Alex Sudheim
Pavement may well be the rock’n’roll darlings of the postmodern age, but as they themselves sing: “It’s a brand new era and it feels great/It’s a brand new era but it came too late.”
The open-endedness of these lyrics is very much in keeping with the band’s oeuvre, which can be read as a kind of musical equivalent of the duck/rabbit paradox – while seeming to be one thing, it is also constantly another. Like no one else before them, Pavement have fused pop’s sweet-cheeked musical sensibility with punk’s seditious growl.
Hailing from Stockton, California, Pavement arrived on the scene in 1989 to declare themselves undisputed avant-rock stylemasters with their quixotic debut, Slanted and Enchanted. On this early work the classic Pavement formula was cast in drip-dry cement: a formula of strange, mercurial temper which continues to confuse and enthrall in their fifth album, the more assured but no less enigmatic 1999 release, Terror Twilight.
Throughout their 10-year career, Pavement have remained in possession of that magical gift for contradiction, ambivalence and subversion that is central to the identity of our age. Their formula is an anti-formula; their image an anti-image. While lead singer and songwriter Steven Malkmus might be the archetypal slacker genius, he is also a mysterious philosopher-king involved in inscrutable divinations of the universe. After all, this is a lyricist who casually drops lines like “One of us is a cigar stand, one of us is a shiny blue incandescent guillotine”, and “A redder shade of neck on a whiter shade of trash/this emery board is giving me a rash”.
Nothing is certain in the world of Pavement. The continual de- and re- fragmentation of self which the music embodies is precisely what makes them so elusively attractive, the perfect soundtrack for the fin-de- millennium.
Caught between the crossfire of popular acclaim and artistic credibility, Pavement choose to fry themselves on the electric fence dividing the two rather than comfortably choose a side.
As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari assert in their classic tome The Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: “We live today in the age of partial objects/bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers.”
Which is why, perhaps, whispers of Pavement’s imminent break-up pass fearfully among the fans during the intense final concert of the Terror Twilight world tour in London’s sold-out Brixton Academy. On stage, the band exude by the bucketload all the charisma, charm and will-to-power that has made them such a cogent voice of dissent and willful originality.
Yet maybe they really are terrified of the tyranny of the twilight, of becoming leftovers. However, in the Pavement classic Filmore Jive, when Malkmus intones: “It’s the end of the rock’n’roll era/we don’t need you anymore!” he’s referring not to his sober-haired self, but to “those rockers with their long, curly locks”.
So perhaps Malkmus is positioning himself as the avatar of the post-rock age, which is a slot he and his band have eminently proved their ability to fill. Let’s hope I’m right, for Pavement certainly aren’t the kind of band to angle for the ringside seats at their own funeral.