Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994) presents diamond-sharp hooks wrapped in fuzz, feedback, and elliptical lyricism. The record includes the catchy single "Cut Your Hair," which felt both familiar and distinct from contemporaneous grunge. The music metabolizes punk's rebellion while projecting a boyish, joyful, almost pain-free tone. The early-1990s alternative boom created mainstream opportunities for underground artists, but the album peaked modestly on the Billboard 200. Stephen Malkmus aimed for a classic-rock ease and glory in the sound. Critics embraced the album even as broad commercial uptake remained limited.
Like a lot of American kids born in the early 1980s, I first heard Pavement on alternative-rock radio in the back of a car. The car was a Saturn going uphill toward the stop sign on Birch Hill Road; it is as clear and romantically enhanced as my dad's memories of hearing the Beatles. The song was "Cut Your Hair."
Alternative to what? Nirvana was already a platinum-selling band; in the wake of Nevermind, artists as superficially uncommercial as Sonic Youth and the Breeders were given a shot at a market share their predecessors in the American underground would have never dreamed of. The gold rush was on, if not already over; "alternative" was just another way to signal the onramp to the mainstream.
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