After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"Box Elder" by Pavement
Here's how it goes sometimes: A guy likes movies, initially because he's attracted to story and spectacle, but after a while, he sees so many movies that he starts to get tired of the same kinds of structure and style repeated over and over. So novelty starts to take precedence over quality, and the cineaste starts grooving on such esoteric virtues as slowness and murkiness. Or consider the music buff, who often gets jaded quickly and starts tossing around words like "overproduced" and "middle-of-the-road" to describe songs they can't abide, while championing acts that traffic in drone and distortion. Whatever the medium, that fan-driven attitude of "tougher equals better" can sometimes infect the artists themselves, as they tie their self-image to being difficult, and dissonance and obscurity become preferable to the solidly built and entertaining.
Back in 1989, Stephen Malkmus and his boyhood pal Scott Kannberg—both died-in-the-wool rock geeks—conceived Pavement as one of those mysterious European-style outfits that buries their personality behind their music. They adopted the "noms de rock" SM and Spiral Stairs, and started recording lo-fi DIY singles and EPs with their middle-aged wastrel neighbor, drummer Gary Young. Early in the band's career, Malkmus would claim that he improvised most of his lyrics and a good chunk of the music, but that was likely as much of a pose as the impenetrable graphics on Pavement's record jackets. Even at their sloppiest, Pavement's songs had a definite structure, and whatever lyrics listeners could make out clearly featured some well-turned phrases:
"Spizzle Truck" by Pavement
It didn't take long for Pavement to become a cause célèbre among indie-rock devotees, who eagerly sought out and dissected their early records. By the time 1992's debut album Slanted & Enchanted was released (over a year after it was recorded), the band had added members in order to become a more reliable touring attraction, and were on the verge of kicking out the sloppy Young. Even Slanted & Enchanted's more abrasive songs—like the stinging "Perfume-V"—work with more clarity and overall sonic oomph than anything the band had recorded before.
"Perfume-V" by Pavement
After the dismissal of Young, Pavement banged out Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, an album at once more random and experimental than Slanted & Enchanted and—when it counted—more clean and poppy. The record sold in the six figures, and scored a radio hit with the kicky "Cut Your Hair." Suddenly the band was being hailed as possibly the next Nirvana, and Malkmus was being talked about as a scathing social critic thanks to songs like the generational wrap-up "Elevate Me Later."
"Elevate Me Later" by Pavement
And that's when things started getting interesting—or annoying, depending on your perspective. Much as Nirvana's arrival as magazine-cover-worthy led the band to find unique ways to rebel—by wearing Ts for their favorite cult bands, or sporting a hand-made "Corporate Magazines Suck" shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone—the members of Pavement came up with their own petty protests. Kannberg flatly refused to appear on a Rolling Stone cover, and even after the departure of Young, the band's live performances were still often rambling and disheveled. When Branford Marsalis quit The Tonight Show, he cited the awfulness of the modern rock bands he had to watch every night as one of the reasons he couldn't be the musical director anymore, and anyone who saw Pavement shamble their way through "Cut Your Hair" in front of Leno and Marsalis had to imagine that they were one those bands Marsalis was talking about.
In a perverse way, the loss of Gary Young seemed to cue the rest of the band to pick up his slack (so to speak). Before, Malkmus had to construct songs that utilized Young's unpredictability, and he had to play and sing extra hard to compensate for any potential problems from the rhythm section. After Crooked Rain, Malkmus started singing with more indifference, and his mates seemed to follow his lead, trying to create an atmosphere where the rare moments of cohesion sounded like minor victories. Pavement followed up Crooked Rain with the sprawling, often off-putting Wowee Zowee, a record featuring some of Malkmus' best songs alongside some of his weakest—all of them performed through a sonic muck that at times seemed more like an affectation than a genuine expression of what the band wanted to be. Pavement's shot at enduring rock stardom misfired, and the band went on to record two more albums and a slew of singles that continued to slap together witty lyrics, endearingly off-kilter melodies and frustratingly bratty performances.
