“You can’t quarantine the past,” he sang. Stephen Malkmus ironically in “Gold Soundz”, one of the songs where Pavement It scoffed at sentimentality, ’90s nostalgia, and the cocky Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots.
If we had a Delorean like Marty McFly, we could travel back 30 years in a time machine to the first Lollapalooza, a concert by Nirvana with Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, or to that era when guitar rock still dominated the airwaves and music festivals. In recent weeks we’ve been excited by nostalgic tours of the smashing pumpkins, Clean bizkit and even the back street Boys and that is one of the proofs that the nostalgia for the nineties has conquered us.
With that same spyglass of nostalgia we can see Pavement as one of the most recognizable icons of that time. The band from Stockton, California, has been considered one of the most important groups of the decade because it seemed that they evoked the values of generation X. That misunderstood youth that rebelled against capitalism, but was immersed in consumer culture . Those who refused to sell out against the system, but yearned to become rock stars and embrace success.
The work they built Stephen Malkmus, Scott Kannberg (Spiral Stairs), Mark Ibold, Bob Nastanovich Y Steve West between 1992 and 1999 is today an idealized photograph of the nineties. It’s still completely analog, happening at a different speed, and slightly altered by time and our memories. Pavement’s music and attitude always seemed to go against mainstream ideas. When the band broke up in 1999 none of its members thought to look back.
the culture critic Chuck Klosterman writes in his most recent book, The Nineties (Penguin Press, 2022), that “it was possible to see Pavement as the best band of the decade and at the same time see them as five guys who weren’t even trying (and ridiculing anyone who was)”.
the legacy of Pavement grew in the decades since and countless bands have tried to adopt his sassy sound with melodies that are about to collapse. Impossible to think about the influence that the band had on the guitarist Graham Coxon who for 1999 adopted on Blur the same distortion and heaviness as the Malkmus and Spiral Stairs guitar combo.
For several years Pavement’s music was protected in the closet of memories, but as Malkmus said, the past could not last so long in quarantine and since their meeting in 2009 it has been time to relive and rediscover those glories. This year the band returns for a new tour of the United States and Europe as well as two new reissues under their belt.
This week Slanted & Enchantedthe debut album of Pavement celebrates 30 years of its launch. To celebrate the date, the band will release a new version of the legendary 1992 album that established Pavement as part of a new breed of musicians that the music press baptized as “alternatives”, who looked more like your neighbor than a rocker with spandex and poodle fur.
At the same time, the recent edition of Horror Twilight: Farewell Horizontaloriginally released in 1999, which compiles the fragmented recording of Pavement’s fifth and final album and made with renowned British producer Nigel Godrich. Both albums abound with 45 previously unreleased recordings, demos, demos and live versions from a catalog we now consider classic alternative rock.
Pavement never aspired to be like Nirvana and disliked being lumped into the same label as the bands they shared stages with at festivals at the time. Trying to find a more methodical evolution of the ideas of Malkmus and company is as difficult as trying to decipher their cryptic lyrics.
He never wanted to belong to that alternative generation and yet he became a stamp of that moment and of that generation full of contradictions. And just as we rejected that sentimentality before, Pavement’s music helps us bring our own nostalgia out of quarantine too.
Operations coordinator for El Economista online