Remember the band Pavement? A certain subset of ’90s kids and 2000 rockers do, while the rest of the world couldn’t be paid to care about them. A specific audience enjoyed their works the same audience that the American director Richard Linklater designed his 1990 movie “Slacker”. It’s not contempt for the band in the least bit. Their records were made for that specific group of teenagers and adequately may have served the purpose of introducing them to indie music. But Pavement could care less about this ‘indie’ identity. They were a band that went unnoticed and so when they finally came back into the picture years later, the world was more than happy to see them again which is why their reunion tour was quite the spectacle.
This same process of re-emergence has happened to most, if not all bands of their era. There are no new ideas in this world, including music, and it is exactly that which enables bands to capture the attention of new audiences. This isn’t the case with Pavement. Pavement daring. Despite this trajectory being characterized by a B-side on TikTok, ‘Harness Your Hopes’, it feels more earnest and holds more promise. Nevertheless, I believe that their credit is long overdue to be acknowledged.
Today, the group has become the subject of a double-sided, metatextual project called Pavements which, on the one hand, is a documentary about their discography, impact, and the recent reunion in 2022, and on the other hand, it is an entertaining portrayal of the band’s possible trajectory had they decided to cater to a more commercial audience and its attitude towards that as both satire and appreciation.
The director of this film is Alex Ross Perry, also the author of Her Smell and Queen of Earth, an established filmmaker with a unique charisma known for his creative failures that actually go well for the projects due to not meeting the expectations. Another interesting concept. The film has his style and spirit. But in fact, it is a fairly common but outstanding fan point of view instantly exposed by the slogan “The World’s Most Important and Influential Band” and his press statements where, for instance, Perry claims that the band has earned the accolades because it is unheard of to have a band such as Pavement. And he’s right.
Using an allusion in the lyrics, irony, and self-reflection, as well as an indifferent lo-fi slacker image, they updated the aesthetic vision of many modernists (Cate Le Bon, Car Seat Headrest, Snail Mail, Destroyer) and did it in such a way that the channels where the response to such work should usually be received are now practically non-existent in relation to them.
While they are not my favorite band in the whole world, they certainly belong among the finest bands of the ’90s. The lack of understanding by the masses, combined with other reasons that will be elaborated upon later, compelled Alex Ross Perry to create Pavements a tribute to the Unsung American Heroes and an incredibly imaginative celebration of their style of music, which is half-cut pop for which an entire era and an entire world of sound was created.
These words chill the viewer in a way that “it is a doc-‘n’-roll which is based on real events but not entirely factual, is a documentary but not completely earnest and ultimately it is more of an idea of the band any band than a documentary about Pavement”. That rather incomprehensible sentence raises the question of what the viewers can expect. Well, nothing can prep you for how Perry deconstructs everything: the band, the rock docs, the biopics. The director of Her Smell makes an intricate evaluation of how many pathetic cliches there are in the awards-winner fare and creates stronger terms, inviting the viewer to consider how much bivouacking is possible in a masterpiece of such biography without Ing-dian jingoism and Wiki plug-and-play.
If you are up to speed with their story then you know what I mean in a few respects. If not, that is where Perry has just about had the last laugh. He shows you their past through archival clips from their first years together and their reunion decades later, alongside modest tributes by new bands who cover their songs. Members (singer Stephen Malkmus, guitarist Scott Kannberg, bassist Mark Ibold, and drummer Steve West), past and present, records, and slacker rock styles are introduced so that later, Perry can dig deeper into their importance.
Space does not appeal to every soul. So, I do not know how you would remain detached from the documentary. Perry knows that and is quite adamant about that. This leads me to one of the many ways he turns the linear conventions of rock biographical works quality upside down – he explains to the viewer why the heroes of the films are important not only to him but to the entire music industry, with Malkmus going through so many phases of Pavement’s biography that by the end of it, the meaning of Pavement becomes all but unclear for him.
Most documentaries related to rock music either follow the basic formulaic composition or focus more on nostalgia and context, which is a given in documentaries. However, it is information that is common knowledge to the great majority.
The audience is inundated with facts, one after another, but with little understanding of how these people came to be this influential, whether they are mainstream personalities or an underground devotion. Pavement does the opposite. It is based on the fact that contributes to the style that became the band’s recognizable and favorable feature. Perry manages to achieve such an effect through self-referential and honest comments about them in three situations, of which the second and first are real, but the third is of a different kind, and for that reason makes none. The first of these is a retrospective exhibition, PAVEMENTS 1933-2022, which includes some artifacts and ‘presumed’ highlights of their real and constructed history.
Here is where the contradictions begin. Imitation of influences and the awareness of the exhibition-goers tell them different stories at the same time. All these things are presented in the amusing way that is typical for Pavement’s words. Underneath all this experimentalism are secrets waiting for the right person to come along and reveal them.
Starving, old notebook sheets and flimsy words glued to a wall tend to be overlooked. To some extent, the off-white pages, now yellowed, offer us a glimpse of their imaginative selves, their vivid stories of the union. The posters and the rest of the cover art behind me fall into the category of art that is old and is regarded the same way. Still, the psychographs possess so much more, they felt as if every single wall was constructed for the time and the idea of that precise workspace.
The second is a stage musical that has been adapted into the shape of a minimalistic production. It is the recording that is most universal. They do not speak but sing in the voice of Pavement’s songs, seeking to understand the feelings of the character who is performing, and immersing himself in the atmosphere instead of expository material. In simple language, a story that has been told many times before: a boy grows in love, reaches the peak of fame, and thinks about the love lost. Perry and the band managed to take it and do their best to reflect the vibes of their records using the restrictions of a non-mainstream play. And it is quite entertaining to watch such low-production designs.
The third project is probably the most peculiar yet the most professional self-parody of all a Pavement “biopic” called Range Life. It parodies out of all the movies I adore. The so-called film “Within a Film” features great names, Natt Wolf and Logan Miller as members of the band, Fred Hechinger playing an unnamed character, and the great Jason Schwartzman takes on the role of Chris Lombardi, the head of Matador Records.
The most impressive, the most imposing, however, is Joe Keery and his role of a moody Stephen Malkmus. As a ‘For Your Consideration’ label pops up on the screen and he sees particular scenes from it Keery fully throws himself into the character. Keery indeed even sees himself as the frontman. There is a rift that at one point he starts feeling that an exorcism would be requisite to free him from the character in which he is going to perform. However, these are very cliche clips, but with a reason. The film’s ‘Range Life’ segments are parodic towards today’s biopics.
Similarly, Keery is once asked which biopic is special and he names Bohemian Rhapsody the worst representative of the mediocre checklist if you ask me, or simply put, the gold standard for vile biographies. Many multi-layered facetious remarks counter the absurdity of the Hollywood machine’s writers and producers. With this level of directors, it is highly improbable that such projects will succeed as all interest in the subject matter is barely apparent. All of this, and even more, is accomplished by Alex Ross Perry and Stephen Malkmus. They combine forces to let the world know what Pavement is all about then and why it is relevant in the world today, which is dominated by a careless and lazy content consumption pattern.
However, the project might serve, or at least hope to serve, as a springboard for other filmmakers to make interesting, more intelligent-looking and sounding, or, more importantly, more inventive portraits of interesting musical figures who do not pay millions of dollars. (I would love a project like this about Chelsea Wolfe, Laura Nyro, or Portishead.) At last, Alex Ross Perry wraps Pavements and refers to the band as Pavement thus honoring what they so wisely call a strange, informative mixture and thereby illuminates Pavement in a completely different light.
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