Love Songs: “You Don’t Know What Love Is”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

There was a woman who was always explaining to me the structures of the world, of desire, of experience. Her analysis was brilliant. I have never met somebody so sure of the way things work. Between us, they didn’t. In the end, I learned, form was a problem. Well placed constraints can excite; they can also kill. Either way they tend to leave marks. A studied silence, breezy banter—these are not so convincing if she can take you in at a glance and see where you are still mottled from the pressure of her touch. But it is easy to adopt the position of the wounded lover. If you know what love is, like Nina Simone sings it, then you know that you, too, can leave, must have left, someone with lips that can only taste tears.

Nina Simone was not the first to sing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and her version is not the most famous. That honor probably belongs to Dinah Washington, with her bright and clear voice, or maybe Chet Baker, about whom I have little to say. Billie Holiday’s take, with her enchanting, off-kilter warble is also probably better known. But Simone’s is something else entirely. Hers was released much later on a collection of rare recordings. It is live, noisy, and the background hum nearly merges with the brushes sliding along the snare drum. That and the crowd’s murmurs lend the track a warmth that all the other versions lack. It speaks, in spite of itself, to love’s inexplicable optimism.

At the very beginning, Simone sings, “You don’t know what love is till you’ve learned the meaning of the blues.” That third word, know, hangs for nearly three seconds. She never loses control of her voice, but she makes the word tremble as does a heart, a hand, a jaw fixing itself in preparation for sentences that cannot be retracted. She performs the standard as a lament sung at the precise moment that mourning’s fog has begun to lift. It is not a warning meant to dissuade young lovers. The blues aren’t miserable; they’re knowing. Simone’s spare rendition comes with the wisdom of experience, of understanding that if love is faith, favor, desire, support, and—when it can be afforded—indulgence and forgiveness, then all of these add up. When it turns, you lose so much: a body to hold yours, eyes that blink too fast in pleasure, a voice that drops too low to even hear it, the rippling sensation that settles somewhere just below the chest. All of the things that accumulate in the miracle of that face besides yours in the morning. It is the loss of such a gift that makes clear what it’s worth.

What makes Simone’s song hopeful rather than bitter is the sly implication that she is not actually singing to a novice. “How could you know how lips hurt,” she asks, “till you’ve kissed and had to pay the cost?” But how many listeners don’t know the price, don’t know “how a lost heart fears the thought of reminiscing”? Love is premeditated grief. That makes it no less enticing.  When she sings “lips that taste of tears … lose their taste for kissing,” it sounds to me like she is someone who knows the taste will return. “You Don’t Know What Love Is” is for when love has lost the sheen of the most saccharine romances and yet maintains sufficient force to upend a life. It is for all those loves that come after heartbreak. Perhaps they are not as clean, but they may be stronger.

What is remarkable is that there are no recriminations across the song’s   five minutes. It turns out it is not the guilt or moral superiority that is universal, but the hurt. “No, you’ll never know,” she finishes off, “what love is.” Then the audience applauds. Someone in the room stamps their foot or pounds on a table. That feels appropriate to me. Words work for some, but others must reach out for something sturdy. Often one slides between these modes. Bliss makes me bristle. Or at least it imparts a similar sensation: the charge in the air has already shifted. I wish it weren’t so. It is too easy to approach love with hunched shoulders. It is too easy to cast a cool eye on simple odes. It is too easy to resort to name-calling, to look askance at the emotion with all its demanding and needing and call it naive. But I think the truest way to speak of love is from just past its bitter end, when you can see what a kiss costs and know you will pay again.

 

Blair McClendon is a filmmaker, editor and writer. He lives in New York.

Love Songs: “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

I think the best love songs are simple. They’re simple because love isn’t, simple because we need to dream a little. Complexity, ambiguity, doubt—they can have their place in novels or in the movies. A love song lets you live in the fantasy of the absolute; maybe that’s also why they last only a couple of minutes. And that’s why we carry them with us, play and replay them until they wear out like old clothes. They stand for too much.

I have many songs that mark the time of particular relationships, both their highs and the lows of their dissolution. I’ve played songs on repeat enough to drive people crazy, and I’ve locked myself in my room to listen to late-period Billie Holiday with the lights off. But I have only one renewable love song, which I’ve brought with me through all my relationships: the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” That’s probably because, although it pains me slightly to say this, it began for me as a family romance. When my parents were young and childless and living in Seattle, they saw a sign for the movie Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film, at a theater near the Pike Place Market. I don’t think my parents were particularly interested in the hip music of the eighties—they just liked the name of the movie. They bought tickets on a whim and went inside.

So the cassette-tape soundtrack of Stop Making Sense was a sonic canvas of my childhood. But it wasn’t until I saw the movie for myself, in high school—watching it with a girl, making feeble couch-based sexual advances—that I was reawakened to the song. It’s unusual for the Heads, who are better known for blending angular, art-school/CBGB cool with African polyrhythm borrowings. The song is very straightforward. Sentimental, even. But a great love song should be sentimental. Why wouldn’t you try to feel everything you possibly can? The groove begins straightaway—simple drums, the bounce of the bassline, some light synth stabs. A perfect little loop. After a couple of repeats, a bubbling riff kicks in, with a soft, pipelike quality to its pitch-shifting. It reminds me of a calliope, although I’ve never listened to one in real life—it’s children’s music from some other, unlived existence: “Love me till my heart stops / love me till I’m dead.”

That’s the naive part, and isn’t accessing innocence without curdling one of the most difficult things art can do? In the movie, David Byrne is the avatar of unrepressed feelings: gesticulating, shaking, yelping, and squawking. As he says in a promotional interview for the film, wearing his now-famous big gray suit, the body gets bigger so the head can get smaller. In the film’s performance of “Naive Melody,” he performs a pas de deux with a floor lamp, elegant and absurd and melancholy-ordinary. Still, despite the naivete, there’s something sophisticated about the rest of the title, that “this” must (emphatically) be the place. Where is “this”? It’s anywhere we point to, anywhere we call home. We try it out and see if it works. There’s something beautiful and agonizing about recognizing love as a placeholder, a space we’re always trying to fill. Every day we have to conduct the experiment of calling that love our own. You could be anyone. You could be mine.

 

David Schurman Wallace is a writer living in New York City. He is an advisory editor of the Review.

Love Songs: “She Will Be Loved”?

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Of all the things I didn’t know when I was thirteen, two pained me the most: music and romance. I had no instrument, no boyfriend, no way of predicting, when I dared to accompany  the radio in the car, if my note would match that note. Girls who could sing, I observed, had hookups and breakups, and, even better, the whispered hallway dramas that led from one to the other. I made certain inferences. And yet I didn’t see how to, well, join the chorus. A good ear is innate, isn’t it? You can unwrap a hundred Starbursts with your tongue and still know nothing of kissing. So I kept my crushes to myself. I stopped singing in the shower.

But ignorance is good for desire. I don’t doubt the subtle pleasures of connoisseurship, but can it compare to the transcendence of a teenager, luxuriating in her loneliness, who detects in the generic bridge of a Maroon 5 song a message for her alone? To the brief and sacred innocence in which I really, truly took it to heart: “She Will Be Loved”? Hard not to cringe for her, except that I envy her, too.

The lucky truth is that I still don’t know much. Not for lack of trying. My first real boyfriend had thousands of lyrics in his head. He made me playlists, as boyfriends often do. The Velvet Underground, A$AP Rocky, Tom Waits. Yo La Tengo. Later, I dated a drummer and learned (kind of) about jazz and samba, about Milford Graves, who transcribed heartbeats into music notation. An education of sorts, but who, in the end, wants to be schooled by love? These days, I play the Top 40 wherever I go. I turn up the volume. In the seat beside me, the person I love says, I thought you hated this song. And maybe I did! Every now and then, I sing, though not because I’ve conquered any fears or learned any lessons. Mostly, I still just listen.

 

Clare Sestanovich is the author of the story collection Objects of Desire.

Love Songs: “Aguacero”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

The first time I felt tropical rain was an erotic revelation: I was nine, visiting family in Puerto Rico on a Carnival cruise. At home in California, rain was cold feet and flooded freeways. But on the island, rain came fast and hot, soaked through my cotton dress, then—sliced by sun—revealed a rainbow. Aguacero. The revelation was erotic not only for my body (the sound, the feel) but also for my mind: now I knew that something bad could also be good—depending on temperature, timing, timbre. My friend Luis Alba calls tropical rain “the secret rhythm beneath all our music”—the windy scraping of the guiro, the shifting pebbles of the shekere—but Bad Bunny’s “Aguacero” begins with ten seconds of literal downpour. Then, the fuckboy’s serenade: me tienes el bicho ansioso.

“Aguacero” is not a proper love song. It’s reggaeton lite (smooth production, raunchy lyrics), one of the more predictable tracks on Bad Bunny’s latest blockbuster. But I can’t lie about what’s on repeat—in the kitchen, on the beach, on the ride home from his place. As with love songs, so with love: we don’t always desire what we deserve. For a long while—longer than we said we would—I had a lover who was in the middle of a messy divorce. He wouldn’t have me for real, and I wasn’t even sure that’s what I wanted. But I was sick, I was tired, I hadn’t fucked with feeling for several years. So I went ahead in the rain. Si el calor es de noventa, el aguacero es de cien. The chorus was both invitation and warning: if the heat’s at ninety, the downpour’s a hundred. This wetness won’t make you less thirsty. 

“Aguacero” wants to keep things light—baby dale easy, easy, sabes que soy piscis—with a languid dembow barely fast enough for dancing. But this restraint only intensifies the song’s sensuality, soliciting a slow grind your body might remember from “Cool Down the Pace” by Gregory Isaacs or “Rock the Boat” by Aaliyah. Bad Bunny comes so close to the mic you can feel the spray of s’s in your ear—now he’s Benito. The lyrics, meanwhile, vacillate between ostentatious detachment (don’t worry, I won’t say I love you) and ardent romantic roleplay (when you want it, I’m your husband). The anxiety confessed in the first line returns to trouble the lovers: she needs a doctorate in psychology to understand his intentions, she’s got him desquiciado, scrolling through archived messages. Still, he insists on a fundamental equality of purpose between them that I recognize from conversations with my lover—yo soy un cuero, y tú también—as if the intense mutuality of sexual desire could serve as a solvent for whatever inequalities emerge down the line. The terms of their arrangement remain unclear, and he seems to like it like that: if they ask, say we’re distant cousins. My lover was also reluctant to name in public what we couldn’t even name in private; we never found the right line.

It’s possible to eroticize almost anything, and the quip about distant cousins makes me wince then smile, admitting how I did feel a queer kind of kinship with my lover: we were both children of short-lived cross-cultural relationships between bohemians, trying to invent sustainable forms of intimacy from the ruins of the nuclear family. Like Puerto Rico, New York is an island: there’s nowhere to hide from the connections that bring us together even once we’ve turned away. There’s tenderness there, if you’re willing to taste it. Yo soy un cuero, y tú también, the men sing, and we dance—but do we all understand the desire that sustains the exchange the same way? The words feel impoverished to me; they do not seem to honor the rich mystery of the mornings he would wake early to touch me in the sun, like I wanted. They’re drowned out by the steady pulse of precipitation that saturates the song. In “Aguacero,” there’s a certain tension between words and music, communication and sensation, as if what transpires between bodies encodes a reality that runs counter to our stated expectations—that exceeds them. 

Or was the song making things worse, naturalizing arrangements that I struggled to sustain in my everyday life? Was it only, as my mother often warns, perpetuating a patriarchal program that objectifies women, evades emotional responsibility, and ultimately blames us for our confused complicity? Quédate en cuatro, que se ve precioso. I was reading Annie Ernaux, Gillian Rose, Luisa Capetillo, and Simone White, eager to interrogate my heterosexual pleasures but reluctant to relinquish them completely. I texted my lover a passage from Simone White: “dancing is not an endorsement of violence but of course it is /// … when dancing i do feel spread out / i feel helpless and resent the sense that separating myself from feelings of love and enjoyment for the sake of so-called liberation is fucking us all up.” At night I would dance alone in my bedroom and post the videos to my Instagram stories, and if I swiped up—the app had a new feature designed to profit from feminine torment—you could see who’d watched them. I tried not to use it, but I couldn’t forget it was there.

When we said goodbye, finally—it was too cold to stand on the street for the time it should have taken—he told me he’d wanted an escape and he thought that was okay. Now he was going home to someone else. In the moment, still bewildered by desire, I lost my will to litigate. But later, back in Puerto Rico, I wondered over the resonance between that word—escape—and the touristic desires that develop our shorelines, uproot our mangroves, and slowly turn predictable seasonal storms into unnatural disasters. I know I’m being dramatic, letting my metaphorical imagination run wild. But no person or place can be an escape: escape is just the rhythm of the one who’s running.

Last night, walking down to the beach in Luquillo, I saw two men with shovels at the mouth of the river that feeds into the sea—or should, because just then it was choked by sand, so the river was rising and flooding their homes. They were trying to dig out the channel, to restore the flow. Their project seemed impossible to me, especially at such a late hour—and wouldn’t the force of the tides always be stronger than the force of the current? But the next morning, I saw they’d opened the channel into a wide delta, and I realized how many times they must have come down to do this work by hand. They had already committed to finding a form that might accommodate the downpour, that might mitigate—if not eliminate—the damage of the deluge.

 

Carina del Valle Schorske is a literary translator and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead.

Love Songs: “I Want to Be Your Man”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

I liked spending evenings in my friend Zack’s living room when I moved to Los Angeles. I would make the short drive down Sunset in the dark and park in the lot behind a ceviche stand, then climb a flight of stairs to his apartment and set up on the couch. Zack produces music for rappers and vocalists, mostly Angelenos like him, and his living room was a deconstructed studio, with sequencers and MIDI samplers occupying his coffee table and clusters of new speakers mushrooming every few weeks, filling vacant corners. This was in the fall of 2020; when we would hang out, he would show me the dregs of his midday Ableton foolings, scraps of beats that mostly never coalesced into songs. I think Zack and I became friends years earlier largely because we snagged on musical details similarly. He knew I liked to hear the drafts. 

These flotsam sessions would fade into trading favorite songs, newly discovered or resurrected for driving playlists. One night, Zack showed me “I Want to Be Your Man” by the late Roger Troutman, the star boy of the electro-funk family band Zapp that emerged in the late seventies. Roger and his brothers—he was the fourth of nine, growing up in Hamilton, Ohio—set themselves apart by using the talk box, a device both futuristic and analog in its time. A talk box delivers sound from a source, like an electric guitar or a synth, into a player’s mouth through a plastic tube. The player, clenching the tube with their teeth, shapes the sound by mouthing lyrics, and it is then picked up by a microphone. The result is a tinny, soulful kind of proto-vocoder tone produced by a musician who looks like they’re siphoning gas. Roger built his first talk box with the tubing from a meat freezer in his family’s garage; the “Electric Country Preacher,” as he called the tool, defines the relaxed but fevery ballad that he wrote in 1987. Roger’s bare tenor croons the verses of “I Want to Be Your Man” over bouncy bass, declaring his love for a woman who may or may not want him back. His talk box’d voice careens in for the chorus, pleading the titular phrase four times in a row. I would leave Zack’s and drive back to my house, yanking the emergency brake to park on a steep incline while Roger descended the scale sappily through the aux: “My mind is blind at times I can’t see anyone but you / Those other girls don’t matter, no, they can’t spoil my view / I must make you understand, I want to be your man.” 

I had gone to LA in the wake of a breakup, the end of a long relationship with the first, and still the only, person I’ve been in love with. This love was not so much the pining kind that Roger feels in the track, but one that materialized between us in the dark, or wholly outside of demarcated time, like a warped fact in a dream. I knew how to love only him and often thought that would be the case until I died. We finally came to terms with the fact that we wanted radically different lives and that we had each failed to persuade the other. We doctored a rental car contract so he could drive back across the border to Canada, and I increased the distance between us by moving further west. I felt a numb relief that muffled my sorrow.

Being alone is sometimes easier than imagining feelings of that magnitude again. How dramatically I had been shaped by that person—an experience I worried would make me somehow unable to accommodate future attachments. There is something about Roger’s syrupy song of desire that has helped me understand this idea to be cowardly and false as time passes, though. “I Want to Be Your Man” revels in the pleasure of wanting someone and wanting to be changed by them, as well as in the unavoidably destabilizing effects of falling in love. Vision blurs and communication fails—“I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried to tell you how I feel, but I get mixed up.” (“Sooooooo mixed uuuuuuupp.”) These chaotic pursuits are still generative in the world of the song, in which a plastic tube can let a man possess the soul of an electric instrument and let a silently mouthed word transmit inhuman timbres. Lately I’ve been trying to allow transformations of the heart on small scales, embracing flings or swells of naive yearning. Drafts of myself spawn in front of me, then eventually walk off and die in some emotional outback, but I guess that’s where we all emerge from to begin with. In How to Wreck a Nice Beach, a book about the history of the vocoder by Dave Tompkins, Roger’s collaborator Bootsy Collins explains that, even for masters, the process of the talk box isn’t entirely comprehensible. “It is a special gift, and it is forbidden for you to know the secrets,” he says. “It will always be a mystery.” 

Elena Saavedra Buckley is an associate editor of Harper’s Magazine and The Drift.

Love Songs: “Hang With Me”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Someone I recently kissed sends me a PDF of a rare, out-of-print book by John Ashbery. The fragment I tug from Fragment: “Seen from inside all is / abruptness. As though to get out your eye / sharpens and sharpens these particulars; no / longer visible, they breathe in multicolored / parentheses the way love in short periods / puts everything out of focus, coming and going.” It’s been a while since I’ve been in love, and, most of the time, the idea fatigues me: I can see the end before anything’s begun. But these lines make my clarity of vision briefly undesirable; I miss the blur.

When I was nineteen, an anxious wallflower at my first literary party, Ashbery barked at me to fetch him a gin and tonic. Now these lines of his wind back the tape to adolescence: when everything is seen from inside even as the self strains outward and time exits its usual shapes and the imagination knows no end. Teenagers make love and ontology anew. I remember the smell of wet grass on long night walks with the first girl I loved. The matching pale green stains on our white sneakers. Our long hair mingling, dark brown and red, in the stairwell, the party we’d just left still loud down the hall. That this was the most surprising thing that had ever happened to my nineteen-year-old body, though it was also the culmination of months of cloaked flirting as well as—it seemed—the culmination of every desire ever. Yet I also glimpsed how much more wanting there was to do.

Since I am time-traveling back to that relationship, my first queer one, which careened to a slow disintegration I didn’t see coming, I am listening to “Hang With Me,” Robyn’s dance-pop love song that forbids love. “Will you tell me once again / how we’re gonna be just friends?” she begins, a plea that morphs into command in the chorus: “Just don’t fall recklessly, headlessly in love with me.” This is the brinkmanship common to teenagers and lovers, feigning control over feelings.

“And if you do me right, I’m gonna do right by you,” Robyn sings before she gets to that other condition, the one that gives the song its title: if you don’t fall in love with me, you can hang with me. These are the stipulations of a contract that’s never going to work. It’s clear from the ecstatic production and obsessive insistence that Robyn herself is already in love. And in her demands, I hear seduction, the kind that plays out when you’re already in bed with someone, whispering “we can’t” while you do.

Wild requests, wild promises, nothing that can be kept—going as it comes. The “heartbreak, blissfully painful and insanity” that Robyn is worried about speeds toward her. It strikes me that this song is, like me, revisiting adolescent passions from a distance. The time travel is imperfect. “Heartbreak” is the tell. For falling in love to become possible, I’ll have to forget that heartbreak is equally possible, but the anticipation of pain worms into love that hasn’t yet earned the name. 

The internet reveals that “Hang With Me” hadn’t yet been released during the short period of love I’ve just described. At first, I am sure that there’s a mistake. The song is overlaid on so many memories of her. But it seems I made a sequential connection simultaneous. At some point that I don’t remember, I heard this song and remembered my ex, and then, at Ashbery’s instigation, I remembered the song and the story together. Now that I’ve written this down, they’ll never be separate. Such a teenage word, never. Like: Don’t worry, I’ll never fall in love with you.

 

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. 

Love Songs: “Up in Hudson”

There was a month in spring several years ago when I rode Amtrak ten times in two weeks, taking the 7:05 A.M. out of Boston Back Bay and returning from Penn Station on the latest train possible. I had to be in New York for various reasons and obligations, but the person I loved was in Boston and my logic was simple: I did not want to spend a night apart from him.

I spent many hours with my forehead pressed against the cool glass of the train window, taking in flashes of the Connecticut coastline, mouthing the words to the Dirty Projectors’ “Up in Hudson,” a song David Longstreth wrote as part of his 2017 breakup album, which chronicles his split with Amber Coffman, former bandmate and partner.

Why was I so obsessed with a breakup song while experiencing a love that made me feel like I’d been hit in the solar plexus with a bag of cement? It’s the chorus that was stuck in my head, for reasons I wasn’t totally aware of. “Love will burn out, and love will just fade away,” Longstreth sings over and over, bitterly interrupting his own melody, cutting through parts of the song that describe falling in love (“In a minivan in New England, our eyes met / We said yes and we said yes”; “First time I ever kissed your mouth, we both felt time stop”). 

What I couldn’t see then—or didn’t know I saw—was that the end with this person I loved was drawing near. It’s in the very structure of the song, how it alternates between their love story and that distressing chorus (“love’s gonna rot, and love will just dissipate”). Though when I hear those lines now, I can’t help but think of the verse that follows: “Now we’re going our separate ways / But we’re still connected.” Maybe that’s just Longstreth trying to console himself with a generic, post-breakup line. But now, I still find myself asking what the nature of that connection is—if absence really can still hold two people together years later, and what claims that makes on the heart.

“I’m just up in Hudson, bored and destructive,” Longstreth sings in the last verse, “knowing that nothing lasts.” On one particularly long Amtrak ride, I spent the hours compulsively scrolling through my camera roll, zooming in on photos of us, smiling faces frozen in time. I see now that I was already, even then, trying to reassure myself as to what I had—and as such, admitting its loss.

 

Camille Jacobson is The Paris Review‘s engagement editor.

Love Songs: “Water Sign”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Parliament’s “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign” is an unabashed ode to passion, to the base and the sensual, to the possibilities of love in the juiciest ways it can exist between people. The song moans into being, a beseeching follows, then there’s a bass so low you can’t possibly get under it, and finally the central question is posed: “Can we get down?” In true Parliament fashion, the tune doesn’t follow a traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure; it consists of an ever-evolving chorus that departs from the lines “I want to be / on the seaside of love with you / let’s go swimming / the water’s fine.” The arrangement is magnificent and the execution velvety, and the soulful, overlapping ad-libs of George Clinton, Walter “Junie” Morrison, and Ron Ford are just romantic lagniappe. Add the production of the track itself, with its big band-y rise of horns and whimsical flourishes atop the funky bassline, and the song is a liquid love affair that pulls you under and takes you there. It’s orgasmic.“Water Sign” is the B side to the much more well-known “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” from Parliament’s 1978 hit album Motor Booty Affair. While “Aqua Boogie” is told from the point of view of a person who is afraid of water, having never learned to swim, “Water Sign” shows us how beautiful and liberating it can be to get swept away.

Addie E. Citchens is the author of “A Good Samaritan,” out in the Review’s Winter Issue.

Love Songs: “Mississippi”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Someone once accused me of being unrealistic about love’s aftermath. This was in the middle of an interminable argument, one in a long series of interminable arguments. I am not really someone prone to interminable arguments, which probably should have told me something about this person and myself sooner than it did, but at the time I was experiencing a new experience and not every aspect of it was entirely unpleasant. What he said was something like this: “You think there are never any consequences! You think you can go around hurting people, and that everyone you hurt will still want to be in the same room as you, having a drink!” I thought about this for a second. It wasn’t true but it wasn’t not true either. Then I said something stupid, which was, “Do you know the Bob Dylan song ‘Mississippi’?”

Is “Mississippi” a love song? Yes and no. I think it is among the most romantic songs ever written and also among the most ambiguous, which are not disconnected qualities. It is not even clearly about a romantic relationship—some people hear it as a sociopolitical song about the state of America, which isn’t wrong. It might be about a guy who has literally stayed in Mississippi a day too long. Yet it contains, I think, every important kernel of wisdom about love and the loss of it; it hits every note that matters. Is that too much to believe about a single song? “Mississippi”—and I am talking about the Love and Theft version, the heart likes what it likes—is about the love that outlasts love. I think often of the line: “I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” And I think, Yes, that’s how I feel! This is true!

Of course, it isn’t true. It isn’t any more true for me than it is for anyone who harbors their own bitternesses toward me. I have plenty of things besides affection—wells of pain, streaks of anger, pain and anger about things so long past you would think they would have disappeared rather than calcified. And yet when I hear that line I think about everyone I have ever loved and everyone who has ever loved me—I think of us on a boat together, maybe drinking martinis. But it’s almost like we are ghosts, like the dead children in the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia, because I know this is a wild, impossible fantasy of the past and the present colliding. Still, it’s beautiful and in its own way even comforting.

But then there is the sadder part of this song, which I can’t ignore. There are those heartbreaking lines, “I know you’re sorry / I’m sorry too”—and who isn’t sorry too? Then: “Last night I knew you / tonight I don’t.” Dylan sings those lines in a kind of mournful howl that in certain moods can bring tears to my eyes. After all, more often than not, we become strangers to each other. These lines are truer, probably, than my fantasy of undying affection, though they coexist with it; these things are not mutually exclusive but in fact inextricable. The magic of the song is its ability to contain all of this.

“Mississippi” is a song about longing—overlapping and conflicting kinds of longing. So I suppose what I was asking when I asked this person if they knew the song “Mississippi” was: Do you not understand that I can want everything all at once, even things that contradict each other? Do you not understand that these conflicts and tensions are at the heart of romantic love? And do you not believe, as I do, that love’s shadow extends long past these bitter arguments, and that is what makes it worthwhile and also why it is making us suffer? But I didn’t say those things; instead, I found myself talking about a song. The argument ended in exhaustion, and not too long afterward, we parted ways for good. But what is for good? The past is ticker tape running underneath the present. There are those other perfect lines from the song: “I was thinking about the things that Rosie said / I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed.”

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

On the Bus with Pavement: Tour Diary

One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason’s freshly filled coffee mug—personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO’S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo—jangles in its cup holder.

A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that’s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like “That’s a negative,” “Mmhmm,” or “Lord, that is crazy.” Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains magnanimous, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. “I think it’s about time for a squirt in the dirt,” goes Jeff’s voice overhead. “All due respect, sir,” Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, “but there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.” We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff’s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. “I make it a point to listen to the bands that I’m moving around,” Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, “and I think I get why people like these guys.” 

I’m accompanying the indie rock group Pavement for a thin slice of their hugely anticipated, nearly sold-out, four-month monster of a reunion tour. Founded in 1989 and nominally dead a decade later, Pavement belonged to the category of unsuccessful and confounding superstars—a band who was never really that famous, that scrutable, that glory-seeking or ambitious. None of their albums or songs ever got anywhere close to gold or platinum in the US. But they were treated as life-affirmingly, almost irritatingly influential by their big- and small-time rock contemporaries, knighted as “the finest rock band of the nineties” by Robert Christgau, and earned Pitchfork’s number one song of the nineties, back when people relatively cared about the opinions held by either Christgau or Pitchfork. They summed the epoch’s diffidence (its huge concern for “authenticity,” its allergy toward the idea of “selling-out,” et al.), were blessed and cursed with the idea that they were the vanguard of a loosely defined genre called “slacker rock,” and, for some among a population that remembers using the word hipster regularly, they are—as they were for the long-lionized English DJ John Peel—“one of the best bands in the world.” This is also a band that hasn’t written anything whatsoever together since their dissolution twenty-one years ago and whose last tour happened at the tail end of the aughts. 

As with most artists now granted the vague honorific of “cult band,” the enthusiasm for their reunion borders on unreasonable. Resale tour tickets in some cities were going for a ludicrous $500. Serious devotees have documented and color-coded each stop with spreadsheets that sort out setlists by album and frequency of track repetition. By the end of their North American leg, there had been a fan-made musical and a museum erected in their honor. Now, a feature-length film is purportedly in the works—one that (once again) imagines a universe in which Pavement is “the most important band in the world.” 

I was pre-verbal during Pavement’s heyday, so a cushion of generational remove mediates my fandom. It is unremarkable, pathological, entirely digitally-based. For those of us who grew up in a cul-de-sac with standard-speed internet—barely sentient for the twilight of the millennium, just learning how to use words like derivative in the pejorative from blogs and message boards—Pavement seemed like shorthand for a precious and preeminent disaffection that had phased out of vogue by the time that rock was no longer the biggest thing on the planet. Fans like me ached for what we imagine we missed out on, and could marvel, in a cool, touristic way, at an Arcadian moment in time in which an artist’s persona was de facto a little brambled and blurry. Now, as a fly-on-the-wall of their reunion tour—a spectacle that brings together past and present by framing Pavement as whole, imperative, immortal—two questions loom: Will it recreate the known or unknown universe as it once was? Or will it all just bum me out? 

 

DAY ONE: SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA

I am walking briskly and alone along a highway bridge immediately in front of Saint Paul’s Palace Theatre, with seven hours until showtime. Pavement’s two buses stand out against the plain back entrance of the venue like two long, smooth, sleeping orcas.

Most of the team is present on the band bus, either making cereal or padding around in search of the other half of a broken tambourine. There’s percussionist Bob Nastanovich, bassist Mark Ibold, and lead Stephen Malkmus, all dressed like normal adult men, which is to say in jeans, ballcaps, and interesting sneakers. The bus’s interior has a sort of upmarket beauty, with everything stained a uniform tone of peanut butter, cabinets made of a gleaming lacquered composite wood, and a hydraulic magic button in the main lounge that extends the room out four or so feet when the bus is parked. Under the glaze of the growing sun, we look like we could be on the bottom deck of a rental yacht. 

Scott Kannberg, the second songwriter and guitarist, whom everyone refers to as “Spiral,” diminutive of “Spiral Stairs,” is notably absent, squeezing in a full eighteen holes of golf on a course somewhere in greater Minneapolis. (Steve West, their drummer, later tells me he wanted to caddy for him, “but Spiral wouldn’t let me get away with it. He’s got men all over this country willing to carry his golf clubs.”) Rebecca Clay Cole—the band’s overqualified keyboardist, and the only other consistent female presence on the bus—is already out too, roaming around Saint Paul in search of a museum. Bob is busily wrestling a jumbo drum of spring water onto the countertop. A pre-show morning is defined by its bumbling. “We’re in need of a sanity-type situation,” Ibold announces just as Bob leaves to hunt for a screwdriver to stab the jug with, so he and Malkmus and I hail a cab to the town’s Little Mekong district. 

Tour is always part-ritual and part-obligation, but it’s particularly taxing for men who’ve all crossed the threshold of fifty and have been off the road for years. They’ve had more than eighty songs to learn, some for the very first time; the venues are the largest and toniest they’ve ever played; their label’s fuss is greater; the audience is bigger by several orders of magnitude, and every member of the band can fill a notebook with fresh anecdotes on the newfound virtues of diet, hydration, and sleep. “This is definitely the most demanding tour I’ve ever been on,” says Ibold once we sit down at an empty Cambodian restaurant, eating a shrimp cake the size of a domino. “Not just musically, but psychologically.” Ibold—who has a day job as a bartender in Williamsburg and was working a shift the day before he left—is sixty. If history repeats itself, the next reunion tour will happen in 2034, when he’s seventy-two. “We have no plans to tour like the Pixies,” Malkmus says, even before I ask. This does seem like the last of things. 

This time around, Pavement will move athletically across the United States, then to bits of Europe, with an average of thirty-three hours of rest in between each show. I would be surprised if nobody in the band reaches a point of crisis by the time they get to the Australian stretch in a few months. “You tell yourself it’ll be more fun than doing the dishes at home,” Malkmus says. “But I’m just old, man.” I have to ask—what’s the point of all this, then? A new car? Karmic debt? Not nostalgia? “Sure, all of that,” he says, “but there’s something else in there.”

Though this has been obsessively documented, I’m still taken aback by the degree to which Malkmus is very clearly the nucleus of Pavement, the band and the idea. He is its principal singer-songwriter, a blindingly good guitarist, and now shaggier and more silvery than he was in 1994 when Courtney Love called him “the Grace Kelly of rock” but retains a boyish, shitkicking quality about him. He can be remarkably feline, charmingly chilly, and has a voice that permanently suggests that he is unspecifically but thoroughly over it. He is, in many senses, responsible for granting Pavement their near-universal designation as a “slacker” band, which accounts for the general slouch of the band’s posture and reifies the archetypal Gen X attitude of rather dying than surrendering any emotional investment. “You know why I’m doing this,” he says, suddenly. “I’m really playing for the fans that are like, I just really fucking like these songs. And these guys were special to me—they made me feel safe. I’m safe here at this show.” He doesn’t look at me while saying this. “I know what you mean,” I reply, soothingly. “You know what I mean,” he sighs.

By the time we get back to the Palace Theatre, the stage is ready for our opening act. A blast of organic and inorganic smells fill the building: buttered popcorn from a choke point in the lobby, a damp pigeony scent from the door that opens out onto the alley where everyone smokes, and a strong mixed waft from the green room, where a routine order has been delivered. (Their rider: Gouda, tubs of chicken salad, whiskeys and hummuses, slabs of sourdough, diet root beers, regular beers.) Like the sound of a great, muffled gong, the doors open. Two hours to go.

BEFORE THE SHOW:

—After checking in with their dog’s caretaker, who was very sorry to let them know that their cardigan welsh corgi has been having diarrhea all day, Bob is rubbing his wife Whitney’s shoulders backstage, watching the opener perform.

—Rebecca is warming up her voice in a rear atrium of the basement by blowing loud raspberries.She’s been brought on tour to make the music sound “about as close to the album as we can humanly get it,” as West notes, adding that she’s “probably the only member of the band that can actually read music.” “I’ve approached this about as devotedly as a person can,” she tells me. “Even before I was approached to tour with them, I’d known that there were piano parts on, you know, a few songs, but all the old albums have these sneaky, crunchy keys and organs all over them. It’s deceptively tough jinglejangle jazz.”

—Spiral has returned from tee time and is now on a long and desperate quest for antacids. After ten minutes, he secures half of a lucky old roll of Tums from our tour manager Mike’s pocket. Later, he shows me a text from his wife, who’s presently somewhere in California dining with their daughter. The photo shows off their spread (pasta, white wine) and her new haircut (blonde bob). “Hott,” his text replies. 

When Pavement goes on, I wonder—are all old bands haunted? The show is a pilgrimage for men who look like they indulge in a good microbrew every once in a while. Those with pleading ankles and spongy knees sit; those still without stand at the front. Some audience members chuck beer cans, shriek, make out, weep. The reports that I’d heard earlier—that a couple was kicked out for having sex at a San Diego show a few days prior—seem totally conceivable, even if this was some of the least horny music on earth. “It’s so funny to see them here,” says a seated patron wearing a Guided By Voices shirt. “This is the nicest venue I’ve ever been in, and it’s like going to a cathedral and seeing a bunch of guys make a sandwich.”  

 

DAY TWO: CHICAGO

“Shit,” says a voice beyond my bunk’s curtain. Then comes the clang of a dropped tambourine. Since clambering into my top bunk around 6 A.M., sticking a socked foot onto Malkmus’s pillow to hoist myself up, I’d slept like a rock until 11. 

After seeing the sunrise with drivers Jason and Jeff—barreling southeastward, fighting highway rumble strips—we’d all arrived and parked in front of the handsome Chicago Theatre, where the band was gearing up for two back-to-back sold-out nights. The interior of the Chicago Theatre earlyish on a Thursday looks like your usual swank venue: high-ceilinged interiors with good acoustics, baroque festoonery along the walls, and a tangle of pedals and cables littering the stage like noodles. Dozens of men and women unload the two trailers, rhythmically decanting small plastic tubs from larger plastic tubs, proving David Thomas of Pere Ubu’s claim that touring “is mostly about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other.” I watch as one tech lugs the giant, silent, theater-screen-sized video rig that the band plays in front of throughout each show, which is both a showcase for some surprisingly good juvenilia from Malkmus’s old lyric notebooks and, according to crew members, a huge logistical pain in the ass. The stage clears for soundcheck, and, now seated as the only audience member up on the prow of the balcony, I had time to study the band at their rawest. 

If you’ve ever listened passively to a single Pavement song, you’ll catch shambly, wooly guitarwork and jammy bass and drum patterns; if you listen closely, you’ll notice that any given Pavement song is filled with total nonsense. In 1995, the New York Times made sense of this by calling the band among “rock’s most notorious nihilists: disaffected, disenchanted, and distanced.” An especially haunting indictment came in an episode of Beavis and Butt-head from that same year, where the two cartoon morons groan at a music video for a track titled “Rattled by the Rush.” “It’s like they’re not even trying,” says Beavis. 

But if Beavis were to see “Rattled” as I see it practiced here before me—Ibold elated, Spiral hardly paying attention, Malkmus shredding while staring at the ceiling—he might notice that it’s not just a performance of ennui: the laziness is also creatively contrived, built into the music. Their tracks are crammed with odd voicings, alternate tunings, a constant sense of tonal ambiguity, slightly uncomfortable intervals. There’s hardly an ordinary sentence or ungenerative thought across their whole catalog. There are few vaguely placeable themes in their lyrics, and the vulnerability behind them—if you can find it at all—always seems like it comes at the end of a bong rip. (Verse 2 of “Rattled” goes: “Pants I wear so well, cross your t’s—shirt smells / Worse than your lying, caught my dad crying.) It sounds like rock, but rock rejiggered by modest, unshowy surrealists—always seemingly noncommittal but irrationally graceful in the end. 

After any obligatory soundchecking or set-erecting, the band and crew basically tool around for indeterminate stretches of time. I find our stalwart tour techs asleep in folding chairs—seated upright, snoring, mouths agape—just off the side of the stage not thirty minutes after soundcheck was over. West has his head down on a desk in the basement. Our tour manager Mike is on an errand: Bob has asked him to buy ping pong balls from Walgreens so that he can chuck signed ones into the audience while he plays. (Ideas for other projectiles—eggs, tennis balls, shot glasses—were dismissed.) Showtime takes forever to come until it suddenly doesn’t.

OVERHEARD FROM CREW MEMBERS WHO WERE OUT OF EYESHOT:  

Voice 1: “We’re gonna need some tea for the team before they go on. Herbal tea is heated between 180 and 200 degrees. Black teas, you’re gonna want them between 200 and 220 degrees.” 

Voice 2: “No problem. But I really don’t think you know what the fuck you’re talking about.” 

Finally, lights go on, and the show is a goofy revelation. Spiral is tonight’s quiet hero. They play a fizzy, relatively deep cut called “Date w/Ikea,” where he takes lead—legs akimbo as in a yoga stretch—and then later leaves the stage, mid-song, mid-set. (“I had to piss,” he explains after the show.) The audience loses their mind. Fans and friends throw trucker hats emblazoned with his name onstage like bouquets.

Tonight’s encore is also uncommonly touching because it includes a marriage proposal. The band jogs out after the compulsory caesura—the audience roars like white noise when they return—and Malkmus nearly ruins the whole thing by telling the crowd that “we’ve got some folks who are about to get married.” But the pageant goes smoothly: Chris, the groom-to-be, ushers his girlfriend Ramona onstage (they are thirty-four and thirty years old, respectively) and twirl around to a sweetish, woozy number called “We Dance.” At the end of the song, Chris gets down on one knee. They are, and it is, a perfectly Pavementian affair: fumbly, lightly lackadaisical, flannel-clad. She says yes. 

Rapt in the tender human awkwardness of it all, we migrate to a totally characterless bar across the street from the hotel where the band and the crew will stay the night. I find our drummer, Steve West, reclining with a Guinness. Bargoers flock to shake his hand, making him sit down and stand up, stand up and sit down. “I’m the most off-the-grid guy here for sure,” he says, swishing the beer around in his mouth like mouthwash. West is now a stonemason in West Virginia with the granite disposition to match. “When this thing started, all of a sudden there were a bunch of dudes from the label emailing me while I’d be out behind my house digging holes. I’m about as good at this band to-do as a head of wilted lettuce.” 

West has belonged to legions of bands prior to this one, but it was his work with the Silver Jews that ushered him Pavementward. The Silver Jews are something of a cousin band to Pavement—West and Malkmus played on some of their albums, Malkmus passed along the Jews’s debut to their first label, and where Pavement stands firmly on the soil of “indie rock,” the Jews err more toward country-flecked, plainspoken poetry—but their legacies have been entwined and underscored since the suicide of David Berman, the Jews’s frontman, in 2019. His life is a subject of delicate love and introspection. “Dave told Malkmus,” goes West, “‘A drummer’s replaceable—we’re all replaceable—but it’s the personalities that you can’t replace.’ So when Pavement needed a new drummer, he offered me up.” He is reverential about David, as all who knew him and didn’t know him seem to be, but his vantage is especially matchless. 

“Artists have always gotten used up and spat out,” West says, leaning back on his stool. “It’s just the way that all of this works. I just hope that everyone remembers how talented he was. I don’t know what took him away from us—I just know that he understood something big about this world. I’m just lucky to have known him at all.” There is a long, terrible grip of silence, then a mangled sound in his voice as he looks away from me. “I loved him,” he says, awfully. “He was my best friend.” 

 

DAY THREE: CHICAGO

I wake up to a group text among Ibold, West, and their soundman, Remko Schouten. “Down for Italian beef excursion? Be in front of the hotel by 11:15.”  

The sandwiches from a place called Johnnie’s are pulpy potpourris of 80/20 ground beef and bell pepper and come prepared in ‘‘half-dip,”full-dip,” or austere “no dip” levels of oily jus. Digesting the whole affair alfresco, I get to know Remko, a wizardly Dutchman who’s been Pavement’s sound engineer since 1992, and is the sort of guy who’ll be working the board and time his edibles to kick in halfway through an hours-long set just to make things more interesting for himself. (This is exactly what happens later that night.)

The conversation makes its way through reminiscences (“Ibold once had to fish out his shit from the tour bus toilet in 1992”) and re-evaluations (“Their first drummer, Gary—he would throw garbage into the crowd while we played, which ultimately became a problem”), but it becomes apparent how valuable his constancy is for a band always in flux—through the coming and going of members, shifting affiliations with record labels, spats and tiffs and breakups. “We run on an absurd machine,” Remko says, which is a nice précis of thirty collected years of writing on the band. “Take Bob, for instance,” he suggests wisely. “The fact that he’s here should tell you a lot about this whole thing.” 

Bob is a selcouth blend of audience motivator and whatever’s-in-the-percussion-room player who feels like the id of the group built on a shambolic sort of peculiarity. Most videos of the band online have at least one top-rated comment that reads something to the extent of “What is Bob’s purpose?” The night before, the newly-engaged Chris had offered an answer to the unspoken question outside of the bar. “Bob,” Chris declared, like he was sharing a commandment, “is the secret glue that keeps everything in place.”

“I don’t know about that,” Bob says to me as he unloads his laundry back in the basement of the Chicago Theatre upon our return. “I really don’t have the skills to play music, I’ll be the first to tell you that. But having Rebecca here really shows you how much more vital we can be when we can actually play the songs. God knows I can’t sing. It’s really fucking embarrassing. I’ve done it for years, and I’ve seen my band wince. Even people in the crowd have covered their ears.”

Not the case on our last night in Chicago. It is not the most flawless show, but the most rabid—everywhere the eye lands seems to be a fan shouting every non sequitur lyric. Like all good concerts, it’s convivial and conspiratorial, but there is an urgency in the audience tonight, a sort of disorienting attentiveness bordering on the religious. It seems everyone knows this will likely be the last time they’ll see Pavement together ever again. “Listening to this band makes me feel like the guy I was in college,” says a patron next to me, arms draped like a shawl around a woman beside him. “Sometime between then and now I became an old man, and I’m not sure how that happened.”

After the encore, Ibold and Malkmus dawdle for a few perfunctory hi-byes before swiftly exiting out the back door for a bar called the Empty Bottle, where a band called Wand is playing. Wand is signed to Drag City, the Chicago-based indie label responsible for springboarding Pavement to fame. Drag City’s founder, Dan Koretzky, whom Malkmus has excitedly been calling “Papa” all evening, greets them, beaming to see friends inside the humid dive. “Didn’t think you’d make it,” he says. Ibold, gazing into the audience—which seems to gaze back at him—adjusts his glasses. “Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” he responds. 

On our way in, Ibold and Malkmus are honked, gawked, shouted at. (There’s a Great show, guys! and an I love you! and then a Marry me!) When we get inside, they part the sea. Two men individually buy me a shot of Fernet when they see me passing lagers to their indie rock saints. Standing there—as a band sort of in apex and sort of in twilight, alongside a younger band who are perhaps on the road to their own sort of apex—I can only imagine that all of this is striking a note that they could’ve only dreamed of striking years ago. 

 

NEW YORK CITY: THE END

My version of tour ends not on the midwestern road but back in New York, at the Pavement Museum, a four-day pop-up event in SoHo billed as a course through the band’s “real and imagined history.” It turns out the room is a shrine to Pavement in a way that feels half like an exhibition, half like pornography for ultrafans. Contemporary acts—Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Bully and Sad13—performed Pavement’s splashier hits on a makeshift stage. Old music videos play on loop on tube TVs with built-in VCRs; lyric sheets are strewn around and encased like curios; there are communiques with record labels, lyrics on napkins, old show programs, the suit that Malkmus wore when he worked as a security guard at the Whitney Museum. I see Spiral there and ask him if it all feels a little like a mausoleum. “That’s really nice of you to say,” he replies.

It’s important to note that a significant amount of the ephemera inside the room is totally fabricated. There are tour posters for lineups and dates that never existed; there are T-shirts for real past tours that were created (and knifed to look roughed-up) precisely for the museum; immortalized in a box, there is a pair of handcuffs that Malkmus brandished during a 1999 show, announcing to the audience that they symbolized “what it’s like being in a band.” The placard next to it reads “These are the original handcuffs.” They are not. They were purchased from a sex shop a few days prior. Same goes for another shadow box, encasing a lone brown toenail that allegedly once belonged to their original drummer, Gary Young (again, no: it was clipped off of the foot of the set’s art director), and for a poster of Malkmus starring in an Apple “Think Different” ad “from 1996” that he absolutely wasn’t a part of. “I have no say in this whatsoever,” said Malkmus earlier that week, of both the museum and the upcoming film. “We’ve all sent them some stuff, but I really don’t even pay attention to what these guys are doing. None of us do.” 

All the ersatz stuff is not subterfuge or sinisterism or deepfakery; this is–to explain the joke–a joke, in keeping with the arch “who-gives-a-shit” quality at the core of the band’s brio. A keen-to-rabid fan could plausibly discern between most bits of artifact and artifice but a casual one (which, more often than not, means a younger one) might accept them all, reasonably, as patent bits of reality. One had to admire it. All this puckish stuff made clear how little it matters what’s real: it’s Pavement not only for a generation already seduced by its apocrypha, but also for the present one, familiar with reenactments and revivals, and possessed of its own breed of absurdity. There’s probably also something to be said about how my own relationship to Pavement—private, greedy, and up until recently, comfortably unilateral —might have made the whole hall-of-mirrors scenario unfolding before me feel a little stupid and perverse. It did, but fandom demands a certain level of delusion. It is dumb and blind to real or invented ironies. To press a band into legacy and lucite before they’re gone is a pure and selfish impulse–and it makes it so they can’t ever die.

 

Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia. She has written for Bookforum, The Nation, The Washington Post, and NPR, among others.