Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Just some thoughts. I have been receiving criticism for liking Pavement as of late, which I think is lame. So, I'm writing about my favorite Pavement album.
I remember...
standing by the edge of the deep end. It was 1994. I was pondering a radio broadcast I'd just heard: some minister declaring the end of the world. He said we'd never survive the year. This declaration has been made before, but this was the first time my little ears had ever heard it. Like I said, it was 1994 - the year of the death.
Since then, death has come to mean many things to me. However, I keep returning to this time period. Maybe it's because I keep filling out those stupid Myspace surveys with questions like: "Do you think the death of Kurt Cobain was the end of alternative music?"
For the record: no, I don't think that Kurt's death was the end. I think that his life both highlighted, and perpetuated, an end already begun - in the music world, at least. I see it best summed up in the croon and wail of Pavement's Stephen Malkmus in "Fillmore Jive": "Good-bye to the rock-and-roll era, 'cause they don't need you anymore..." And, with the advent of the internet, as well as the DIY publishing/producing/crafting explosion, I can only revel in the prognosis of this declaration. Looking back at 1994, some damned good music was put out. However, I think that one of the most important albums as to the history of alternative music and the scene in terms of documentation has to be Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement.
Pavement was another of the classic 90s scene bands who had more than a minor flirtation with the Troy Dyer prototype. This album, a musical documentary of the music scene, has an odd and ironic self-awareness, and is, of course, still typical Pavement: the off-tone Malkmus voice, with fly-by episodic lyrics which never fit the rhythm, and break-out jams led by a steady, classic cadence. However, this album flirts musically with genre and the very notions of identity as it recollects a scene caught in moment at the edge yet on the verge. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain does an excellent job of summing up a particular movement in music which is both a death and a new beginning. Wavering between the past and what is to come: our present, and the strange status of indie music as simultaneously independent, yet selling mini-vans and those super-compfy Gap panty hose (of which I own 3 pair in burgundy, black and gray).
The album opens up with "Silence Kit," an upbeat song of irony. Sing-songy rhymes and that drum beat you find yourself doing on your desk sound solid, yet the words willow away and allude: a shimmering gold fish in a pool, the size and shape of this song are elusive. The difference between "kit" and "kid"; "reel" and "real"; "heel" and "heal" perplex listeners. Do a lookup of the lyrics, and you'll see a wide debate as to what the lyrics actually are, confirming how these sleights simultaneously befuddle, yet enlarge. Malkmus was a poet obsessed with existing in two places, and his writing in the album shows it as he claims personhood as both male and female, you and me, dead and alive, etc. "Silence Kit" is a vocalization about how to treat silence. The old ways, listening to one's sister, father, family isn't working. Instead, by the end of the song, it's the music which becomes the voice. It's the "snare kick," and the warmth of the momentary spotlight - like the glow of philosophical break-through or a masturbatory orgasm - which take the forefront in this life, this world, which the album seeks to describe.
"This is the city life," the lyrics declare, and we move on into "Elevate Me Later," a perfect segue into the sporadic and episodic. "We greet the tokens and stamps/Underneath the fake oil burning lamps," we get a pensioner's view of "the city we forgot to name," the fortress ensconcing our modern-day life. And, to Malkmus, the settlement is insecure, hedging, and fake. It is a synecdochic world of metaphor: "the courthouse's double breasts" threaten the little "tokens and stamps" we have become. The images reconstruct the strata of society, but also land us on a Ride the Ducks tour of the world. He turns a critical eye to us, to our comfortable lives and what we do to get them: we are both over and under. Like a young Tom Lawrence in PCU (also out in 1994), Malkmus just wants to see why we're "complainin'" as we live a "protean life." The song ends with a bleak revelation, like a candle with a black flame (a "fake oil burnin' lamp" to light the way?): "there're 40 different shades of black/ so many fortresses and ways to attack/ so whya complainin'?" The song sees the multi-dimensionality of the world, the vibrancy of shade and hue. It's a world of too much information. No color is just red, green, blue, black - it is hindering and freeing.
And freedom is the next step in an identity search. The album samples from other musical genres in "5-4=Unity" and "Newark Wilder," going from jazzy beats to country sounds, especially in "Range Life" and "Heaven is a Truck." Both of these latter songs talk of a need for independence, which can perhaps be sought in new ways. There is a need to escape the fortress. Then comes "Stop Breathing," which halts the pop beat of the album, slows it down and jars our senses. Set in a war scene, melodious guitar strokes turn to twangs and Malkmus's voice wavers between a conversation and a song, runaway words. The plodding rhythm of the song indicates struggle to breathe for one's self, to live one's own life without someone or something else as an apparatus. "No one serves coffee, no one wakes up," he says, highlighting a dependent relationship. Malkmus is crooning, talking about a death, setting the mood for the elegies imbued in "Cut Your Hair" and especially "Fillmore Jive." These two songs are the most episodic, taking snapshots of the scene in different ways. "Cut Your Hair" is almost a list of hip requisites ("Chops a must/NO BIG HAIR!"). "Songs mean a lot when songs are bought and so are you," Malkmus continues in the end, likening humans to their product - and songs are nothing new on the market. The song closes with a cynical sneer, a repetition of "Career, career, career, career" echoing and growing larger like a notion in one's fearful brain. One simple word suddenly becomes charged with scenes and emotion. "Fillmore Jive," on the other hand, documents more widely less of a particular scene, and more of music itself. It describes the "jam kids," punks with "glum looks" and "rockers with their long, curly locks" going by on a street like a chronology in motion. All have a look, and a characteristic possession which make them what they are. All are left out on the street as "the rock-and-roll era" comes to a close. "They don't need you anymore" sums it up: the pronouns are vague. Who is this they? And is "you" actually me? Is it completely unbelievable that artists, maybe songs themselves, do not even need a faithful, or even identifiable, fan base to take off? Does the music create its own scene now instead of the people? Who is at service here, and who is being served?
"Fillmore Jive" also ends the album as Malkmus gives us an overview of recent musical history, and a prognosis as to where this runaway train could be leading us. He notes that he just needs to "sleep it off," like a bad hangover from a wild, wild night. The outlook Crooked Rain gives is bleak and blurred. There is a search for identity and integrity, a need for freedom from that ever-mysterious "man." But the freedom is interesting in is prospect. As the core of independent and DIY movements dominating the indie scene, it is at once, a death and a dream. Every artist wishes to able to create and have it all be a success. But, at the same time, this freedom comes at a cost as the world begins to change. The former era of rock-and-roll, its core and the very meaning of the word, has significantly changed. We cannot help but wonder what this means, and what is its value.
And as an 11-year-old standing on the edge of the pool, I was not thinking about the past and future of alternative/indie rock as it formed itself as a genre aside. I did not foresee myself in purple tights and vintage leather at basement clubs with no signage and an illegal bar giving a shit. I was not even aware of the band Pavement (but I do believe I had seen PCU). And, as Kurt Cobain died, I was not even thinking about how this could be life just beginning. I thought the apocalypse had something to do with aliens (I was raised Baptist and never paid attention...who knows). No, I just wanted to swim. I just wanted to cool off and have some fun. So I jumped right in.
