Ignorance Dissolves

Why I can't get "Black and White Eyes in a Prism" out of my head.

To my ears, Guided by Voices’ 2021 album Earth Man Blues was their eclectic, kaleidoscopic, Sgt. Pepper-like tableau — swapping out emotional depth for a immersive, cumulative musical ride, with ear candy around every corner.

And its crepuscular, autumnal follow-up that year, It’s Not Them. It Couldn’t Be Them. It Is Them! — one of my favorites of this era of the band — is like those good vibrations curdled into a deliciously bad trip.

With guitarist Doug Gillard flexing his orchestral muscles, it begins sort of like John Fante’s classic novel Ask the Dust ends — hallucinatory, dislocated, a delirious wander through the canyons of the mind.

“Soft drugs in unconfirmed Mexico / Liquid sticks to your neck,” Robert Pollard sings in the internationally flavored opener, “Spanish Coin.”

Climb another wall over the mountain
Breathe in the force of experience

From those Spanish guitar strums, mariachi trumpets, and tactile hand percussion, It’s Not Them. It Couldn’t Be Them. It Is Them! settles into more familiar GBV territory — the muscular power pop of “High in the Rain,” the circuitous FM rock of “Dance of Gurus,” the daffy interlude that is "Razor Bug.”

And on Side 2, It’s Not Them. toggles from good to transcendent.

Partly by way of one gorgeous song:

I can’t really say any Pollard tune is specifically about X, Y or Z.

That would do a disservice to the heft and breadth of the work; only he can speak to these things.

But I think one overarching theme of his work is rejecting binaries.

Embracing ambiguity, nuance, and grey areas as not dissonance for dissonance’s sake, but the undergirding reality of all things.

And “Black and White Eyes in a Prism,” to me, cracks open that topic like an egg.

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I love Pollard songs where he seemingly bitches about the modern world.

From “Packing the Dead Zone,” from 2017’s August by Cake:

Music in boxes
Nail heads
Hat companies
Well worn fools
A room full of dolls
Idol hands
Confident knives
Psychopath timecard
Philosophical zombies
Gymnasium rats
Negative twitters
Earth politicians and ozone sneakers

From “Blink Blank,” from 2018’s Space Gun:

At quests for new triumphs
We are the champs
With endless revisions
And typewriter cramps

I’m going blink blank
In the think tank

Put more succinctly, it’s the jargon of clones.

(Another of my favorites. It’ll get its own op-ed.)

Along with all the other quintessentially 2025 afflictions. I hate unearned certainty.

“I’m on the right side of history” is the grossest thing in the world to me.

None of us know where all this is going.

Much less how our current actions or positions will be perceived or judged down the line.

But the terminally Rogan-brained “Two wings, same bird” line of thinking makes me cringe out of my skin, too.

I guess there’s no winning.

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Anyway, “Black and White Eyes in a Prism” boils all this down to elemental, archetypal language.

Perception unmoored from context or formatting, free-floating in a geometric matrix:

Black and white eyes in a prism
Ignorance dissolves
Into a single blazing color

With every chorus, Gillard’s luminous string arrangement surges back, as if flooding the stereo field with clarifying light.

That “force of experience” from “Spanish Coin” breathed out.

Then, the kicker line:

Everything in between is alright

Which I don’t think means “everything in between is permissible.”

I don’t think the message is “Both sides are dumb, I’m above it all.”

I think it’s that the entire, unadulterated spectrum of human experience is on the table for art-making, sense-making, perspective-building.

Maybe that’s vague or axiomatic.

But as an ex-religious kid, raised in high anxiety and high control — now an adult easily set off by what I perceive to be religious thinking, with a real propensity to poke the bear — I feel that message on a cellular level.

It’s like medicine.

And maybe “Black and White Eyes in a Prism” can be comforting and head-straightening for you, too.