AfterWord

Raising Cain

The modern American writers and I have avoided each other's sideways gazes until quite recently. What I have found in their output has delighted and challenged me in all the ways literature can and should. One cannot help but see the saga of the Trasks and the Hamiltons as anything less than a six hundred page, Californian parable. Steinbeck's prose leaps and gallops through the Salinas Valley he so loves, mapping the the geography of human souls along the way. Original sin and parental folly meet to squall within us all: this is Steinbeck's landscape. For all its excellence, conversation is the tale's trump card; our interior unchartability becomes all the more knowable as we observe the characters' interactions with each another and converse with them ourselves. There's Sam Hamilton's frivolous wisdom and Adam's bipolar sentimentality, the moral confusion of Cal and the possession of Cathy by an evil unknowable. We live east of Eden and there's no returning. The Garden and the Fall reside within us all. It's stories such as these that harken us to press on to the Promised Land. Timshel. Thou mayest.

Backup Vocals

The voices of the dead resonate like the bass and drums of a jazz quartet. They suggest and murmur, they keep it all in time. Elie Wiesel said that "poets exist so that the dead may vote" and so they do. They cast their ballots and know they can't succeed. The Romantics are outmoded, the modernists out of style. Still, the whisper of the dead is what puts a halt on deafness. Deafness to the beauty, deafness to the glory, deafness to redemption all around. If only we would listen to the poets and lamenters, the psalmists and their woes. Give an ear to all the writers and directors, let our eyes take in their characters, their lessons and their worlds. They whisper, they shuffle and they never hit the snare. They won't make you listen and they won't make you heed. They're backup singers to far less worthy entertainers. The book says: we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us. Lend an eye to the votes they cast. The back of every ballot says "so who's dead after all?"

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part Eight)

Lyrically, Malkmus is just as scatterbrained as his music would suggest. Though there may be the occasional rhyme, reason is all but incinerated. His vocabulary is more attuned to the absurd than anyone else in his field. Indie rock takes its cues from T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound’s fight in the Captain’s Tower (‘Desolation Row’ anyone?) and R.E.M.’s create-your-own-meaning murmurs with its affinity for the cryptic. But while everyone else is trying on their best Albert Camus impersonation, Stephen Malkmus was and is hipsterdom’s very own Lewis Carroll. Take this excerpt from ‘Stereo’: ‘What about the voice of Getty Lee? How did it get so high? I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy. (I know him, and he does.) Then you’re my fact-checking cuz”. Or maybe this instance from ‘Harness Your Hopes’: ‘Show me, a word that rhymes with Pavement, and I won’t kill your parents, and roast them on a spit’. Eminently amusing and utterly meaningless, it’s a breath of fresh air to not have to seek out the esoteric in the songs one listens to. You don’t really seek out the meaning in the lyrics of Pavement because there really is none there. Jokes, puns and all that stuff but you’re not going to find the meaning of human existence anywhere on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. And that’s the best part.

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part Seven)

People throw overproduced on to Terror Twilight like they're executing criminal justice. The last person who said this was Pavement's finest hour in the town square of Pretentia was probably Piltdown Man. There are worse offenses certainly. Proclaiming your undying love for this swan song is a far cry from saying Liz Phair only got better with the end of the nineties. The occasional polite adjectives like 'enjoyable' or 'fun' are bestowed upon Terror as a means of distancing oneself from giving it too much artistic credibility. It's in vogue to slam their final moments and proclaim that you listen to Slanted and Enchanted more than you breathe from the rooftops (take puff on Parliament cigarette here). I'm not trying to set myself up as a voice crying out in the wilderness but all I have to say is: what the hell's the matter with you people?! If you don't feel more joy listening to 'Spit on a Stranger' or 'Major Leagues' than any other Pavement song, humanity's ship is sinking and its time to let the women and children off first. '...And Carrot Rope'? 'Billie'? This record is as good as any of their others, more spacy and streamlined, yes... but if you're about to abandon Stephen Malkmus for one or two laser sound effects, you probably have never seen Star Wars and are also possessed by Satan's second-in-command. Enjoy and forget the naysayers!

 

A Worthy Criticism

"For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. ‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!"

- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part 6)

 

I'll come out and say I'm biased. This one's the favorite. You can throw any of the other pillars of early alternative rock at me (The Smiths, R.E.M., etc.) and I'll say the early years were not toppable. There's something beautiful about a band with no sense of traditional production values, just laying down the riffs and beats that came to mind. Brighten the Corners is testament to indie not being an objective, black-and-white world. It's a synthesis, it's grey, it's a shady lane and everybody wants one.

