Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

Why Pavement’s Music Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Posted on | July 27, 2010 | 5 Comments

Big Ones of Alternative Rock vol. 1
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DISCLAIMER: Here are the reasons I don’t dislike Pavement:

1) Their music is fairly good.

2) I understand why they mattered so much in the early-to-mid 90s.

3) I like other independent label bands from that era that I wasn’t there to “get” either.

Here are the reasons why Pavement infuriates me:

1) They’re music is not as good as the preposterous fawning of a certain generation of critics would have you believe. Compare these certain favorite Pavement tracks to similar tracks of their era:
Pavement – Summer Babe (1992)

Nirvana – Sappy (1993)

Pavement – Conduit for Sale! (1992)

The Fall – Spoilt Victorian Child (1985)

Pavement – Zurich Is Stained (1992)

Blur – For Tomorrow (1993)

Pavement – Two States (1992)

The Fall – Who Makes The Nazis? (1992)

Pavement – Cut Your Hair (1994)

Presidents of The United States of America – Peaches (1996)

Pavement – Unfair (1994)

Soundgarden – Superunknown (1994)

Pavement – Fight This Generation (1995)

Radiohead – Paranoid Android (1997)

Pavement – Shady Lane (1997)

Mclusky – Alan is a Cowboy Killer (2002)

Keeping in mind thatall of these songs were iconic songs of the 90s by Pavement. I started with those before finding parallels. All the songs that are listed below them are contemporary, similarly-themed, musically, lyrically, and culturally. With the exception of The Fall tracks (which explicitly influenced Pavement) and the Mclusky track (a not-so-implicit response to Pavement’s increasing British influence from a band that known describe their own songs as “too Pavement-y”), all of the tracks were the product of major label bands that had much larger followings and less universal critical plaudits than Pavement (in some cases, outright ignorance). Yet all of them pretty much mop the floor with their Pavement equivalents. Personally, “Unfair” is my favorite Pavement track. I like “Superunknown” a lot more than “Unfair.” And the title track of Superunknown is at best my fifth favorite song from that album.

Nonetheless, if you were an indie kid, or something a purist in the early ’90s, burnt out by the overwhelming mainstream attention given to your community, Pavement’s emergence in the 90s as the “alternative” to alternative rock was a godsend. The recent Pavement best-of released by Matador (the dominant indie label of the last 20 years that Pavement helped put on the map) was clearly intentioned to introduce the band to a new generation. That means it features fewer tracks from Slanted & Enchanted (which says a lot about that album’s “importance” versus its greatness), more from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (the album that holds up best musically), and a bunch of highlights from the remainder of their catalog. The music is solid, but not exceptional, and in the context of the vast diversity of other music that has gone on before and since (including bands that loved Pavement and cited them as inspirations), it’s iconic status as one of the most fiercely independent bands came at the cost of the music being, in the words of an exceptional punk band, good, not great. In the ’90s, Pavement was one of the more prominent subculture links to a sub-genre of a particular style, so if you cared especially about that subculture or sub-genre, and less so about culture at large, they were godsends. But if you were just starting to discover music sometime 5-10 years following Pavement’s demise in 1999, the 10 year difference between Hex Enduction Hour and Slanted And Enchanted may as well be the difference between the New Testament and David Foster Wallace.

Other than the musical reasons for Pavement’s appeal in the early ’90s, there was another obvious cultural factor that has led to Pavement’s continued appeal in the indie music “community”:

Stephen Malkmus Pavement

Stephen Malkmus is cute. He in fact, may epitomize the look of the “cute indie boy” for an entire generation. He was in fewer photos than fellow cute alt-rocker Kurt Cobain, and thus his cuteness to girls wasn’t as well-documented in the mainstream press. But his appeal to girls burnt out by meathead metal fans and frat boys was no doubt an obvious draw for guys to like the band, even if their intentions were no purer than those meathead metal/frat guys. On the other hand, if the exact same songs came from guys who looked like this, guys would be interested but girls less so:

