Sometimes you just need the Pixies

So, I'm in the music library studying for a music history exam. After about three hours in a row of listening to music that spans 408 B.C. to 1300 A.D. and looking over the study guide for the 30th time, I feel like I'm going to explode. I need a little sonic salvation, so I put on the Pixies. The first time I heard this band (that I remember) was about five years ago, and I don't think I feel much different about them now than I did then. I only randomly listen to these guys about once every few months. It's a sort of weird therapy.\nYou see, I don't like them. I like to hear them every now and then. But don't get me wrong: I don't like them, I just like to know they're around in case I need the Pixies. I mean, it's like that guy in your class who smells really bad and then one day he's not there and it feels kind of lonely because maybe once you had to be his lab partner and something really funny happened that every time you think about high school or some guy who smells...well there he is. He's got to be there, standing out, not fitting in...and everything's perfect. Kind of like how I'm in the library and everyone else is listening to Bach or Palestrina (which I would've killed to have been listening to for the past three hours minus my time with the Pixies), and I know some of them can hear it and I'm so beautifully, elegantly out of place right now.\n(Oh, and the buildings are all blowing up because I'm on "Where Is My Mind," the last tune in "Fight Club," when they all blow up and it's gray and calm and though everything's going to blow up it's sort of celebratory because it's just time.)\nThis is not one of those times where I'm going to say, "If you haven't heard this band, stop what you're doing right now -- don't even bother putting your pants back on -- and go get a CD," though I'm sure there are a handful of people out there waiting for my next column so they can hear which CDs to pick up and which ones to trash. I actually hated this band at first. I still recall listening to Doolittle for the first time thinking, "It's a shame that the singer had to ruin everything because the rest of the band sounds really cool. But this guy's whinier than Jesse Jackson. The songwriting is juvenile and has no direction."\nIn fact, I'd say you really need to be in the right mood to listen to this band. You need to want chaos in the middle of a well-ordered day. Frank Black makes more sense when he's the eye of the hurricane, not the other way around. You see, it's not about what the Pixies say, it's all about how they say it.\nThe grunge movement tried to prove that ugliness is a form of expression. But for all that was right with that (which isn't much because it was pop music then anyway), the Seattle scene failed to capture the brilliance of the message of the Pixies. Musical self-destruction is a more powerful statement than destroying what someone else made. That's what they did. They made their own boundaries to be broken down by themselves.\nSo I guess next time it's the Talking Heads when I get bored. One of the other few bands with such a distinction. Yeah, I don't like the Pixies, but I feel safer knowing I can always put them on when that one odd-shaped piece of the puzzle is missing. \nI guess that's my response to anyone who asks how I can listen to something I don't like. You miss the point of music if you don't try to feel. The Pixies are totally affecting, and I love that. No one else would've said it, much less burrowed into your head like that. Sometimes you just need the Pixies.