Guided by Voices "Bee Thousand" [1994]

Trying unsuccessfully to suck as badly Pavement and Dinosaur Jr, a drunken schoolteacher-led band of rustbelt slackers learn on the fly they can't keep time or in tune. It thus becomes difficult to understand if they're failing classic rock or failing alterna-suck. Whichever it is, that's Guided by Voices -- slumming it lo-fi and lo-life, dashing off sub-2-minute (and sub-worthwhile) garage-band vignettes like a cassette of song ideas reminiscent of irritatedly and constantly switching the radio dial in a particularly pretentious liberal arts college town. This is borne out, too, when one tries to decipher the aggressively meaningless song titles and lyrics on "Bee Thousand;" filling syllables with nonsense is apparently easier than describing anything real, and besides, it might get too close to taking a stand for something. This kind of shit is catnip for douchebag Gen-Xers who like to declare their own intellectual superiority over anyone who might dare say "Bee Thousand" is an utterly random collection of words and riffs somewhere on a trash heap between Captain Beefheart's insanity and John Lennon's junked-out gibberish, minus any of the talent. Basically, even though Paul Westerberg was a complete weenie by the mid-90s, at least he never tried to force opaque, phony artsiness on anyone. Wow -- hard to believe Westerberg was cooler than anyone back then.