Grounded

The rumors of this blog's death have been greatly exaggerated.

A friend popped up on Twitter this evening and suggested that "Grounded" is "[T]he soundtrack to the perfect dusk drive. Windows down, natch..." I couldn't agree more.

This song makes me want to swerve back and forth on a lonely country road, crickets chirping, a warm breeze in my face...

The life of a doctor is so slow, so mundane. He goes through his days like any working other working stiff, except he holds someone's life in his hands. If you make a mistake at your job, your workplace loses some money or a client. A doctor fucks up and someone's dead.

But it's a business. The doctor comes in to work everyday. At the end of the day, he calls home and drives off in his sedan. His day ends when he leaves the hospital.

Funny how this song came to my attention at the height of the health care reform in this country. Folks arguing over letting the government take care of our health needs or to just allow things to stay as they are. I won't take sides here. The fact is that people are suffering, even dying while we figure this mess out.

It's a business. There will be profits and there will be losses. Boys are dying on these streets.

Black Out

The saying "Ignorance is bliss" holds a lot of truth. If you're not aware that anything is wrong, about what you have to worry? If you're in the dark, you don't see imperfections.

Take a hole-in-the-wall bar for instance. The lights are mostly turned off. The only thing you're thinking about is getting plowed and hooking up with the young lady next to you. Then the bartender turns on the light and tells everyone to go home. You look around and see that this dingy little place is not where you want to spend the rest of your evening. The woman you were just chatting up doesn't look so great either. (She's probably thinking the same thing about you.)

Ignorance truly is bliss. There is no worrying about the world if you're not aware it has any problems. It's almost freeing to be so worry-free.

Though it's ultra-cryptic, "Black Out" plays with this idea. After rather confusing verses, Malkmus repeats, "No one has a clue." And the song closes with the repeated lines of "fun fun fun, fun for the summertime blues" and "it's gonna set you free."

What could ever have Pavement so carefree, without worldly worry? Pot. It's been well-documented that band succumbed to a lot of pot smoking during the recording of Wowee Zowee, and "Black Out" does little to dispel this fact.

(Crappy live footage of "Black Out")

Rattled by the Rush

We get shaken or rattled in so many situations. Do we like it? Do we dread it? Do we feed off of it? All of the above.

The rush of being questioned, performing physical feets, or being in awkward situations rattles our inner-souls. We lose ourselves for a moment. The excitement leaves us disoriented.

It's like how you used to wrestle with your dad or an older sibling. You could never win. Your dad was too big, too strong, but he was sure not to hurt you. Something about this fruitless, physical activity arouses you. You then find yourself a little out of it, almost dizzy.

"Rattled by the Rush" places the classic rock tendancies of their later material within the herky jerky, laisez-faire jamminess of mid-nineties Pavement. The song demonstrates quintisential Stephen Malkmus' vocal stylings. He slides easily from deadpan smartass to squealing troubadour and somewhere in between. Aside from SM's singing, it's also one of the most ambitious guitar performances that ranges from the aforementioned classic rockiness to a looser, sloppier.

The song is as Pavement-y as it gets.

Easily Fooled

A b-side to the "Rattled By The Rush" (aka "Rattled By La Rush") song has been running through my head, lately. "Easily Fooled" is this jammy piece of happy that found its way onto La Rush's backside as well as the comprehensive Wowee Zowee re-issue, Sordid Sentinels. On the latter, the song appears twice: once as the original recording and then as a live recording in Holland.

Waiting for life to accidentally get better is what's fooling us all. It's like all those guys in line at your gas station, waiting patiently for that one lottery ticket that will be their salvation, when, all along, they could've saved all the money they spent on lotto tickets to buy that Hummer they've been eying. Your girlfriend will get better looking, if you wait long enough. Your band will be on MTV and headline Lollapalooza if you just wait for it. I could go on and on, but I'm sure you get the point.

This great wait is the same thing that keeps most of us spinning our wheels, waiting for that American dream or some shit like that to come to fruition. It's what makes the working poor vote for conservative politicians in hopes of the trickle down to take effect. People continually take out more and more credit with a plan to pay it off later when their ship comes in. How foolish. That ship will never come.

The song's head-bobbing jamminess bridges the band's material between their final three albums. The off-kilter, stoned performance demonstrates WZ-era Pavement to a T. This song would have fit perfectly with "We Dance" and "Rattled By The Rush" if the rest of WZ stuck with this folky aesthetic. The lyrics suit the clarity and dominant theme of alienation found on the next release, Brighten the Corners. (I'm thinking "We Are Underused" and "Fin".) Pavement's third album was their most accessible and Dead-invoking which is where this song seems to be headed. I can't think of one career-spanning song in Pavement's catalog, but "Easily Fooled" does the second half of their tenure great justice.

I've always had this feeling that Pavement's greatness would be realized by the masses, but I guess I too was easily fooled.
Pavement – Easily Fooled

Serpentine Pad

"Serpentine Pad" always felt like Pavement's take on the Sex Pistols. SM sings in this phony British accent about fighting the corporations and some other nonsense over a hap-hazard performance by the other band members. It may be the closest thing the band ever did to a 1977-ish punk song about the anti-establishment.

The music is bottom heavy as Ibold drives the song and the feedback-happy guitars take a back seat. Besides Malkmus' poor Johnny Rotten impersonation, this is one of the clearest recordings of Nastanovich's screaming back-up vocals.

Pavement's humor truly comes through on "Serpentine Pad". From the sloppy guitar work to the fake accent to the silly punk rock lyrics, this track demonstrates how the band can make you wanna' rock out as well as giggle. A song like "Serpentine Pad" convinces me that this band never took itself too seriously, and that's refreshing.

(Sorry for the clip. It was all I could find.)

We Dance

As a disjointed acoustic guitar strums and piano keys tinkle beginning 1995's Wowee Zowee, you can hear the sucking sound coming from the executive board room...or was it a gurgling bong? Either way, executives run around frantically wondering what did they just purchase in their new distribution deal with Matador. Pavement was supposed to be the next next next Nirvana that was going to drag Atlantic Records out of the music industry doldrums. Where was the "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? "Jeremy"? "Blackhole Sun"? I often chuckle at this picture of suits loosening their collars, wiping sweat from their male-pattern-baldness, and leaping out of high-rise windows as SM states, "There is no castration fear." There may have been "castration fear" at Atlantic Records HQ the first day they listened to WZ.

"We Dance" begins Pavement's most experimental album that also happened to be their first (and only) release with the distribution advantages of mega-label Atlantic Records. (Of course, Capital later picked up the pieces.) The track sets the slow-to-mid-tempo experimental feel of an album that was ridiculed by critics and fans. It was only after the release of Brighten the Corners did fans finally appreciate the greatness that is Wowee Zowee. (This, coincidentally, was when I realized the "Pavement Factor" existed. The PF basically means that each release by a band is hated in comparison to the band's previous, classic release...until the band unleashes another dud. This may be why Pavement continues to re-release its albums in hopes that their fans will somehow fall in love with Terror Twilight.)

The country balladry that is "We Dance" may have come from their experiences in Memphis while recording WZ at the infamous Easley Studios. The song has this looseness as SM casually offers a dance, praise for your elders, and some Brazilian nuts while the sparse instrumentation sloppily prepares the listener for a new kind of Pavement, a stoned Pavement. It's probably the most soothing song ever penned by SM, but at the same time provides some uncertainty of what's to come.