Fight This Generation: Pavement’s Wowee Zowee Turns 30

IIRC, there’s a meme that goes approximately, “actually the band’s best album is their fifth-worst.”

This (top-tier, accurate, scathing) joke exists at least in part because of the contingent of Pavement fans who took up Wowee Zowee’s cause in the three decades since my Facebook pal Mark Kemp gave it a two-and-a-half star rating in Rolling Stone. Every generation they grow stronger, or should I say we — like many in the Kemp camp it took me a very long time to connect with the 1995 effort that reestablished these oddballs’ bona fides beyond obvious standouts like “Grounded” and the ending is a predictable one. It’s now the Pavement album I listen to most, by far.

So how did we all get there? I guess I have to drop theories now, the sort of thing that probably made the band members howl with troll-devious laughter at the time and they’ve presumably just watched with bewilderment ever since, including and up to the Alex Ross Perry flick Pavements that gets some kind of limited wide release on actual big screens this year. Stephen Malkmus is an unabashed intellectual and I think Pavement took to the “slacker” label about as well as Texas Is the Reason did being called emo. But he’s also smart enough to understand that his now-legendary band’s famous offhandedness, his free-associative lyrics, and singing that recklessly cannonballed into the pool of pitch on every song all made for a fascinating spectacle for their devotees to cosplay.

That is, they played right into critics’ favorite archetype from Daniel Johnston to Young Thug: the geniuses who don’t know what they’re doing. (Or do they!) On the best-album-is-their-fifth-worst front we have exhibit A from Robert Christgau’s review of Beck’s Mellow Gold: “Proving how cool you are by making an album that sounds like shit is easy. Proving how cool you are by making an album that comes this close to sounding like shit is damn hard — unless you’re damn talented.” 

Let’s depart from Wowee Zowee’s place in the canon for a moment to discuss its more inarguable distinctions. The ramshackle batch of songs pulled some impressive sleight of hand by taking notice away from the fact it featured (easily) the band’s highest production values up to that point. It was Pavement’s longest album at just under an hour, making it easier to get lost in the crevices than, say, “Stop Breathin” of the previous Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, a decent song I’ve always felt distracts from the momentum a bit at track three of the minor MTV invader. 

Between its esoteric material and numerous inclusions, Wowee Zowee has more hiding places by definition, the sinew your brain just won’t notice until it’s registered the more muscular parts. At Malkmus’ behest, they lobbed all the prospective b-sides and ephemera onto the same wavelength as (haha) potential hits, giving them equal weight in the chain. So lastly, it’s the only Pavement album whose sequencing was completely up to him, and I think Spiral Stairs never really got over that; third albums tend to be where cracks start to show in bands’ power dynamics. Experimental ones definitely are.

Like Prince’s Sign “☮︎” the Times of all things, the power of Wowee Zowee isn’t necessarily in the unimaginable luck of showcasing 16-18 of its auteur’s best-ever compositions but the mastery of the auteurship itself: the range, the boldness, the internal logic, the balls. But while the Prince actually featured some of his best-ever compositions for the wilder moments to fall back on, excavating the highlights of Wowee Zowee gets harder as it comes into view as a worthy totality.

I can point to the swaggering “Rattled by the Rush” and plaintive “Grounded” as pieces that clicked for me “first,” but now do I think they’re “better” than the vicious In Utero riffs of “Flux=Rad,” or the penultimate blues-psych freakout climax “Half a Canyon?” Is the covertly anthemic Kannberg highlight “Kennel District” (“why didn’t I ask”) catchier than Malkmus’ jabberjaw “Best Friend’s Arm” (“I can see I can see I can see I can see”) or the covertly classic-Pavement “AT&T” (“whatever whatever whatever whatever”)? Can an album really be that great if I have this much trouble naming its best songs?

If anything, Wowee Zowee makes an incredibly strong case for the album-as-album via the socialist utopia Malkmus posited by unionizing the b-sides against the “hits.” By giving all 18 of these misfit tunes equal weight and time for their case to be heard, the easy picks do in fact coalesce into less of what we typically call “standouts” and all kind of skate-ramp off each other into more exciting thrills. I don’t know where “Best Friend’s Arm” and “AT&T” would be without the lounge dip “Grave Architecture” connecting them, and I don’t want to.

 

VIDEO: Pavement “Rattled by the Rush”

And you have to love the deep conviction behind the backwards logic of the bookending tracks, opening feint “We Dance” coming off like the most somber epic they ever proposed before Malkmus keynotes Wowee Zowee with “there is no castration fear” and saving the closing slot for swinging blooze throwaway “Western Homes” complete with treated vocal and laser-synth zaps. Every classic band has a magnum opus-feeling thing that usually explores genre a bit, from London Calling to the White Album. This isn’t that, but it has the feel. It’s also talked about like it subtly tanked their superstar chances after “Cut Your Hair” and “Gold Soundz” made it to 120 Minutes but I don’t think anyone seriously felt that even in 1995. Pavement weren’t self-saboteurs; they just did what they wanted. Stone Temple Pilots were elegant bachelors by comparison.

Ultimately, the bands whose entire catalogues stick with you have a strong foundation. Lots of them flame out after one big record because when they finally found the ingredients and the juice to go for it completely, they didn’t know what to do next. Pavement didn’t necessarily know what they were doing either, but like their peers Sonic Youth, they burrowed deeper into their own sound and impulses, and amassed a discography with plenty to love instantly (Daydream Nation, Slanted and Enchanted) and plenty to dig through when you’re ready (A Thousand Leaves). Pavement’s fifth-worst album is in fact their best — they only made five albums.