A common misconception about critics is that we love writing negative reviews. In my experience, writing about a record I like is far superior to writing about a record I don’t like. Sure, if you happen to be a mean-spirited ass, you will relish trashing somebody’s art in print. (Admittedly I am a mean-spirited ass when it comes to the output of indie wimps like James Blake and How to Dress Well, who make R & B feel as sexy as a surgical glove dipped in mayonnaise. See? I truly enjoyed typing that!) But it feels a lot better to find something I genuinely love so I can attempt to explain why I love it to readers. Sharing my enthusiasm for great music (which will hopefully inspire readers to check out worthwhile art, theoretically enriching their lives in some small but not insignificant way) is the only socially redeemable aspect of my profession.
In 2014, I interviewed a singer-songwriter from Philadelphia named Timothy Showalter, who has recorded several albums under the name Strand of Oaks. The record we were talking about, Heal, was easily my favorite thing he had ever done. Heal was great because it was more musically dynamic than Showalter’s previous work (he had evolved from hushed folk to synth-accented arena rock), yet it wasn’t so different that the record was completely unrelated to what preceded it (he’s essentially an autobiographical songwriter, and Heal described his marital problems in startling detail). It’s the kind of record I always hope for as a professional appreciator of pop music in that it showed me how completely wrong I was about everything else in Showalter’s discography. I’m always excited when I’m proved wrong, and luckily it happens to me pretty often. I’m still waiting for the day when I hear “Cotton Eye Joe” in precisely the right context and realize that Rednex are fucking geniuses.
The most notable part of my conversation with Showalter was only tangentially related to Heal. On the record’s first track, there’s a line about Showalter singing in the mirror to Smashing Pumpkins songs back when he was a fifteen-year-old burnout growing up in Indiana. I immediately gravitated to this lyric, as it was describing something I had also experienced when I was a slightly older teenager living in Wisconsin. (Showalter told me later that his mirror-singing song of choice was “Muzzle,” whereas mine was probably “Hummer” or “Here Is No Why.”) I then explained that I was writing a book on musical rivalries and that one of the chapters was about the Smashing Pumpkins vs. Pavement. I said I had a theory that Billy Corgan’s overreaction to a lyric on Pavement’s Crooked Rain Crooked Rain was rooted in an inferiority complex common among Middle Americans such as Showalter and I and that this incident was really a metaphor for Corgan’s overall worldview and that it contributed to the rise and fall of the Smashing Pumpkins.
This run-on sentence made Showalter very excited. It turns out that he’d already had the exact same thought. I was merely the latest person to enter into a conversation with him about it.
“I think Smashing Pumpkins and Pavement is [the] beginning of what indie rock is now. There’s this, like, sarcasm and irony and these, like, arty fucking smart kids that I just want to punch in the face sometimes,” he said. “Like, ‘We don’t like to try’ or ‘Our guitars aren’t tuned.’ And then Billy Corgan went, ‘I want to change the world with this chorus’ and ‘My guitars will be in tune.’ He was like, ‘I just wrote the most beautiful melody that’s ever been recorded.’”
Just like that, Showalter and I bonded like a couple of Siamese dreamers.
I should probably outline the particulars of the Smashing Pumpkins–Pavement rivalry, just in case Showalter and I are the only people who have thought way too much about it. Actually there isn’t all that much to sketch out. Pavement was a highly celebrated indie band back when “highly celebrated indie band” wasn’t considered an oxymoron. In 1994, they released a song called “Range Life,” in which the band’s primary singer-songwriter, Stephen Malkmus, sings, “Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins / Nature kids, they don’t have no function / I don’t understand what they mean / And I could really give a fuck.” Because the Smashing Pumpkins were one of the era’s most popular rock bands, and because Pavement was already considered the decade’s coolest band, those twenty-seven words inspired much clucking in the rock press. The name Pavement immediately appeared in every Smashing Pumpkins magazine profile, even though many of the people who liked the Smashing Pumpkins probably couldn’t name a single Pavement song.
