WBCR Loves You

So recently in the studio we got “Quarantine the Past: The Best of Pavement”. I’ve always been a gigantic Pavement fan, but something about recieving their greatest hits collection was a little jarring. Why still listen to Pavement? Why are they so important? Or are they at all? I remember the first time I heard Pavement. I was 14 or 15 and my dad gave me some obscure EP of theirs and told me I would love them. I did not. I thought it was…sort of blah. It wasn’t till a year or two later that things really clicked. It was raining and I was doing the dishes and thinking about how boring my life was (remember I was 16 here) and listening to “Slanted and Enchanted” and the song “In the Mouth a Desert” was playing. Maybe it was because I was hormonally vulnerable. Maybe it was just something in the air but right then and there I fell in love with them. I re-listened to the song over and over again. There’s nothing particularly upbeat or outgoing about the song. In all actuality it sort of lopes and meanders chaotically over Stephen Malkmus’s thrown aside non-sequiters. I think the most appealing thing about Pavement is the feeling and atmosphere they create. Their low-fi but filled with brilliant pop-chorsuses. Slow, but something you can sing along to. Shambolic but filled with a lot of brilliant instrumentation. Pavement is the perfect band to revisit now. We live in a society that doesn’t care about much outside of ourselves, doesn’t have the time to be perfect, doesn’t have the time for anything outside of our vaguely bleak-recession era lives. Pavement works so well for us because it doesn’t have much of a point. Most of their songs are about girls, about boredom, about trying but failing. I think the best way to sum up their outlook is in “Gold Soundz” when Malkmus throws off the brilliant line “You’re the kind of girl I like/ Because you’re empty/and I’m empty too.” Maybe I’m too pessimistic but isn’t that what 2010 is all about? Let’s all stay connected through technology, but we don’t have anything we really care about. So I guess 2010 is the perfect time for Pavement to make their comeback and reach out to a whole new slacker generation. Bebe P.s. I went on one of those “babymaker” websites to see what the lovechild between Stephen Malkmus and I would look like and it is frickin’ cute.