The Releases: Tremblers and Goggles by Rank (LP—GBVi, 2022) / Alex Bell (Single—GBVi, 2022)
I know that I’ve professed my love of the Phillies a few times throughout The GBV Project, but I’ve yet to mention that I’m an equally big fan of the Philadelphia Flyers. I won’t trouble you with details of a nearly forty-year relationship with a hockey team that FiveThirtyEight once used statistical data to argue was the most mediocre franchise in all of American sports. It’s complicated, not particularly interesting, and has absolutely no relevance to Robert Pollard or Guided by Voices.
But knowing this helps to establish the fact that I’m an almost religious watcher of every Flyers game. I make social plans around an eighty-two game schedule that stretches from October to April. And, when the orange and black finally again become the perennial playoff team that they were throughout my late-teens and twenties, I will—in all seriousness—even be reluctant to schedule summer vacations any earlier than late June; lest I miss the chance to see the Flyers lift a Stanley Cup that has eluded their grasp for the last half-century.
Over the past couple of seasons, I’ve transitioned from watching Flyers games via satellite television to a combination of different apps. And as any regular watcher of these apps can tell you, the advertisements are extremely repetitive. Sure, TV ads have always been repetitive, but it’s not that uncommon for the same spot to appear during all three television timeouts in a hockey period—and there have been more than a few times where one ad repeats during the same three-minute break.
I tend to get desensitized to these things relatively quickly, zoning out for a few moments to catch up on a Discord thread about the very same game I’m watching. With several of these ads, I could quote back specific lines, describe the people that are in them, and still not even recall what was being sold. A few decades ago this would have been an absurd notion, but perhaps due to the proliferation of ads pushing services instead of products—insurance, resume builders, sports betting—advertisements have grown a bit more abstract. I wonder what Don Draper would think of this.
Over the past week or so, there is one ad that I keep snapping to alertness at. In it, a geographically separated group of twenty-somethings use Facebook to plan a Thanksgiving Break get together in a hometown that they’ve (presumably) all long since left. It’s all very idyllic. The actors are all conventionally attractive. The settings are perfectly picturesque. There’s just the right amount of snow on the ground. And—in the element that most catches my attention—it’s all soundtracked by Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline version of “Girl From the North Country,” before the somewhat awkward Johnny Cash duet begins.
I struck a particularly cynical tone when it came on the other day, for at least the sixth time in a game that was already hopelessly out of reach for the Flyers. I suggested to my wife that a more accurate Facebook ad should feature a similarly idealized Thanksgiving dinner table, where an uncle suddenly interjects with a particularly appalling racist conspiracy theory, all while the reasonable members of his family look on in abject horror. It could be soundtracked by one of those AI country hits that are making the rounds these days, and fade to a title card that reads, “This Family Moment Brought to You by Facebook.”
Of course, I’m far from unique in my cynicism toward a social media platform, but I harbor a particular dislike for Facebook; for the record, I never joined Twitter, so I’ve only had second-hand exposure to that shit show. Of course, I’m also far from unique in my hypocrisy toward social media; after all, I left Facebook in protest about a year ago—the election was the final straw—but I’ve maintained a presence on Instagram.
And I guess that saying “left Facebook” is a bit of a misnomer. I didn’t actually delete my account, and for a few reasons that I still feel are valid. Mainly, the fifteen years of posts that I made on the platform are essentially a running scrapbook of my life from my late-twenties to my mid-forties. Retracing that timeline, I can watch my kids grow up again, revisit good times spent with friends and family, reflect on hardships and frustrations with added perspective, and preserve some of the last communications that I had with people who are no longer with us.
But my last few years on Facebook didn’t involve much of that stuff. It was a mix of of increasingly-exasperated political posts, the instant regret of clicking on comment sections that I knew better than to click on, and selling old furniture and music gear on Marketplace. Whatever value I had once gotten out of Facebook was now completely overwhelmed by a near-constant barrage of things that did nothing other than raise my blood pressure. I deleted the app from my phone, and moved on.
And I lost nothing of true importance. I didn’t need to be ‘connected’ to old friends that I haven’t had real contact with since high school. I didn’t need to read posts by friendly acquaintances from two jobs ago; and I sure as hell didn’t need to read the comments by their old high school friends and ex-coworkers. I have plenty of friends—both old and new—that I prioritize having more contact with than the occasional ‘like’ or quick comment.
And while I didn’t make any kind of extra effort with those friends after leaving Facebook, I did notice that the communication that we had became less superficial. This past summer I took a solo road trip through the western states, spending most of the time back home in Arizona. I visited with nearly every member of my family that I care to keep in contact with, and I made a point of spending time with five close friends—crashing on the couches and spare rooms of three of them. Since my family and I moved to Oregon in 2012, all five of those friends have become parents; my wife and I were the outliers, as our own children were already seven and ten by the time we left Arizona.
I would describe the visits that I shared with each of those friends as ‘substantial.’ We talked about fatherhood, work, music, the aging (and in some cases, death) of our parents, politics, hobbies, and travel. None of these conversations were obstructed by the gauze of “yeah, I saw your post about that.” There were laughs, drinks, thoughtful questions, revealing answers, tears, more laughs, more drinks, and giant fucking bear hugs. I hadn’t seen some of these friends in years, and I hadn’t talked that meaningfully with them in far longer. And while I can’t definitively say whether this was a product of the poignancy of middle age, or my withdrawal from the frivolity of social media communication, I suspect that both were factors.
