Quarantine the Past

In 1992, the Los Angeles Times dispatched a reviewer to a live show by buzzy Stockton, California, rock outfit Pavement. Critic Jonathan Gold didn’t quite know what to do with this special new band. Nirvana, Mudhoney, and U2 were invoked, only for such comparisons to be waved away. There was a nod to the Velvet Underground, from Pavement’s “loopy untuned guitar chords” to their “passive stance and a sort of dark-star charisma.” It’s a strange review, in which writer assures reader that he knows the band is hip, trendy, and well-regarded among indie rock insiders, even if he can’t bring himself to account for why. “Pavement is the latest example of that ‘90s phenomenon,” Gold wrote, “a band considered overhyped before almost anybody you know has even heard of it.”

Pavements—the new Pavement mock-rock-doc—is its own kind of “‘90s phenomenon.” If the band seemed out of step with grunge, Britpop, noise rock, and other sub-genres of the decade’s so-called alternative scene, then Pavements is (perhaps fittingly) a little outside its own time. Driven by the era’s twinned, warring energies of ultra-hip irony and cloying sincerity, Pavements is a superlative Gen X treatment on what may be the ultimate Gen X band. It’s a playful, bitter, joyous, enervating, postmodern meta-take on a slacker band—and the slacker ethos—that pleads, heart-on-sleeve to be taken seriously. But not, like, you know, too seriously.

How do you pay tribute to a group who made career of shirking from acclaim? Pavements, as its pluralistic title suggests, takes an all-inclusive approach. The film is the result of several high-ish-profile Pavement-related projects that have puzzled the rock press over the past few years. There was a touring museum show, Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum, which collected band ephemera (real and fake) in a walk-through jape of similar touring rock archives. There was Slanted! Enchanted!, a short-lived musical that gave the Pavement songbook the jukebox musical treatment, à la American Idiot or Mama Mia!. And there was Range Life, a parodic Pavement biopic starring Stranger Things lead Joe Keery as singer-guitarist Stephen Malkmus and Jason Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi, founder of Matador Records.

Then there’s the doc itself, which captures the band preparing for a 2022 reunion tour and diarizes their formation in the late-1980s, their underground popularity, and near-brushes with rock ’n’ roll stardom. There are other threads too, including a doc-within-a-doc tracking Keery’s obsessive, method actor-y quest to perfectly emulate Malkmus’s suburban Californian accent and behind-the-scenes footage of the casting and pre-production of the Pavement musical. Everything but the kitchen sink, basically.

All of this—the museum stuff, the musical, the biopic, the making-of-the-biopic, the doc Pavements itself, which is a kind of a meta-document of all these projects—is devised and stage-managed by writer/director Alex Ross Perry, who clearly conceives of the project as a Wagnerian total work of art; one which is as much about the band as it is about the manifold ways of making sense of them. To keep his half-dozen plates spinning, Perry and producer-editor Robert Greene use split-screens and intuitive editing chronology that toggles between archival and live concert footage, musical rehearsals, fake (I think) news interview footage from the Pavement museum, tracing each project’s development and tapping into their unique narrative possibilities when necessary. So: the aftermath of a disastrous 1995 Lollapalooza show, which saw the band leaving the stage after being pelted with mud by a group of shirtless alt-rock hooligans, is revealed in a mockumentary band meeting. Malkmus’s anxieties about selling out are explained with recourse to a mocked-up Apple advertisement featured in the museum exhibit, in which he shreds a broom like a guitar under the corporate tagline “Think Different.” Credulous headlines about the museum, musical, and biopic are flashed onscreen, serving as proof that the filmmakers have got away with something.

To watch Pavements is to take part in a feature-length guessing game. What is real? What’s made up? And more to the point: What does the film actually mean, and what’s just another winking, nudging, meta-ironic joke?

