Pavement is remembered as the epitome of ’90s slacker rock, southern California ironists who sang-talk impenetrable lyrics over meandering guitar licks, feedback, and toy instruments. With the advantage of hindsight, and with the disadvantage of living in a TikTok-ruled cultural hellscape where nothing seems that serious or that real, it’s finally obvious that Pavement made some of the most focused, profound, and least ironic music in the entire American rock canon. Like Steely Dan, Pavement was a group of young men who composed corkscrew multipart rock suites with the power to explain the deeper realities of existence to people many decades older than they were. “I swing my fiery sword, I vent my spleen at the lord — he is abstract and bored, too,” lead singer Stephen Malkmus declares in the 1997 song “Transport is Arranged,” words introduced through a charmingly amateurish flute solo.
There was no revolutionary promise in Pavement’s decade of music, no exhortations to idol-smashing, leaving aside that infamous dig at the Smashing Pumpkins in 1994’s “Range Life,” and no invitations to danger or chaos. There were fleeting, sideways visions of paradise in their music, of the shady lanes that everyone needs, or the range where you could settle down once your feud with the Pumpkins was good and settled. But if the Beatles’ pithy summary of their life’s work is that the love you make is equal to the love you take, Pavement’s is reducible to three words, lightning cracks from the cloud of lyrical obscurity at the tail end of 1997’s “Fin”: “No more absolutes.” Pavement was real end-of-the-century stuff, punk’s ethos of sledgehammering critique stripped of its former heroism and shock value. They were nobody’s standard-bearers. As a result, they were free to make music true to the infinite confusion, discomfort, and exhilaration of life in general. “Silent kid, don’t lose your graceful tongue,” Malkmus sang on what became one of the band’s most famous songs, from 1994.
Pavement broke up in 1999. They were appreciated enough in their own time to sell a million records and play the Tonight Show in 1994, where Malkmus rolled his eyes through a performance of “Cut Your Hair.” Today, they’re considered all-time greats, geniuses of melody and tension and originators of the diffident, philosophical mode that came to dominate American guitar rock in the new century.
How did they do it? There are helpful clues scattered throughout the newly released half-fiction, half-documentary Pavements from director Alex Ross Perry. The film is a standard-issue rockumentary wrapped around three Perry-executed gimmicks of varying success: an attempt to make a fake Malkmus biopic, an off-off-Broadway jukebox musical of Pavement’s work whose precise level of irony is never really made clear, and a pop-up Pavement museum that looked like a sincerely executed and very cool little piece of cultural-historical curation.
Thanks to this interwoven four-part structure, built around an exhaustingly vague irony-sincerity faultline, viewers often aren’t sure if they’re watching real concert footage or recreations from the fake biopic. Past, present, and musical theater versions of songs fade in and out of one another. Malkmus and his bandmates constantly age forward and backward. After a while, a viewer begins to wonder if there’s something Perry’s actively avoiding here or something whose evasion he wants the audience to notice. Maybe he thinks it’s disrespectful to the source material to try to explain Pavement, those great rejectors of absolutes, a group that could seem to care about nothing and everything.
Pavements can be lively in its convolutions, thrilling for fans of the band, but it really thrives when dealing with the film’s big unsolvable mystery, the thing it addresses through all that elaborate evasion: the mystery of Malkmus himself. Joe Keery of Stranger Things can be irritating in his role as himself playing the role of an actor cast to play Stephen Malkmus in a fake movie, but he also lands a very important observation: “The dynamic of the band is, there was the four and the one.” The four were guitarist Scott Kannberg, bassist Mark Ibold, drummer Steve West, and the uncategorizable Bob Nastanovich, an almost co-frontman who played maracas, slide-whistles, kettle drums, and his own yelping voice. The one was Malkmus, who is of a different species than the other four.
Malkmus was a stone-faced tortured poet and guitar savant with the proportions and good looks of a tennis champ, an Adonis slumming it with the freaks. “He was the brat of the neighborhood … and I was the black sheep of the neighborhood,” Kannberg recalls of their first meeting, when they were in Middle School in Stockton, California. Kannberg had an uneven solo career and was applying to be a Portland bus driver at the time of Pavement’s first reunion tour in 2009. Ibold had an excellent second act as the final bassist for Sonic Youth. Nastanovich quit music altogether after Pavement ended, becoming a racing form writer and manager for horse-racing jockeys.
Pavements touches only briefly on Nestanovich’s quarter-century at the track and does not really explore what I believe to be one of the more fascinating disappearing acts in the recent history of American music. But you at least walk away from the film with the sense that Malkmus existed at a vast remove from his bandmates. When I saw the reunited Pavement play at Primavera Sound in Barcelona in 2022, their third show after a decadelong break, Malkmus, who has had a long and successful post-Pavement career, looked as if he was horrified to be seen in public with the conspicuously delighted Kannberg and Nastanovich, who he barely turned to look at.
Malkmus’s distaste for his Pavement colleagues is well-established by now and hinted at in Pavements, though Perry is careful not to spoil everyone’s fun. Still, Maklmus’s masterpieces were only possible because Kannberg and Nestanovich were there with him. And while Malkmus suspects he’s a god, he also realizes he’s an oddball within the rock pantheon. His singing voice is a cracking almost-tenor, distinctive because its owner knows how much technically better he could make it, if he ever found himself fronting some entirely different and much less compelling band.
“When I sing, it’s what the singer’s supposed to do, not what I’m supposed to do,” Malkmus says. “You’re imagining what a cool singer would sing.” Malkmus is both a self-imagined cool rock star and an actual cool rock star. Pavement could harmonize a vastness of opposites with such a strange and unique being at its helm. For instance, they could repeatedly acknowledge that rock music and life in general are often just one big hoop-jumping performance, but without declaring that everything’s fake or abandoning all potential for real wisdom. Malkmus could chuckle mid-lyric, like he does on 1993’s “Summer Babe-Winter Version,” before delivering one of those dead-serious, supernatural rock haikus that echo through your head for the rest of your life: “Every time I sit around, I find I’m shot,” he sings in a high-climbing spiral over accelerating guitars.
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Perry does not tell us where Malkmus’s music comes from and never even seems to ask. Perry has directed two other films about rock bands — Her Smell, an intense auteur work from 2019 about a fictional group’s breakup, along with a 2024 concert documentary about the Swedish metal band Ghost — and he knows how unnamable the creative mind and spirit are. He thinks the way to most fully grasp Malkmus is through indirection. In Pavements, as in real life, Malkmus is the silent kid whose tongue stays graceful.
Still, there’s another, much less satisfying evasion in Pavements. Pavement isn’t really slacker rock, but they are one of the defining cultural products of the 1990s, a band that both captures and critiques that long-ago time of empty superabundance and mostly unseen American civilizational drift. Perry is only 40, meaning he was 9 when Slanted and Enchanted was released. He knows Pavement as a nostalgia act and the ’90s as a faint teenage memory. Maybe a convoluted Pavement quasi-documentary isn’t the right vehicle for a true reckoning with the ’90s and their legacy. But Pavements makes me wish someone would attempt one. There are scores of Pavement songs that would soundtrack it perfectly.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.