I once assumed that Pavement would be forgotten by later generations, just as the knowing, sarcastic wit of the nineteen-nineties came to seem passé in the two-thousands. The band’s music was ragged and dry, the work of self-referential pranksters scavenging for meaning at the tail end of rock’s imperial era. Their catalogue features a spoof of fifties lounge jazz but no dance remixes or stunt cameos; there are ramshackle songs about architecture, tennis, and the band R.E.M. but little mention of sex or rebellion. Their style became synonymous with their bandleader, Stephen Malkmus, who sang with a kind of deadpan cool, unimpressed by the world around him, including the hooky songs the group churned out. This was music about being bored by everything but language itself.
What made Pavement so out of step with its time (and ours) was its seemingly indifferent attitude toward success. If you were a certain kind of impressionable teen, casting about for pretensions to adopt as your own, Pavement’s rise, in the early nineties, was thrilling. The most annoying things I’ve ever said were owing to a Pavement sticker on my high-school binder. What the band modelled was the possibility that you could be accepted on your own terms; failing that, you could pretend that you’d never cared to begin with.
Maybe it was always just a weaponized awkwardness, a desire to hold the world at arm’s length. Malkmus and his childhood friend Scott Kannberg had grown up in Stockton, California, a Central Valley city that would have felt much farther from Bay Area cosmopolitanism than a mere eighty-minute drive. In January, 1989, Malkmus and Kannberg went to a local studio to record some songs, with little sense that they were forming a band. The studio owner, Gary Young, volunteered to play drums for them. The first EP by Pavement—the band’s name was inspired by Kannberg’s college courses in city planning—was praised in a circuit of small fanzines, and Young joined as the group’s third member, adding an air of chaos to performances. (Though he was nearly twenty years older than his bandmates, he became famous for performing drunken headstands when he should have been playing.)
Pavement’s early music was scratchy and eccentric, built on guitars that gnawed and eked their way through songs. The first three members were eventually joined by the percussionist Bob Nastanovich and the bassist Mark Ibold. In the early nineties, Pavement looked like a funny paradox, a crew of cherubs in collared shirts backed by Young, a long-haired, often shirtless showman pounding his drums. But, even if they were known for being sloppy, they never seemed like amateurs. Young was replaced by Steve West for “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain,” the band’s polished breakthrough, in 1994. The members continued recording and touring until the release of “Terror Twilight,” in 1999, by which time their sound had evolved into something more robust and bucolic. After exactly a decade as a band, Pavement broke up. Malkmus and Kannberg pursued solo projects, and Ibold joined Sonic Youth.
A few years ago, the director Alex Ross Perry began working on “Pavements,” a film about the group, which was released this month. The band members had little involvement, though a couple of them expressed a wariness of the “legacy trap”: they didn’t want the movie to present some fixed, triumphalist narrative. The film is ostensibly a documentary, set in 2022, when the band reunited for a tour, and it includes some typical scenes one might expect—rehearsals, old clips, interviews. But the bulk of “Pavements” takes place in an alternative America where the group is “the world’s most important & influential band,” worthy of idolatry.
To explore this other time line, Perry commissioned a musical set to Pavement’s songs, which he titled “Slanted! Enchanted!” He also wrote a serious, straightforward rock bio-pic called “Range Life” and shot scenes with the actors Joe Keery (of “Stranger Things”) and Jason Schwartzman. Lastly, Perry curated a museum show devoted to the band’s impact in this parallel world, placing real-life artifacts, such as notebooks and gig posters, alongside a fake platinum record and sham ad campaigns. To further complicate things, in the film Perry focusses mostly on behind-the-scenes stagings of these events, and the performers seem in on the joke to varying degrees. Where the “Slanted! Enchanted!” dancers talk about the musical with a kind of outsider bemusement, the “Range Life” cast always remains firmly in character, regarding Pavement as gods. In one absorbingly strange scene, Keery works with a dialect coach to nail Malkmus’s lackadaisical, slightly nasal intonation.
Trying to manage the different planes of reality in “Pavements” is mind-bending, and maybe a little pointless. (If you want a more traditional retelling of the story—albeit one heavy on puppetry—try “Louder Than You Think,” a 2023 documentary about Young.) There’s something endearingly annoying about the new film—the way an overzealous fan might make you rethink your own devotions. I went to one of the jukebox-musical shows, in Manhattan, and it was surreal. Reduced to their core melodies, the songs became deliriously sweet allegories for young love. For a moment, I wondered if I’d completely misunderstood this music for three-quarters of my life.