The “Range Life” diss was a gift for rock journalists—conflict is salacious, of course, but “Range Life” also conformed to a media narrative that had already been established for the Pumpkins (and Corgan specifically) since the beginning of their career. In spite of the group’s dominance of alt-rock radio and MTV, the Pumpkins were defined by criticisms lodged by semifamous hipsters (including Malkmus, Steve Albini, and Kim Gordon) who hated them. Every article about the band addressed the Pumpkins’ “credibility issues” and inherent lack of coolness. Corgan was constantly dressed down in print for being either a whiny drama queen or an arrogant egomaniac. It was as if music reporters went into their Smashing Pumpkins assignments assuming the band members were assholes and put it on Corgan to prove that they weren’t. Even if the Pumpkins successfully managed their PR problems for one writer, the scale would automatically be set back to “asshole” for the next writer.
The Smashing Pumpkins weren’t the only alt-rock juggernaut besmirched by “Range Life.” Malkmus arguably reserved his funniest put-down for Stone Temple Pilots, whom he classified as “elegant bachelors.” Now, STP obviously had their own credibility issues—the Pumpkins were hated, but at least they were taken seriously by most rock writers. STP was both reviled and regarded as a joke. This is a shame, because as any dirtbag metalhead with a soft spot for pop hooks could’ve told you, STP wrote some of the catchiest anthems of the grunge era. Nirvana and Pearl Jam set the template, but they didn’t craft singles as transcendent as “Interstate Love Song” and “Big Bang Baby.”
STP had the misfortune of rising to prominence during the snootiest era in rock history. In any other decade, STP’s ability to craft submental, gonad-rattling rock songs would have been better appreciated. But in a grunge context, STP’s arena-rockin’ ways stuck out like a hot-pink duster at a flannel convention. This didn’t prevent STP from selling millions of albums, but it did undermine their long-term sustainability.
Oddly, Malkmus suffered no significant repercussions for taking an unprovoked shot at two bands that were far more popular than Pavement. Normally, it’s the shit talker in these situations who gets lambasted, not the shit taker. Pavement’s only tangible (alleged) punishment was that Corgan supposedly kept Pavement off Lollapalooza that summer. (The Smashing Pumpkins were headlining.) But Pavement ended up on the bill the following year.
Malkmus ultimately benefited from a unique (and in this case fortuitous) dichotomy—he was a member of a band that was a major success critically and a minor success commercially. The media was both sympathetic to Malkmus’s cause and inclined to protect him against a more powerful adversary. It’s the same dynamic that protects trolls from getting called out by the celebrities they spend all day denouncing online. It’s expected that a celebrity should just take it because a troll isn’t worth the effort. Everyone believes that punching down makes the person in the “higher” position look stupid, even though the constructs of class and professional privilege aren’t supposed to matter online. Similarly, Corgan and Malkmus existed in the same context with critics even though they were on different planets commercially, and this situation made Corgan vulnerable.
Whenever Malkmus was asked years later about the Smashing Pumpkins, he tried to distance himself from “Range Life,” claiming that he never really insulted Corgan. “I only laughed about the band name, because it does sound kinda silly,” he told NY Rock in 1999. “And well, their status, that they were the indie darlings, the heroes of the indie scene. I never really dissed their music. I like their songs—well, most of their songs anyway.”
Three things about this quote stand out: (1) It’s impossible to tell exactly how much of it is sincere and how much is ironic, which means it’s practically a Pavement song; (2) Malkmus weirdly describes the Smashing Pumpkins (“the heroes of the indie scene”) in the way most people would describe Pavement; and (3) Malkmus saying “I didn’t diss the Smashing Pumpkins” is not as convincing as hearing him very clearly diss the Smashing Pumpkins in “Range Life.”
Corgan, for one, wasn’t convinced by Malkmus’s demurrals. Instead he internalized “Range Life,” along with every other slight he was forced to suffer from the indie-rock community. In 2010, sixteen years after “Range Life” was released, Pavement reunited for a nostalgia tour that included no plans for a new album. In response, Corgan wrote on Twitter that Pavement “represented the death of the alternative dream,” adding, “Funny how those who pointed the big finger of ‘sell out’ are the biggest offenders now.” Corgan seemed to be physically incapable of letting “Range Life” go; it was as if the song had been absorbed into his very physiological makeup.
“It’s easy to pick on the geek,” Corgan complained in a 2012 Stereogum interview. (Notice that he’s speaking in the present tense.) “My clothes are too tight, I’m always 10 pounds overweight, I’ve got crooked teeth, one of my eyes is bigger than the other one, I’ve got no hair, I sing with a funny voice.”
