Pavement adds a Colorado date

From a distance, a safe distance, it frequently appeared to me that the whole 90's indie rock scene, which took its cues from a generally receptive and hipper media and a cultural bias already comfortable with characters wearing outside-the-mainstream attire, benefitted enormously from the indie scene of the 80's, which was markedly smaller and which generally had to fight for everything it got. Which is not to denigrate its best people, of course...if anything, the sst's and other tiny labels cranking niche skatepunk or cowpunk or thrash or what have you allowed less obviously extreme indie artists to get some attention with music that less extreme listeners could connect to.

The Cobains and Vedders, of course, stood astride the aesthetic and commercial posture platforms - one might say that the chasm grew too wide for Cobain - and somewhere along the line it became kind of okay to regard indie heroes as genuine heroes, rather than fear tainting them with the kind of blind adulation once reserved only for cashier-type mainstream poster boys.

Stephen Malkmus was one of the best examples of the post-struggle indie rock icons, a sensitive-to-a-fault and awkwardly unsettling songwriter, he and Pavement became antihero heroes in a way that, say, Bob Mould before him and Rivers Cuomo after him never really could be.

Pavement was product, almost perfectly, of its time, gutter poets in a time when gutter poetry hadn't yet lost all its grime, even if it hadn't entirely earned it either.

They just announced a reunion tour stop in Colorado, for September. Little doubt the place will be crawling with white teed IT types, probably with their second wives, scrutinized by press types buzzing off a vague sense of the importance of the event, even if most of them couldn't name three Pavement songs if their jobs depended on it.

Haven't decided if I'm going to pitch BW to cover it, and even if I do, I have to wonder if Malkmus is doing any retail press.