Debaser

There is no introduction. The guitar comes in slashing, almost violent in its immediacy, and the song never relents — it is one of the most front-loaded pieces of rock music ever recorded, designed to hit before you've had time to brace. Black Francis's vocal is somewhere between screaming and singing, a performance of barely contained mania that perfectly suits a song taking its cues from the Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel film "Un Chien Andalou" — surrealist cinema as raw material for a two-minute attack of sound. The production is purposefully crude in the best sense: no polish, no distance, the guitars distorting as if the recording equipment is barely holding the content. Kim Deal's bass locks in with Joey Santiago's guitar and they drag the listener forward through sheer kinetic pressure. This is the Pixies at their most unfiltered, before any concern for accessibility, and the song functions as a kind of thesis statement — we will be strange, we will be loud, we will be literary in ways that don't announce themselves. "Debaser" opened "Doolittle," and the choice to begin an album this way was itself a declaration. It belongs to moments of productive aggression, to running, to the particular joy of something that demands nothing from you except that you survive it.