round 1
(10) pavement, “summer babe (winter version)”
laid low
(7) cracker, “low”
299-291
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 6.
sean lovelace on “low”
West Virginia
Listen: One of the best days of my life was spent in West Virginia. With a poet, Mark Neely, I played the most strategically rigorous disc golf course of my life, the Black Course located on a misty mountaintop outside Moundsville, up a road winding along gap-mouthed barns and flocks of bedraggled chickens and skinny dogs and smoldering stacks of tires and sly foxes and oily creeks of despair and lost and hopeless children and “past the burned-out industrial plant” as the official PDGA directions advise. I shot 23 over par and hit a small sheep (or maybe goat) with a Frisbee. I felt stunned, like I was punched in the face by happiness. Mark made a hole in one, I shit you not. He later fell into a ravine. Much later that dusky evening an elderly woman left her trailer (she was the region’s unofficial taxi and her 1970s Impala was amazingly untidy) and picked Mark and me up from our motel and took us to a casino along the Ohio River and I told the lady we were visiting town to attend a conference about bridges (I have no idea why I made up this sudden lie) and tipped well (she was our only ride back to the motel) and won $109 in video poker while getting smashed on lite beer and muscle relaxers and black coffee. A really special day, top-tenner. Ever since I’ve wanted to listen to a song that captured the feeling of that one special time in West Virginia. The tone of it. Its essence. Yes, I found Jake Crack immediately: very cool, great river and coal train imagery, but he uses the term, moon or moonlight, too often. I hate lunar references in poetry or songs. The Lilly Brothers wrote one of the best West Virginia fables about madness ever sung, but their lyrics are consistently wordy and, well, dated. Mark Carman’s voice sounds like a coatrack tumbling down an escalator. Screechy. I do really like Hicks, especially her lesbian folk singer trading cards, but her pitch is just overly reedy to my delicate and unsymmetrical ears. Then along comes Cracker.
How Many
I’ve been asked to write about the band, Cracker, six times in my life. The first five times I said no. Because I was too busy, too drunk, too busy, too busy, too confused. What have I in common with Cracker? I have barely anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a cornfield or one of the few remaining woodlots in the state of Indiana, content that I can breathe.
So Questions the Song “Low”
What does it mean to be desired? To be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn someone? To spend time with someone? What does it mean to be lowered? What does it mean to be let go?
A Video of Catfish Eating Crackers
One Vignette from the Pandemic
From home, I call my partner. She’s alone, working in a large, empty building with her office door closed. The air smells of copier ink and resentment. I say, “Can you pick up crackers? I cannot eat chili without crackers. I never could.” “Fuck the crackers,” answers my partner. “This is a pandemic. The crackers are over.” I hang up the phone.
I rarely have kind words for Facebook, a site bloated with voyeuristic bagpipes, busy bots, howling blowhards, T-shirt vagabonds, abominable moms, blurry news, bombastic vacations, food porn, bouncing vampires, boastful poets, cat weirdos, and relentless and deliquescent fatheads. A social club I can’t believe accepts people like myself, a sort of madhouse mirror, a suck-hole of the soul, and etcetera to the demoted planetoid Pluto and beyond. Pretty addictive too. Like all drugs, it’s bad in the long form. But again, like all drugs, it has its good moments. So I’ll admit a glad tiding the day I conked my head while surfing the hollows of the internet and dreamt upon a man/amalgam named David Mimi "Bunyan" Faragher Jr., former member of the band, Cracker, and a decent session musician/security guard/outdoorsman/porkpie hat wearing dude with maybe a military background who always posts in sort of a questioning and simultaneously gracious and nuanced tone (finding anyone not tone-deaf on Facebook is a bit like sighting a double rainbow), even with fraught topics, like cross-dressing or parenting or bowhunting or the time he rode a 4-wheeler through a shopping mall with Elton John (yes, that Elton John). But I am not here to discuss Bunyan Faragher or Elton John. I’m here to discuss a song Faragher played percussion on, the alt-country-blues-funkadelia (often erroneously labeled as a rock, no doubt by marketing dolts) four-minute-thirty-five seconds single that is dense and onomatopoeic (in its own way) as a buzzzzzzzzzzzing turbine of clangy-ass glow, “Low.”
