{"id":2369,"date":"2025-06-06T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/pavements-is-a-kaleidoscopic-fever-dream-of-a-rock-doc\/"},"modified":"2025-06-06T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T14:00:00","slug":"pavements-is-a-kaleidoscopic-fever-dream-of-a-rock-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/pavements-is-a-kaleidoscopic-fever-dream-of-a-rock-doc\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Pavements\u2019 is a Kaleidoscopic Fever Dream of a Rock Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-2149811525.jpg\" width=\"1290\" height=\"840\" alt=\"Pavement, January 5, 1997, Amsterdam. (Credit: Paul Bergen\/Redferns)\"><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<p>More from Spin:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/06\/5-albums-i-cant-live-without-luke-pritchard-of-the-kooks\/\">5 Albums I Can\u2019t Live Without: Luke\u00a0Pritchard\u00a0of the Kooks<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/06\/turnstile-rock-with-hayley-williams\/\">Turnstile Rock With Hayley Williams At Brooklyn LP Release Show<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/06\/marianne-faithfull-bids-adieu-on-posthumous-ep\/\">Marianne Faithfull Bids Adieu On Posthumous EP<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Your music taste defined you in the \u201890s.<\/strong> Before the internet blurred allegiances, the metal kids only listened to Megadeth and Metallica (but only stuff prior to their 1991 self-titled mainstream success), the sensitive theater folks liked R.E.M. and Peter Gabriel while suburban punks reached for <em>Dookie<\/em>. Everyone listened to Nirvana. However, only the coolest, most disaffected slackers had <em>Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain<\/em> spinning constantly on their Walkman.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Ross Perry\u2019s <em>Pavements <\/em>ostensibly functions as a documentary about Pavement but like the band\u2019s work, there is an unshorn self-modesty that disallows for the conventional talking-head-meets-archival-footage approach that most rock docs tend to follow. Instead, Perry opts to employ five different narratives to present a fractured look at Pavement and its legacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1290\" height=\"843\" src=\"https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-1265047936-1290x843.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-463286\" srcset=\"https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-1265047936-1290x843.jpg 1290w, https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-1265047936-340x222.jpg 340w, https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-1265047936-768x502.jpg 768w, https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-1265047936-1536x1004.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-1265047936-498x325.jpg 498w, https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-1265047936-1668x1090.jpg 1668w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1290px) 100vw, 1290px\"><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Pavement (L-R): Stephen Malkmus, Mark Ibold, Scott Kannberg, Bob Nastanovich, Steve West, Vaartkapoen (VK), Brussels, Belgium, March 19, 1994. (Credit: Gie Knaeps\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>First off, if you aren\u2019t a Pavement fan, it\u2019s highly likely <em>Pavements<\/em> isn\u2019t for you. A certain familiarity with Stephen Malkmus\u2019 songs and the band\u2019s short-lived history is more or less required to enter. For the uninitiated, the segments tracing the band\u2019s indie rise and premature end is a good primer and so is the story about the group reforming in 2022. But after that, things get weird.<\/p>\n<p>Another strand follows a museum exhibition that Perry produced about the band. Another looks at a musical theater production that Perry mounted using Pavement\u2019s music, a la <em>American Idiot<\/em>. And the most confounding is the making of a fake biopic called <em>Range Life<\/em> starring Joe Keery (of <em>Stranger Things <\/em>fame) as Malkmus.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Clocking in at over two hours, <em>Pavements <\/em>is a bit of a tangled mess but so is much of the music of the band it\u2019s feteing. Still, Perry doesn\u2019t allow the movie to slip into hagiography. It is self-aware, even down to a reference to <em>Bohemian Rhapsody <\/em>in the phony biopic sections. This is important because the idea of \u201cselling out\u201d was the kiss of death to those cool kids in the \u201890s who loved Malkmus and Pavement.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This idea of \u201cselling out\u201d comes up a few times, including fake \u201990s ads for Apple and Absolut Vodka that feature Malkmus and a riff on <em>Wowee Zowee <\/em>cover art, respectively, displayed at the exhibition. Malkmus acknowledges that this notion of \u201cselling out\u201d doesn\u2019t exist today, something Perry and Pavement are clearly conscious of avoiding when making the obligatory documentary.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Despite its length, <em>Pavements <\/em>doesn\u2019t dig in deep enough at times, especially in the final years. <em>Brighten the Corners <\/em>and <em>Terror Twilight <\/em>are barely mentioned, though the band\u2019s infamous skirmish with a Lollapalooza audience in West Virginia in 1995 is given ample screen time.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Like other mercurial musical acts, Pavement thrives on a slippery subversion of truth. Though <em>Pavements <\/em>attempts a similar conjuring act as <em>Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan by Martin Scorsese, <\/em>it feels less willful and bought-into its own concept. If anything, <em>Pavements <\/em>will appeal to longtime fans who will agree that their beloved Stephen Malkmus and company survive the rock doc\/rock biopic treatment and still emerge with their dignity intact, selling out be damned.<\/p>\n<p>To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2021\/07\/the-greatest-rock-stars-of-all-time\/?utm_source=yahoo&amp;utm_medium=bottomlink&amp;utm_campaign=yahoolink\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More from Spin: 5 Albums I Can\u2019t Live Without: Luke\u00a0Pritchard\u00a0of the Kooks Turnstile Rock With Hayley Williams At Brooklyn LP Release Show Marianne Faithfull Bids Adieu On Posthumous EP Your&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[579,24,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pavement","category-pushly","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}