YOU'RE KILLING ME

Pavement inspires a strange, ironic, loving bio-pic.

- BY HUA HSU

“Pavements” is a true fanatic’s take, as heady and weird as the band itself.

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.