 

This is Pavement on or around the fourth of fifth day of the Genesis creation. It's still chaotic and whimsical but its slowly taking on a more ordered form. The Spike Jonze music videos and lyrical wit from this album are the bait and you end up staying for the chance to see the temper tantrums of Slanted, the toddler waddle of Crooked Rain and the adolescent moodswings of Wowee Zowee grow into a relatively stable adult. An adult that would never be caught dead in a Ralph Lauren polo or an undesirable office job but a grown-up nonetheless.

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part 5)

Purists, this is your stop. For the slightly pretentious Malkmusian, Wowee Zowee was the last step before the boys hopped the bus to Sellout Central. I would have to agree that the chaos becomes more ordered from here on out and if that's all that you were staying for than this is the appropriate time to leave. There's ups and downs on this album like you wouldn't believe. All out aural assaults that plague any decent person's iTunes library and moments of randomized sublimity that will hopefully never depart from our edified eardrums.

 

I would hazard to say, at the risk of sacrilege, that this double packaged collection is Steve and Spiral's weakest set of output. Maybe I'm just missing the point I've been espousing: that their greatness was a result of their absurdity. But this one ventures too often into unlistenability for my (possibly) untrained ear canals. Any good Darwinian would say that  Crooked Rain is the common ancestor to both Wowee Zowee and Brighten the Corners. We can scream and shout all we please about whether they sold out or not, but the fact of the matter is that if Malkmus is nature, he selected the more produced path of Brighten as the next step of evolution. Brighten the Corners set the path he continues on even today with the Jicks; Wowee Zowee is there too, but like an antsy kid in school trying to get called on  Still, let's give credit where credit is due. 'We Dance' through 'Grounded' (my favorite song by them) is enough to make even a confused sellout like me go wowee zowee. You tell anyone I made that last pun and unpleasant things will happen to you. 

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part 4)

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is the one to be remembered. Pavement had lost some of the fuzz of their earlier b-sides and Slanted to put out an evolved, step-on-forward album that is only criticized by the unwise. Praise God that hardly anyone's that stupid. The tension it presents, the line it dares to toe, the lack of any cohesive 'statement', these are what make Crooked Rain an ageless time capsule, harkening us to remember whatever we like, using nostalgia as a means of carrying on. Not as distorted as Westing but not as refined as Terror Twilight. The line between the outright careless and the carefree may have gotten blurred on some Wowee Zowee songs but Crooked Rain churns out playful riffage and lyrical madness that gives you the idea that Pavement was blissfully unaware of their ability as a band and that this was the very thing that made them great in the first place. They're just 'those guys' and isn't that teriffic?

 

Stephen Malkmus played the fool during Radiohead's rise to power. Thom Yorke and he lived in the same world, not really asking or answering any questions, for that was not their place. Their speciality was realization, observance and misunderstood understanding. Life in the nineties was fragmenting into a a cut-up, yuppie-sized incapability to proceed. We were becoming glued, stuck and synthesized. Every day, the choice was between despair and detachment. People who said there was a third option were probably telemarketers. Though Yorke's criticism and paranoia of postmodern existence was justified, it's Malkmus's voice of absurdist awareness that one must bend an ear to every once in a while. The world doesn't make sense, nor does it care for our emotional wellbeing, end of story. It's fallen and gone. Will we laugh or cry, live or die?

 

'I don't care, I care, I really don't care, did you see that drummer's hair?' Oscillation and confusion is fine. Cracked eggs and dead birds scream as they fight for life, but right now the issue is the length of the percussionist's hair. And why Malkmus belts the word 'career' like he's saying 'Korea Korea Korea' over and over. And when irony and malaise meet, as they have in these last twenty years, those are both valid concerns. The centerpiece, the tableau in snapshot form presented by Crooked Rain is 'Gold Soundz', beyond a doubt. If 'Gold Soundz' doesn't make you lovingly long for days gone by, I'm afraid you have no soul. Sorry I had to be the one to break it to you. 'So drunk, in the August sun/And you're the kind of girl I like/Because you're empty and I'm empty/But you can never quarantine the past'. You certainly can't and it's Spiral Stairs, Mr. Malkmus and the rest of them that turn the past from a hellhound on our trail to the laughter of adolescent friends and concerts we'll never forget. They're wizards unaware of their magic and they can turn emptiness into a celebration with the advent of a single lyric.

 

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part 3)

On debut albums, indie bands have free range to express themselves as loud and proud as they please. Slanted & Enchanted is the void and God moving over the face of the deep. It's Malkmus calling out the beginnings of his world and constructing the base forms of life out of ashes. It's grainy, it's up, it's down. He moves in mysterious ways.

 

Through the fuzz of distortion, glory came into view. The court jesters had gotten guitars and this was their turn to speak. Orchestrated chaos had found its publicizers.

And While We're Talking About Nineties Indie Rock

 

Let's not forget the recent return of the classic lineup of Guided by Voices. Their new album, Let's Go Eat the Factory, just dropped yesterday and it seems their short bursts of lo-fi, edgy pop are still coming out just fine.