Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and the kids no longer listen to Pavement

This past weekend Stephen Malkmus performed on NPR’s Live From Here. Malkmus is the former lead singer of 90s indie rock cult heroes Pavement, and Live from Here is the long-running radio variety show formerly known as Prairie Home Companion. I had heard that Prairie Home Companion had changed a bit since the ignominious departure of Garrison Keillor in 2016 amid charges of sexual misconduct. They had a new host, bluegrass musician Chris Thile, and had recently ditched the Prairie Home Companion name for a new handle.

But how much Prairie Home Companion had changed wasn’t apparent to me until this weekend when I received a text from a friend saying, “Heads-up: Malkmus is on that show Live From Here (formerly Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion show) on 90.1 at 6pm.”

Malkmus on Prairie Home Companion? What is one of the edgiest rock stars of the 90s and one of my personal heroes doing on a show my parents listen to? Prairie Home Companion is no place for a guy like Malkmus. It’s a place for anonymous bluegrass musicians and ponderous monologues about small town Midwesterners and advertisements for fictitious sponsors. That show is the furthest thing from edgy so why is Stephen Malkmus gracing their stage?

And then, just like that, I had one of my middle-aged revelations, one of those humbling moments when I suddenly remember I’m not a young man anymore, where I am forced to come to grips with the fact that my conception of the world no longer matches the world in which I live.¹ Stephen Malkmus, I realized at that moment, is no longer hip.

Now I realize there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Stephen Malkmus. Pavement were never as popular as Nirvana or Pearl Jam or various other bands to come out of the 90s, and they only managed one moderately successful hit.² But to a certain segment of 90s college students, Pavement were the coolest, most impressive band who had ever made music. With clever lyrics, catchy but off-kilter melodies, and licks borrowed from the Velvet Underground and the Fall, Pavement were the perfect band for people in search of something a little more alternative than the alternative music that had become mainstream in the wake of Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”

Perhaps just as appealing as their music was Pavement’s projected persona. First of all, they didn’t look like rock stars at all. Malkmus didn’t sport Billy Corgan’s bald dome or Axl Rose’s ridiculous stage get-ups, and nobody in the band had Pearl Jam’s long locks, or Kurt Cobain’s vintage cardigans, and certainly nobody wore leather pants. They looked simply like a group of middle class white guys recently graduated from college. At a time when alternative was cool, these guys were pulling the ultimate alternative move by looking like regular joes. They were anti-rock stars.

And they often appeared like they weren’t even trying, embodying the 90s slacker ethic and providing further support for the old maxim that effort and cool are inversely proportional to each other.³ Malkmus often appeared bored when he performed, as if there were a million things he’d rather be doing at that time. Their live shows were often loose and sloppy affairs (it wasn’t uncommon to see them stop a song several bars in and restart because somebody had screwed up) and one member of the band, Bob Nastanovich, didn’t even know how to play an instrument.⁴ In other bands and in other eras these things may have been seen as detriments, but with Pavement they just made them seem that much cooler.

Despite critical acclaim⁶ and a rabid following from a core of devoted fans, Pavement never managed to take the leap to massive popularity. They remained a cult band throughout their history. But their lack of popularity made them that much more appealing to their fans.⁷ In the 90s if you liked Pavement it meant you were in on something good that everyone else didn’t get. They were a badge of hipness, a sign that you were in a select group who was truly in tune with what was good.

But now Stephen Malkmus is 51 years old. Pavement hasn’t made any new music in almost 20 years.⁸ And worse, nobody really cares about Pavement anymore. Ask a person under 30 today what they think of Pavement and they’ll probably give you a puzzled look. They no longer signify hipness the way they once did, nor do they even seem particularly relevant. Indeed, their detached irony and slacker stance seem out of place in our woke age of political activism.

No longer launching a thousand Weezers⁹ Stephen Malkmus is instead playing Prairie Home Companion. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Artists age and evolve, their audiences get older, and it makes sense NPR would want to attract a newer and younger fan base to one of their flagship shows, especially since the core of Garrison Keillor’s fans, let’s face it, are not long for this world. But I’m pretty sure the reason I’m so bothered by his appearance on that show is because of what is says about me.