Pavements exists at the wonky confluence of a two major trends in twenty-first-century hagiography. There’s the contemporary preponderance of music biopics like A Complete Unknown, Elvis, Bohemian Rhapsody, Back to Black, What’s Love Got to Do with It, Bob Marley: One Love, etc., etc., etc. And there’s the perpetually popular music documentary (or “rock doc”), made hand-in-glove with labels and artists themselves. While some of these movies are undoubtedly entertaining, both mediums feel somewhat debased. Perhaps it’s because they serve a rather obvious ulterior motive: driving consumers towards back catalogues and generating revenue for a given legacy artist (or, worse, the do-nothing “estates” posthumously entrusted with that legacy). Even when these films are good, they feel kind of cheap and sleazy, like pornos, Ernest sequels, or VHS compilations of sports bloopers. They are not real movies. They are sell-outs.

Selling out was, of course, the mortal sin of the 1990s heyday of Pavement’s semi-popularity. Malkmus in particular seemed so resistant to achieving popularity on anything but his own terms that he committed to subtle acts of self-sabotage. Pavements repeatedly returns to the opening lyrics of “Here” as a kind of chorus: “I was dressed for success, but success it never comes.” But that’s not quite right. As depicted in the film, Malkmus seems more like the kind of guy who, if he heard opportunity knocking, would dive and hide behind the sofa. Throughout Pavements we’re shown archival footage of Malkmus sneering at music journalists desperate (or merely professionally motivated) to understand him. The film never really gives a sense of just how exasperated Malkmus’s bandmates were with his slacker obstinacy. As a subject, he remains aloof, if affable.

Malkmus typifies a pose (or slouch) endemic to his generation. Gen X’s defining cultural product was not grunge, Clerks, Douglas Coupland, or Mr. Show. It was OK Soda, the Generation X-baiting pop concocted by the Coca-Cola Company in 1994. A bad-tasting tinned sugar water marketed to disaffected young people with a series of blasé ads, a shrugging motto (“Things are going to be OK”), and manifestos consistent with the era of Adbusters anti-capitalism, OK Soda’s total failure to capture its target market embodies the era’s grander anxieties. Gen X did not want to be marketed to, even (especially) when that marketing took the form as hip, anti-marketing (or not-so-subtle conservative brainwashing).

That ill-fated flop soda hit shelves the same year Kurt Cobain took his own life. At the risk of flattering Cobain’s personal struggles to mere metaphor—I wouldn’t be the first—his suicide had an obvious symbolic heft. It suggested that artistic purity and superstardom were fundamentally incompatible. It was a vexing problem, offering no obvious out (except, in Cobain’s particular case, the most obvious one).

Malkmus seemed finely attuned to such vexations. And his inability to entertain conventional pathways to success (like playing late night shows without making a gag of it) suggests a marrow-level resistance to anything like mainstream acceptance. It can be hard to remember in our current era, when an indie rock band’s best path to profitability is licensing a song to a truck commercial, but to many artists of Malkmus’s era, selling out was seen as a form of self-abnegation or spiritual suicide. At the same time, not selling risked a more material failure. This demand placed on the slacker bands was perhaps best articulated by one of the 1990s most perceptive cultural commentators, MTV’s couchbound critic Butt-Head, who watched the video for Pavement’s “Rattled by the Rush” and scoffed, “They need to try harder.”

In one of the several films-within-the-film Pavements, we see a fictional argument between the band and Matador Records executive Gerard Cosloy (played by Tim Heidecker) over their decision to follow their tuneful 1994 breakout Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain with 1995’s Wowee Zowee, a wilder, more experimental album with no mainstream singles. In an interview, and out-of-character, Heidecker hails Pavement as his generation’s “slacker Rolling Stones” and unpacks how that generational resistance to selling out has changed. “Nobody cares anymore,” Heidecker says. “If I’m able to con somebody into giving us money to do a commercial, then I feel like we’ve won.” If Gen X cool kids shuddered at the very idea of being a commercial demographic, whose attitude and art could be exploited for profit, their successors saw that same prospect as a kind of righteous theft. (Later generations, whose opportunities for artistic and even basic economic solvency have been even further slashed, may be forgiven for practically begging to be exploited. To wit: I once sold a tweet to the McDonald’s hamburger company for a piddly one thousand dollars and a gift card.)

This intergenerational tension drives Pavements. Faced with museum exhibits and off-Broadway musicals mounted in their supposed honor, the members of the band seem modestly amused (they are surely in on the joke), if a little uncomfortable. Perry is a filmmaker closer to Heidecker’s generation, one whose own career is marked by deeply personal indies (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) and the odd for-hire gigs, scripting a Winnie the Pooh reboot for the Disney corporation. Perry’s approach here is clever. He deploys every ironized, tongue-in-cheek trick in the book to mount a persuasive, and totally sincere, case for why Pavement’s music matters.