Mark E. Smith of The Fall

Mark E. Smith of The Fall

D Boon Minutemen

D Boon of The Minutemen

Dave Yow

Dave Yow of The Jesus Lizard

These are three musicians who are, to put it nicely, less cute than Stephen Malkmus, though no less beloved in the early 90s by the same dudes who loved Pavement. Girls would never like to look at these guys as much as they would Malkmus, which means that it is easier to bring girls to see Pavement shows and still come off as sensitive. But the dudes who saw Pavement would just as quickly see this:

At Pitchfork Music Festival 2009, which I attended and covered in no small part because of The Jesus Lizard’s presence, a five-year-old daughter of a fan, too young to understand the context of “get ‘er out of the trunk” but not too young to have good sense of music, was  dancing to this song on an amp. So don’t tell me the organizers of Pitchfork Fest 2010 have had a sudden change in sensitivity over the past year. In reality, the susceptibility of girls fed up with frat types to faux-sensitive hipsters young and old, in many ways also epitomized by Pavement, has been routinely lambasted in books, comedy, television and songs by musicians in the same camp as Pavement (such as the Mclusky one up there, and the most famous song Henry Rollins ever recorded). In that sense, you can see the cultural influence of Pavement on Interpol, Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Neon Indian, The Liars, Phoenix, Girls…suffice to say, it’s a much uglier side of Pavement’s influence that has little to do with music.

So that’s the legacy of Pavement: being an “alternative to an alternative” that no longer exists, the creator of a few good songs that are now much easier to compare to better ones,  allowing willfully crude recordings to be considered finished products for reasons other than originally intended, and a textbook formula easily manipulating girls in hipstervilles across the USA. If you were in your 20s in the early-to-mid ’90s and Pavement was your first exposure to these kinda songs—or if you were an older rock fan during this time who saw the contradictions of “mainstream alternative”—you get an automatic pass if you like the band (the demographic, mind you, is the one to which rock critics drastically skew circa 2010). But for every other demographic, liking the band is more often than not a product of being “told what to like,” (Keeping in mind that those two demographics apply particularly strongly to present music tastemakers.) But that’s still not a particularly encouraging sign for Pavement’s legacy in the long term, let alone the present.

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Comments

5 Responses to “Why Pavement’s Music Doesn’t Matter Anymore”

  1. Pat L
    July 27th, 2010 @ 9:41 pm

    This is a pretty good playlist, but it’s a bit heavy on the Pavement, don’t you think?

  2. Ethan Stanislawski
    July 27th, 2010 @ 9:43 pm

    Let no one say I don’t know what I’m talking about!

  3. cody b
    July 29th, 2010 @ 12:26 pm

    Phew… being old has some shielding qualities from your wrath…I get a pass.

    Rebuttal deleted..nice post.

  4. Dead C
    July 30th, 2010 @ 5:13 am

    It’s not a big deal, but your post is completely off. Pavement’s set at Sasquatch was 22 songs in length, all of which are great tracks. It’s not a situation of them only writing a couple of songs that were “decent” it’s a situation of you liking certain bands and or songs more than them and what they’ve created. I don’t listen to Pavement because I want to fuck Malkmus and to post suggestions like that just because you aren’t a huge fan of a band, seems like a cop out.

    The Meat Puppets aren’t “cute” but they’ll still making really solid music. The Jicks make great music with Malkmus too, but they are overshadowed by Pavement.

    “Cut Your Hair” is poppy, but, if you listen to the lyrics, there’s no comparison to a song like “Peaches”. These aren’t even necessarily their best tracks and there was a lot more variety to their work than is being suggested.

    The point is, I’m a man and a bit of a “music nerd” myself. None of the casual fans or successful musicians that I know who are fans of Pavements work have ever referred to the band with anything beyond references to music and the songs itself. Their work still sounds fresher than most of the stuff being released today. So, you’re not a big fan? That’s fine, but I would argue that the appeal for most of the real fans is musical.

    I’ve from Seattle and I saw Soundgarden in their heyday, but if you think that shit has more dimensions or sounds less dated, you are crazy. Plus, they were way more famous than Pavement was and got way more credit than they did at that time period

  5. Cody B
    July 31st, 2010 @ 8:26 am

    I’d sure like to get a vote from someone under 50..the youth is not being served.
    http://mog.com/Cody_B/blog/2176347

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