Anti-Climacus

(I know it's a weird video. It was the 90s. Try not to pay attention.)

I'm not sure at what point I realized that the 90s, for my friends, had taken on the approximate stature of the 80s in the people we used to mock. It most likely happened in the spring of 2009, when weekend evenings (and some others besides) would inevitably end with a group of us consuming a moderate amount of alcoholic beverages and singing along to the untold treasures of one friend's 90s playlist. Or else the evening spent at the bar with a friend from my PhD program in which we imagined having a all-90s party, the conversation concerning which entailed three hours of progressively obscure references.* Certainly no later than the trip to Williamsburg, VA with two friends, which included listening to Jewel's Pieces of You in its entirety. Our vague recollection of having liked it was discovered to be unfounded--it falls off quickly after the singles, and most of the singles are not that good.

"Gold Soundz" is the ur-90s nostalgia song, of the sort that remembers the first verse wistfully halfway through the third, so I have no problem with Pitchfork naming it the #1 song of the 90s. The 'z' at the end of the title is either 90s cool, an ironic invocation of 90s cool, or a serious, sentimental reappropriation of 90s cool, all happening in 1994. Its first words are 'go back,' and as any Straussian can tell you, the first words are important (as is the lovably post-modern end of the final verse, which draws attention to the intentional choice of 'wait' as the last word).

The Pavement aesthetic, such as it was, was decisively southern Californian: music may be pretty but if so must also be lazy; music may be loud and obnoxious but if so must also be silly. Either these combinations will appeal or they won't. You also can't care very much about vocal quality: Stephen Malkmus got better as the band went along, but his voice was always harsh and he had trouble sustaining notes. Also, this is a band that had a member who went as Spiral Stairs (best weird band-member name since Bez). It's not for everyone.

I find the first two verses to be almost disposable: the excellent part of the song begins with the bridge, where the jangly implications of the song up to that point are realized; it's unusual and quite interesting for a song to gather intensity without a guitar solo or an intentional change in dynamics. And then that last verse:

So drunk in the August sun
And you're the kind of girl I like
'Cause you're empty, and I'm empty
And you can never quarantine the past

Constructs a little universe out of particulars, and, like the video for Smashing Pumpkins "1979," probably only means something to you if you can associate it with a particular memory.


*Yes, that's pretty underground come to life.