Pavements is now showing on MUBI in many places.
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024).
In the early 1990s, as punk was finally (the fable goes) breaking to the masses, a concurrent Gen X fairytale took root within the granite and concrete facade of the Whitney Museum’s Breuer Building. Or so we hear it, 41 minutes into Alex Ross Perry’s experimental rockumentary about that decade’s ultimate slack-rock tricksters—with “style, miles and miles,” they sang, “so much style, and it’s wasted”—Pavement.
This scene of Pavements (2024) stars actor Joe Keery (Stranger Things, 2016–25), who has been hired to play a 29-year-old version of Pavement frontman and indie prince Stephen Malkmus in a faux biopic—a rocku-melodrama not unlike, say, Pistol (2022), the doomed Hulu series about the Sex Pistols. We watch a method-acting Keery trace Malkmus’s footsteps in the site of his artistic genesis, treating his place of postcollegiate employment—he worked as an art security guard—like the college-rock equivalent of the John Varvatos store that once housed CBGB, or the Big Pink house in Upstate New York, where Dylan and the Band made The Basement Tapes. Here at the old Whitney, the suburban-California-born Malkmus once stood against the wall, bored, cribbing art concepts into a notebook for surreal lyrics that would fill Pavement’s immortal long-player debut, 1992’s Slanted and Enchanted.
“This is where it all started,” Keery wryly proclaims, “with a lyric pad in his chest pocket. I just imagine him in his uniform, showing up … these young, these kids”—just kids, even?—“showin’ up, in charge of guarding all this priceless art, and here they are…”—wait for it—“making their own priceless art. It’s— You couldn’t write it, you know?”
In many a music film, this ground-zero pilgrimage would be treated like a skeleton key unlocking the true profundity of Pavement: Their nonsense lyrics were birthed of postmodern art! But in the prankish metafiction of Pavements, it is a holy lark. It is but one in a parade of perfectly timed sarcastic gestures taking the piss out of the music-doc industrial complex and the recycled tropes it employs to smooth out and punch up stories of bands that are by nature chaotic, uncontainable, unfinished, misremembered, and clichéd. In the case of Pavements, the inscrutable spoof forms a looser, truer story.
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024).
“You can never quarantine the past,” goes a lyric from Pavement’s catchiest song. May as well have fun with it. Pavements does justice to the chaos. Frayed and careening like the post-punk bands that originally inspired Pavement, Perry’s film weaves together three distinct archival projects—concurrently executed on the occasion of Pavement’s 2022 reunion—blurring fact and fiction. First, there’s an off-Broadway jukebox musical, Slanted! Enchanted!, which reimagines Pavement’s signature irony, in classics like “Gold Soundz” and “Summer Babe (Winter Version),” via the medium of maximal sincerity. Then there is a historical museum exhibition, mixing phony artifacts with authentic ones, as delightfully strange as Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology. Thirdly, there are heavily dramatized scenes from the farcical “big-budget Hollywood biopic,” so overwrought and far-fetched that they become Pavements’s most hilarious moments, turning the marketing-oriented scheme of modern biopicking into high comedy. The glue holding this curious collage together is real performance and interview footage, both recent and archival, often split-screened like Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966).1 Pavements’s epigraph comes from 1992’s all-timer pop-noise jam, “Frontwards”: “The stories you hear, you know, they never add up.” (Prophetic!)
Dizzying as the film’s bricolage can be, confusion has fueled the band’s whip-smart indie-brat ethos since forming in 1989. “Noise-rock’s premier and only sing-along band, and of course nobody has a clue what anyone’s singing about,” wrote one discerning zinemaker in a review of Pavement’s second single. Or as Alex Ross (the music critic) put it in The New Yorker in 1997: “A Pavement album is a series of small labyrinths. The pleasure of the maze matters more than finding a way out.” A Pavement movie should bask in the bewilderment, irreverence, and mischief that guided the band’s obscured artistry and blasé attitude toward legacy, even before the scope of theirs came into focus. “It’s nice to be known for something, I guess,” Malkmus said of Slanted and Enchanted in the ’90s. “Even if it is a lo-fi Fall rip-off album.”
Back then, music critics liked to describe Pavement’s oblique, free-associating lyrics as examples of “poetic indeterminacy.”2 Pavements clearly pitches itself to that same questioning lilt, asking, somewhat skeptically, What is a true way to represent this story? Many of the most ambitious music storytellers of the 21st century have known it cannot be accomplished through a linear narration of facts. The film’s provisional answers, evoking the messthetic of Pavements’s post-punk predecessors—Swell Maps, the Fall, Pere Ubu—are nonlinear, fractured, playful, spontaneous, and unresolved. Pavements proceeds to incite its own question: Are they serious?, delivered with the disoriented glee of a distorted sha-la-la melody.