A 2022 “Talk of the Town” notice in The New Yorker, covering the debut of the Slanted! Enchanted! musical, referred to Pavement as “Pynchonian.” It’s a nod, I guess, to the band’s initial desire to cultivate an air of mystery around themselves (with Malkmus and co-writer/guitarist Scott Kannenberg adopting pseudonyms in early liner notes) and to Malkmus’s own absurdist, stream-of-consciousness lyricism. (Or maybe Pynchonian is just shorthand for something vaguely underground that is taken extremely seriously by critics and other ostensibly in-the-know types?) In any event, if Pavement is indeed Pynchonian, then Perry—whose first film, Impolex, was an associative 8mm riff on Gravity’s Rainbow—recalls one of Pynchon’s heralded literary heirs. Call it “Foster-Wallacean.”

In 1993’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace dissected the trend in hyper-ironized, post-postmodern, pop-conscious, meta-fictionalized literature. It’s not merely that the literature of Wallace’s TV-weaned generation “made a real attempt to transfigure a world of and for appearance.” It’s that these attempts, more often than not, offered no real rebellion. Irony and arch-self-consciousness, Wallace argued, were already de facto the attitudes of televisual culture, “ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative.” And so, fiction capable only of mimicking those qualities was doomed to merely consolidate the “contemporary mood of jaded weltschmertz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference,” and so on.

A true break from this closed-circuit, ironized “No Exit,” Wallace suggests, would be a literature—and, it follows, a culture—“willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile” and endure, even embrace, incrimination as being sentimental, uncynical, and utterly genuine. To wit: Wallace’s essay is often regarded as a key text in the cultural turn towards a “New Sincerity” (though Wallace does not use the term and, I suspect, would have loathed it).

Pavements epitomizes this sort of aesthetic revolution and applies it to the shopworn form of the rock ’n’ roll documentary. A doc about an absurdist, highly ironized band that were merely absurdist and highly ironized would likely prove insufferable. And not least of all because it offers no authorial intervention—no take—from its makers. Perry is smart and self-aware enough to get this and talented enough to snip the vexing gordian knot of the Gen X irony trap. He describes the conceit of the Slanted! Enchanted! musical, on-camera, as an attempt to “put these slacker songs . . . in the most sincere art form possible—musical theater—and see if it works.” His whole film is made under that same auspice.

In Pavements’ climax, its half-dozen threads are drawn together in an intricately cross-cut sequence, scored to a crescendoing pastiche of the group’s greatest non-hits. The soaring, operatic medley is perhaps, the maudlin, melodramatic pop form. Think only of Celine Dion or the Key & Peele sketch mocking Les Mis. Yet Pavements feels like it has earned the indulgence. It’s not a sudden, mawkish fishtail into earnestness. It’s almost as if Perry, Pavement, and their movie project have transcended irony and all that “jaded weltzschmertz” stuff and achieved a hard-won sincerity. It’s not just a doc-hybrid steeped in deep stew of cynicism and sardonicism. Rather, it marshals its many ironic techniques—the fake interviews and artifacts, the self-consciously “bad” Bohemian Rhapsody-style biopic—in the service of a totally heartfelt, meta-sincere message, which is, basically: Pavement rules. It is ironic only in the truest sense of exploring the space between what is said (or seen) and what is meant.

In its rigor, which is both formal and intellectual, Pavements gets about as close to being a “real movie” as any rock-dock-music-biopic-thingamajig conceivably can. More importantly, it earns perhaps the highest compliment that any film made in this mold might merit: for weeks after seeing it at the New York Film Festival, I found myself re-immersed in Pavement’s catalog, falling back in love with music that meant a great deal to me in my “college rock” days, humming “Spit on a Stranger” in the shower, shuffling around the kitchen frying eggs in tatty gym shorts, mumbling, “I was dressed for success, but success it never coooooomes . . .” Stephen Malkmus may scoff at such a unaffected admiration. But that’s OK.