Corgan could’ve probably stopped there and made his point. But why would a man who once performed an eight-hour improvised jam inspired by Hermann Hesse’s 1922 masterwork, Siddhartha, choose this moment to show restraint? He continued:
“They didn’t pick on Kurt [Cobain] because they all wanted to be Kurt. They all wanted to be Beck, they all want to be Thom Yorke. Thom Yorke’s okay because he’s ‘the right look’ funny. I’m not ‘the right look’ funny, I’m 6'4", I’ve got my mother’s hips, people are like, ‘Who is this guy?’ I wouldn’t be up there if I weren’t talented, you know?”
Malkmus never called Corgan a sellout. He called the Smashing Pumpkins “nature kids” without any “function” whom he otherwise didn’t “give a fuck” about. As a critique it’s not all that personal or specific—it’s the sort of tossed-off remark that a snarky dude would make to crack up his buddies while watching cheesy alt-rock music videos, knowing that he’ll never have to support it with a cogent argument or actually face the guy he’s clowning. That’s basically the spirit in which “Range Life” was written. It speaks to what was so appealing about Pavement for the people who liked them. “Range Life” is just some funny shit that was made up more or less extemporaneously. It’s precisely the kind of impulsive artistic endeavor that’s anathema to an innately calculating artist such as Billy Corgan—a straight-up lazy “we don’t like to try” move, as Showalter put it to me on the phone. Corgan would rather write “the most beautiful melody that’s ever been recorded,” a goal I’m guessing Malkmus (along with most rational people) would find to be comically grandiose.
The paradox of stacking Pavement’s body of work against the Smashing Pumpkins’ body of work is that for all Corgan’s plotting and Malkmus’s flippancy, Malkmus is actually more consistent than Corgan. Even though I like Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness more than I like any Pavement album, the overall arc from Slanted and Enchanted to Terror Twilight accidentally achieves a perfection that Corgan could not will himself to reach on purpose. Slanted and Enchanted is a prototypical debut—it falls together with an unstudied amateurishness that somehow coalesces into incredible songs. Terror Twilight is a prototypical last record—it’s very clearly the work of a band that has reached the end of what it has to say. (Even the title predicts Pavement’s eventual breakup.) In between, you have the “let’s be popular” record (Crooked Rain Crooked Rain), the “let’s be less popular” record (Wowee Zowee), and the “let’s find a happy medium between the previous two records” record (Brighten the Corners).
The Smashing Pumpkins’ career path is less direct. The band’s 1991 debut, Gish, has some of the same debut qualities as Slanted, but it’s less singular as a statement, sounding in retrospect like a rough draft for the superior (as opposed to merely different) Siamese Dream. The last Smashing Pumpkins album with the original lineup, MACHINA/The Machines of God (and the accompanying free album, MACHINA II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music), was a stab at reviving the grandiosity of Mellon Collie in the wake of the commercial failure of 1998’s somewhat underrated (but hardly great) Adore. MACHINA has some incredible songs and some incredibly crappy songs, and in retrospect seems more like a failed reboot than a proper closing statement.
At the risk of reducing both men to regional caricatures, it more or less rings true that Malkmus personifies a casual confidence associated with California while Corgan embodies a gnawing insecurity that’s inherent to the Midwest. Malkmus’s artistic persona is the lack of a persona; he could be himself and attract admirers. In Pavement, the less he seemed like a rock star, the more he seemed like a fucking rock star. Corgan, however, had to invent a version of himself that people could believe actually belonged in a band. All rock stars who grow up in the Midwest do this—Bob Dylan, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Axl Rose might come from the same part of the country, but they all wound up in their own made-up solar systems. Corgan didn’t have the luxury of simply screwing around with a four-track until music writers showed up to fawn over him: the only way he was going to make it was by writing and recording songs that were undeniable. As the ’90s wore on, Pavement was allowed to mature naturally and remain tangibly human. Meanwhile Corgan just got loonier until he transformed into a pale, bald-headed Nosferatu around the time of Adore. (All significant midwestern pop stars inevitably devolve into freaks.) All the while, he kept working harder than anybody, even as the haters derided him for trying too hard to prove that he belonged.
Can you blame Billy Corgan for never getting over the bitterness of that? Can you blame the public for slowly backing away from him once he ran out of top-shelf material?
If I were to rank all the unlikable public figures whom I am ashamed to find relatable, Billy Corgan would be number 2. At number 1 is Richard Nixon. I blame Oliver Stone (number 3 on this list) for number 1.
