Pavement Who Cares

As you people already know, 3 of my favorite things are:

1. incredibly strained attempts to connect things to the point of incredulity

2. The Beatles

3. Pavement's debut album, Slanted & Enchanted

So while I yawned about 3 minutes into this oral history of Pavement's swan song album, Terror Twilight, I did get a kick out of this intro:

It may be an overstatement to say Pavement were the Beatles of their generation, but they kinda were. What the Beatles were to ’60s pop, Pavement were to ’90s indie rock—the definitive, pace-setting act of the decade who underwent many surprising and substantial evolutions in a tidy 10-year lifespan. And upon closer inspection, their respective narratives run parallel to an uncanny extent: 1992’s epochal Slanted and Enchanted sparked the initial rush of Pavemania; 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was a Rubber Soul/Revolver-style step toward sophistication; 1995’s messterpiece Wowee Zowee was their ’67-’68 period of lawless experimentation; 1997’s Brighten the Corners was the band’s late-game Abbey Road-esque consolidation of strengths. Their mirror trajectories even extend to the streaming era, where both acts have their Spotify stats topped by songs that weren’t even released as proper singles back in the day.

And then there’s 1999’s Terror Twilight, which was Pavement’s Let It Be—and not just because it represents the finely chiseled tombstone to a brilliant career. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: What began as a loose, live-off-the-floor affair gave way to a more laborious process overseen by a big-name producer (with Nigel Godrich in the Phil Spector role) who put his fancy fingerprints all over the finished product. The result was an album that tried to reconcile the elegant and eccentric extremities of Pavement’s sound into a pristine, next-level pop statement, but instead wound up heralding the band’s demise. And in its wake, Terror Twilight left behind a troubled legacy marked by competing track sequences, divisive reactions, trash talk, and hurt feelings.

I couldn't care less about Terror Twilight but Slanted & Enchanted is a ride or die album for me, and what I consider to be THE album of the first half of the 1990s, even as every Pavement song I ever heard afterwards never did a thing for me. Which makes sense, since I also never really fell under the spell of the tons of copycat slacker bands that tried to follow the Pavement formula, but without Slanted & Enchanted's unrelenting effortlessness. S&E's sloppy, earnest amateurism is charming and wonderful, the ensuing albums of "aren't we way too cool for school?" hipster irony - whether it was the band's fault or not - was neither charming nor wonderful, and certainly the music itself did nothing to transcend such labeling whether it was fair or not.

The weird thing about Slanted & Enchanted is that for months before it came out I'd heard about it throughout the alt-rock music press, which in 1991 was not easy to do for a 19 year-old in Farmville, VA. To this day, I still find it kind of curious how much pre-release attention the record got, which still doesn't make a lot of sense for a band nobody'd heard of: 

Pavement's debut album Slanted And Enchanted was an underground sensation even before its 1992 release: Much like Nirvana's Nevermind, which preceded it by just a few months, the album was copied, traded, and spoken of in hushed tones. It famously got a full-page rave in Spin before the then-fledgling Matador Records had even sent out promotional copies. And, like Nevermind on a more intimate scale, Slanted would prove to be a watershed record with a lasting impact.

Sounds a lot like the annoyingly-desperately-pined-for-before-it-was-even-written-by-an-unknown-author-manuscript that was to become Gone with the Wind. Grrr. GRRR!!

So instead of comparing them to The Beatles, this older article does a better job of comparing their debut to the band they should be compared to, Nirvana.  S&E has always reeked a bit more like Nevermind which rock historians want us to believe magically appeared in record stores one day & changed everything by word of mouth in some sort of noble, organic fashion when the reality is that the record company spent months on a quarter-million dollar marketing blitz for the record. Also they seemed to adopt grunge's annoying "oh no we just release massive records by huge record media companies to be played on MTV all hours of the day but oh no we don't want money or success in any way we're just humble artists waiting to be discovered after we die like Emily Dickinson" bullshit that grunge bands loved to bray about on the way to the bank. 

But I'll always remember exactly where I was when I heard Pavement's first album when it finally came out and to be fair, the band doesn't owe me anything more.