But here’s where I have a confession to make: I haven’t entirely stayed off of Facebook. On my desktop computer in my home office, the Chrome browser opens Facebook to an account that I set up for Strange Currencies when I started the site in 2020. And over the course of this year, I’ve opened it up every month or so to access a Guided by Voices fan group, where I occasionally share links to articles that I have written for The GBV Project.
I joined a handful of these groups back in 2021, as I was nearing the end of the A Century of Song project. I would share song-related blurbs that I had written in order to drive a bit of traffic to Strange Currencies, and it actually worked. The Frank Black/Pixies group was particularly responsive, and several of its members became regular readers of the site. I also got positive receptions from the Pavement/Stephen Malkmus, Radiohead, and R.E.M. (the website’s name helped, I’m sure) groups.
Some of these fan groups were a little more resistant to my presence. I inadvertently started an argument between some long-time posters in a They Might be Giants group, over what kind of content violated their ‘no self-promotion’ rules. Naturally, I sided with the ones who felt like my posts were insightful and relevant, but I didn’t feel compelled to stay around when one particularly protective member took offense to some old-timers sticking up for a noob. Likewise, I bolted after a guy in a Bob Dylan group got worked up when I referred to a mid-sixties ‘thin wild mercury-era’ song as “amphetamine-fueled.”
And if you’ve never had the pleasure of frequenting any of these Facebook fan groups, here’s my biggest takeaway: they’re fucking weird. They all have their own codes of conduct. Many are insular, and seem very suspicious of newcomers. Some are militant about staying on-topic, while others allow for occasional tangents. Most strictly prohibit any talk of politics—which is particularly odd when the subject is a band like The Clash. Members tend to be supportive of each others’ similar obsessions, but not always; I saw one person’s (admittedly awful) fan art essentially get them laughed out of a David Bowie group, and probably afraid to ever pick up a colored pencil again.
One of the strangest things about these groups is that I suspect many of their members’ interests to be unidirectional. Like, after spending some time in a fan group for The Who, I’m pretty sure there are people out there who only listen to The Who. No Kinks. No Stones. No Captain & Tennille. Even mentioning a Roger Daltrey solo album in their presence might elicit a sideways glance. No, these people don’t like music. They only like The Who. And I wouldn’t have believed it until I saw it with my own eyes.
This Guided by Voices group that I pop in on every once in a while is also a bit weird. One of the things that members will frequently do is post pictures of “Not Bob,” which are often just photos of anyone with curly white hair—men, women, and the occasional scruffy poodle. There are a lot of in-jokes based on particularly odd lyrics, song titles, and non-sequiturs from the vast GBV catalog. They’ll frequently hold ‘tournaments,’ ranking obscure tracks from said catalog.
And Guided by Voices fandom almost seems to encourage this level of buy-in. With a mainline discography of over forty albums, plus a plethora of EPs, singles, compilations, live bootlegs, and Robert Pollard side/solo projects, one could spend a lifetime—and a small fortune—seeking them all out. And the fact that these songs all come from a wholly-relatable-yet-somehow-mythic figure only seems to up the intrigue. For the past forty years Bob Pollard has crafted a universe, piece-by-piece; and while it’s one of his own making, it welcomes any and all to revel in it for as long—or as exclusively—as they’d like.
But chances are that when I complete The GBV Project next month, I won’t find myself compelled to return to that Guided by Voices fan group. And really, that’s too bad, because while I’m only listed as a “rising contributor” to it, I get the general sense that my presence there is welcome. I also genuinely enjoy seeing an internet forum engaged in positive community building, banded together by a shared love of something that should only be capable of bringing joy to an often bleak world. Sure, it’s an exceedingly dorky community, but theirs is a dorkiness that makes total sense to me.
And while I recently turned my frustration with a bad hockey game toward a relatively innocuous ad, I can admit that my proposed replacement only told part of the story. Perhaps there could be a companion ad that showed the members of that Guided by Voices fan group laughing together—while physically separated—over a picture of a Bichon Frise doing Bob Pollard’s signature high kick. Then it could transition to folks ‘liking’ a video of a visibly nervous kid sharing his acoustic guitar cover of “Echos Myron.” And lastly, it could close with a group of slightly out-of-shape fifty-somethings meeting in-person for the first time at a Dayton bar, while visiting Ohio for the annual GBV-themed Heedfest.
In total, this two-ad set could reconcile the digital communities that we were once promised with the reality that we actually got. And maybe the tagline could read, “Facebook: Bringing Together a World that We Helped to Tear Apart.”
Or something like that…
Rating: Tremblers and Goggles by Rank (7.2) / Alex Bell (★★★★)
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “Bird shape and planted near a rib, a ring tone / Close to the nearest heart, a robot strike zone / The sun was heavy like a medicine ball / I saw the lizard on the red brick wall” (“Lizard on the Red Brick Wall”)
Next Week: GBV ring in another three-album new year with a trip to “La La Land.”