Labeling Anything Obscure a “Drug Reference”
“Getting stoned” is not a drug reference. It refers to either author Shirley Jackson or perhaps relationships, the daily microaggressions wrapped within the summer squash of love like a parasitic worm, etcetera. Where did my Debbie Harry art print go? I purchased it from a local artist right here in Muncie, Indiana, and it was hanging right over there on my home office wall. It’s in a soybean field, moldy. Where are my running shoes? On the roof, in the rain…Life is a boxing ring. That deleted text message is a cut eye, bleeding badly. Every muttered word is a punch in the face. Watch the left hook while sleeping. Beware the effects of sustained concussion. Knockout is a certainty.
“A million poppies” is a reference to either roadside meals of bagels or repeated viewings of The Wizard of Oz while on a tour bus.
“Junkie Cosmonaut” is actually well-established NASA slang. (See Packing for Mars by Mary Roach.) It refers to the practice of stuffing the arms and legs of auxiliary spacesuits with contraband items before flights to the International Space Station. As cliché as it may sound, the Russians often fill the suits with bottles of vodka. In “Low,” the lyric is using the jargon as linguistic metaphor (Cracker’s lead singer, David Lowery, is now a professor at the University of Georgia), the “suit” as signifier, the secreted items as the hidden interior meaning/sign behind every uttered word. Not a drug reference, clearly.
My favorite Part of the Video
My favorite parts of the video are the vignettes of Sandra Bernhard pissed off while driving, on her way to beat the hell out of Cracker’s lead singer. I like her expressiveness. I like the way she uses the beater station wagon as a prop. She’s actually dog-cursing a huge stream of invectives, but, due to censorship standards at the time, she’s not even allowed to MOUTH certain curse words, so they cut any sustained shots of her lips moving. Still, she’s got acting chops (and all other kinds of chops—she’s old school, stage-pro, burlesque, craftsperson supreme) and she sort of silent movie acts her way to the boxing ring. She’s flustered and it’s building to an incandescent rage. Effective. I was moved.
Facebook Reimagined:
I don’t think anybody was thinking “hit.”
Folks, I won’t stab you in the back with a fork while you’re climbing a ladder. I’m IN the record business, but I’m not the record business.
Photos of furniture is depressing. STOP!
For the video, Sandra shows up on a fucking Ducati. You know that Hunter Thompson essay, the Sausage Monster?”
I’ve been a session guy forever. You wouldn’t believe the stories. Sheryl Crow, Dusty Springfield, Elton John. Hell, I recorded with The Monkees. I have a lot of life lessons for you to like or not like!
Playing percussion is like being a left-handed pitcher. Every band needs a percussionist.
I’m at the clinic. I might update later but I doubt it.
Sandra said she’d do the video if she liked the song. And she fucking loved the song. Then she asked for the station wagon and they gave her that, too.
I wore a dress on stage for years. Even Letterman talked about it. It wasn’t political. Dresses are really comfortable.
I heard Low again this morning while showering and it made me feel like if I’d stuck around we could have done more. I’m not disparaging what David has gone on to do at all, but we had a certain chemistry and momentum. We coulda been Led Zeppelin!
This place reminds me of when I was bass fishing and saw a snake eat a snake.
Low was written in about two minutes and twelve seconds.
We always snuck country into our songs. People don’t even see it. Know why?
Because they don’t even know what country music is anymore.
Art is so weird because you just don’t know. I used to mow lawns. When you mow a lawn, the fucking lawn is mowed.
Sandra sees this cop car or like security maybe. And she’s eating a banana, right? She walks right up to the car and sticks the banana in the tailpipe and then walks over to me and says, “I do not like cops.”
Social media reminds me of back home when we use to play golf by hitting cow-shit piles with sticks.
