Another breathtaking example of Stephen Malkmus's very important place in rock history. As leader of Pavement, the band that singlehandedly transformed the "alternative/college rock" era into the era of indie-rock and lo-fi slack, he had his finger on the slow pulse of rock music's ironic mellowing into meltdown art and commercial non-potential. "The Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" gives a highly important homage, a passing of torches of sorts, to their predecessors in the lineage of "alternative music," Athens, GA's own R.E.M.. Pavement were so alternative, they up and shattered and re-collaged a whole quasi-genre, with songs like this one, which appeared (folding irony onto itself to achieve a kind of earnestness which pure irony cannot seek to deliver) on the 1993 AIDS benefit compilation, "No Alternative." Ten years after "Chronic Town" changed a new wave landscape into an alternative vista, Pavement takes their indie-rock ancestors through a historiophilic tilt-a-whirl, comparing their impact on music history to General William Sherman's historic march through Georgia, to the Atlantic Ocean, at the time, nearly 130 years before.
Another breathtaking example of Stephen Malkmus's very important place in rock history. As leader of Pavement, the band that singlehandedly transformed the "alternative/college rock" era into the era of indie-rock and lo-fi slack, he had his finger on the slow pulse of rock music's ironic mellowing into meltdown art and commercial non-potential. "The Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" gives a highly important homage, a passing of torches of sorts, to their predecessors in the lineage of "alternative music," Athens, GA's own R.E.M.. Pavement were so alternative, they up and shattered and re-collaged a whole quasi-genre, with songs like this one, which appeared (folding irony onto itself to achieve a kind of earnestness which pure irony cannot seek to deliver) on the 1993 AIDS benefit compilation, "No Alternative." Ten years after "Chronic Town" changed a new wave landscape into an alternative vista, Pavement takes their indie-rock ancestors through a historiophilic tilt-a-whirl, comparing their impact on music history to General William Sherman's historic march through Georgia, to the Atlantic Ocean, at the time, nearly 130 years before.