My Enduring Love of Pavement

Thirty years later, I'm still listening to their music

Marcelle holding a Pavement CD. (We’re sure she’s got the vinyl too.)

Music is like love: it captivates, and if it fits just right, that love lasts for a lifetime. Pavement has been imprinted on my music fan heart since 1992, when the band released Slanted and Enchanted and Watery, Domestic, and when I first heard singer and guitarist Stephen Malkmus tell me the secrets of artsy boys.

During the ‘90s, I stood in packed music halls, at secret shows, and at outdoor venues with my fellow Pavement fans, strangers mostly, all of us enthralled, singing along to every lyric as if it were our own.

Oh the lore of this band, edgy in that way that a middle finger has a weight to it. There were whispers of Malkmus doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink, that the bassist, Mark Ibold, was a waiter at Café Orlin, and that Spiral Stairs, also the guitarist and singer, was a pseudonym.

But to love Pavement is to love the music, and not the players per se. To know vague details about band members, but not to trespass beyond. To fan, but not to fawn. Because it is the music that matters, those dips and valleys of yearning, and belated lust, and good old generational discontent.

My enduring love of Pavement means I have strong opinions about their best albums (I’m going with Slanted, Enchanted but oh how I do admire the epicness of Wowee Zowee); their five best songs (tough, and it shuffles, much like a playlist does: Box Elder, “Here,” “Flux = Rad,” “Grave Architecture,” “Shoot The Singer,” and this is where I get tripped up, because how can I not include “Summer Babe”?); and lyrics you can’t shake out of your head: “I’ve got styles, for miles and miles, so much style that it’s wasted.”

It’s not just that the music is fueled with a natural nostalgia and takes me back to a specific era of my younger years. Decades later, the songs still hold up. I can still enjoy a simple phrase like “Someone took in these pants,” and understand, in my bones, the frustration of it.