Earworm of the Day: Guided by Voices - I Am A Scientist

I've been to exactly one Guided By Voices show, a few months before they broke up in the early 00s. It had been postponed once due to Bob Pollard's back injury, and even then he performed most of the show sitting down (where, at some point, he launched into a monologue about how shittily they were being paid). I think I may have been one of a handful of women at the show, and while I knew GBV was the prototypical indie dude band, it was a little disconcerting. A large part of being a fan is interacting with other fans. It's one thing to trade shows, along with the minutia of indie rock fandom, with online phantoms, it's quite another to have to be assumed to be someone's wife, dragged to the show under duress.

Anyway, this is a pretty obvious, I guess, quazi-hit -- or what qualifies as a hit for a band that remained largely underground. It hits a lot of early 90s video stereotypes: grainy B&W, shaky camera angles. But it's one of Bob Pollard's most straightforward songs.