“I was kind of a poser then. I still kind of am a poser.” At 59, Stephen Malkmus is stuck in time, a musician like so many others forced to re-enact, re-live, and re-experience their teens and 20s in public. There’s nothing he can do, he’ll always be the guy from Pavement. Not a bad band to be the guy from, but they broke up over a quarter century ago, probably prematurely. Never drug-addled or mentally ill, Malkmus’ discomfort with the media and the band’s popularity cast him as one of the more surprising burnouts of the 1990s. Brixton 1999: with handcuffs dangling from his mic stand, Malkmus said “This represents what being in this band for nine years has been like” at what would be Pavement’s last show for over a decade. He immediately recorded a solo album and quickly formed Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, enjoying the kind of modest working musician’s life he apparently preferred to rock stardom. His bandmates, especially Scott Kannberg aka Spiral Stairs, suffered like all frustrated supporting players do when their dictator decides to break up the band.
But not all rock auteurs land where they think. Billy Corgan, Malkmus’ bête noir since 1994, immediately regretted breaking up The Smashing Pumpkins at the end of 2000 and tried to get everyone back together again just a few years later; he had Jimmy Chamberlin, but James Iha was happy playing in A Perfect Circle, and D’arcy Wretzky was incommunicado, lost in Hollywood and hanging out with Mickey Rourke too much. Corgan LOVED being famous, loved playing live, and couldn’t help but use the press to build and burnish the myths and the legends of The Smashing Pumpkins. To Malkmus and millions (maybe just a million) of members of Generation X, it was terminally uncool to care, and it was beyond the pale to achieve, let alone openly seek out, commercial attention. For Malkmus, the distinction wasn’t political, it was purely social. When Pavement was asked to play Lollapalooza 1995, the first thing Malkmus asked was “Is it going to play in New York?” He didn’t want to be seen on a lame corporate rock tour in front of his friends. Corporate rock, sure—Pavement’s records were distributed by Atlantic—but not so open, not so proud, never too excited.
Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements is a great film about a pathetic man, one who dreamed of success and worked hard but would never admit it; someone who cared more about what people thought than the people he made fun of for the same, a hipster poser who nonetheless produced five landmark indie rock albums in less than a decade. Malkmus’ work is undeniable, even if I’ve never been able to get into Pavement, ever, they have half a dozen classics, especially “Grounded,” used in the movie’s most moving montage. Pavements is Perry’s best film yet, and I’m excited to hear that he “hates the filmmaking process” of traditional narrative features, because this is the best movie about a rock band in years. Besides tearing A Complete Unknown and Bohemian Rhapsody to shreds, Pavements obliterates hagiographic rock documentaries like Bret Morgen’s Moonage Daydream. That movie contained absolutely nothing new for even passing David Bowie fans, a very SHALLOW dive, one that was boring at that.
Perry and editor Robert Greene fill Pavements’ 128 minutes with archival footage, home movies, recent rehearsals, and three Pavement “projects” set up specifically for this movie: a jukebox musical (Slanted! Enchanted!), a Hollywood rock biopic (Range Life), and a museum show in Portland (Pavement 33-22). All three were real projects that came to a head and saw audiences, but, museum show aside, these were a very small group of people, and for all intents and purposes, the jukebox musical and especially the biopic were made in quotation marks, just like most of Malkmus’ work. He’s rarely open and uninhibited in his songwriting; his best work—especially “Grounded”—isn’t so wound up. Pavements shows how high-strung Malkmus is, a condition at odds with his whatever slacker persona; Joe Kerry, the actor playing Malkmus in Range Life, points out that Malkmus speaks from the back of his throat, very constricted—it made me realize how knotty and unresolved so many Pavement songs are, and why I never responded to them. They’re not a band that would ever do anything to get more applause, and they would never do anything obvious. The music is so convoluted I have a hard time grabbing onto anything; when people say they saw themselves in Malkmus, I’m not sure what planet I’m on.
In a retrospective review of Slanted and Enchanted published yesterday, Mike Powell of Pitchfork wrote, "Call it generational disaffection, call it male posturing, call it playing it cool, but that aloof quality in Pavement is, ironically, what helped me connect so strongly to their music in the first place, not just because I found it comparatively unembarrassing to wearing your heart on your sleeve but because talking around or past your feelings—wanting to say something and not being quite sure how to say it, or feeling that to rupture the silence around a feeling was to corrupt it—seemed emotionally accurate in a way full disclosure never was." How is "full disclosure" less "emotionally accurate" than "talking around or past your feelings"? This kind of pathetic bullshit is annoying enough on its own, but to celebrate it, to soak in it... no wonder I've never been able to get into Pavement.
It’s as if the worst thing in the world is to be, for a moment, “not cool.” Someone has a line about Pavement’s appeal to people who think “everything’s stupid, and everything sucks.” Tim Heidecker, interviewed as himself and playing Gerard Cosloy in the movie-within-a-movie Range Life, says it was exciting to see the band on The Tonight Show “goofing on the whole thing,” and others praise Malkmus for being “above it all” at all times. This is exactly what’s always irritated me about Malkmus, and I didn’t think I would learn anything new about him or Pavement. But Pavements makes it clear he was and is much more neurotic and uncomfortable with success than I ever thought. He sabotages Pavement over and over, and nearing 60, you don’t imagine any of these guys getting together for fun, ever.
Why? What the fuck is this guy’s problem? The other four guys in Pavement, they’ve got to be thinking to themselves every day, This prick. They recorded five albums in the 1990s, with plenty of B-sides to support steady touring without ever having to write together again. They could’ve kept going through the 2000s and for the rest of their lives if not for Malkmus’… what? Pavements doesn’t get into whatever Malkmus was looking for, just that he desperately wanted out of the iconic indie rock band mold they were stuck in by 1999. To be so lucky—why blow it up? There isn’t any obvious reason beyond he thought the whole thing was lame, and I think that’s really pretty STUPID.
Malkmus and Corgan lived their public lives on opposite ends: the former quickly found solo success, while the latter has been hopelessly chasing Top 40 and rock superstardom for two and a half decades. Few have noted the similarities in their work: both bands often write about different aspects of being in a band and recording music at the end of the 20th century, with two of their biggest hits—“Range Life” and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”—explicitly about the identity crisis that comes with becoming a rock star. They were both bands about bands, what it meant to be a band, from the clothes, the covers, the interviews, the musical and lyrical quotations and barbs. Corgan synthesized a quarter century’s worth of pop, rock, and heavy metal into a body of work that functioned as an extended eulogy for “the rock band” from the moment it began. “Rock is dead,” said Corgan in 1992, and 1997, when James Hetfield of Metallica could only say, behind his back, “That’s dude’s dark.”
They were both performance artists, Corgan with his various personas in his distinct eras, while Malkmus’ frustration with fame produced some of the more obnoxious self-destructive behavior in indie rock that didn’t involve drugs or nervous breakdowns. Malkmus could’ve dissolved the band with dignity like Bob Mould and Hüsker Dü, but he “showed up” his own bandmates even in his 40s, during their brief 2010 reunion tour. Kannberg was about to apply to become a Seattle bus driver just a few years before; that alone should’ve squashed any beef Malkmus had with him and the rest of the band. There’s nothing cool about this guy.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits