Why is pavement so good

And with that slacker 'tude in the lead, Pavement repackaged the avant-noise of the indie elite into playful hooks with all shades of feedback, distilling the magic of earlysomethings, carelessly jamming with no aims beyond living in that moment. It's the definitive document of what makes indie rock, indie rock. Search term. Billboard Pro Subscribe Sign In. Top Artists. Top Charts. Hot Songs.

Billboard Top Videos. Top Articles. By William Goodman. Copied to clipboard. Click to copy. Artist Mentioned. But there are no airs in central California.

I had some relatives who became kind of wealthy through real estate, but they built their house to look like Tara from Gone with the Wind. They had Clydesdales! It wasn't classist. It wasn't classy.

It was more like… new. I mean, I like Clydesdales, you can have Clydesdales if you want. But people in Westchester County aren't breeding Clydesdales, you know? The source material for our music had more to do with going to the University of Virginia. Before that, I just liked dumb teenage punk. I thought Social Distortion was high art.

After an hour at the park, Malkmus needs to go home. As we walk back to his car, I try to ask the principal questions I need to ask: Why is Pavement reuniting now? Why is the band reuniting at all? I mention that this could actually hurt their legacy, since there's a certain romantic cachet to never coming back.

I also mention, on the upside, that these massive sold-out concerts will allow Pavement to earn some of the money they never made when they were musically peaking. He says, "That's a consideration. And he tries.

But he just can't make himself do it. I… I want to do it. I mean, I don't want to be the person who only kind of wants to do it. He knows he is not being particularly convincing. He's been pushing for it for a while. If we're going to do it, everyone says this is a good time. I suppose what I like about this whole reunion is the openness. Will it be fun for us?

Will people in the audience have fun? Who knows? It's not like I'm gagging to get out there and play those songs, but I am curious to see what it will be like, and I'm curious to see the other guys and watch them play onstage again. I'm assuming it's going to be fun. I ask if he has much of a relationship with the other members of Pavement; he says he does, but it's tenuous. The only member he consistently communicates with is multiinstrumentalist Bob Nastanovich, but that's mostly because they're in some of the same fantasy leagues.

I've found that the easiest way to get in touch with him, even if it's about a Pavement-related issue, is to propose a trade in one of our fantasy leagues and attach my question in an e-mail memo. I only talked to Stephen for about five or ten minutes about this reunion, and the only things he clarified was that I would need to be comfortable quitting my job, that I'd have to practice, and that I had to promise not to blow the money I made on horses.

Malkmus likes to say that Pavement is a democracy. But Pavement is a democracy the way the Replacements were a democracy, or the way Creedence Clearwater Revival was a democracy, or the way Zimbabwe is a democracy. The rest of the group have wanted to reunite for years; nobody has ever fully explained why they broke up in the firstplace. I phone guitarist Scott Kannberg and ask him about this. He tells me how much he misses playing their old songs.

He never even refers to him by his first name. But I've come to accept that. As soon as the Pavement reunion concludes, Kannberg says, he's moving to Australia. I ask if he would make another Pavement album if Malkmus decided he wanted to do so. Kannberg's detached diffidence is easy to understand: Malkmus is a hard person to read. I believe him, but I'm not sure if this indicates weird sincerity or next-level mockery.

Sometimes he's amazingly straightforward, like when I ask if he thinks Pavement could have been bigger if that had been what they wanted. But it was really just the difference between being Pavement or being Weezer," Malkmus says. There's a formula to that, and I'm not a good chorus writer. I'm better at the verses. Sometimes I don't even get to the chorus. This feels like honesty, but it might just be conversational misdirection. Malkmus sometimes comes across as cagey because he doesn't like constructing fake answers to pointed questions.

After the success of Crooked Rain, Pavement seemed to be standing on the verge of alternative rock stardom, but they turned their backs on that prospect with their next album. Wowee Zowee was a record of 18 sprawling tracks which says more about the band than any of their other albums.

It starts with a simple strum but goes off the rails quickly, fraying at the edges, speeding up and slowing down and adding more nonsensical lines and random observations. Then it ends, aptly, with the song folding in on itself and Malkmus screaming out of tune. On the face of it, Stereo seems essentially about selling out and the dangers of letting fame destroy your band. But this is Pavement.

So the chorus reads more like an ironic statement by Malkmus about the band not being on the stereo and the whole song seems a knowing dig at the band for having never becoming as popular as they should. But there was the trick: with its huge chorus and loose, stadium-filling guitars, it sounded exactly like it was made for your stereo. This could have been the song that made them. It has all the hallmarks of classic Pavement.

Instead Stereo made it to No 48 in the UK singles chart. The final song on their final album, Terror Twilight, and how did we get here?