Start Choppin

The title came from the studio: they were cutting tape to splice together different takes, and Mascis said start chopping. He said the stops and starts were how the song was written rather than edits. It was the lead single from Where You Been and reached number three on Billboard's modern rock chart, their highest placing there, and twenty in Britain. Pitchfork placed it among the best two hundred songs of the 1990s and singled out the ridiculous falsetto note in the chorus. The video, in the upload here, shows slackers slam-dancing in pools of water until a net turns them into struggling fish. It has been in their set for more than thirty years.