NOT IN MY AIRFORCE

An imagined (ie, I MADE IT UP IN MY BRANE) conversation with Robert Pollard, regarding his song “Not Behind The Fighter Jet” from the Guided by Voices album “Mag Earwhig!”, which I bought for £6 from Oxfam in Shrewsbury at about midday on February 19th 2006. (It was quite a nice day for February, although it turned overcast in the afternoon and rained at one point.) I think “Mag Earwhig!” is actually one of the best ever GBV albums, and this is my favourite song off it. (No mean feat, as there are many other good ones, like “Little Lines”, “Learning to Hunt”, “Bulldog Skin”, “Jane of the Waking Universe", “Choking Tara”, and well, I could go on…).

BH: So this song – “..Fighter Jet” – I really like it! Does the song reflect a certain anger regarding American military aggression and the average U.S. citizen’s assumed culpability for it?

RP: Well I guess there is a certain amount of that creeping in, but not consciously… obviously American military aggression wasn’t quite such a hot topic when I wrote this song back in 1997. Really I suppose it’s more trying to be a non-specific and universal frustrated yet optimistic love song aimed toward the whole world…

BH: Like most of your best songs are!

RP: Er.. yeah! Sure! And the military aspect kind of represents the tragedy of how happiness and the things people really need in their lives are so simple and easy and obvious, and yet if you’re not lucky enough to stumble across them, recognise them and grab them, they can be elusive and real hard to find… and so many people who are unable to hold on to these things overcompensate by instead building up these complicated and frightening plans and systems, and physical structures of metal and explosives, in order to precipitate needless and self-defeating geo-political rampages… so fuck that, it’s much braver to acknowledge what you lack and go back to the source to find it… that’s what I’m saying here.

BH: Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought… I was kinda gonna skirt around it, but thanks for getting straight to the point.

RP: Personal/Political – never pretend they’re not connected.

BH: Plus cos of the army thing, you also get to use lots of cool, exciting words in the song, like “paths of glory”, “wounded mercenary bleeds”…

RP: Yeah, that too – we all loved guns and blood and war movies and stuff when we were kids, right? Before rock music and girls came along. So it’s good not to completely forget that. And of course I still like aeroplanes a lot. They’re really cool. I hope that’s not a contradiction with what I was saying earlier…

BH: Life is full of contradiction, and it is good to acknowledge this in song.

RP: For sure!

BH: So, these are some pretty big themes to be putting across in 2 minutes and 13 seconds…

RP: In song-writing terms, that’s four times as long as you need to make your point. I let this one run on a little because it had good rock-out potential.

BH: Hell yeah. Did you guys play this one live much?

RP: Well you’re imagining me here and writing my lines, and you never saw any of our live shows or bothered buying the live albums, so how could I possibly tell you?

BH: Fair point. So what’s your response to people who say that you assemble your songs like crossword puzzles out of random riffs and cut-up lyrics, and that none of them really mean anything?

RP: Well, idiots are always with us. Sometimes that’s the case, and sometimes it isn’t. And c’mon, isn’t this essentially how everybody writes songs? I just do it out in the open, that’s all. You start with your building blocks, pile them up, and meaning creeps up on you unexpectedly from a weird angle you’ve made in a dark corner. It’s a process of discovery.

BH: Amen to that. Well thanks for your time Bob, I appreciate it.

RP: God bless!

Mp3 > Guided By Voices – Not Behind The Fighter Jet