You wouldn’t believe the money I’ve made off Low. There’s probably a check out in the mailbox right now! That song’s been following me for twenty years. I could buy any car out there. But what’s a car? A car is a thing that gets you from A to B. I’d rather get another tambourine.
Old habits are strong, man. Old habits are jealous. I also don’t need your vacation pics, ever.
Jack Nicholson was on the set one day. I have no idea why. I think maybe he knew Grasso. Think maybe they golfed together. Anyway Nicholson’s eating this giant-ass hoagie. And Sandra just walks up to him and grabs the sandwich and takes a huge bite. I mean tomatoes were falling on the ground! And she just wiped her mouth and gives him a grin and hands it right back to him. Course he was flattered. That’s Sandra.
Do you know Bonnie Raitt? Great voice, raspy as a bone comb. One time her and I were trying to do this elaborate prank on her drummer and it involved me jumping out of the back of a moving pickup truck. On this country road at night. And I did it it. Guys, my feet hit, then my head—like boom!--and then I passed out. And she didn't even know I jumped. She just drove off. And I wake up spread eagle on this country road looking at the stars. Huge-ass lump like an egg on the back of my head. I'd been out for over a half hour. One car had come by I wouldn't be here today. I’m not religious but I feel very, very fortunate.
I don’t care if your spouse is a good cook!
Your porn star name is your first dog’s breed paired with a vegetable. Go!
The director for the video, Carlos Grasso. He’s like a Mexican Italian crazy guy. That’s why it’s in black and white. Arty, you know. Shadows and shit. He’s taking video of river rocks. Europeans do that.
So I'm living with Andrew Ridgeley. And he owns this crawdad. I mean this huge crawdad. It's like a big lobster. But he won't ever change the water in the tank. And I'm like Andrew, change the damn water but he just gives me a look. So while he's at the studio I go in there and I clean out that aquarium and I clean the gravel and I change out the water. The crawdad was dead in about a half hour. That's what I mean by life lessons.
That one song basically took Springsteen off MTV. We were proud of that.
Low was massive in Scotland, no idea why.
I always thought the title was great. I mean there’s so many songs about getting high, or higher places, or succeeding, whatever. How many times have you seen a happy post on here and you’re thinking that’s BS?
You know George Michael, right? I took him up to my old farm back home and we went squirrel hunting. And it was raining. And he was bitching about his fancy boots or something and everything. And I shot these two squirrels. But then when we went to get them I didn't realize I shot them across a creek. This big tree…but there was a hill so I didn’t see the creek. Anyway, we had to wade across the creek. And George was furious and cursing me blue. And we got the squirrels, but it kept raining and the creek kept rising. And we couldn't get back across. And we were freezing. Finally, we found a downed tree—this little skinny tree—and had to take our shoes off and crawl across on this wet tree. Water roaring below us! We almost died! It was another very lucky escape, but George never did let me hear the end of it. Not ever. Just kept whining about his fancy boots.
All you people talking shit on Elton John after my last post don’t know the real Elton John. He is gracious. One time my aunt saw him at this random art gallery in London and asked for a photo. He’s not uptight. He’s a kind guy.
People say alternative to what? I’ll tell you what we were an alternative to: music as a can of Coke. Overproduced, formulaic banal pop.
Back then we had to sign this letter and send it to the radio stations saying it was like “being stone” not “being stoned.” I mean people will believe a lie if it helps them in any way. The lyric is clearly “being stoned.” It would be really stupid any other way.
Grasso listens to the song one time. He says it’s a man and woman fighting. But they’re in the same body, the man and the woman. That’s why he had Sandra beat up David.
What’s your right food at the wrong time? Mine is grilled cheese sandwich.
I’m a pro. I can go hard. I can lay out if the song requires. I can invent.
There is a certain Zen to playing the same song thousands of times.
See you all in Minneapolis on Friday!
Sandra walks in one day and she has a live hawk on her shoulder. Then she bets me $100 she can kick the door jamb on the trailer. I mean the top of the door. I say there's no way you're kicking the top of a door. But she did. I learned later that's an old Sammy Snead trick. You know, the golfer.
