The Releases: It’s Not Them. It Couldn’t Be Them. It Is Them! (LP—GBVi, 2021)
In 2007, I embarked upon a year-long project to listen to all of the music that I owned. I spent time researching release dates for everything in my digital catalog, and put it all into a single playlist, arranged—as best as possible—in chronological order. On New Year’s Day, I kicked off with a mixture of Louis Armstrong’s ‘Hot Fives & Sevens’ recordings and a reconfigured running order of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. By the end of January, I had reached the 1950s.
Eighteen years later, there are few specific marking points from that endeavor that I can remember clearly. I recall that in June I interviewed for a teaching job, right as I was in the middle of my revisitation of 1997: the same year that I graduated from that same school. By the time I started that job two months later, I had reached the then-current 2000s. However, the most memorable listens from that summer were largely of releases from what was already sharping up to be a generous year for new music: Person Pitch, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Boxer, and Hissing Fauna…Are You the Destroyer.
I don’t remember how much music I owned in 2007. I do know that I acquired a 160GB iPod—the largest capacity model that Apple would ever produce—toward the end of the year, and that it was (briefly) capable of holding all of the music that I owned in a digital format. This would have included a collection of around 800 CDs, a few large envelopes of CD-Rs, and at least a year’s worth of downloads from eMusic. As for records, my vinyl collection was small enough to fit on a single shelf in a large wall unit. If asked to offer up a decent estimate of the number of albums/compilations that I owned in all formats, I’d put the number somewhere between 1200-1300.
At the end of that year, I compiled a list of my two hundred favorite albums, and published it to RateYourMusic—which I had just discovered that summer. I still have access to that list, and it’s a fascinating (to me) case study in both how much and how little my tastes have changed. There isn’t a single album on the list that I am ashamed to have included, but if I were to undertake a similar task today, roughly half of those records wouldn’t make the cut. Of those that still would, some were ranked way too high (Abbey Road at #13) and others were way too low (The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady—which was new to me in 2007—at #64). I also appeared averse to including more recent albums in the uppermost echelon: OK Computer was a total outlier at #6. And, of possible interest to followers of this project, Alien Lanes landed at #82, while Bee Thousand came in at #40.
The days where I had the capability to carry my entire music library with me—while still having the capacity to comfortably listen to it all within a year—were relatively short-lived. Over the next few years, my collection expanded rapidly—aided by CD-R/eMusic swaps, cheap CDs, and minor dalliances in file-sharing—but the portability of that collection didn’t keep pace. At first, surgical manicuring of the iPod sufficed: why have both Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits and The Essential Bob Dylan in there if the latter contained all of the songs from the former? Then the cuts became less elegant: it sure didn’t look right when scrolling with the click wheel, but I suppose I only needed “Positively 4th Street” and “Things Have Changed” from Essential, since the other songs from that two-disc set could all be found on actual albums. Eventually, catalogs were separated into “Pod-worthy” (Oh Mercy, Modern Times, and (yes) Self Portrait) and “Pod-unworthy” (Empire Burlesque, Down in the Groove, Under the Red Sky) sections.
At the beginning of 2012, I once again set out on a mission to listen to all of my music; only this time I knew there was no way that this task could be accomplished in only a single year. I also knew that taking a chronological approach would test my endurance. Therefore, I decided to randomize this revisitation by cutting up several small scraps of paper, on which I wrote a specific year. I put these scraps into an old sunglass pouch, and drew out the first number: 1994. I then gathered all of my music from that year into a single playlist, and began listening. Upon reaching the conclusion of 1994—and each subsequent year—I would craft a personal playlist of my one-hundred favorite songs, and post a list of my top thirty albums to RateYourMusic.
I repeated this process until the sunglass pouch was empty. At the beginning of each ‘new year’ I’d scour the charts of RYM, making a list of the albums that I needed to acquire. The number of records that I first heard throughout the project was little short of overwhelming. The new-to-me jazz records of 1964 alone included the likes of Empyrean Isles, Getz/Gilberto, The Sidewinder, and Grachan Moncur III’s avant classic Evolution. Every ‘year’ provided a new revelation: 1968 led to my long-overdue discovery of Os Mutantes, panis et circencis, and the entire Tropicália scene; and I had never even heard Stereolab before buying Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements during my survey of 1993.
This endeavor finally came to a conclusion at the end of 2015, after I completed the last year drawn from the bag: 2000. Over the four calendar years encompassed by the project, my music collection had grown exponentially, to include now-favorite albums like Blue, Maggot Brain, Journey in Satchidananda, Leaves Turn Inside You, and Clube da Esquina—none of which I had heard before 2012. Granted, my digital library also now included plenty of albums that I was far less enamored with; in part because I fully gave in to my completist itch, filling out the neglected corners of discographies by taking generous advantage of the library systems of Washington and Clackamas counties.
And even though I emerged both wisened and exhausted, it wasn’t long before I got back on the discovery trail. The 2012-2015 project had focused primarily on albums. Over the next few years, I became more of a “song hunter”—scouring compilations from reissue labels, box sets, and increasingly-obscure corners of the music nerd internet, all in an effort to find heretofore unknown-to-me gems. Some of these songs would make it into the year-long A Century of Song project for Strange Currencies. Even more of them would appear as part of a different venture, The American Garage Rock Road Trip.
And every time I think that I might finally have this whole music thing figured out, I discover new avenues worth exploring. But music obsession is a zero-sum game, and walking down each of those new paths ultimately means that I end up with less and less time to retrace the steps that I’ve already taken. And engaging in any kind of ‘project-based listening’ also means that I don’t always get to prioritize the music that I’d rather be listening to at any given moment.
And this fact has been on my mind in recent days, as it often has been throughout The GBV Project. The album that I was supposed to be focusing this week on falls into that ever-growing batch of ‘just okay’ Guided by Voices records. Sure, there are a few solid tracks that I may have overlooked the first time around, but I wouldn’t say that revisiting It’s Not Them was exactly a revelation. Yeah, hearing “Spanish Coin” again was cool—and I think I can comfortably reserve a space for “My (Limited) Engagement” in the inevitable ‘best of the present-day lineup’ playlist—but I also can’t help but think that GBV might’ve had a little more left in the tank than they let on here.
Rating: It’s Not Them. It Couldn’t Be Them. It Is Them! (6.8)
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “Man who fell to Earth / Madman agreed to all in need / Goliath disappeared / The image cleared for all to see” (“High in the Rain”)
Next Week: New year, new album. Same as it ever was.
