Game Of Pricks

The "Game Of Pricks" is largely a metaphor for the corporate music industry, which Guided By Voices had entered into after about a decade as a little-heard indie band. The group formed in 1983 in the musical coldbed of Dayton, Ohio, and got very little attention until 1994, when music on the fringes moved toward the mainstream. Their album Bee Thousand, released that year, earned them national press attention and a deal with Matador Records. They landed on festivals, including Lollapalooza. It wasn't until that year that the band were able to quit their day jobs and focus on music full time, but that wasn't all good, upending their lives and taking away their grounding. It also meant they had to play "the game," dealing with promotions, contracts, and all those other banalities that aren't necessary when you're pressing your own albums. In 1997, lead singer Robert Pollard broke up the band because it was all too much. He quickly put it back together, but with a different lineup. It wasn't until 2010 that he re-formed Guided By Voices with the original lineup.

"Game Of Pricks" was part of the Guided By Voices album Alien Lanes, the follow-up to their breakout album Bee Thousand. Instead of making their songs more accessible, they went in the opposite direction, keeping them loud and abrasive. Instead of polishing a select group of songs, they put 28 unfiltered songs on the album, none with any hit potential, which was kind of the point - the pressure to make a hit didn't suit them. "Game Of Pricks" is probably the most popular song from the set, but it's very much an acquired taste, running just 1:33 with a largely indecipherable lyric.

Guided By Voices frontman Robert Pollard was asked by Songfacts in 2023 to name some lines that stand out in his vast catalog of lyrics. He named this passage from "Game Of Pricks": I'll climb up on the house Weep to water the trees And when you come calling me down I'll put on my disease