I hate divas. Cracker played a radio festival show in Florida where the radio station gave out commemorative license plates to the audience. These quickly became metal Frisbees. We didn’t leave the stage!
If you tour, your bus will break down about once a month. You better like waiting.
You keep asking me, so, YES. I get tired of playing the song, but it’s played pretty regularly on the radio in the U.S. and Canada and of course Scotland. It has become something that radio folks call a recurrent record. As many spins as a current hit. Get your mind on that guys.
We were sound-checking in Portland, all a little bit hungover, and Johnny was just making noise. That’s how Low began.
One day, they got some issue with the boxing ring, like the ropes or something. And we’re all standing around shooting the shit and Grasso asks Sandra if she knows how to punch. And POW! Sandra decks him. In the stomach. I mean you don’t ask Sandra Bernhard if she fucking knows how to punch.
We need more items for the auction!
You ever caught a fish and cooked its tail on a fire right there on the riverbank and eaten it like a potato chip? Well, I have.
But I never imagined it as a single. The writer Luis Antonio Sensini has written about “the narrative fallacy,” where you look back on things and rearrange them in a logical order that makes sense, which becomes your memory of something even though it’s really a lie. And I seem to have done that with Low. Invented this whole narrative about it. Because when I went back to my notes from around then, there was not a word about Low. I mean, nothing. Hilarious.
I don’t really follow what’s going on right now in music.
It's weird having money. I used to be broke. Back home I used to work for Pizza Hut and man we hated Domino's. We really did. It was like a high school rivalry! We’d try to run Domino's drivers off the fucking road! Back in the 90s they had to deliver in 30 minutes and it's almost impossible to deliver in 30 minutes. I heard a bunch of those Domino's drivers died and so the company changed it. This is a mysterious world.
I’m a Black Swamp man, as far as tambourine. With gourd, I prefer just a regular guiro. Preferably netted with beads.
Susanna Hoffs, from The Bangles. I took her deer hunting and she didn't know shit. She had this little camera and was wearing a yellow rain jacket. She thought we were at a petting zoo or something. And we come around the corner of this tall-ass corn and this deer’s right in front of us and I hand her the gun and say shoot. BOOM! she shoots its antler off! And the deer is walking around like it's drunk, like woozy. Because the antler is connected to the brain plate. And Susanna freaks out and tosses the gun into a pond. Now what am I supposed to do? So I pull out a knife and just rush at the deer and leap on its back while it’s woozy. We have this big wrestling match! It’s kicking the crap out of me! Anyway, I don't want to be too graphic, but I got the deer.
Low is on like nine albums. I mean Lydia Lunch covered Low.
You don’t need to read sheet music to succeed. Phil Collins can’t read a single note.
I remember Don made us play Low over and over. We must’ve done it 20 times. He was a real character. Had a funny voice you could hardly understand. He’d be chewing on a cigarette, mumbling something at you, and every once in a while you’d hear “Keith”—because he’d worked with Keith Richards. He was like a voodoo producer, but the perfect guy for us at that time.
Songs get stuck in your head because they are good songs.
I was barely in the video, but I don’t care. I’m not a Rockstar. I’m a percussion guy and a fisherman and sometimes I like to cook. A simple man. I don’t care. Stop asking me about the video or I will block you and I don’t even know how.
Pussy Monster
Remember when Franny Choi wrote the poem, Pussy Monster? She took the Lil’ Wayne’s song “Pussy Monster” and rearranged the lyrics in order of frequency. An interesting machine for examining the lyrics of a song, sort of like consuming a pizza not by eating it, but by constructing a kite from the pizza and flying it directly over the house where you first made love or methamphetamine. Let’s try it with “Low” and then go vote.