Self-identifying as a “smart” kid in the late ’80s and early ’90s usually meant having an Oliver Stone phase. This seems curiously difficult for people who are concerned with retroactively “improving” their adolescent tastes to admit. But from the mid-’80s (when Ollie made Salvador and Platoon) to the mid-aughts (when his critical rep cratered with 2004’s Alexander), Oliver Stone was, to quote film historian Robert Kolker, a “more controversial, written about, admired, and despised figure than any filmmaker in recent memory.” For nearly two decades it was acceptably adult to view Oliver Stone as a seminal cultural figure. Even people who found Stone’s films reductive, self-important, obvious, or even incompetent still participated in the dialogue those films inspired. This registers as an obvious victory for Stone, who was frequently criticized for ham-fistedly inserting his political point of view into the most transformative historical events of modern times—Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election, 9/11. And yet Oliver Stone has left his mark on the way those events were subsequently discussed.
You could argue that a teenager watching Oliver Stone movies back when Oliver Stone movies were important was merely eager to be perceived as a grown-up, making this activity akin to sipping tea in a cafeteria full of soda drinkers. But when I rewatched Oliver Stone movies as an actual grown-up, I realized I was exactly the right age for JFK when it came out—during Christmas break when I was in the eighth grade. The ideal audience for an Oliver Stone movie has to be both cynical about the legitimacy of authority figures (a.k.a. “the system”) and naive about the way the world actually works (i.e., they need to believe that “the system” is a tangible entity and not an overused metaphor). JFK flatters viewers who blindly buy into their own fake expertise, and no demographic puts more value on unearned experience than teenagers.
This explains why I, as an eighteen-year-old high school senior, really wanted to see 1995’s Nixon—a 189-minute sort-of sequel to JFK—the weekend it opened in theaters. None of my friends were interested in seeing this film. I had to persuade my dad to go with me. But I’m pretty sure I loved it. After all, I was uniquely suited to enjoying an overlong meditation on a self-pitying, perpetually persecuted figure. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which had come out just two months earlier, had primed me for Nixon.
The most obvious similarity between Nixon and Mellon Collie is their extremely long running times. The original version of Mellon Collie clocks in at nearly 122 minutes. The vinyl version is just over 128 minutes. The expanded reissue edition balloons to an ungodly 351 minutes, which, by comparison, makes the 217-minute director’s cut of Nixon look like the most historically suspect Vine video ever made. But the most crucial parallel concerns the protagonists: Billy Corgan and Richard Nixon have essentially the same worldview, and it was shaped by a similar mix of insecurity, megalomania, talent, and an inability to discern legitimate grievances from paranoid delusions.
In his landmark 2008 book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, journalist and historian Rick Perlstein formulates the perfect metaphor to describe Nixon’s perspective and strategy for attaining political power. While a student at Whittier College, Nixon founded a social group called the Orthogonians for a “silent majority” of unexceptional students deemed unworthy of the school’s elite fraternity, the Franklins. Orthogonians, like Nixon, saw themselves as hardworking “regular” people fighting against a powerful elite (personified by the Franklins) for status and wealth. Perlstein convincingly argues that Nixon carried this dynamic over into his political career, which subsequently shaped the public discourse in ways that are apparent to this very day. Nixon understood better than anyone that Americans, no matter how well-off they are, can always find somebody to resent for the crime of appearing to be better taken care of than they are. (The Tea Party would not exist without Nixon.)
Stone explored the Orthogonian concept thirteen years earlier in Nixon, though he did it with a lot less nuance. The least debatable critique of Stone’s work (even for people, such as I, stubbornly inclined to defend it) is that his characters tend to plainly state Stone’s themes in the form of dialogue in lieu of allowing audiences to draw their own conclusions. This happens a lot in Nixon. “Why are these assholes turning on me?” Anthony Hopkins’s sweaty, swarthy, nearly hunchbacked Dick Nixon seethes when reporters grill him about Watergate at a press conference announcing the end of the Vietnam War. “Because they don’t like the way I look! Because they don’t like where I went to school!” (Once again, the press corps is biased in favor of the Thom Yorke look.) Later, Paul Sorvino, as Henry Kissinger, solemnly intones to no one in particular, “Can you imagine what this man would’ve been if he had ever been loved?” In an earlier montage, Stone simply has a mock news announcer declare that Nixon “didn’t have opponents, he had enemies” over a mix of newsreel footage and historical reenactments. The old journalism maxim “Show, don’t tell” is bullshit in Stone’s book.
