That’s true whether you are one of the band Pavement’s diehard fans—as almost everyone in the theatre where I saw it was—or someone who never understood the band’s appeal.
Like the band it lionises, however ironically, Pavements wants to have its cake and eat it too, flipping back and forth between the sublime and the silly.
For people who don’t know the band at all, the laughter will almost certainly be the kind inspired by “mockumentaries” like This Is Spinal Tap. How else could someone respond to the film’s opening tagline that these nobodies are “the world’s most important and influential band?”
That overstatement hits different for those of us aware that Pavement is not a made-up band. Then it becomes button-pushing clickbait, the equivalent of declaring that Norway has the world’s greatest cuisine.
For diehard fans like myself, the claim has an extra layer of humour. Even though we know it is objectively absurd, it actually might be true for us personally. That’s what happens if you have played Pavement’s records so many times over the years that you have memorised every surreal word and off-kilter note.
During a long road trip with my friend and future Battleground editor Joel Schalit in 1997, travelling from the San Francisco Bay Area to Death Valley to see the Hale-Bopp comet without light pollution, I played the band’s third—and least successful—album, Wowee Zowee, for him.
I was nervous because he was a former DJ and expert on experimental music, the sort of person unlikely to find Pavement’s slacker aesthetic compelling. After we were halfway through the record, he told me that he understood my devotion, even if he could never share it himself.
“They’re going to be the Grateful Dead for our generation,” Joel wryly declared. Even though this was a dig, it was entirely consistent with the band’s self-deprecating brand of comedy, cloaking a sincere desire to bypass the music industry’s preferred approach while building a sustainable following.
As the 2022 reunion tour that inspired Pavements makes clear, the band ultimately achieved that goal in spite of themselves, becoming the sort of artist that people will make pilgrimages to see.
The film celebrates this improbable journey by reproducing the band’s willful perversity, showing how they turned weakness into strength.
We get a documentary about the band, jumping back and forth between a chronological treatment of their history and clips of them rehearsing for the reunion tour and then playing their first live shows in over a decade.
Alongside this relatively conventional treatment, Pavements also provides three counterpoint narratives.
We visit a pop-up museum dedicated to the band, follow the production of a “jukebox” musical featuring the band’s songs, and watch the development of Range Life, an entirely fictional Hollywood biopic about the band featuring Joe Keery from Stranger Things and Wes Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman.
We either get to experience these different parts of the film simultaneously, with the frame divided into two or four parts, or through artfully constructed montages that cut back and forth between them. This is the reason the title is plural.
At times, Pavements feels like a mash-up of The Beatles first film A Hard Day’s Night, which makes light of that band’s improbable fame, and Peter Jackson’s 2021 Get Back, which uses footage left over from the Let It Be project to create a documentary of nearly eight hours.
Pavement never came close to achieving the success of The Kinks, much less The Beatles. But there is a way in which they resemble that most famous of bands.
Just as The Beatles’ story seems to encapsulate the 1960s, with their break-up providing a fitting conclusion to the decade, Pavement’s story does the same for the 1990s.
That’s where the crying comes in.
Even when scenes featuring Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical are riotously funny, they excavate a depth of feeling from Pavement’s records that belies the band’s detached, ambivalent self-presentation.
The effect is similar to Julie Taymor’s 2007 film Across the Universe, which used Beatles songs to tell a fictional story of the 1960s, shedding new light on the relationship between band members in the process.
When you get past the relentless self-ironisation on the surface of Pavements, it becomes clear that the film is showing us how and why the 1990s were destined to fall hopelessly short of the 1960s.
Even more poignant than that lesson, which is one that members of Generation X like myself learned the hard way, is the realisation that the film itself is now hopelessly dated.
Pavements is clearly a product of the interregnum when Joe Biden was in the White House, before the nightmare Donald Trump conjured in his first term turned terrifyingly real.
It’s hard to imagine the project getting off the ground now, when the infrastructure that sustained the band’s overeducated and underpaid fans is being systematically dismantled to make way for a totalitarian state.
Pavements conveys the ambivalent optimism of the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War made it possible to imagine the future getting better. But it also reminds us how the pandemic, in spite of the tragic losses it inflicted, briefly offered us a glimpse of a world in which the self-destructive tendencies of our hypercapitalist world might be restrained by the state.
To be sure, Pavement has always had the power to annoy those of us committed to progressive politics. Even though the band members clearly embraced them on a conceptual level—we see Stephen Malkmus wearing a T-shirt from one of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns—they long ago mastered the pose of the désengagé, standing above the fray even when they cared deeply about the outcome.
A key sequence in the film concerns the band’s ill-fated participation in the 1995 Lollapalooza Tour, when they performed early on the main stage to sparse and largely unenthused audiences across the United States, then hit bottom during a West Virginia show where people in the mosh pit started hurling clods of mud at them during their set.
The fray pulled them down from their pedestal, culminating in a cringeworthy shot where guitarist Scott Kannberg repeatedly shouts “Fuck you!” while giving the audience the finger, then turns around and drops his pants.
Not only do we see the actual footage of this depressing incident, but we also get to watch the actors filming “Range Life” reenact it in front of a green screen and watch one of the characters in the musical comment on the Lollapalooza audience’s negative reception with an especially bleak rendition of one of Malkmus’s meandering ballads.
Finally, the film cuts to a shot from the opening of Pavement’s pop-up museum, showing a display in which the outfits the band wore in West Virginia are displayed on headless mannequins, still spattered in mud.
Because we have just seen the archival footage from that show, we know that the clothing matches. But the suspicion that there is something “off” about this display is confirmed when Pavement drummer Steve West wonders aloud how the museum was able to produce these artefacts.
We get the sense that what Pavements really wants to communicate is its subject’s belatedness, creating and preserving content for the Beatles treatment it will never merit.
What matters most isn’t what Pavement achieved—three gold records and one platinum according to the film’s alternate history, less than hald those sales in the real world—or their devoted fan base, but the hard limit to their success, as Stephen Malkmus alludes to at one point.
The West Virginia concertgoers who pelted the band with mud, much like the unruly Woodstock 2.0 crowds from the previous year, synecdochally represent the market forces that made sure the 1960s could never come again.
Pavements shows us how to absorb that painful lesson and keep going, discerning hope in the refusal to play by mainstream rules, to make irony sincere and turn our sense of futility into fuel.
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Photograph courtesy of whittlz. Published under a Creative Commons license.