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024).
Todd Haynes’s mosaic-like Dylan film, I’m Not There (2007), comes up in many discussions of Pavements as the gold-standard music-history film that dared to embody the formal qualities of the music itself.3 In all of Haynes’s music movies—Velvet Goldmine (1998), Superstar (1987), The Velvet Underground (2021)—he’s “refusing the idea of ‘master narrative,’” he once told me, more concerned with how “there isn’t some final truth about anything. Especially when you’re dealing with music culture and the way that music enters your bloodstream and your unconscious, you want to feel the freedom to interpret it in your own way.” Haynes has also commented on narrative cinema’s tendency to use artists’ stories to affirm “values of stability and wholeness.” “In most of my films about artists or musicians, a general sense of instability, or mutability, is what interests me,” he said. “The artists depicted are basically embracing what is mercurial or unstable about identity, if not making it the project of their art.”4
Perry and Pavement are more intuitive than analytical, but seem to share in this idea that telling one finite story is too ridiculous an approach to entertain, that a closed narrative loop could never be “definitive.” That’s especially true for a band whose story and enormous influence keeps growing, as new generations of musicians—including many women-led bands, such as Speedy Ortiz, Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, and Bully, all seen playing the exhibition opening in the film—pull Pavement into a wordy rock continuum that is ongoing.
Facts are still safeguarded, albeit creatively, in Pavements. One scene toward the end shows the band as they are pelted with mud and rocks during Lollapalooza 1995 (this really happened)—their friend David Berman jumps onstage, whiskey bottle in hand, to scream “fuck you!” at the mosh-hungry meatheads. This is a great historical document, and even better for how Perry juxtaposes the actual footage of the incident’s aftermath (the band goofing around backstage, pretty unfazed) in split-screen with the fake-biopic dramatization (a bitter, despondent feud about Pavement’s future—“We can’t do it! We’re not Sonic Youth! We’re not Hole!”), showing the seams of how media myths are manufactured. Throughout Pavements, fourth-wall-busting references to Peter Jackson’s Get Back (2021), Broadway’s American Idiot, and the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa only amplify that process-oriented tinge of absurdity.
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024).
Eschewing the neat commodification of their band in the ’90s, Pavement’s rejection of easy legibility became inherently meaningful. The tunes themselves were accessible enough: sunny, stately melodies sung cool and flat; a rush of windows-down California breeze crashing into atonal New York noise. But in their own shrugging style, the members of Pavement were antagonists to the corporatization of the underground, never signing to a major label, refusing to untangle their music for the sake of palatability. “Can you treat it like an oil well, when it’s underground, out of sight?” goes another of their best lyrics, implicitly (if not literally) critiquing the major-label machine that had aggressively drilled into subterranean pop. Pavements proves how much fun it remains to be beholden to no one, and who can resist getting a little sentimental about that? “I’m gonna start crying,” Pavement cofounder Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs) says at one point, at the packed-out Pavement museum opening, gazing at show flyers and other ephemera as Soccer Mommy croons “Here” in the background. “I thought it was supposed to be fake. This is all real!”
In a 2019 interview, Malkmus spoke about the merits of letting things “make sense in a more subconscious way,” but also offered some intellectual breadcrumbs to follow. He mused on his perennial obsession with Mark E. Smith, how the late Fall leader tended toward lyrics that were “chewy.” He described how the formative influences of poet John Ashbery and conceptual artist Jenny Holzer made him wonder, early on, “What could you do with words that was different?” Malkmus talked earnestly, too, about working at the Whitney in his twenties. “It’s like the first time you see a Cy Twombly painting and get it. … They’re before the Beat Generation, and it’s just kind of deconstructed. They’re not following the forms of their elders exactly, yet they’re respectful to stuff that is historical. But it’s not linear. It’s sort of like how your mind really works, at least it’s how mine does.”
- Much of the archival footage previously appeared in Lance Bangs’s Slow Century (2002). ↩
- Review of Pavement, Terror Twilight, RJ Smith, Spin (June 1999), in Spin: 20 Years of Alternative Music, eds. Will Hermes and Sia Michel (Three Rivers Press, 2005), 30. See also Joe Levy, “Put It All Down,” Village Voice (December 28, 2004). ↩
- Malkmus recorded four songs for the I’m Not There soundtrack: “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and the rarities “Can’t Leave Her Behind” and “What Kind of Friend Is This?” ↩
- From an interview with Judith Revault d’Allones, in Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process, ed. Michael Koresky (Museum of the Moving Image, 2023). ↩