At Nixon’s midpoint, there’s a preposterous scene in which Nixon leaves the White House in the middle of the night to visit the Lincoln Memorial, where he encounters a group of college students who challenge him about the war. The setup for the scene is based on a widely reported incident that caused some in Nixon’s camp to question his sanity, or at least his sobriety. According to Nixon’s own account as well as interviews with the students he spoke with, what was discussed that night wasn’t terribly consequential. Nixon was described as tired and disjointed in his thoughts—he wanted to talk about Syracuse football (the students were Orangemen) at least as much as he wanted to talk about Vietnam. The students, meanwhile, were understandably bewildered by Nixon’s presence and overall weirdness. Nixon’s most memorable quote from that night came during a tangent on the environment: “You must remember that something that is completely clean can also be completely sterile, without spirit.” Nixon was arguing that pollution was good for America’s personality.
In Nixon, the Lincoln Memorial anecdote is turned into another treatise on the powerlessness of Orthogonians in the midst of shadowy, all-controlling Franklins. Stone delivers his critique in the guise of a beautiful brunette coed who looks uncannily like Alyssa Milano. “You can’t stop it, can you?” she asks Hopkins-as-Nixon, referring to Vietnam. “Because it’s the system, and the system won’t let you stop it.”
There are plenty of smart people who would argue that Nixon could have indeed stopped the war much earlier than he did. Presenting Nixon’s persecution complex as evidence that he was a pawn of the Man not only indulges Nixon’s self-pity but absolves him of responsibility. Those inclined to attack Nixon on these grounds would argue that Orthogonian marginalization is largely, if not entirely, imagined.
I feel like the truth is somewhere in the middle. The fact is that Nixon has been stigmatized by history for reasons that seem to run deeper than the substance of his political record. He will never be regarded with the same affection afforded his most hated rival, John F. Kennedy, even though it’s commonly accepted that JFK’s campaign cheated its way to victory in the 1960 presidential election. JFK was smoother and more glamorous than Nixon, but he also grew up with far greater wealth and privilege. Kennedy could’ve slept through the first few decades of his life and still had the wherewithal to become a success; Nixon watched two of his brothers die before he finished college and had to scrape along for years just to survive.
That’s just the way life is. The class system exists. Some people get breaks, and some people don’t. However, it doesn’t explain everything in the world. A quirk of being human is the tendency to personalize whatever happens to us in our daily lives, as if these events are judgments on who we are as people. But they’re not. Sometimes, it’s just stuff that happens.
Oliver Stone started out as a Franklin (his father was a stockbroker, and he was accepted to Yale) but opted to become an Orthogonian (he dropped out of Yale to go to Vietnam and later became an antigovernment conspiracy theorist). Billy Corgan is unquestionably an Orthogonian, and Stephen Malkmus was his JFK. In case it’s not already apparent, I am an Orthogonian, too. I am loaded with middle-American resentment. Deep down, I suspect “they” don’t like me because of where I went to school. Or maybe it’s because I have my mother’s hips. Either way, when I see guys like Corgan and Nixon seethe, I seethe right along with them.
The key to understanding Billy Corgan is assuming that every public statement he makes is in some way rooted in his indignation over how he’s perceived by the media and “cool” musicians.
This is something that many of us who think Corgan is both brilliant and moronic know instinctively. When Showalter and I went on our Smashing Pumpkins tangent, he referenced Corgan’s appearance in the excellent documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. Specifically, Showalter singled out this Corgan quote from the film:
Every once in a while you have an artist that is very sophisticated, but somehow in their sophistication they don’t alienate the common person. They’re really a people’s band. The great hole in their career is that they’ve never been truly accepted by the intelligentsia.…What was it? They just don’t fit in a neat box.
Unbeknownst to Showalter, I had referenced this exact quote in a Grantland column on the Smashing Pumpkins’ surprisingly solid 2012 comeback record, Oceania. It’s not that Corgan’s observations about the way Rush had been perceived historically by rock’s media gatekeepers aren’t trenchant as they pertain strictly to Rush: besides the members of Rush, Corgan says the smartest things about why Rush matters in Beyond the Lighted Stage. It’s just that this statement is even truer as it relates to Corgan’s own career. Corgan’s greatest demon—the greatest demon for all Orthogonians—is craving the acceptance he is forced to loudly deny wanting because he secretly knows it will never arrive. You have to act like you quit in order to conceal that you were really fired. It always comes back to “Range Life” for Corgan.