Last October, Pavement played its final show for the foreseeable future, at Sony Hall, a small theatre in midtown. It had been ages since anyone had seen the band in such an intimate setting. It opened with “You’re Killing Me,” the lead track on the group’s début EP, and it soon became clear that the set would be largely chronological. The evening ended with “Harness Your Hopes,” a once obscure B-side that went viral in 2017, owing to a quirk of the Spotify algorithm. It was ironic that a band formerly concerned about managing the scope of its success had been swept into the unpredictable vortices of contemporary fame. “That’s the end of our career,” Malkmus said, as the group finished the song and walked offstage.
The following night was the North American première of “Pavements,” at the New York Film Festival. Perry jokingly thanked us all for attending a special screening of “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan bio-pic from last year. It was the type of droll wisecrack one might expect from a Pavement devotee. Afterward, members of the band joined Perry onstage, looking appreciative, if also perplexed.
In fact, I did go to see “A Complete Unknown” soon after. A couple in Dylan’s core demographic stepped out during the trailers, complaining about the volume. I pretty much forgot about the movie after I left the theatre, as I’m sure many did, but I also went back to some Dylan albums I hadn’t listened to in years. It felt like this was one of the film’s primary goals—to guide our Spotify searches. I had a chilling vision of someday shielding my ears during trailers playing before bio-pics of my own teen heroes.
Just as a generation of young people now picture Timothée Chalamet’s wispy mustache when they think of Dylan, it’s likely that many fans understand N.W.A., Queen, Bob Marley, and Elvis Presley almost solely through their recent, varnished bio-pics. There are Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson movies due for release this year, as well as four separate Beatles ones slated for 2028. Perhaps pop-music history will soon exist only in the form of authorized, brand-managed hagiographies. Netflix recently announced that a nine-hour documentary about the complicated genius of Prince, directed by the Oscar-winner Ezra Edelman, would not be released, because of concerns raised by the artist’s estate. Even in the lower-stakes world of publishing, a celebrity can mobilize her fan base against anything deemed unofficial. Adoring books about hip-hop musicians such as Mac Miller and De La Soul have been criticized by the artists or their estates—basically for being journalistic endeavors.
When careers are seen as intellectual property—and when, with the decline of album sales, one’s back catalogue becomes an even more valuable resource—legacies will be guarded with a lawyerly vigilance. Messiness gets edited out in the name of a few key narrative turning points. The possibility that an artist today would ever offer the kind of access that Metallica gave for “Some Kind of Monster,” a 2004 documentary that famously featured the band in therapy, seems as likely as the prospect of American politicians welcoming the scrutiny of reporters.
In the absence of friction, contemporary bio-pics are just a series of boring victory laps. Intention and accidents, theft and boorish behavior: it all gets folded into the myth-serving lore. And it makes fools of us fans. The magic of pop music isn’t just the star on the stage; it’s how the crowd sways, and what fans do afterward with the feelings inspired by the show. All this made “Pavements” feel more exceptional. It seemed to exist adjacent to the band. A true fanatic’s take, it aspires to be as heady and as weird as the band itself. Perry’s aggressively clever story about Pavement is different from what mine would be, yet I recognized a fellow-traveller. In making something so intensely loving, he points out the banality of modern-day fandom, in which we’re all expected to be brand ambassadors, reciting someone else’s gospel.
“We’re not trying to stay underground or trying to be big,” Malkmus told an interviewer in the nineties. “We’re just existing.” While “Pavements” caricatures the good-versus-evil dynamic of the era’s indie purism, it’s also about a kind of ambivalence. Great works aren’t always the result of the muse descending, and sometimes a career materializes by accident. Beautiful moments grow out of listlessness or pettiness. I went to one of Pavement’s shows in 2022. I was initially wary, since some pleasures are best left in the past. But it was a delight to realize that Pavement was now a different, slightly more capable band. At one point, Malkmus held his guitar skyward like a rock idol, and I wondered if this was a joke. But it didn’t matter anymore. The band played everything a little slower, and the songs drifted through the theatre with a dazed elegance. The group had found something new in these old songs, and we were all free to change along with them, or not. ♦
