, cursing dudes as well as anyone!

She could and she has. That's not the point! She is but *one singular woman* (and a GOAT to boot) and he has made thousands of songs.

My observation that he has some kind of problem working with women goes back to this very fact. I am not saying he is a hateful piece of shit nor have I ever implied it -- that is because I do not believe it. I am saying he does not see women as his professional equal with the exception of *one* woman. For me, a longtime fan of his music and woman musician, I was and remain disappointed to see that this is considered ok and status quo based on his good ol boy persona.

I don't actually like talking about this at all because it reminds me the lengths to which people will go to deny the reality of what I am saying by distracting and bringing up the ONE TIME he worked with Kim Deal. It happens like clockwork.

otm la lachera. boys in this thread would do well to consider ll’s words. earlier posts lamenting what a drag it is confronting similar opinions in all of the ilx threads is some bullshit

Bingo LL - Well said.

Bob's worked with like 400 guys and 2 women AND has said he doesn't want women in his band... not much wiggle room there tbh.

My point was just that it was weird he would say “no girls in the treehouse” to Kim, of all “girls.”

Yeah that's pretty unfortunate to learn as Kim boosted GBV's audience quite a bit by releasing the Breeders' cover of "Shocker In Gloomtown" on an EP around the time Scat released Bee Thousand, which was probably the first time outside of a pretty narrow audience had heard a GBV song.

But I'm far less invested in GBV as most people on this thread, they had a really amazing streak that caught my ear for a few years.

LL OTM. I've always felt Bob showcased the bloke-ish sports-guy chauvanism as a machismo cover for his awkwardness over being creative, but you are what you present to the world, and it's always been a turn-off.

I've always interpreted Giggling Faggots as a bandname, like "Coming in to town with the Giggling Faggots", but I have nothing to support my theory that that's what Bob meant, that's just where my brain went the first time I heard it. It's a pretty jarring line, which was probably its purpose, but it hits a bum note on an otherwise sublime album.

Tbh, as a fag, I don't mind it, but understand how it turns people off.

I love GBV and a lot of Pollard's other work, even, but it's no coincidence that I know exactly zero women outside of ILX who give a shit about either.

I saw GBV in the early 2000s in Chicago & late in the extremely long set he went on a rant about how Jim DeRogatis didn't like the band, and started riffing on what (he thought) DeRogatis liked, saying "Hip hop? I'm hip, hop on this", shoving his dick out, "Rap? Wrap your lips around this", shoving his dick out, and "Disco? Dis go in your mouth", again shoving his dick out. I thought it was shitty, probably more misogynist than homophobic, but both.

That the shows are full of the indie equivalent of frat bros is also evidence, yes.

When I saw them in 2002, Sonic Youth were playing the same night across town, and he went on this long drunken rampage about how GBV were better because their name had more letters. It was truly embarrassing.

I saw GBV and Sleater Kinney at NYC Summerstage - a weekly concert in Central Park that pairs artists in double bills. Toward the end of GBV's set, Pollard growled, "Who's here next week... Shudder to Think and ABBA?"

I took it as a joke, more or less, about Summerstage's "eclecticism" (not that the sets were really eclectic); but my STT-loving friend took it as a dis, and was angry.

GBV and Sleater Kinney at NYC Summerstage

my only memory of that show, which occurred toward the end (it may have contributed to the end) of my maniacal gbv obsession, is that sleater-kinney blew them off the stage.

I picked up the GBV "final show" DVD from a thrift store a few months back. Great setlist but hardly the world's most inspiring live band, if that's anything to go by.

Which GBV final "final show" was it?