TS: Pavement / Smashing Pumpkins

Lorax just became one of my favourite posters

despite all my rage I am still just a latter-day saint

Pavement are the progenitors of 'ugh indie'.

pavement

i am sorry for the infinite sadness of people who do not get why

― da croupier, Thursday, February 10, 2011 12:11 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

pavement:american 1990s :: wallace stevens:american 1950s

one of my friends hates everything after S&E b/c malkmus's voice is "too pretty" or "too pop" or something, I forget exactly how he put it but either way that's a pretty dumb thing to say

1979 > pavement's entire career (which I like!)

Keep my ass-ness to yourself

(btw i know it's sorta predictable that pavement had to fall from the lofty heights of indie sacred-cow status they occupied ~10 yrs ago... but that doesn't make the hateration any more comprehensible to me)

Actually the Stevens comparison interests me. Care to elaborate?

"i hear they live in crematoria and smoke your remains" one of the best lines malkmus ever wrote. out of many, many good ones. the line about smashing pumpkins, on the other hand, one of the weakest lines he wrote.

i rate myself punkin sympathizer but this is not even close.

Pavement was a decent (if still overrated act) up to and sort of including S&E

Haha, I love/hate sentences like this one. "They were pretty good up until people got the opportunity to hear them on record!"

The-Pavement: Slant Me All Summer/Enchant Me All Winter

They were pretty good up until people got the opportunity to hear them on record!

this sums up my experience with Pavement to a T.

Actually the Stevens comparison interests me. Care to elaborate?

― uh oh i'm having an aneurysm (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, February 10, 2011 5:14 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

1. immediate (or immediately posthumous) canonization by similar demographic (intelligent, vaguely-dissatisfied white college bros);
2. quiet, unglamorous lifestyle and public image (indie rock = resistance of 'art' as vocation?); and
3. a certain self-awareness in Malkmus' lyrics that affects me in the same way as Stevens' meta-poetic reflections

(nb i don't know all that much about wallace stevens)

lol for some reason I read Wallace Stevens as Wallace Shawn

"i hear they live in crematoria and smoke yr remains" is a line that sounds like it could be from some Modernist poet

otoh the lyrics to Gold Soundz and Cut Yr Hair (and Range Life for that matter) seems like some self-reflexive bullshit to me

((also I am thinking much more abt the last 3 or 4 albums than S&E))

excellent malkmus lyrics:

Glance
Don't stare
Soon you're being told to recognize your heirs [Ed.—could also be "airs" I suppose]

No
Not me
I'm an island of such great complexity

Stress
surrounds
in the muddy peaceful center of this town

Tell
me off
in the hotel lobby, right in front of
all the bellboys and the overfriendly concierge.

The gauzy thoughts
of the sturdy Scots
wrestle with the elements up on the trail high;
I need to know,
where does it go,
how do I get there, and what will I find?

obviously these all work better as song lyrics but well y'know

also I really love certain aspects of their songwriting, the weird left-turns which are sometimes just plain brilliant, like the hang before the chorus in "Shady Lane" that gives Malkmus time to squeeze in a few more syllables before the tension finally breaks

the edge of creation is blurred and blushed

Malkmus has so many great lines. Corgan has pretty much none, it's all high-school level notebook poetry. Corgan's strengths were primarily as a studio tech - shaping the Pumpkins sound with all those weird, layered guitars. It's clear he focused most on the craft of recording - arranging guitar parts, fiddling to find the right combo of hyper-compressed and overdriven rhythm guitars, etc. But Malkie is the superior writer in every way.

Alex Ross wrote a New Yorker article in '97 in which he made self-satisfied Ashbery comparisons.

um Pavement's '97 album title is taken from Ashbery iirc

so Malkmus kinda explicitly invited those comparisons

yeah was gonna say, not the craziest comparison in the world.

wld like to read that new yorker article if it's online

I have "self-portrait in a convex mirror" sitting open on my desk beside me — I like the idea of long-ass poems but rarely want to put in the effort to actually read them. this is pretty good so far tho.

wasn't "church on white" about a poet?

I thought that was about some dead buddy of his... also, perhaps coincidentally, the last decent song I heard from him.

man now i really wanna know who the Wallace Shawn of 90s rock is.

think church on white is supposed to be about robert bingham, who founded open city magazine, and was an author.

i think billy corgan is the wallace shawn of 90s rock? both so bald anyway.

^^^lol

um Pavement's '97 album title is taken from Ashbery iirc

It's not. Malkmus said at the time that he loved "Hotel Lautreaumont," but I'll check my Ashbery selected poems when I get home.

Billy Corgan is the Ernest Borgnine of 90s rock.

well whatevs, malkmus cited ashberry as an influence ... which means ... i don't know? what were we talking about?

It's not. Malkmus said at the time that he loved "Hotel Lautreaumont," but I'll check my Ashbery selected poems when I get home.

hmm okay - well at the very least I don't think it's fair to fault Alex Ross when Malkmus was going around trumpeting Ashbery's influence on him and the album in interviews at the time

xp

i think billy corgan is the wallace shawn of 90s rock? both so bald anyway.

― tylerw, Thursday, February 10, 2011 12:34 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

inconcievable!

who would be Corgan's My Dinner With Andre foil? Courtney?

Well, I only added 'self-congratulatory" because it was (a) a New Yorker article written in 1997 and (b) by Alex Ross.

who would be Corgan's My Dinner With Andre foil? Courtney?

lol yeah I was trying to think of this too - would have to be someone male I think. maybe one of Courtney's other paramours (Ed Norton? lol)

who would be Corgan's My Dinner With Andre foil? Courtney?
i'd probably watch this. probably not a stretch to imagine some future reality show, with corgan triying to produce courtney's new record.

or how about Malkmus HA

Malkmus can be a good lyricist, though he annoys the shit out of me sometimes...

Corgan has semi-decent moments, but he's not as good a lyricist as Malkmus, but I think he's really good at composing. If the only Pumpkins songs you hear are Cherub Rock and 1979 you're not going to know how, say, the best songs in Siamese Dreams & MCIS take strange left turns themselves and resist conforming to verse-chorus structures; think of the "I want to turn you on" part of "Today" where not only do those huge bright sunshinely guitars turn sinister on a dime, but the implicit dark undercurrents of the song ("Can't wait til tomorrow/May not have that long") break free and threaten to wreak havoc on the foreground...

You guys act like Corgan's on some BTO horseshit...I wish Ned or DJP would come in here & back me up...

I don't disagree - on those first two albums there's some really inventive song structures, it's all very well planned out. I remember reading something Corgan said at the time about how if you're going to have a 10-minute song you need to make sure that it has a bunch of different parts that evolve into one another and fit together (which kind of isn't true in a general aesthetic sense, but you can hear this approach in the songs themselves)

just went and listened to "Today" — oh shit I remember this song! I used to like it as a kid, never knew it was by the Pumpkins. dude's voice is even worse than I remember tho :/

To be honest, I'd rather listen to Siamese Dream and Gish when I want a rare fix of that Alan Moulder wall of sound.

Thru The Eyes Of Ruby >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the entire output of a band Blur ended up trumping and who aren't fit to lace MES' shoes

yo

I mean, who cares what SP's lyrics are like, they write awesome cinematic spiralling unpredictable massy and often sublime music

my 2c

i keep meaning to do a one CD edit of melon collie, that and use yr illusions I&II