This is why (I think) Billy Corgan blames Obama for his bad reviews.
Let’s back up for a second. In 2012, during the promotional cycle for Oceania, Corgan appeared on Infowars, a talk show hosted by paleoconservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In case you’re not a right-wing nut: Jones is perhaps our nation’s highest-profile “truther”—he believes the US government was behind both 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings. Normal people might know Jones as a rotund, crimson-faced rageoholic who is occasionally invited on mainstream talk shows to scream about gun control. But when Corgan appeared on Infowars, Jones was suddenly more effusive than Jimmy Fallon greeting the sixth lead on Modern Family, praising not just Corgan’s music but his ability as a “thinker.”
Now, if you’ve ever been in the company of rich, middle-aged white men who subsist on a steady diet of conservative talk radio and self-sustaining smugness, you can probably guess the sorts of “thoughts” that plopped out of Corgan’s mouth on Jones’s show. In short, Corgan talked a lot about the importance of “rigorous debate” in light of “corporate interests” who are “stifling dissent” because of “crony capitalism.” Jones, meanwhile, grunted approvingly as his own buzzwords were parroted back to him. At one point, Corgan claimed that he doesn’t watch television because too many shows depict a “castrated” version of the American male, an odd argument coming from an artist who originated in the antimacho alt-rock era. (When Corgan sang about how he “used to be a little boy” in “Disarm,” he was practically Sylvester Stallone’s antimatter.)
Corgan (of course) spoke at length about the way the media controls reality, referring (of course) to how his recent appearance on a South by Southwest seminar panel was spun into a “rant” by Rolling Stone’s website. “I’m very keen to watch how other people are demonized…when somebody rises up with a grand idea,” Corgan told Jones—an instance of one holder of grand ideas confiding in a fellow holder of grand ideas.
What’s most annoying about libertarians is their astonishing mix of bravado (Corgan constantly refers to himself as a “self-made person”) and sense of perpetual victimhood (Corgan also whines about being “attacked” online for questioning climate change, because he’s the only person ever to be criticized for expressing a stupid opinion on the Internet). Somehow, in the minds of megalomaniacal blowhards, these otherwise irreconcilable polarities achieve a weird, toxic harmony. For Corgan, the music industry might as well be the government, and being a climate-change denier is merely an extension of loving Permanent Waves in high school when all the preppy kids preferred Rick Springfield.
This is what Billy Corgan has become, and it’s the primary reason he—in spite of those old Smashing Pumpkins hits still dominating the dramatically reduced rock-radio landscape—is not held in the high esteem that his talents and body of work would normally justify. It’s not the system, it’s him. His insecurity over cool people believing that he’s awful has made him awful.
And what of Stephen Malkmus—the actual Stephen Malkmus, as opposed to whatever “Stephen Malkmus” might signify in Corgan’s mind? Corgan might be surprised by how much they share in middle age. Like Corgan, Malkmus split from his band in 2000; in a Corganesque gesture, Malkmus held up a pair of handcuffs at Pavement’s last show and declared, This is what it’s like to be in a rock group.
In the years after Pavement’s breakup, the group’s albums continue to hold up for many of us who liked them in the ’90s. But for the rest of the world, Pavement’s influence has shrunk, not grown. Shambolic guitar rock is now regarded as passé in indie circles; it’s sort of incredible how much Pavement sounds like a jam band in retrospect. (Grimes would probably never cover “Gold Soundz,” but Phish did.) Malkmus continues to tour small clubs and put out likable, guitar solo–heavy records with his current band, the Jicks. In magazine articles, meanwhile, he seems to talk exclusively about fantasy sports and rock documentaries. In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield, Malkmus even demonstrated a working knowledge of Rush’s catalog.
“I just listened to Fly by Night the other day—you know Side One? It really holds up,” he said. “It gives you this rush, no pun intended, where you air-drum to it and it just makes you feel invigorated. Then on Side Two there’s a horrible slow one about going to California like Led Zeppelin, and it just falls dead, like the dead owl on the album cover.”
I like to imagine that in some far-off dimension, Billy Corgan and Stephen Malkmus are just two middle-aged white guys with an opinion about Fly by Night, showing the rest of us Orthogonians that the Franklins aren’t so different after all.