"Give It A Day" by Pavement
There are plenty of Pavement die-hards who consider Wowee Zowee to be the band's best album, and respond to that record's abundant imagination and brave embrace of chaos theory. It's undeniably a fun record, in its own wise-ass way. But seen from the perspective of what came afterward—two more hit-and-miss albums in which Pavement became hooked on delayed gratification—Wowee Zowee comes off more like a cowardly abdication of responsibility. During the remaining years of Pavement's run, Malkmus continued to whip up great songs, with lyrics that scanned like fiendishly clever little puzzles. And he continued to sing them as though he were walking barefoot across a hot beach, while his mates loped along behind
The destructive impulse in some musicians can be exciting in and of itself, and it's easy to understand why a lot of critics and music buffs gravitate towards acts that like to knock their own block towers down. But after a while, the knocking-down stops looking like creative courage and starts to look more like sadism, spiked with an unhealthy dose of adolescent petulance. There needs to be some element of contrast to make willful sloppiness work. In a movie, a long static take has more impact if it's not surrounded by a dozen more long static takes; in music, noise and aggression are often more effective if it's clear that a band is capable—and willing—to do something else.
Of course, musical preoccupations can go the other way, too. Some critics—myself, for one—get exhausted by extremity and start to overpraise music that is florid and pretty, seeing crystalline beauty as the supreme value. But that's a neurosis for another day.
"There Goes The Sun" by Pernice Brothers
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
OutKast/P.M. Dawn
Years Of Operation 1991-present/1988-present
Fits Between Funkadelic and Jungle Brothers/De La Soul and Stevie Wonder
"B.O.B." by OutKast
"To Serenade A Rainbow" by P.M. Dawn
Personal Correspondence Remember that scene in The Jerk when Steve Martin's character hears Lawrence Welk on the radio for the first time and runs around waking up the black family he lives with, yelling that he's finally found music that really speaks to him? I had a similarly embarrassing (and perhaps painfully revealing) experience with P.M. Dawn. I was browsing at a chain record store when the clerk started playing P.M. Dawn's debut album Of The Heart, Of The Soul And Of The Cross: The Utopian Experience. About three songs into it, I was convinced I was hearing the next evolution of hip-hop: a kind of rap more melodic and flat-out beautiful than any I'd heard before. I bought the album right away and started evangelizing about the band, even dragging my roommates to see them in concert. Of course, in the years to come, P.M. Dawn would be mocked by their peers as wimpy hippies, and they'd go on to release three albums of varying quality, distinguished primarily by their poetic spirit and inescapable softness. As I hope I've made clear by now, softness is by no means a deal-breaker for me, but over time, P.M. Dawn's celestial riff on rap and R&B started to seem vaguer and vaguer, to the extent that I now find even that debut album too twinkly by half. I think back on the version of myself who fell hard for P.M. Dawn, and I cringe a little. (Not that I haven't already touted music in this series that others might fight even more embarrassing…and not that I won't continue to do so.)
So why combine an entry on the disreputable P.M. Dawn with the highly acclaimed, decidedly more substantive OutKast? It's not meant as a swipe at the latter, whose work I still find exciting. (I've never even tired of the overexposed "Hey Ya," perhaps because I have fond memories of dancing to it at my pal Scott's wedding.) But the shifting stance on OutKast among the critical elite is partly responsible for expediting my current estrangement from hip-hop. For a time, OutKast was one of the most respected acts in the genre, pumping out imaginative, forward-thinking records that sold well and topped year-end lists. Then they reached superstar levels with Speakerboxx/The Love Below, and immediately became a bludgeon with which some persnickety cultural guardians began to beat on the less rap-savvy. Because they'd become the only hip-hop act that a majority of critics agreed on, that made them automatically suspect among a vocal sub-group of those critics. These days, saying you like OutKast doesn't buy you any credibility than declaring your allegiance to P.M. Dawn would.
Enduring presence? Luckily, this kind of hand-wringing over what's cutting edge and what's wimpy and mainstream tends to fade over time, and 10 years from now, hardly anyone will remember that the award-winning, multi-platinum-selling Outkast were briefly on the outs—though it would help if Andre 3000 and Big Boi would reunite and work together an album to wash away the taste of the undercooked Idlewild. As for P.M. Dawn, I think losing a key member, waiting 10 years to release a new album, and appearing on the kitschy NBC series Hit Me Baby One More Time has pretty much doomed any chance that they'll rehabilitate their rep. Sorry, 20-year-old Noel.
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