Pavement - Things Get Old

  I love Pavement, I grew up with their records, I idolized them. My friend once said it best, “What I like about Pavement is that they seem to know me better than I know myself.” As silly as that seems given SM’s obtuse lyrics, that ambiguous Pavement energy, a mixture of cocksmanship, pranksterism, nostalgia, and even a bit of darkness, seemed to resonate with my youth more than most of the bands out at the time. Whereas the Strokes and the White Stripes served straight up retro revival for us too young to remember their forebearers, Pavement was smarter, more nuanced. I felt like they were actually like us, full of anarchic energy as well as a smart-ass knowing. They were too cool to be cool, too smart to be hip, but in the margins they could be incredibly affecting.
  I first heard heard Slanted and Enchanted around 2001, only months after they’d broken up. They were my first introduction to the concept of indie rock and remain my ideal of the form, so much so that I internalized their failures as successes. I even had the notion that me and my smart-ass rock friends could make it just by being our smart ass selves, even while living in the middle of nowhere Indiana, hanging on the idea that someone out there (possibly Thurston Moore) would inexplicably find us and launch us into semi-stardom. A decade of fandom later I’ve become older and wiser. I’ve read Perfect Sound forever, watched the Slow Century, watched my contemporaries rise and fall, played in bands of my own and been thoroughly demystified of the glamour of independent music, or hell, the glamour of music in general. No love lost really, in fact in the place of my youthful idealism is a real love (I hope) for the music that sountracked my maturation and a more nuanced perspective on how bands and the music industry in general work. And after all these year, I still love SM, Spiral Stairs, Nast, Ibold, Westy and Young. But at the ripe old age of 24, and even though I never saw them the first time around, I am getting my first dose of reunion tour blues.
  Malkmus has been openly ambivalent about this reunion. First there was the GQ piece with Chuck Klosterman who, like Malkmus, cares more about sports than music these days and is about just as uninterested in Pavement. Then there was a more exploitative piece in Mojo featuring the whole band, another non plussed SM, and some sad moments when Kannenberg lets on how much more the band means to him than Malkmus. Put together with Perfect Sound Foerever and you can pretty much get the picture: Malkmus is kinda a dick and kinda aware of that, the rest of the band are kinda not dicks but maybe kinda not as talented and no one in the band really wants to talk about it. So my expectations for this Pitchfork performance were kinda secretly not so high, despite my really wanting them to be.
  I only went to one day of the festival this year, for money reasons and due to my work schedule. So many of my old pitchfork pals didn’t go at all, having either moved away, moved on, or completely lost interest. Whereas in the past the fest had always seemed like a sort of like a homecoming or gathering of a disparate community, this year everyone looked unfamiliar. I tried to summon the spirit, but it was hot, the sound was often shitty, there was no 312, and everyone looked if not young than childish, as if some shift into real adulthood had occurred unnoticed in my life this past year and I was just now realizing it. I wasn’t hating on anyone, my worst criticism of the day was launched Washed Out, saying they were a little boring. Beach House put on a great set, Major Lazer made me dance, Big Boi sounded good while I waited for Pavement in the setting sun. I was having a reasonably good time. And then the sun went down and Pavement sauntered on.
  And the set was, well actually quite good. The sound was awful for half the songs (the lighter half), the guys were so completely unenthused to be there it hurt, there were about 5 false starts, and the crowd was exhausted as fuck and pretty sick of standing face to armpit in the hot sun waiting for them to play. And yet, somehow, it was worth it. When the band was on, they delivered. There were several moments were I thought they’d fall apart but they’d swing back into cohesion, making the high points matter so much more. They played the songs faithfully but changed them up enough to make them sound if not new, then at least like living songs. It wasn’t slike the Slint show, where they played note for note but with no energy or spontaneity. It was by all metrics a real Pavement show. Compared to the footage from their last show before their breakup, maybe even a really good Pavement show. And since this will probably be the only Pavement show I ever see, I’m glad for that much.
  Perhaps it was disappointing for some. To be honest, I didn’t walk away in a blissful haze, and I don’t think Pitchfork fest has ever had such an anticlimactic end: no encore, no announcement, everyone just slowly walked out a little puzzled. And maybe I am so prematurely old, so jaded, expectations so low and so willing to forgive that I couldn't actually be disappointed. But Silence Kit killed, and it killed in that sad longing way it did when I first heard it. And when Malkmus replaced “shitty-life” for city-life the second time, instead of feeling sapped or slighted I kinda felt on the same page with him. It was unexpected and cathartic, and it revealed something I love about Pavement that no one talks about that much, that they’re a kinda dark, depressing little act when you get down to it. So many of their best songs are colored with loneliness, misanthropy, loss, anger, bitterness. It’s by far not what this band is about, but it’s all there. There were definitely more uplifting highlights of the show: Conduit for Sale, Trigger Cut, Frontwards, Spiral Stairs’ songs actually sounding really good to me for the first time maybe ever. But for all their attempts and all their thank-yous and all their practice (really, they sounded pretty tight), they couldn’t put on a convincing face of gratitude, they couldn't fool any of us into thinking that they were at all as excited to be there as we were to see them. Whatever wasn’t working for them before is still not working. But they were themselves, they played well together, and there were enough moments where they looked like they might actually be really enjoying the music they were playing, if not the people they were playing it with.
  And I think it was all very fitting. The era that birthed Pavement is clearly over, Pavement as a living entity is clearly over. They sounded out of context, out of place, and out of style at the fest. They aren’t some returning heroes getting their long lost due from a generation that finally “get’s them.” Although, I would have loved for them to say “hey kids, you Pavement fans are alright, I’m glad you still exist” But they did their job and they tried hard for us, for the kids who weren’t there the first time around, or maybe it was for our money. Who cares? I got to see Pavement, the real deal, in all their hapless glory. They gave me an unrepeatable performance, they surprised me, and I still feel like those songs I’d heard a million times meant as much to me now as they did ten years ago.