PAVEMENT
A couple of the 34 songs Pavement played at Metro last month were crap, in that they were unaffecting. They didn’t make me dizzy, they didn’t make me much of anything. Luckily, the crappy moments were short-lived. But in those moments of disengagement I was able to think of Pavement as a rock band loosely based in Stockton, California, getting a lot of play on WXRT and MTV. Being conscious of the facts ruins the fun. I sit through a lot of shows and listen to a lot of records fully conscious of facts.
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I think I know why. Most critics are more comfortable approaching a piece of popular music through the words than through the music itself. Words are easier to describe–you can print them, after all. You can talk about the “things that happen” in the song and about the way the singer/narrator “feels.” (This explains why mediocre, clever artists such as John Hiatt and Randy Newman receive such lavish critical attention.) But nothing really “happens” in a Pavement song, and Malkmus never explicitly says how he “feels.”
