If you could settle down, you would settle down. You would drop out and drop off. You would take the nostalgic privilege of the Slacker ethos and live that life. You would go back to those gold sounds, if you could, and live in the ironic lo-fi reverie of Pavement’s determined indifference to the market and the music magazines. “If you could,” is the signifier here, because Pavement’s trademark yearning, full of obliquely surrealist misdirection, is also the point — being this laidback is an aspirational model, and is in direct opposition to the urgency of the world. That makes Pavement effortlessly and enduringly cool. It also permeates Pavement with the pathos of a perpetually downcast, fatigued outsiderness, not by necessity, but by self-chosen immolation. Pavement strained against the system so well that the system changed with them and then they rejected what they became.
At the center of that dichotomy is Stephen Malkmus, who wrote jangling stream-of-conscious music which spoke to a generation of intelligent, self-effacing, and inward-looking fans. The seemingly indifferent effortlessness is the point, which makes it so strange that Alex Ross Perry’s experimental portrait of the band is trying so very hard to impress, by meshing together a multi-directional documentary which features the opening of a Pavement museum, the production of a stage show of their songs, and real archival footage paving the way to a reunion show. Then, on top of all that, there’s a snarky faux music biopic inserted in-between all of it.
The effect is dizzying, as Perry’s film tries to keep it all in the air. Conventionality would never suit the goals of the band but this strained push towards novelty gives us bits and pieces but obfuscates the central message, that even those hard moments when it all came crashing down, can provide some amount of warmth in hindsight, when the band finds out that not only is there still an audience for what they made, but that people never stopped caring.
What’s happened with music since they went away has created a new, equally weird status quo for Pavement to fit into, or strain against. Their most popular song is now one of their most simple and silly, the hyper-catchy “Harness Your Hopes,” which was somewhat of a discarded B-side that caught fire on TikTok some years ago, and has since brought the band back into the conversation.
Pavement were always there, though, as the perennial outsiders, the group that rose from the ashes of the extraordinary Silver Jews and combined that sensibility of slacker poetry with the affable, boyish simplicity of legendary acts like The Replacements.
Being hard to define and obscure on purpose is just one aspect of who Pavement were, and to that end, Perry’s new work solidifies that component of the band. But it misses what is most essential and fundamentally true about Pavement — that underneath their nonchalant hipster presentation, they are a deeply accessible band that were always going to break again on something like TikTok. When you hear them you immediately know why it worked in the ‘90s, riding the knife’s edge between self-sabotage and making music that felt immediate and free.
As Perry splits his vision of Pavement into pieces, they do not exactly coalesce, nor independently show why the band mattered so much. It also wouldn’t make sense to play it down the middle, so much would be lost in a straightforward documentary that traced their lineage and spent a third of its runtime on the fight with Billy Corgan (mostly Corgan being upset and Malkmus being above it) or the industry at large (also mostly the industry being upset and Malkmus being above it), but even in Pavements, we reach the obvious conclusion: the fight was not external, but was an internal struggle with fitting in all along. And that’s why Pavement has resonated so well with a generation of folks who didn’t fit the right-sized expectations of their time. It’s because being a perfect slacker takes a lot of work, just like being good at anything, and for Pavement, they got to be the best at working hard to make music look easy. What Perry’s film reminds us is that this approach still matters and that for all that has changed, Pavement are still holding success at arm’s length. The reason they still won is because they still get to hold onto it for themselves, on their own terms.