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.