Kerb your enthusiasm

Sound Advice #4: 

Pavement – Slanted and Enchanted (1992)

When I was at university, I took a module focusing on the work of writers who lived during the reign of the British Empire, such as Rudyard Kipling. I remember very little about what we studied, but I do remember thinking that the course name, ‘Ripping Yarns: Fictions of Empire, 1880-1924’, would have made a fantastic title for a Pavement album. They’d already split up by then, of course.

1992: I’d already decided I was a Pavement fan before I’d really heard any of their music. I’d caught five-second snippets of songs such as ‘Trigger Cut’ and ‘Texas Never Whispers’ on the indie chart of the ITV Chart Show back in 1992 (they hadn’t made a video for either track so those few seconds were all the programme played), which I thought sounded great – melodic, chaotic, laid back and yet also strangely focused.

In press interviews, they came across as quirky, without it ever feeling forced. They had not one but two drummers, one of whom (Gary Young) displayed a particularly individual brand of eccentricism, ranging from performing handstands onstage or clucking like a chicken mid-show to handing out mashed potato or strands of cold spaghetti to bemused punters as they came through the doors.

Seriously, what was not to like? They sounded fun, they sounded intriguing and, to their credit, they didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in fitting into any particular scene.  

I finally heard a Pavement song in full (this is pre-YouTube, remember) when I bought ‘Slanted and Enchanted’ in early 1993, roughly a year after its release. For a 13-year-old to spend around £13-£14 of my pocket money (remember how expensive CDs were in the early 90s?) on an album by a band of which I’d only heard a combined total of 10 seconds, this was obviously a massive gamble, but definitely one that paid off.

I was blown away on first listen. For someone more accustomed at the time to hearing polished, highly produced albums such as ‘Nevermind’, ‘Ten’ or ‘Automatic for the People’, it was something of a revelation to hear a record so wilfully raw and rough around the edges, where distorted, buzzing guitars came close to drowning out Stephen Malkmus’s gloriously wry vocals (I always imagined he sang with one eyebrow raised) and the drums threatened to break free from the song they were supposed to be holding together. Sometimes capturing the true essence of a song is more important than capturing the most technically proficient version.

The songs themselves were wonderful, of course (and still are). ‘Summer Babe’, ‘Trigger Cut’ and (my personal favourite) ‘Perfume-V’ should by rights be permanent staples of any definitive alternative playlist in the same way seminal classics such as ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ and ‘Freak Scene’ already are.

The band’s love of English post-punk and indie is evident on the Fall-esque ‘Two States’ and ‘Conduit For Sale!’, while tracks such as ‘In The Mouth A Desert’, ‘Loretta’s Scars’, ‘Our Singer’ and even the country-tinged ‘Zurich Is Stained’ bring to mind The Wedding Present (it’s easy to image David Gedge singing all of them). ‘Chesley’s Little Wrists’ manages to channel the spirit of Gang of Four over frenetic free jazz rhythms, while the gorgeously world-weary ‘Here’ could loosely be described as the ‘ballad’ of the album (it was later covered by Tindersticks).

The original album cover appropriated for 'Slanted and Enchanted'

Also striking was the artwork. The band name and album title were seemingly painted in correction fluid over the existing cover of a piano music record from the 1960s, while the inside was a DIY collage of apparently random photos (with the exception of shots of the three band members involved in the recording) and pages torn from notebooks, alongside the largely nonsensical lyrics to 10 of the album’s 14 songs, lovingly scrawled in what I assume to be Malkmus’s handwriting.

This, coupled with the lo-fi nature of the music, reinforced the notion that anyone could have a go at doing this: you didn’t need a studio the size of the Starship Enterprise and you didn’t need to be friends with a graphic designer – all you needed were ideas and enthusiasm, and Pavement evidently had both in abundance. And anyway, isn’t the idea just as important as the realisation when it comes to art?

Although I remain a huge fan, for me, Pavement never quite managed to match the sheer experimental playfulness of ‘Slanted and Enchanted’ (although 1995’s ‘Wowee Zowee’ came pretty close). Follow up ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’, while obviously great, always felt a little restrained compared to its predecessor.

‘Slanted and Enchanted’ will be a quarter of a century old next year, a prospect which is equally incredible and terrifying. Of all the albums I’ve owned in that time, I’ve probably listened to this one more than any other (twice in the last two days alone).

It’s really no exaggeration to say that the day I grow tired of this record is the day I stop believing in the power of music.  

Hip Hop Hump Days #7: The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury (1992)

Listening back to ‘Hypocrisy is the Great Luxury’, it strikes me that this record is something of a paradox: it sounded way ahead of its time in 1992 and yet it’s almost impossible to imagine it being released in any other year.

For those unfamiliar with the Disposable Heroes, they were a Bay Area duo comprising frontman Michael Franti and multi-instrumentalist Rono Tse, both of whom had served as members of The Beatnigs, an “avant-garde industrial jazz poets collective” (which sounds terrific, frankly).

To call it conscious hip hop doesn’t even scratch the surface. Sure, themes such as politics, money and social injustice are present and correct, but when the album’s opening line is “In the 1970s, the OPEC nations began to dominate the world’s oil economy”, you know it isn’t aimed at people who think the height of hip hop sophistication is bouncing down the street in a lowrider whilst wearing giant gold dollar signs round your neck.

From a strictly musical perspective, you could describe it as industrial hip hop – and indeed, the duo probably found greater acceptance in alternative rock circles (they had opened for the likes of Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine) than in the West Coast hip hop community, which was more focused on the warmer G-Funk sound being pushed by the likes of Dr Dre.

Franti’s upfront, confrontational-yet-calm vocal style often placed greater emphasis on getting the message across than it did on rhythm or flow – and he had plenty to say. Subjects covered across the album’s 13 tracks included anger at African-Americans ‘selling out’ to The Man (‘Famous and Dandy [Like Amos ‘N’ Andy]’), media bias and the subsequent dumbing down of society (‘Television, The Drug of the Nation’), racial equality (‘Socio-Genetic Experiment’) and – at a time when it was unthinkable for a hip hop artist to speak out against it – homophobia (‘Language of Violence’).

This isn’t an easy listen by any stretch of the imagination – in fact, Franti’s brutal yet intelligent lyrics (helpfully reproduced in the sleeve notes) probably played no small part in alienating any potential mainstream hip hop audience they may have had. Not that Franti and Tse would have cared anyway – they weren’t there to fit any formula, as evidenced by the inclusion of a cover of Dead Kennedys’ ‘California Uber Alles’ (albeit with slightly amended lyrics).

‘Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury’ was the duo’s only proper album. Following a spoken-word collaboration with beat author William S Burroughs (‘Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales’) in 1993, they decided to follow their own individual paths, with Franti going on to form the more accessible but no less socially aware Spearhead. 

But 23 years on, this album still stands up as an astonishingly raw snapshot of the USA in the early 90s, as seen through the eyes of a man who has woken up from the American Dream to find the Star-Spangled Banner soaked in blood and oil.