Pavement:Classic or Dud

an entire generation of aughts kids got raised on Pavement. they broke up in what... 2001? 2002? everyone was discovering those records afterwards. they soundtracked my highschool experience

so your point is wrong or maybe i'm just in the minority.

weirdo kids in their early 20s like pavement ime

idk anyone under 25 that like gbv tho fwiw

they broke up in 1999

i'm sure pitchfork's unending approval of their catalog had something to do with the fact that they remained such cult favorites into the 2000s. i mean they were never selling records or TV spots

an entire generation of aughts kids got raised on Pavement.

yup

my first girlfriend seemed to have spent 80% of high school (00-04) watching slow century w her bestie

every flimsy aughts indie band bared at least a little bit of their influence. Broken Social Scene, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah etc. it was huge talking point and a shared interest among friends

if you liked Pavement, we had something in common.

i'm 22 as well and this was happening in 2006 or 2007

There was really no time for Pavement to go away, because Matador starting releasing deluxe anniversary editions of their albums in 2002 and continued on until 2008 until the only one left was Terror Twilight, which they didn't bother with.

Pavement's the one band I adored that I can barely listen to now. I can't even listen to the Parquet Courts album that lots of people liked last year: the sloppy mamacita ethos.

huge nostalgia over the nineties is making sure some twenty/mid twenties persons are into Pavement. Once you get to know pitchfork, the pixies reunion tour and twin peaks, Pavement is really just a stone throw away.

xp and yeah the box sets have been pretty good at capturing the feeling of the era and why Pavement mattered.

i wouldn't even say it was nostalgia. more than it bled over into the next era

those records sounded fresh and undiscovered even in that time because everyone was already ripping them off

Now that I think about it, Pitchfork has been around now as long as Rolling Stone had been when I was old enough to start reading Rolling Stone. I wonder if Pitchfork seems like the old guard.

Pavement blows. No heart

As a Gen X-er who feels a special affinity for Pavement (I've been listening to them since 1992) and who has young impressionable music fan cousins, I've found that the kids dig Pavement and think they still sound relevant.

The band that has not aged well with the kids: REM. At least that's been my experience from a very small sample set.

Pavement blows. No heart

― Pentenema Karten, Monday, April 13, 2015

"No heart" LOL. And as Beavis and Butthead said, they're like, not even trying...

REM is much more of a you had to be there band...seriously, does anyone listen to that stuff anymore?

REM hung around way too long, so the kids remember them as this old lame band that old lame people enjoy.

my dad listens to REM!

of course people my age enjoy R.E.M. you'll find your way to to "Murmur" eventually. I thought they were a corny radio band for awhile though

xp
Yeah, kornrulesz, that's true...they stuck around.

is Pavement one of those bands that has zero appeal outside of the generation that experienced their initial popularity?

was talking a guy at one of the pavement reunions shows who was 19

How are we defining "Millennial" here? I'm a borderline [born late '82] and I know plenty of people who love them born between 1980 and '85. I discovered them sometime after buying the Spin Record Guide (1997 or '98), and they've remained among my three or four favorite bands ever since. What's weird is that even though Shakey's post in the thread revive makes perfect sense to me - I don't know why they would mean anything to someone who came of age ten years after their cultural moment, either - I find that they've diminished less with time than, say, Nirvana.

IOW, my experience is the near-opposite of Alfred's. ILM has rerouted my thinking about music enough that I barely listen to indie rock anymore, but Pavement still sounds as good to me as it ever did.

Pavement aren't exactly Truman's Water or whatever at this stage, plenty of scope outside of OG fanbase

they're a very clear starting point for "indie rock". just like joy division or whatever else. there will always be kids attracted to this type of music

it's not like everyone born in '95 is bumping PC Music and Drake

This is all v informative

Malkmus' career post-Pavment is pretty underrated and he is still touring the world at pretty decent sized venues. The Jicks do play Pavement songs in countries that did not get a chance to see Pavement more than 1-2x. I hear traces of Pavement in current acts like the Parkay Quartz and Speedy Ortiz.

it's not like everyone born in '95 is bumping PC Music and Drake

― hackshaw

phew!

Anyone young enough to have tindr do a quick search for # of results for Pavement?

kids still listen to Pavement like kids still listen to Nirvana

how is that?

i ask because afaict kids these days listen to nirvana the same way kids in my generation listen to bob dylan and i don't think pavement is quite there yet

People around my age who read Spin were pretty well acquainted with 90s indie rock, so even if we didn't cop Slanted and Enchanted when it was topping critics' polls we were on board a year or two before the group broke up. I suppose the reissues and Pitchfork appraisals would have acquainted '00s teenagers with the group, though their inspired, funkless amateurism was a pretty far cry from what U.S. indie rock sounded like after 2004 or so.

I once heard the comment "don't talk to anyone under 25 about guitar music" and shook my head so that's why i feel the need to clarify all this stuff

and Guided By Voices, and Sebadoh. and you name it. it's not some forgotten thing. nor will it ever be for a certain subsect of people

I didn't get Dylan at all until I wasn't a kid anymore

alright how about led zeppelin as a comparison then

Also, to state the obvious, Pavement never posted anywhere near Dylan's or Nirvana's sales numbers - kids in the early 90s didn't listen to Pavement like they listened to Nirvana, either!

Which answers your above question - only suitable comparison for Led Zep would be, like, AC/DC/Aerosmith/Guns N' Roses/Metallica. No one else even approaches that sales bracket

Pavement was the first indie rock band I got into. This was in 2002, when I was 13. I still like the records a lot (didn't catch the reunion tour).

My impression is that they're an indie rock staple of enduring cross-generational appeal. In short, hackshaw is right.

It reminds me of 80s hair metal, where it's popularity is very limited to a subset of people who were teens in the 80s.

have you already forgotten about Guitar Hero and Rock Band?

also: I Love the 80s, 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders, and 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock & Roll, all on constant VH1 loop.

Yeah, I was in college when Pavement was as-big-as-they-ever-got and I was sort of shocked to find myself among the oldest people at the reunion show.

pavement obv aren't culturally entrenched like mj or the beatles or zep; they're culturally entrenched like the velvet underground

a close but cooler friend in high school whom some combination of mental illness and acid later made very different burned me a cd-r with "cut your hair" on it and i can hardly listen to it these days

I am 27, got super into Pavement in high school around 2003 or 2004, I get that they're a product of a past era (loose meandery goofy slackers with a wry sense of humor) but I can still appreciate them and I think they're musically really ultra great.

I wonder what is happening now that's SUPER rooted in the current era that 20 years from now I'll be like "really? What are you getting out of this in 2035??" All I can think of is PC Music

Diplo will probably be president in 2035.

Or his mother.

I dig Pavement, fell hard for them in high school, but man i don't begrudge anybody for not getting them or liking them, and indie rock these days seems partially detached from pavement style slacker steez anyway

Diplo travelling through time and being his own mother was the worst Star Trek episode

I hear traces of Pavement in current acts like the Parkay Quartz

I thought I'd read Parkay Quartz (who I like) deny it in an interview, but it's beyond traces - they sound like a tribute band half the time.
The last song on their last LP is called "Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth" LOL

It seems like the Pavement influence is pretty big in the young indie rock scene even beyond Parquet Courts and Speedy Ortiz. Grooms, Twerps, Menace Beach etc. all remind me of them in some way.

yeah, if anything i think there's more Pavement echoing thru current indie rock than there has been in many years