2000 Great Songs #1466: Teenage FBI

After a rocky start trying to get into the lo-fi to a fault early/mid-90s records from Guided By Voices, I learned to love the aesthetic, appreciating Robert Pollard's delirious pop skills despite the half-assed (at best) production and performances, hearing the songs as blueprints for properly-produced tracks I could hear only in my imagination. (There's a reason this is the 11th GbV track to make the list, tied with The Kinks & The Who.)

So it was both scary and exciting when the band brought on The Cars' Ric Ocasek to produce 1999's Do The Collapse. This time, I didn't need to imagine a fully-formed song; Ocasek took care of that. And I ended up absolutely adoring the opening track "Teenage FBI." Sure, it sounds more like a Cars song (particularly the new wave synth flourishes), Pollard actually singing like a seasoned pro with supporting back-up vocals, but just drop-dead perfect indie pop. You could tell Pollard had only bothered writing his usual 90-second blueprint, which they just played twice, but, still, it was a fantastic little absurdist pop gem at any length.

The record was pretty divisive among fans and critics at the time, many of whom cringed at the production polish (since then, Pollard & GbV have bounced back-and-forth between scratchy home-brewed production and more fully-fleshed-out records). Even the band seemed bemused--notably, their 2003 greatest hits compilation used the 90-second rough-demo-sounding original version of the track rather than Ocasek's clean-up. And it's still fantastic--you can't keep a Pollard winner down--but I prefer the latter.

Live in the MTV studio:

More live:

Stripped-down original from the hits collection:

See the entire Top 2000 to date in a sortable database!