Big School

Anyone who thinks Guided by Voices best work can be found exclusively on its LPs hasn't heard "Big School." The song, which leads off the "Static Airplane Jive" 7" EP, is as catchy as they come, easily among Robert Pollard's best straight-ahead rockers. Like "Postal Blowfish" and "Watch Me Jumpstart," it's a simple song musically, but that simplicity allows for Pollard's expansive, ultra-catchy vocals.

Coming from someone who was then a schoolteacher, the lyrics are interesting, to say the least. Pollard seems ambivalent about school, damning it as the song opens with the lines "Servant to master, sinister bastard," but then seems to suggest that school can be a haven, singing, "Knowledge escapes you, society rapes you/ I've got my notebooks and I'm going back to big school."

As the song progresses, however, Pollard seems to suggest that there is a big world out there that his students might not ever see, perhaps one that he has been able to see thanks to the increased opportunity afforded by GBV:

Now if I could free you
What would you be then
Look at my eyes through the telephoto lens
And notice the traces
Of faraway places
We're both driving my car back to the
Big school

If a student did notice the "traces of faraway places" in Pollard's eyes and decided to pursue them, there is still the problem of escape. The big school is "a million miles away and it's in the backyard," he sings, capturing the push and pull of something that is everywhere and nowhere all at the same time.

For those who do escape, Pollard wants to make one thing clear, taking a quiet moment to speak, not sing: Don't look back, don't you ever look back... 'cause it just might catch you." Pollard himself left the big school a couple of years later... and never looked back.