Books 23 FURTHER PROOF THAT rock critics, and not fans, are ...

FURTHER PROOF THAT rock critics, and not fans, are the ones who write history is the appearance of this book-length consideration of the greatest band to ever come out of Stockton, CA. While Pavement garnered an impressive amount of media attention during its decade of existence, sales of the band's six albums probably fall short of the totals of such 90s luminaries as Sponge, Seven Mary Three, Third Eye Blind and Sugar Ray. So why the interest in such a low-selling, albeit highly influential group, some five years after its demise?

Regrettably, this is a question that author Rob Jovanovic, a British music journalist, neglects entirely in his Pavement bio, Perfect Sound Forever. Jovanovic operates under the assumption that anyone reading his book will be in complete agreement with his assertion that Pavement was the second-greatest band of the 90s, after Nirvana. While this may or may not be the case, it is a puzzling assumption for an author to operate under.

Jovanovic does a solid job of retelling Pavement's story, dutifully following them from their inception as a Northern California duo recording in a garage studio, to indie-rock elder statesmen. Every recording session, European tour and tiff is accounted for. What's lacking is any appreciation of what made Pavement worth caring about.

The root of the problem is the book's implication, heavily backed up by interviews with the other band members and hangers-on, that lead singer and guitarist Stephen Malkmus was a petulant, passive-aggressive jerk, increasingly annoyed with the struggles of touring and the effort of playing with amateurish musicians. All this may be true, but it leads Jovanovic down the route of playing up the accomplishments of the rest of the band, and ignoring the centrality of Malkmus to Pavement's accomplishments. While the contributions of co-founder Scott Kannberg were essential, and Kannberg songs like "Passat Dream" and "Date with Ikea" are pleasant trifles, the large amount of attention given in the book to Kannberg's development as a songwriter is akin to publishing a Beatles book dedicated to Ringo's songs.

Much as I hate to admit it, perhaps the most astute statement ever made about Pavement was Courtney Love's assertion that Malkmus "is the Grace Kelly of rock." Much like Kelly, Malkmus, in his heyday, possessed an effortless poise and charm that was infectious. Pavement brought a silkiness to the brusque, gruff world of postpunk, smoothing out the angular, jagged tones of 80s heroes like the Fall, the Minutemen and Wire, creating a glorious noise that, in another, far better world, would have made them MTV darlings. As it actually was, Pavement managed a few minor hits, including "Cut Your Hair" from their 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, but stayed under the radar of the mainstream alternative-rock fan for their entire career.

The attraction that Pavement held for its fans was one of attitude; Spin magazine once astutely commented that Malkmus "played the guitar as if life was an elaborate practical joke, old chum, and he wouldn't miss it for the world." Malkmus was the spokesperson for Slacker Nation, obliquely referencing their love of snarky irony and fears of adult responsibility. His lyrics, fractured and disjointed, reflected his iconoclastic method of songwriting, in which narrative was nowhere to be found, replaced by a grab-bag of clever one-liners and puns. Lazy critics lumped Pavement in with other "slacker" bands like Superchunk and Swell Maps, but Malkmus owed more to the love of language for its own sake found in contemporary poets like John Ashbery. Rather than the rock god who made pronouncements from on high, Stephen Malkmus always seemed like the infinitely witty, charmingly affable friend we all wanted to have. What comes through thematically is Malkmus' overwhelming ambivalence—about the music industry, about his past and especially about relationships.

Brighten the Corners (1997), Pavement's last great album, is crammed full of pronouncements of hesitance about women and marriage. "Transport Is Arranged" features the lyric "I've been thinking for days/about the means and the ways/that I can hate all I touch/I know, you're my lady, but…" One cannot help but pity the poor girl Malkmus wrote all these anthems of ambivalence about. Later in the same song, Malkmus sings, "A voice coach taught me to sing/he couldn't teach me to love," a typically Malkmusian non sequitur, simultaneously funny, ridiculous, meaningless and drenched with significance. Similarly, "Fight This Generation," from Wowee Zowee (1995), was initially taken as a Generation X anthem, but on closer inspection the generation in question appears to be of a procreative nature.

It would be easy to go too far reading significance into Malkmus' lyrics. Primarily, they are the results of the gleeful game of linguistic pretzel-twisting played by someone who derives great pleasure from bending the English language into unusual shapes. Much like Television, another linchpin of the indie ethos, Pavement combined a fractured poeticism with glorious washes of guitar glamour. Unlike Television, whose guitarists Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd were acclaimed as axe gods, Malkmus never received the recognition he deserved as a guitar player. Much like his lyrical skill, much like his band, Malkmus' guitar was subtle, never showy.

Perfect Sound Forever is put together like a scrapbook, with the main text surrounded by handwritten scraps, posters and clippings from magazines. The design is particularly apropos for a Pavement book, with a DIY sensibility akin to an indie-rock four-track recording. One suspects, though, that part of the reason for the design was that there simply was not enough material to fill a full-length book otherwise. Jovanovic has done an admirable job of researching the band, and Pavement fans will be able to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of the band's history. To write a book about a musical group, though, and neglect to engage with their place in music history, their relationship to previous bands or the significance, whether musical, lyrical or otherwise, of their work, seems like nothing less than a dereliction of duty, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the responsibilities of the music critic. To paraphrase one of my favorite Malkmus lyrics, Jovanovic has only poured us half a book. o