Tuesday Tuneage
Guided By Voices - "Teenage FBI"
1999

I'm not at all qualified to write about Guided By Voices, not being a card-carrying member of the cult and having never even checked them out live. Plus after all these years of hearing the hype, what finally got me to go to my iMac the day after Christmas and buy a GBV album? Hearing their atypical polished "Glad Girls" on a rerun of How I Met My Mother, it played as montage music while Ted did something romantic and/or world-embracing. Then I chumped out by settling on the one-disc anthology Human Amusements At Hourly Rates rather than getting a real album, rationalizing it because Allmusic.com wrote that it's the equivalent of GBV leader Robert Pollard making me a mixtape of his best work.

But I write because I write. So, thirty-two songs on the disc and which one do I present to you?

"Teenage FBI" because I love the title, it's got hooks galore, and the lyrics start out as an ahhh-romance cliche than throw in some Fed-level 21 Jump Streeters at the end of the chorus, all in a buck-thirty-nine.

And speaking of that Allmusic.com review, it sums up the appeal of Guided By Voices on Human Amusements - an album whose vast majority of songs now seem to be on some sort of shuffle in my brain during many waking moments - perfectly: "77 minutes of great hooks, hummable melodies, man-sized guitars, and general rock geek bliss." No argument here.