[tws]

(Listen along while reading)

Somewhere between Madison, CT and Syracuse, NY on a hot summer day in June 2005, my friend Adam had a revelation.
“You know that theory,” he began, “that there’s a mathematical formula that generates a good song?”
I wasn’t sure about the validity of that theory, but I’d heard enough to convince me that there were some songs out there that provided enough support for the concept.
“Yeah,” I responded noncommittally, “I think so.”
“I really think that Stephen Malkmus had it down to a science.”
Adam was right, whether or not any mathematical vertex may be applicable in building the perfect pop song. Even if the idea was just a fun “Dark Side/Wizard of Oz”-type conjecture, Stephen Malkmus really did own it. I can’t think of any band of the 90’s era besides Pavement (and perhaps, on a different level, The Afghan Whigs) that generated such consistently and amazingly good songs. All four of the full-length albums that Pavement released during the heart of the 90’s: 1992’s Slanted and Enchanted, 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, 1995’s Wowee Zowee, and 1997’s Brighten the Corners were all outstanding for surprisingly unique reasons from one another. Even their final album and arguable transition to solo career for Malkmus Terror Twilight closed out the decade with a perceivable bang.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I feel like I need to paint a background image for this band and the arguable genius behind it. The 1990’s were a strange time. I’m just old enough to remember the ethos that effectively separated the 90’s from all of those other strange decades and generations. Within a span of less than six months, 1991 burned out an entire generation of artists. Thanks to DGC signing a decent Sub Pop band called Nirvana, the slacker, stoner, victimized-by-Boomers, rebel was now the marketed middle-class ideal. The single best thing that Nirvana’s mastermind Kurt Cobain ever did was take advantage of his time in the sun before removing himself from the planet beneath it; he championed countless bands that would never have seen the limelight had he not cited their influence.

What made the 90’s special, in my opinion that many of my friends share, was that it was the last time when anyone really said “fuck everything that came before us” and was willing to not look the gift-horse of self-indulgence in the mouth. In England, a self-deprecating neo-nationalism movement had captured the biggest bands, which culminated in a verbal bloodbath between the more successful Oasis and the more talented, intelligent, self-aware, and genuinely better Blur. But Britpop was inconsequential to what was happening to American music, still mired in grunge until April 9, 1996 (my thirteenth birthday, and the day that Soundgarden broke up). Or was it?

Pavement owed a great debt of gratitude to a number of iconoclastic British bands. Before even hearing what their music sounded like, you can tell they took a major cue from The Fall from their fractured album artwork. Stephen Malkmus was and still is like an American Mark E. Smith. Granted, he’s a better songwriter, more sober, funnier, much more handsome, easier to work with, and less weighed down by a pesky messiah complex than Smith, but that’s neither here nor there (it’s better than here and there!!!..sorry, I think that’s how the lyrics go).

What made The Fall great, when they did have great moments, was how, much like many other post-punk bands, they had a blatant disregard for any perceivable trends and expectations that their peers and critics placed upon them.

That was what struck me about Pavement when I first bought and watched the disappointing “Slow Century” documentary. Pavement (in its prime) was comprised of five guys who not only looked absolutely nothing like a band, but individually didn’t even look like they had business being in a band. Did years of growing up on bands that subscribed to the idea of messy and ‘dangerous’ as equals good affect my idea of Pavement as a band that defined their generation? No, because I didn’t really come to understand why they were the best band of the 90’s until a couple years ago.

Stephen Malkmus and classic that-guy Bob Nastanovich have always been huge horse racing fans. No, they don’t ironically enjoy watching horses charge down the track in the way that hipsters ironically enjoy Jenga and Bocci. SM and Bob love horse racing, and that’s that. They had no need for pretension; Malkmus started the band in Stockton, CA with Scott Kannberg and an old hippie drummer named Gary Smith. They recorded Slanted and Enchanted and a bunch of singles that formed the backbone of what was now being genre-fied as ‘indie rock.’
Many still maintain that S&E is their best work, but I disagree; I haven’t heard a greater American rock album in the last twenty years than “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.” By the point they made CRCR, they’d expanded into a five-piece ensemble with experience behind the drum kit (Steve West) and in pretty much every facet of the band (Mark Ibold playing bass, replacing SM’s guitar-EQ’d to sound like bass). They turned out “Wowee Zowee,” blowing up across Europe, starring in festivals and drawing lavish praise. In the states, they got enough lip service from major music publications to do well, but not as well as a new crop of one-hit wonders and novelty songs that sprang up in the ashes from Cobain’s death and Nirvana’s sudden halt. Swing music became outlandishly popular for some reason. The Butthole Surfers had a hit single. A whole army of Pearl Jam ripoffs rose from the murky depths and asked us if we could take them higher.

In 1997, what many would say was the best year for music in that decade (e.g. OK Computer, the Belle and Sebastian singles, Elliott Smith’s XO, etc.), Pavement generated what I believe is their second-best full-length in Brighten the Corners. A random four-star write-up the album got in Rolling Stone convinced me to go out on a limb and just buy while I was on a trip to New Orleans that year. I liked it at first, but I didn’t love it. That summer after my freshman year of high school I listened to Pavement a lot. I remember wandering around at my hometown beach listening to “Perfume-V,” my favorite song on Slanted and Enchanted, practically on repeat.

“Wow,” I remember thinking, “this sounds like summer.”
For the band that created “Summer Babe,” whether or not their music sounded ‘summery’ was pretty much a non-issue. Where by 1992 the image of the slacker was front and center in pop culture, SM and Spiral Stairs were the living embodiment of it without even trying. It seems like it just didn’t matter. They had that post-Nirvana window to break out onto the US charts in 1995 when “Wowee Zowee” dropped, but in some respects, blew it.

“We wanted to try to see if we could [get more mainstream airplay when the album came out], so I of course picked “Rattled by the Rush” and “Father to a Sister of Thought,” Malkmus says with a big shrug in one of my favorite parts of ‘Slow Century,’ “I guess I was just smoking a lot of grass at the time, but to me, they sounded like hits.”

The greatest overarching comment I could make was that none of this “sounded like hits.” I remember, in addition to thinking that Slanted and Enchanted sounded like summer, thinking often as any one of the 14 tracks blasted from my headphones, “Albums aren’t supposed to SOUND like this!” But it did, and it ruled. Needless to say, it opened my eyes and ears that all-important first summer of high school.

So, where does this all leave us ten years later? The unkempt, bookish, irony-loving ‘indie’ kid is the marketed ideal. At least when Adam and I had this landmark conversation about Pavement in 2005, it seemed like all you needed to do for indie-rock success was be a bunch of skinny white guys who sound like Talking Heads, or at least have the word “wolf” in your name. Pavement are the reason we’re at the proverbial “here” today, but nobody will blame them for anything. They just did their thing and never got big enough to experience industry backlash on their band or personal backlash on themselves. It’s strange to think that they started doing all of this, burning all of these musical ideals and idealistic trends into the fabric of rock culture almost twenty years ago.

“You know how Stephen Malkmus generally sang off-key?” Adam asked me, almost rhetorically as we stared out onto the New York State Thruway.
“Yeah,” I responded somewhat noncommittally, despite the fact that I knew exactly what he meant. Their music was a fine art, whether they cared or not. Fuck everything that came before it.

I should probably note that the whole thing's not edited like this.