Chris Flackett
You have to admit, whether you’re a fan or not, ’90s American alternative rock band Pavement never made it easy for listeners. Their exhilarating combination of odd tunings, distortion, stream-of-consciousness lyrics, noise, sense of ironic distance and surprisingly melodic indie-pop moments made for a style that you could never quite accurately put your finger on. This was a band that loved Captain Beefheart, The Fall, R.E.M. and Creedence Clearwater Revival in equal measure, and it shows. They were often tagged with the ‘slacker’ tag, unfairly considering the amount of music they put out across albums and E.P.’s over a roughly 10-year period. It might be fairer to say they were laid back, even fairer to say their music was, beneath the sense of irony, extremely playful.
Pavements, the documentary from director Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell, The Sweet East) captures this playfulness, both in the footage, archival and new, that it uses, and also in the way it approaches film form, layering different narratives throughout, one of which is fictional but presented at face value, a commentary on the music biopic as a genre with tongue placed firmly in cheek. It’s a technique that more often than not works, and perhaps more importantly, captures something of the character of Pavement’s music.
The first strand of Pavements is perhaps the most typical one, tracing an occasionally non-chronological history of the band using archival footage, contrasting this with newly filmed footage of the band rehearsing and preparing for their 2022 reunion tour (their second reunion after their 2010 tour, something that the film doesn’t really touch upon). The archival footage is great, a reminder of how much more slick and high definition everything looks now, but also a reminder of how much more fun (at least for a miserable old codger like me) pop culture was in the 90s. There was a sense of fun in what the media communicated on a pop culture level, and fun in how that communication was done. Even if Malkmus doesn’t appear to be always having fun having to explain why Pavement is neither pop nor unlistenable noise and why it’s both of those things, Pavements use of this archival footage shrewdly shows that the great thing about Pavement is how they weren’t a one-size-fits-all band; they were multi-faceted, with depth beneath the so-called ‘slacker’ surface.
The second strand is where we get into a playful meta-environment, where Perry shows us excerpts from the casting, rehearsal and performance of a most unlikely example of musical theatre—Slanted! Enchanted!, a show with no dialogue based entirely around the songs of Pavement shaped into a narrative of a man coming to the big city and finding himself torn between two women. It’s ridiculous, it’s absurd, it shouldn’t work—and yet it does. Maybe that’s the point Perry, who wrote and directed the show for its three workshop performances, filmed for Pavements, was trying to make—that culture can be enriched by taking risks and mixing unexpected elements, much like Pavement’s music itself. Perhaps it’s an argument that ‘alternative’ cultures can be easily co-opted into tamer, more commercial forms, but it doesn’t appear so—Perry treats the show with respect and sincerity in how he depicts the rehearsals and performances (and the fact that some, if not all, of the cast were aware of the band before being cast, and some confess to actually being huge fans). It must also be said that the performance and arrangements of Pavement’s songs in Slanted! Enchanted! are noticeably very well done and powerful, particularly a performance of ‘Fin’ that emphasises and makes a key motif out of the line ‘no more absolutes’.
The third strand is perhaps the closest to Perry’s creative motivation. The director has stated, “The music documentary has run out of gas. The musician biopic seems doomed to be a part of our lives forever, the lowest form of highbrow storytelling. Yet, against my better judgement, I love all of these movies that are rarely very good and seldom qualify as cinema. I love-to-hate clichéd storytelling in phoney baloney biopics”. It is this push-and-pull, love/hate relationship with the musical biopic that motivates the fake ‘film within a film’ strand, where a fictional biopic of Pavement, entitled ‘Range Life’ and starring Stranger Thing’s Joe Keery as Stephen Malkmus, highlights the ridiculous position music biopics find themselves in of over-exaggerating moments in a band or musician’s life in order to suggest an importance or symbolism that perhaps isn’t and never was there.
As such, the clips from this fictional are hilarious and are sometimes juxtaposed with the real event in split screen; for example, the band being pelted with mud at Lollapalooza ’95. Backstage, the real band are shown via archival material after the mud-slinging to be laughing it up, whereas the ‘film’ version is played as a tense band meeting, with Geery’s Malkmus being blamed for walking off and for generally self-sabotaging any chance of commercial success the band gets. It’s reality vs. idealised fiction; a band, like many bands, laughing it up and messing around backstage vs. a gloomy, tense meeting where the battle for the souls and superiority of art vs. commerce is fought. Which one is more honest, and which one do you think wins more Oscars? To this point, the fact that the clips from the film are water stamped ‘for your consideration’, with Geery telling Perry that the peak of the music biopic is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is hilarious (as is Keery, who really buys into his part, at one point anxiously claiming he is going to have to “exorcise Stephen Malkmus” from him, as well as showing his voice coach a close-up picture of Malkmus’s tongue that he has taken to aid him with learning Malmus’ vocal mannerisms).
A clear point is being made, using the idea of a band as unlikely to be considered for a music biopic as Pavement, about how the music biopic as a genre overtly sensationalises the lives and stories of bands and musicians, so as to create an easy-to-digest narrative around these artists that often doesn’t really exist and in some instances didn’t really happen. The primacy of the myth, the story over the art becomes detrimental to an actual appraisal of the things that matters most—the music, all in service of a desire for awards glory. You might agree or disagree with this take on the music biopic, but what is important is that a film like Pavements can generate this kind of debate. The argument between mainstream and alternative cultures goes all the way back to the 50s & 60s, where discussions about ‘the underground’ and the ‘alternative society’ were prevalent with the newly emerging youth culture, and it’s still as relevant today, with the internet providing many with the ways and means to circumnavigate mainstream culture should they choose to. As long as people still discuss what the purpose of art is, it’s an argument that will remain central to the shaping of culture.
In the battle of art and commerce, Pavements ultimately knows which side it’s on, and that’s the creativity, playfulness, and multi-faceted art of Pavement. Long may we all remain so.
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