On Robert Pollard: “Man Called Aerodynamics”

[No. 02 in a Series]

“Man Called Aerodynamics,” the opening track of the 1996 Guided By Voices album Under the Bushes, Under the Stars, hits you like an anxiety attack, if an anxiety attack were indistinguishable from bliss. Like “Gold Star for Robot Boy,” the first song on the second side of the band’s 1994 breakthrough Bee Thousand, it starts with a disorienting jolt, as if someone had bumped into a turntable playing the Nuggets compilation. For the first couple of seconds, it sounds like pure noise, the multitracked guitars (all played by Robert Pollard) flying off in different directions. Reminiscent of Love’s “7 and 7 Is” and the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun,” two notable punk-rock precedents, “Man Called Aerodynamics” feeds on its own self-destructive urges. It uses entropy as its energy. It’s a motherfucker of a song.

It’s also one of the very few songs in the history of popular music to have the word aerodynamics in its title. Webster: “The study of the properties of moving air, and especially of the interaction between the air and solid bodies moving through it.” Pollard’s fellow Daytonian Wilbur Wright once likened an airplane to a “fractious horse.” An aircraft, he explained, had to be fundamentally unstable in order to be maneuverable. The machine had to be out of control for the pilot to wield control over it. The moving air had to have a say in things if the solid body was to resist gravity’s squalid despotism. Wright’s revelation pretty much sums up the wild flight of “Man Called Aerodynamics.”

What makes the song a masterpiece, though, are the vocals. Arthur Lee, on “7 and 7 Is,” and Johnny Rotten, on “Holidays in the Sun,” incorporated the violence of the music into their vocals. Their singing, angry, aggressive, adolescent, reflected and reinforced the punk thrust of the instruments. Pollard’s vocals are completely different. As the music rages around him, he sings the song slowly and deliberately, drawing out each word. He’s the calm pilot, within and yet removed from the surrounding turbulence. The song rushes forward recklessly, but Pollard gazes backward ruefully.

Find deep within your memory coat
a cricket bag you ate from,
its sweet smiling apology,
acceptance awaits you —
don’t be afraid to cherish it.

The lyrics are strange, even by Pollard’s standards. But it’s clear, both from the haunted imagery of the words and the melancholy mood of the singing, that this is a song about guilt and its expiation, the shame of the past and the possibility of forgiveness, if not redemption. It’s about discovering a place of calm, a still point, at the center of the chaos of memory. And somehow, just as the buoyancy of the solid body is inseparable from the moving air, the calm is inseparable from the chaos. The man is not just called aerodynamics. The man is aerodynamics.

Look it up in the bookmobile,
look it up in the gun rack,
in the magazine rack,
and the map.

For it is only after the fence comes down
that the cartoon bubble explodes
and the new party begins …

The secret to finding what you’re looking for is to look for nothing in particular — but to look for it fearlessly.

Image: Detail of “Super Hard” by Robert Pollard.

3 thoughts on “On Robert Pollard: “Man Called Aerodynamics”

  1. Al Batraus

    I’m curious as to how you identified the collage that is the cover of UTBUTS as being titled “Super Hard.” I own the original (which is about 4×4 inches) and the mannequin photo that was the back cover. Thanks in advance for any information regarding the title.

  2. Thuan Pham

    I am really enjoying your On Robert Pollard posts. As a longtime GbV fan, it is fascinating to take a 2nd (or is it 89th) look at these songs from another fan’s thought provoking and moving perspective. I believe a new double album is in the can and hopefully in our ears this spring. Can’t wait!
    Keep it in motion!

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