There's a Silver Jews line, one of the many aphorisms that David Berman seems to have plucked pre-written from the air, that goes, "All my favorite singers couldn't sing." Apply that sentiment to a whole band and you've got the Pixies. Midway through the ‘80s, a group of non-musicians banded together to hurl the snow globe of rock music at a dilapidated brick wall. Charles Thompson, better known as Frank Black or Black Francis, met Joey Santiago in the dorms at UMass Amherst. They both liked Iggy Pop and the Violent Femmes, and they both had vague dreams of being in a band. They could play guitar, kind of. They knew more or less what a song was supposed to sound like. So they dropped out of college and put an ad in the local alt-weekly: "Wanted: musicians to join a Husker Du/Peter, Paul, and Mary band."

Kim Deal, who remembers the ad also specifying "no chops," was the only one who replied. She showed up to audition and agreed to play bass, having never played one in her life. She knew a drummer, David Lovering, who had shelved his drums years ago, so she looped him in, too. The four of them started playing together with Francis at the mic, and what came out of their sessions was as feral as you might expect. There was no one to impress, no arbitrary standards to meet. The Pixies made noise until it took the shape of a song.

It's not that the Pixies reinvented the wheel. They just started rolling it down a street no one had visited before. Eschewing the notion that pop music should be personal, that it should supply a pressure valve for the tortured frontperson singing it, the band looked to the Bible and other surrealist artworks for lyrical material instead of their own lives. They adapted movies to weird uptempo pop songs and howled about the spoiling earth. Their lyrics either work on a mythic scale or spiral off into absurdism; in their best songs, they do both.