Malkmus performing on Prairie Home Companion relays the same message I get when I try on an old pair of pants and they don’t fit anymore, or when I step on the basketball court and pull something within five minutes, or when my optometrist tells me I need progressive lenses. It’s just one more sign that my youth has passed me by.

Footnotes

^{1. The first middle-aged revelation I remember having occurred when I was in my late-20s. I know, being in your late 20s is far from middle age, but the experience nonetheless put me on notice that I was no longer young. I was coaching a high school cross country team and we were traveling to a meet in Athens, GA. I said to the team, “Hey, guys! You think Michael Stipe is gonna show up to the meet?” “Who?”↩}

^{2. 1994’s “Cut Your Hair”↩}

^{3. There was an episode of MTV’s Beavis and Butthead that aired during Pavement’s heyday where the two are watching the band’s 1995 video for “Rattled by the Rush.” (Sadly there’s no video of this on Youtube so I’m going by memory here.) While Pavement play their song, Beavis and Butthead start yelling at their tv, “Try! Try! Try!”↩}

^{4. In no way do I intend for this to come off as a slight to Bob Nastanovich. I’m not alone in thinking that Bob is the heart and soul of this band. His musical contributions to the band were limited to providing backup vocals and playing snare drum, maracas, tambourine, and seemingly any other random instrument he found lying around. But his role in the band was much bigger than this. He drove the van in the early years, did the band’s accounting, and designed the t-shirts5 they sold at their shows. Extremely personable, he was often the face-man for the group, performing interviews when others didn’t feel up to it. (See  this hilarious interview with MTV’s Lewis Largent from 1994.) But most of all he brought a comic energy to every show they did. I can’t imagine Pavement without Bob Nastanovich.↩}

^{5. Before Pavement the standard for rock shirts was black and the occasional white. Pavement bucked this trend by offering shirts in bright oranges and reds and blues. To my knowledge they were the first band to do this, and today such colors are common with rock shirts. I don’t think Pavement gets enough credit for this innovation.↩}

^{6. Of their five full-length releases, four received four star reviews or better from Rolling Stone upon release. The one that didn’t, “Wowee Zowee,” is predictably a fan favorite. Their albums “Slanted and Enchanted” and “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” appear on multiple lists of the best albums of all time.↩}

^{7. Perhaps no artifact demonstrates better Pavement’s inability to break through commercially than the video of their performance on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show in 1994. They had just scored an Alternative Rock Radio hit in “Cut Your Hair” and were slated to perform the song in their first performance ever in front of a national television audience. This was their chance to break through to a wider audience, to introduce themselves to music fans at home who may not yet have been aware of them. But instead of just playing the song, the Pavement boys played a bizarre 15-second intro that defies words. I seriously can’t do it justice by describing it. Just watch the video. It almost seems like they were trying to sabotage their career, and perhaps they did. There’s no telling how popular they would have become had they taken more traditional approaches to promoting themselves. But of course moves like this just made them more beloved by their hardcore fans. What a cool move to intentionally alienate your audience on national tv!↩}

^{8. Since Pavement’s breakup in 1999 Malkmus has released six albums with his band, The Jicks, and has a seventh coming out in May. Though not as groundbreaking or as good as the music he made with Pavement, Malkmus’s work with the Jicks has been consistently solid. He has softened his sound, easing into a comfortable middle age that eludes many other artists. I’ve spent an entire essay bemoaning the fact that Stephen Malkmus is old, but all things considered, he’s done a remarkable job of evolving with age. (See this performance of an acoustic set he recently performed for Pitchfork in Brooklyn.) There’s something depressing about seeing aging artists attempt to perform the same way they did when they were young. The Beastie Boys, in their last few years, and Madonna performing at the Super Bowl Halftime Show a few years ago, are two examples that come to mind. But Stephen Malkmus has so far avoided such embarrassments.↩}

^{9. In the liner notes to the 2002 reissue of their debut album, Slanted and Enchanted, Dan Koretsky, cofounder of the Drag City record label, described Pavement as “the band that launched a thousand Weezers (in addition to Weezer)”↩}