Brush behind her junkie sun sleep one rose disgraced eyes of vine rusting just million poppies on name calling knows flow back go let make is hair sky river trees get gonna their eyes glass street sheet of walk me their their go go the the some some and and blue blue from from brown brown cosmonaut cosmonaut take take green green green don’t don’t don’t fruit fruit fruit is is is below below below feet feet feet sometimes sometimes sometimes down down down your you’re you’re to to to to want want want want you you you you I I I I I the the the the the the I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll girl girl girl girl girl girl girl girl be be be be be be be be with with with with with with with with stoned stoned stoned stoned stoned stoned stoned stoned stoned low low low low low low low low low a a a a a a a a a a a you you you you you you you you you you miles million million million million million million million million million million million miles miles miles miles miles miles miles miles miles miles being being being being being being being being being being being being being being like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey…
Sean Lovelace is a professor of creative writing at Ball State University. He runs marathons and eats nachos.
NOT HERE, BABE! katie moulton on “summer babe (winter version)”
Note: Stephen Malkmus was born May 30, 1966. Twenty years later, on May 30, 1986, I was born. This is interesting only to me, and is included here as warning of big Gemini energy.
Summer Babe (Winter Version) #1
Spring semester, sophomore year of college, I had a crush on a guy in my art-writing class. He was the kind of guy who drove from Boston to Austin for SXSW over spring break, where he’d stumbled into a secret show with the Flaming Lips and Peaches. He was extremely tall and wore dark skinny jeans before it was mainstream (again). Based on my friend’s vantage point across from him in the circle of small desks, she nicknamed him The Bulge. When he friended me on Facebook (just two years old at that point and socially supreme), I clicked straight to his Music section. While my own page listed assorted 70s rock acts, 90s hip-hop, 00s emo, and the Garden State soundtrack, his was a single sentence:
I pretty much only listen to Pavement now.
Oh shit. Pavement was a massive gap in my music knowledge. The name signified alternative cool, an arty punk that seemed to have nothing to do with Green Day, which was my foundational icon of northern California punk. I liked melody and hooks! I liked sweetness in my mosh pits! I could be arch, but never fashionably so. By naming Pavement—only Pavement—the crush signaled that he was 1) discerning, 2) into irony and messiness, 3) beyond trends, and 4) beyond time, considering we were five or six years old when the band broke out. Was Pavement also beyond me?
By the end of term, I ginned up the courage to invite him to a party thrown by my upperclassmen friends. First I had to prepare, so I logged onto LimeWire and found mislabeled songs from Pavement’s 1992 studio debut, Slanted and Enchanted.
“Oh, the summer of ‘’92,” Rob Sheffield wrote in the Rolling Stone album guide. “Nirvana was on the radio. Corporate rock was dead. The end of the Reagan-Bush era was so close we could taste it. We were young and in love and the world was changing.” I didn’t hold any nostalgia for the summer of ’92—or any real memories, other than a blurry clip of Bill Clinton playing sax on Arsenio Hall. But I recognized the irony in even Sheffield’s introduction to the band. If grunge-gods Nirvana were on the radio, then Pavement was the alternative to alternative.
The album’s opening track, “Summer Babe (Winter Version),” blows open with dense fuzzy guitars, a compressed squall with no starting point. The tempo is plodding and all over the place. But the palatably heavy drone is woven with skittering cymbal and undeniable melody. It’s just three chords. It’s got no hook, but it’s catchy. The guitar lines are pretty, almost wistful.
Then the vocals shamble through the side door, Stephen Malkmus in a laidback deadpan. Ice, baby, he intones—the very first line is a reference that points at the absurdity of our world. (It’s ironic, according to definitions found in the Jagged Little Dictionary.) The song sounds nearly mono, and Malkmus’s vocals are nearly monotone. He delivers increasingly free-form, imagistic lyrics in a laconic drawl: “My eyes stick/ to all the shiny robes/ you wear on the protein delta strip/ in an abandoned houseboat”—what the hell is that? Am I having a stroke?
Malkmus said he wrote the song after college while living in New Jersey but included some imagery from his native Stockton, California. (This was around the same time he was starting Silver Jews with David Berman. See? BIG Gemini energy.) Let’s take his word for it! Besides, if I was going to get it, to be a truly cool listener, I needed to abandon my primitive need for narrative, identifiable image and emotion. I would detach!
Detachment, after all, was what I’d been trying and failing to achieve since elementary school, when I first realized that I was not a kid but a loose jumble of sharp feelings clanking around inside a paper bag. Painfully shy, easily wounded. When “Summer Babe (Winter Version)” was released, I was a quiet, skinny try-hard, playground gravel scarring her knees, fingers chewed bloody. Later, detachment was what they told us to practice in those grim and cheesy Alateen meetings. Under flickering fluorescents at the YMCA, they told us that detachment “did not imply judgement or condemnation.” Detachment—“neither kind nor unkind”—would help us separate from our alcoholic parents. In our minds at least, we could “let go of our obsession with another’s behavior.” We would not allow ourselves to suffer because of someone else’s choices.
The thing is, detachment totally implied judgement, and I was always suffering because of other people’s choices. I couldn’t change what they did and I couldn’t make myself stop feeling it, but I could make wry jokes. In adolescence, irony helped me stand apart from my uncertainty and anger, my all-consuming vulnerability, and sometimes it even made people laugh. (Once, under a pool table, the most popular boy in middle school called me “Jerry Seinfeld” as a compliment, and then put his tongue in my ear. What's the deal with that?)
By the night of the party with the college crush, I got it: Pavement was cool because it sounded tossed off, because it dabbled in discord, because the frayed edges pointed to its own artifice, and the artifice of the whole endeavor. In “Summer Babe,” the closest we get to a refrain arrives at the end of the song: the off-kilter, unharmonized “Every time I turn around I find I’m shot!” Yet the guitar riffs are catchy as hell. They bobbed through the current in my head, humming through the day. I was ready.
However, the most I remember from that night is the boy doing a pull-up from a bus stop pavilion, his skinny jeans belted precariously at the far end of his torso. And crowded into some dim smelly apartment, he mimed highdiving into someone’s cleavage. The Bulge, truly. We weren’t a love match, all right? I realized that not giving a fuck what most people think often means that you give too many fucks about what a smaller group of people think.
I realized that sometimes disaffection is not a pose for deep feeling. And worse than feeling too much—in this case, I didn’t feel a thing.
But all was not lost. The next week Pavement-Only invited me to the campus radio station, where I had the duration of his DJ set to browse the music library and burn as many CDs as I could onto my Dell laptop. I sat on a cracked sofa and smashed-and-grabbed the ABCs of obscure-to-me indie pop and rock from the previous fifteen years: Afghan Whigs, Blonde Redhead, Breeders, Butthole Surfers, Cocteau Twins… The thing about cool guys is that they’re the unwitting gateways for folks like me to get very geeky and uncool about the very things they’re hip to.
The Bulge and I didn’t keep in touch. By the next semester I noticed the Music section of his Facebook page had changed. It read: I pretty much only listen to The Cars now.
Summer Babe (Winter Version) #2
In my mid-twenties, I met a guitarist from a band-on-the-rise that all the blogs kept comparing to Pavement. Critics cited the band’s “’90s sounds fueling the fires of 21st-century paranoia”: its mix of art-punk influences, discordant anthems, imagistic lyrics, and the vocal delivery—dryness belying emotion, with a surreal, quotidian humor. Anyway, the blogs were always divining who would be the next Pavement.
When the guitarist learned I’d been a music critic, he asked, “Have you ever thought about writing for Vice? We did a thing with them in Mexico last year.” I said, “I think I’m too sincere for Vice.”
At a summer festival, I hung out with the band in the backstage areas. I liked the guitarist, liked his collared shirt rumpled in the humidity, his long fingers, and his wit, which moved at a tempo I could never quite match. He seemed super talented at detachment. I met other musicians, there to play or just hang out, left sweat marks against a brick wall. A dude told me about running shit at some tentacle of Vice, and how everybody should move to Toronto. I watched the Breeders from a side stage, and nearly touched the hem of Bjork’s gossamer cape. But when the band went further backstage into the artist area, I was turned away. I was kind of cool, but I wasn’t that cool.
