Music Monday: The Pixies

Many years ago, I played a roleplaying game called Primetime Adventures. It's a unique game, where the GM and the players jointly create a TV show. We decided to create a show about the rise and fall of a rock band, where some of the members were human, and the others were fae. We called the band The Pixies. Because it's funny, and because it's the name of one of the best bands ever formed. The band is The Pixies, and this is Music Monday.

When you think about 80s music, you may think about a lot of different sounds, but it is highly unlikely that you'll be thinking about The Pixies. They pretty much defined being ahead of their time, and so were much more of a hugely influential band than a hit machine like Nirvana and Pearl Jam would become a few short years later. They did enjoy real commercial success in Europe, but back in the US, they were only truly big when they went on reunion tours.

Their original run, with the original members, was both ridiculously short and incredibly prolific. They released an album a year for four years, between 1988 and 1991, and actually broke up for the first time between the first and second pair of albums. It is those four albums in those years that I'll be covering here.

For me, as someone who was a teen in the 1980's and spent much of his 20s in music filled bars, The Pixies were a big part of my personal soundtrack.

Surfer Rosa

The first song I'll write about is one you probably know, because it was the iconic closing song of Fight Club, a film I absolutely loathe. But, you know, the song predates the film, and was a perfect choice for the ending of that film. This is Where Is My Mind and it is probably the coolest song ever about snorkeling in Puerto Rico:

Next up is one very few Pixies songs written and sung by the band's iconic bass player Kim Deal, who would go on to join her twin sister's band, The Breeders. It's about an older white woman having sex with a younger man in the 1950's, not you'd really be able to get that from the lyrics. This is Gigantic:

Doolittle

I didn't have a lot of songs from Surfer Rosa because, well, I need the space for Doolittle. This is one of my favorite albums of all time, and pretty much every song here is a banger. I had this argument with a music journalist colleague, who downgraded Doolittle because "it's the one with the hits." To which I say - and said - yeah, because it's the one with the best songs.

We'll start with a song where the lyrics only make sense if you know there's a surrealist silent film made by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel called Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), and that band leader Black Francis (AKA Frank Black, real name Charles Thompson) loved it and wanted to do to art what he thought the film did: Debase it. This is Debaser:

Next up is a song about suicide and Charles Manson and the Beach Boys, musically influenced by surfer rock, and as dark as it is pretty. This is Wave of Mutilation:

The next song was written when Black Francis was a teen, and is very much a Lou Reed reference. It is a song about being a homeless drug addict, because Black Francis is cheerful like that. It was possibly the closest thing the band had to a breakout hit. This is Here Comes Your Man:

The lyrics of the next song are almost childish in their simplicity in dealing with environmental harm. But it is so melodically complex and beautiful, and the refrain is so powerful that it carries it through, and is an absolute anthem. The guitar work by Joey Santiago in this one is simply astounding. This is Monkey Gone To Heaven:

The next song is another environmental song, and also a song about about death, as personified by the title character. It is not a hit, by any stretch of the imagination. But I just love it so much. There's such a mix of despair and humor to its delivery. This is Mr. Grieves:

The next song is another one many of you will know. The lyrics to this one are... problematic. It attempts to deal with how women are sexualized, but repeatedly using the word "whore" as a means to that is not great. That said, it also has one of the most harrowing bit of lyrics in music:

"Uh!"
Is
The
Sound
That the mother makes when the baby breaks

This is Hey:

I could post about every song in this album, friends. I really could. I am holding myself back here! But I'll feature one more, the last one. The biblical story of Samson and Delilah gets the Black Francis treatment, focusing most of all on Samson being blinded. Fun times. This is Gouge Away:

Bossanova

The band's music became more dreamy, with stronger than ever touches of surf rock. This is much less of a hits album than Doolittle, and absolutely works best as a whole. But I'm here to highlight specific songs, and that's what I'll do!

Dreamy, space-y, and absolutely lyrically opaque (seriously, go read the lyrics), this song is just gorgeous. This is Velouria:

Only in researching for this post did I learn that this brief song isn't about a woman, but rather a man. A specific man: Influential blues pianist Mose Allison. You learn something new every day, folks! This is Allison:

What is this song about? Listen, friends. I have no idea. Hell, genius dot com has no idea. But how gorgeous is the melody, right? So beautiful. This is Ana:

The message I'm trying to bring y'all here is that Black Francis' lyrics got even weirder and trippy-er in this album, because apart from a return to the sea as a topic, I have no idea. I mean...

Time is an arrangement
Time is an arranger
I am a derangement

Yes you are, Charles. Yes you are. This is All Over The World:

Remember how, two albums previously, two years previously, they were singing about snorkeling? Well, now here's a song about an old woman and old man, and their goal of digging for fire. This is weird. This is the last song I'll feature from this album. This is Dig For Fire:

Tromp Le Monde

By the time the Pixies made this album, they were less of a group, and more one man and his backing band. Creatively, this album was all Black Francis, for good or for ill. It is my least favorite of their albums, but that still makes it a great album. Because in the hot flame of the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, that's what they did. Even more than Bossanova, this album is built to be heard as an album. None of songs makes sense as a single, though some were released as such.

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was the man who built the Eiffel Tower. This song, where he is repeatedly called "little Eiffel" (as opposed to big Eiffel, which is the tower), is basically a mini biopic in a song. They thought he was nuts, but he was right. Hmmm. I wonder who else Francis was thinking about there. This is Alec Eiffel:

Is it weird that Francis waited until his fourth album to write a song about the college he dropped out of to start a band? It's a little weird, right? This is U-Mass:

Bonus: Cannonball

I mentioned earlier that Kim Deal joined her twin sister Kelley's band The Breeders. Well, I can't really write about the Pixies without adding this one last song, from the Breeders' album Last Splash. The album was released in 1993, just two years after The Pixies broke up, and is widely thought to be about the breakup, and about Black Francis (though Deal has claimed it is about the Marquis de Sade. Also? It has one of the greatest bass lines of all time, and is just an awesome song. So we'll let Kim have the last word and play us out. This is Cannonball: