Alex Hates Music: Fun-a-Day 2015

Day 7

TODAY'S SONG:

"Type Slowly (live)" by Pavement

Whereas yesterday I didn't have many memories attached to the shuffled song of the day, I have a boatload for Pavement. Since my freshman year of college, they have been one of my favorite bands. My earliest memories of Pavement come from a couple years earlier, when the song “Stereo” was on heavy rotation on the Fredonia college radio station. They never announced what they were playing, so I was left in the dark, wondering who it was musing about the high pitched voice of Geddy Lee. Sometime in my senior year of high school, I downloaded a 50-mp3 Indie Music Starter Kit compilation, which featured “It's a Hectic World,” quite possibly the dumbest song to use to exemplify the music of Pavement: it's lower quality than Slanted and Enchanted, Stephen Malkmus isn't singing (or drastically changed his voice), and it's...not good. So for about a year I thought that I hated Pavement.

Pretty much the best thing ever.

That all changed when I really gave Slanted and Enchanted a fair chance. Right away I thought the recording quality was fairly off-putting, but the songs were so strong that it didn't matter. At all. It became my favorite album in no time flat. I slowly accrued every Pavement record through the course of that year, falling insanely in love with each of them. It was reinforced by the Pavement DVD that came out that Spring, Slow Century.

“Type Slowly” is on Brighten The Corners, the fourth Pavement record, which I ordered in the summer before my sophomore year of college, while I was living in my parent's basement and working at the college painting door frames and classrooms. I worked with one other guy who was a few years older than me, a quiet and surly chap who only listened to Coldplay. When he told me this, I asked him if he liked Radiohead. He promptly said, “No.” We hardly spoke to each other the rest of the summer.

Not Radiohead.

We had one radio that we listened to. If I got to it first, I would put it on NPR and listen to the news for an hour before it changed to the auto-rotation of indie rock. If my coworker got to it, we listened to garbage. I ended up wearing headphones a lot, alternating between Pavement, The Postal Service, and Radiohead. On my breaks, I read Bret Easton Ellis and Douglas Adams novels. I was bored a lot at that job. I wish there had been podcasts back then. Give me some Ira Glass, Terry Gross, Improv4humans, or Marc Maron, and I bet that job would've been a lot more enjoyable.

Here's my song for today, which actually doesn't have a lot to do with the memory I wrote about, but another lonelier memory I have attached with that summer. I ain't here to try to bum you out though, except with this song: