"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!"
16 January 2012
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.
12 January 2012
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.
07 January 2012
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.
06 January 2012
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.
05 January 2012
You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part 2)
Chicago has Wicker Park, Brooklyn has Williamsburg, California has Stockton? The people at Pitchfork could have easily called Pavement’s widespread influence on indie culture had they come from Silver Lake or the Mission District of San Francisco. To transform the scene as members of the Stocktonite citizenry (‘a veritable no man’s land’), that was about as unpredictable as Pat Robertson declaring that he had just met up with Anton LeVay and thought he was a pretty neat guy. Hipsterdom’s history is urban to the core. For every Justin Vernon coming out of Eau Claire, are three sets of Fleet Foxes sound-a-likes manifesting in Seattle. Similar to Mr. Vernon, Stephen Malkmus, Spiral Stairs and the rest of the ‘Gold Soundz’ gang came out of territory that no trendspotter could have foreseen. Malkmus eventually settled down in Portland, the hipster Medina to Williamsburg's Mecca, but his humble beginnings as an indie icon are what set out his slacker set of bandmates as a particularly magical occurrence in the alternakid schema of things.
04 January 2012
You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part 1)
Nostalgia practically demanded that the nineties would be in vogue eventually. The decade seems to be best defined by its undefinability. Mainstream radio was saved from hair metal by Kurt Cobain’s Beatle-esque punk and then plunged right back into the depths with the centralized putridity that is Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam. But if you want nineties in its purest sense, unpasteurized slackerdom, you simply can’t look to anyone other than Steve Malkmus and his fellow Stocktonites as the iconic representatives of this ten year period without an identity. While Kurt's kids smelt like teen spirit and the creeps rocked out to Radiohead, Pavement was playfully riffing on the key of apathy, becoming the poster-boys of slacker-cool indie rock. Their geographical absurdity, musical originality and lyrical frivolity are what paved the nineties and their namesake for indie kids across the globe. These next few days are dedicated to a band for all seasons.