After the festival, we took MDMA and at first, I was embarrassingly bad at it. The lead singer kept showing me stark line drawings in his sketchbook, his fingers taut, saying, I saw this. A thick orange horizon, an underground mountain. I saw this. His eyes rattled; my vision went womp womp. Am I having a stroke? Anxiety made my heart lurch into my throat, but when I crashed through into the high, it was like stepping under a waterfall on a glacier.
Rather, the high was also like that singular moment at the center of “Summer Babe (Winter Version).” Throughout the song, Malkmus refuses to emote, sometimes sounding like he’s reading Mad Libs cue cards, finding as many ways as he can to fit in syllables that sound like ice. But after a long guitar solo, just after the two-minute mark, Malkmus stumble-sings, “Drop off the first shiny robe”—and can’t help but laugh in the middle of the lyric. What’s funny about it? Some inside joke, somebody off-mic pulling a face. Maybe he too thinks the lines are ridiculous and nonsensical, and for a second, lets it slip. But the laugh drops as he sings the next line, “I’ve got a lot of things I want to sell, but—” and there’s that flash of intimacy, uncertainty, that but. A micro-pause. But—“Not here, babe!” He immediately undercuts that fleeting vulnerability with a flamboyant, almost sarcastic, shout.
But then Malkmus switches tones yet again, and sings, really sings, for the first time: “You took ’em!”—launching the last note for several measures, holding it in a howl of longing. It’s the most melodic instant of the whole song, and it’s the instant he breaks into true, desperate feeling. What a rush! I believe that emotion. Not because the song insists on it, but because it can only crack open an inch to show it.
The guitarist and I walked slowly around the shady squares of a city neither of us knew. I listened to the cool air moving through every hair on my arm. We traded sketches of our major tragedies, but then talk turned—blessedly—to music. I talked about how, typically, a song called “Summer Babe” would spend verses outlining the particular charms of said babe, building a roomy enough simulacrum for listeners to deposit our own ambivalent romances inside. But with Pavement, “Summer Babe” points to that empty shell—a joke, but not a mean one. I talked about how I always misheard that one long note, that brief break into emotion, as “Don’t gooooooooooo!” because we hear what we’re listening for.
Irony is not the replacement for vulnerability. Detachment doesn’t evacuate feeling. Instead, that gleaming ironic edge points to the sloshing emotions it contains. That edge—the lark of not caring whether we can pull something off, or in front of whom—rescues us from melodrama and from self-seriousness. It also saved Pavement from the limits of genre or era. Despite its popularity and influence, Pavement got to exist outside of grunge. In not trying to fit the sound of the time, they ended up defining it. Malkmus seemed to carry little baggage as he moved on, kept making good albums, whether experimenting or sounding just like the smart-ass slacker they pegged him for in ’92. He called Slanted and Enchanted “probably the best record we made because it’s less self-conscious and has an unrepeatable energy.” It was an amateur recording in a garage, done for a laugh. With “Summer Babe (Winter Version),” Pavement was un-self-conscious, and therefore free to be whatever.
These days, I get accused of being cool because I “know about music.” But the uncool truth is that I talk about music so I can talk about the gaping hole in my chest in polite company. And so I can talk about the gaping hole in your chest without, you know, being weird about it. Look, we’re doing it right now. It’s going all right, isn’t it?
When it was time to go, that summer night after the festival, the guitarist waited for a cab with me in the center of a wide dark boulevard. I told him I’d caught feelings; he said it was just the molly, and we were both right. He said, “You are too sincere for Vice,” and I said, “I can’t believe I took ecstasy and I’m not going to have sex,” and we laughed. Because even though it wasn’t really a joke, it pointed at the frayed edges of the whole thing—the night, the comedown, a version of whatever there was for a minute between us, in parentheses.
Katie Moulton used to have a radio show that opened with audio of Thurston Moore encouraging kids to "destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture." Her writing about music & culture has appeared in the Believer, Oxford American, No Depression, Consequence of Sound, Village Voice, and other places. This spring, she'll be the alum artist-in-residence at Art Omi and a MacDowell fellow. She teaches at Goucher College in Baltimore.