Pavement.

            Pavement is my favorite band.

I’ve been asked the question multiple times, usually after people realize that I’m a music aficionado (read: prick). Choosing Pavement over other groups was not an easy decision. I listen to a lot of bands; I can connect with Dylan, Springsteen, Westerberg, and so on. They all offer something musically and aesthetically pleasing to me (“You’re an idiot, babe”, “This town is full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win” (I’m eighteen years old…let me have this one for now). But Pavement gets the top spot. Why? I’m not entirely sure, and I sort of like it that way. Since my childhood, I had held an appreciation for the classics: The Beatles, Beach Boys, Stones, etc. Those bands, while excellent, were of another time – my parents’ generation – and not mine to own. I would never be able to see Dylan or Jagger at their prime (and some, like Hendrix, were an impossibility). I needed a group that spoke to me, that was of my time, a bastion for the disaffected youth of tomorrow!

It was sometime during the fall of my sophomore year of high school that music began to take its inextricable hold on me .I was browsing the internet when I happened upon a web page for the defunct rock band Pavement. The more I read about them, the more certain phrases kept reappearing: “kings of 90’s indie rock”, “low-fi techniques”, “smart slackers”, “cryptic lyrics”, and “a seminal masterpiece”. Needless to say, I was intrigued.  I decided to watch the video for their song “Gold Soundz”, off the 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. It features the band dressed up in Santa costumes tooling around Santa Monica, California. They run around a mall with bow-and-arrows, shoot a store-bought chicken out of the air, and find keys to a convertible inside it. The video ends with them sliding down a hill and eating Oreos and milk.

I loved it. The internet’s descriptions were apropos: the guitar seemed to float through the song, creating a lazy summer atmosphere that Pavement, as a whole, exuded. They were loose and imperfect in a good way. Their lyrics were literate without being pretentious. At first glance, they appeared nonsensical, but little phrases soon became ingrained in my consciousness. The line “You can never quarantine the past” is buried within “Gold Soundz”, and I find that one could do worse in terms of economizing deeper meanings. Stephen Malkmus, the group’s lead singer and songwriter, loves the way words sound, and often juxtaposes odd ones to fit his melodies. He is the poster boy of the apathetic academic: an intelligent college-grad who decided to be in an indie band as a career.  

I think you need to sympathize with a band’s general disposition before you can call them a “favorite”. The Beatles seemed like nice guys, right? If they wrote those songs, but were unlikable people in their interviews, I don’t believe they would have been nearly as successful.  Don’t take this to mean you need a political statement; Pavement seem so agreeable to me because they seemed to genuinely love being in their band. “Gold Soundz” is featured on an album that could be described as “sunburned California dreamin”. Within the song “Newark Wilder” is Pavement’s ethos, and one of my favorite lines ever: “It’s a brand new era, it feels great / It’s a brand new era, but it came too late.”

Maybe this is why Pavement is my top band. They are music lovers who created a group on a lark, managed to become critically acclaimed and respected, and broke up before they became pastiches of themselves. They realized that they weren’t going to be Hendrix, or Dylan. They made music that they liked and never tried to become something that they weren’t. Malkmus now has a solo career that functions as a sonic playground for his guitar skills. Two years ago, I had the chance to see him play in Philadelphia with his new band, the Jicks. Here was my Hendrix, alive and kicking. He tore through songs from his latest LP, and as the sheer squall of his guitar caused the building to shake, I knew I found something of my time, something special.