The night before the New York premiere of Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s prismatic, inventive, maddeningly clever documentary about the poster children for success-shy ’90s indie rock, the band themselves assembled in Midtown Manhattan for a “one-off” concert. Was it their final show before retirement? They did not officially say so, and also they have retired several times before, but you never know.
I stood in the back of Sony Hall, a subterranean club on 46th Street, watching the band play a set that started with a run of sludgy, punky early songs, each of them two minutes of chaos and noise. In the middle of maybe the fourth song, I felt a tap on my left shoulder and felt hot breath on my left ear. A guy in my exact demographic (white, 49-ish, Pavement fan) was saying something to to me, but between Stephen Malkmus’ squalling guitar and my earplugs, I couldn’t make out a word. When I took a plug out and leaned toward him he waved me off—“No, no,” I saw him mouth.
When the song ended, he yelled into my ear again. “I think they’re playing ’em in chronological order!” he shouted.
“What do you mean?” I hollered.
“I don’t know how much you know about Pavement,” he continued, and I realized that, naturally, I was in a room absolutely packed with Pavement fans.
Pavements includes a truly remarkable number of elements relating to the band Pavement—archival concert footage, fly-on-the-wall scenes of the band rehearsing, awkward interviews on MTV’s 120 Minutes, exhibits both real and fake from a Pavement pop-up museum, comically overdramatic biopic scenes with actors playing the band, songs from a Pavement jukebox musical staged in 2022, a close-up photo of Steven Malkmus’ uvula—but oddly it does not include that many Pavement fans. We see some of them in the crowd at concerts, singing along and, in one case, weeping. A few of the actors in the fake Pavement stories (Jason Schwartzman, for example, who plays a Matador Records executive) tell the camera what the band means to them.
But what about the real Pavement fans—you know the ones. The movie’s only acknowledgment of the cultural footprint the Pavement fan has made, at least as far as many non-Pavement fans are concerned, is the great gag from Barbie when one of the Kens Kensplains Pavement to the Barbies. We then see the band meeting Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, who look delighted to meet the subjects of their joke, though everyone sort of elides the fact that the true butt of the joke is the Pavement fans who can be insufferable about the band they love.
I possess nowhere near the level of knowledge of the fans who recognized, say, “Easily Fooled,” a song they last played live in 1997. But I have definitely spent plenty of time over the past few decades being insufferable about the band I love. Pavement was always so smart, so arcane, and so dedicated to pursuing their own idiosyncratic purpose that to love them was to commit to knowing about minutiae. It was to declare that you cared deeply about a band whose shtick was always that they didn’t care enough, or at the very least didn’t care about the stupid crap everyone else cared about.
Though Pavements doesn’t really portray Pavement fans, it does cater to them. Unlike many music documentaries, the film seems unlikely to transform any casually interested viewer into a hardcore fan. The casually interested will, I’d guess, be utterly bewildered by Pavements, which assumes a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the band’s shambolic history—and also a bone-deep understanding of the mix of pride, ironic detachment, ambition, and disdain the band brought to its every action, all of which the movie innovatively re-creates.
Through the concert, the Pavement fan behind me kept a running patter going to everyone around him, leaning over to every neighbor’s ear to deliver critiques, observations, conspiracy theories, and inarguable truths. (After the band played a particularly obscure song, he said, fervently, “That’s Pavement, right there.”) I spent much of the concert with a hand casually covering my left ear, hoping to ward him off. It was heartening to observe that none of the other Pavement fans, faced with this funhouse-mirror version of themselves, wanted anything to do with him. It also made me a little sad. What if this was truly the last time someone would talk to me about Pavement at a Pavement show?
The concert, like the film, was a gift to dedicated fans, the kind of show that two different people immediately referred to as an “Eras”-style experience—moving mostly chronologically, yes, and full of deep cuts. After the band played its unlikely streaming-era hit, “Harness Your Hopes,” Malkmus took off his guitar and announced, cheerfully, “That’s the end of our career!” After he walked offstage, guitarist Scott Kannberg stayed for a moment, enjoying the cheers. Then he leaned toward the microphone and said, confidingly, “If you keep cheering, we’ll come back and play some more.”
