Pavement :: Gold Soundz
To: Stephen Malkmus and Pavement
From: David Perez
Re: Gold Soundz
Dear Stephen-
There is no reason I should like your band. There is no reason I should love this song.
Your songs are constantly on the border of collapse. Sometimes I feel like you’re playing on a tight rope. Sometimes I feel like you’re fucking with me.
And the noise…is unabashedly turbulent. So rocky, you have to negotiate with yourself whether you think it’s music. And it is. It is music. Maybe in its purest form.
The first thing that strikes me is that YOU DID THIS. You decided it was OK to be almost frustratingly vague in your lyrics. You decided it was ok to have a song like 5-4=Unity, weird and sundry in its style, almost a dim sum of idioms on the same record as Gold Soundz. Gold Soundz —sweet, and self-centered—almost abusive of its creators:
It has a nice ring when you laugh
At the low life opinions
And they’re coming to the chorus now…
Despite the nice brittle poetry in this sentence… the historical context is unavoidable. Your reputation as a difficult if not self-contained collaborator is evident, and almost vindicated by the acknowledgment. Then, you motherfucker/genius… you change the narrative:
So drunk in the august sun
And you’re the kind of girl I like
Because you’re empty and I’m empty
And you can never quarantine the past.
The song instantly becomes deceptively sentimental.
I have to have a long talk with myself. I have to ask some hard questions. Why do I love your band so much? Why do I love this song?
Maybe it’s because, somewhere in that quiet/selfish head of yours you trusted us, and didn’t assume how smart or willing we are to devour this music. You let us decide if music could exist in this weird collision.
Maybe one day we will run into each other in the supermarket. You’ll be buying yogurt for your kids, I will be buying limes or something. I’ll sputter awkwardly about seeing you at Pitchfork, and how I like Trigger Cut so much. You will probably feign modesty, and get awkward and want to leave. And you won’t know that I am grasping for a tomato. I’ll clench it in my hand, and decide in that moment whether I throw it at you, or just kiss you on the mouth.
Gold Soundz (3.7MB MP3)
Pavement (label site)
joshua said on friday, august 29th, 2008
hiram said on saturday, august 30th, 2008
Oh man, there’s so much to say about this song, but I think that you, Dave, have done such a wonderful job of summing up my feelings about my years of listening to Pavement that I’m not sure I can write much more. I will add that to me the song in it’s sunshiny goofiness seems incredibly sad. It’s almost as heartbreaking as “The Way Love Used to Be” by The Kinks. Or maybe it’s that I used to listen to it on the bus on headphones years ago while the same woman everyday would sit and talk to her self and I would imagine she was singing the song and I’d try not to make eye contact with her, but she was always staring at me telling me that I could never quarantine the past.
And Joshua, that’s a wonderful story, thanks for sharing it.
This record once saved Rob and Mark and I from hypothermia. In January 1995 or 1996, Rob and I drove Mark to Boston across the white Ontario plains in Mark’s Escort which featured neither heat, nor, we discovered, an entirely functional engine. But before the engine died, we listened to this tape over and over. And while the engine was dying, we turned the tape player off, somehow thinking it might help, and at the top of our lungs sang this record from start to finish, not missing a word and doing the instrumental parts with funny mouth sounds. And it kept us warm, and kept the sounds of the snowy night wind and the frail carburetor at bay. And when the engine finally gave out on some desperate lonely stretch of 401, we smoked a carton of duty-free Winstons and waited. This all happened before Nintendo or cell phones, but finally a Mountie arrived to radio a tow-truck, and Rob asked him if it’d be okay to pee on some Canadian underbrush.
You can never quarantine the past.