"For stasis, as I intend the term, is not an absence of novelty and change — a total quiescence — but rather the absence of ordered sequential change. Like molecules rushing about haphazardly in a Brownian movement, a culture bustling with activity and change may nevertheless be static."
from Leonard B. Meyer's 1967 book, Music, The Arts, and Ideas
Not one of those Pete Frame rock family tree jobs, but an "influence map" of Pavement (who are currently gearing up for their 30th Anniversary Tour, jeepers) taken from Perfect Sound Forever, Rob Jovanovic's 2004 book
Close ups:
Pavement - along with Saint Etienne, Urge Overkill, Teenage Fan Club and of course Primal Scream - were a key group for me in terms of formulating the notion of "record collection rock".
For a while there was this regular column in Melody Maker, a page where a musician would run through a list of records significant to them. Stephen Malkmus did one. Alongside the writing (or speaking? ) style and the tone (drily droll and couched in that slacker-ironical mode of the time) what struck me was that Steve seemed to have listened to everything. Every record that had ever come out. So one minute he'd be referencing 999 or some other second-division Brit punk group, the next it would be Sandy Denny or Fairport Convention.. There'd be a passing reference to Nurse With Wound or Nocturnal Emissions or something like that. He'd enthuse about Ege Bamyasi but perhaps some really obscure Krautrock would be cited too. The piece was erudite - that's the only word for it.
Thinking about it now, without the piece to hand (I've got it somewhere, in some folder or other), I feel there might actually have been serious gaps in the knowledge. Swathes of not-mentioned-at-all stuff : nothing danceable, electronic, or for that matter, Black.... pop too was absent. And indeed those things are all conspicuously missing from the Influence Map above.
Still, the overall impression at the time of reading was that here was a chap, still only in his twenties, who had listened to EVERYTHING, had a take on EVERYTHING, and was capable of wresting enjoyment out of the utterly generic or desperately minor as easily as the obviously canonic and alternative-pantheonic. I didn't know at the time that some in Pavement had worked as record clerks, a job that would lend itself to playing anything and everything that came through the store, just for fun and curiosity and to fill time (also to annoy / bemuse the customers). That was one way to acquire a deep education in rock and its tributaries. Another way would be working at the college radio station, with its library of records and the flood of new freebies that would come in back in those days when college radio actually mattered and played a big role in alternative music promotion.
But as well as vast knowledge, another byproduct of this immersion would be detachment - it's almost inevitably a byproduct of an omnivorous cultural diet. There were still some firm and sweeping opinions. In this piece, or perhaps another similar one, Malkmus opined that "you guys" (meaning the British) had had two great moments - early '70s folk-rock and the late 70s-early-80s postpunk DIY thing. But ultimately, increasingly, one's taste and listening got widened so much that strong allegiances or fanaticisms would not emerge.
Very like Bob 'n' Pete in Saint Et, in fact - but being American and alt, obviously without the affection for chartpop.
A Real Life piece by Chris Randle on how "all recordings are also hauntings"
The rollcall of the over-cited: Nigel Kneale, Mark Fisher, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, T.C. Lethbridge, Roland Barthes...
But at least one name I'd not heard of before:
"With cinema, reanimation became possible. Promoting the Phonoscope, his film-projecting machine, the inventor Georges Demeny boasted he would reverse oblivion: “How many people would be happy if they could only see once again the features of someone now dead. The future will see the replacement of motionless photographs, frozen in their frames, with animated portraits that can be brought to life at the turn of a handle. We shall do more than analyze, we shall bring back to life.”
Overall, though, this cud is starting to feel rather thoroughly masticated
