“Gold Soundz” is one of those songs that like a fine wine has grown in value with age. While art never changes, when time passes and its immediate surroundings dissipate, what remains in this new light is often seen as enduring. One of the most critically beloved and commercially neglected acts of the ’90s, the shambling, jittery sound of Pavement’s music was emblematic of their ambivalence and confusion about the demands of society.
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The History
“Gold Soundz” was the second single off Pavement’s second full-length album, the 1994 release Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. It followed the Top 10 hit “Cut Your Hair,” but failed to chart in America. (It did barely break the British charts at No. 83.) The label, Matador Records, took one more swipe, releasing “Range Life” as the third single, to crickets.
Yet by the time the ’90s were over “Range Life” and “Gold Soundz” were generally acknowledged as the apogee of the band’s craft. Pitchfork named “Gold Soundz” the decade’s best song.
The album itself did pretty well. It went to No. 121 on the album charts and sold over a quarter of a million copies, which is respectable. However, that same year Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple (6.4 million), Weezer’s self-titled debut (3.6 million), Hole’s Live Though This (1.3 million), and Smashing Pumpkins’ Pisces Iscariot (1.1 million) all sold significantly more.
In his Village Voice review, Rob Sheffield called Crooked Rain “a concept album about turning 28.” It’s sort of like having the whole world open up for you, as it does in your early 20s, only to discover now that you’re older, there are carefully prescribed visiting hours.
Bitter Whine
Singer/songwriter/guitarist Stephen Malkmus may have tried to play off their “Range Life” dig on Stone Temple and the Pumpkins as a joke or a caricature, but those more successful acts knew exactly what was going on. Some of it has to do with the myth that underground musicians don’t want to sell albums or be successful for fear it will sap their integrity.
But even if you insist on paying your dues before you pay the rent, you still need some way to pay the rent. Whatever qualms Pavement might have had about success, they weren’t going to kick it out of bed.
“Even though we came off as these, like, ramshackle guys who were slackers or whatever who didn’t care,” guitarist Scott Kannberg told The Ringer in 2019, “we actually did really care about it all, and really thought about what was out there.”
Years later Malkmus could admit that some of what drove their aloof attitudes and indifferent posture was their own insecurity and fear. They thought they could be as big as Smashing Pumpkins. Why not?
“When it was all said and done, I thought we had a pretty good chance to make a dent in the marketplace,” Malkmus wrote in the liner notes for Crooked Rain’s 2004 reissue. “But it turned out that the time was just ‘all right’ and the tunes were not that catchy. We didn’t quite set the world half-alight like I thought we would. There was some hubris going on and sour indie rash as well as genuine dislike for the big time. Oh, and some true fear as well.”
Lost Between Stations
Unfortunately for Pavement, their label’s efforts to support Crooked Rain mirrored their own tentative embrace of mainstream culture. Matador was an adored independent that started in 1989, but had already scored critical attention with Liz Phair’s 1992 debut Exile in Guyville, Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque, and Superchunk’s On the Mouth. It was enough to earn the owners, Chris Lombardi and Gerard Cosloy, a partnership with Atlantic Records in 1993.
A year into their deal, the guy who made it, Atlantic Records President Danny Goldberg, became chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Records, of which Atlantic was a division. So Matador hatched an agreement with Warners to handle the album instead on Pavement’s behalf as they were comfortable with Goldberg.
At the time, there was still a lot of anxiety among independent artists about their integrity and authenticity, since much of their appeal came from speaking for and to the underground and representing the ideas and fashions neglected by mainstream culture. That didn’t mean they weren’t interested in selling records or making money, it just made them squeamish.
“So what ended up happening was we did the record just as a straight Matador record, with no Atlantic logo on the back,” Cosloy explained to Stereogum in 2014. “The record is marketed through Warner Music, goes through WEA, but Atlantic doesn’t actually do any promo or marketing of any sort.”
So the release went through a company, Warner Bros., that wasn’t working any other Matador releases, and was only working with Pavement on a record-by-record basis, while the label Matador had partnered with was shut out. Despite being part of the same company, this couldn’t help but alienate the people at Atlantic.
“We ended up with the worst of both worlds. While it did have much better sort of chain-level distribution because it went through [Warner Bros. distribution arm] WEA, the costs and expense of doing so were very high,” Cosloy said. “It probably should have been a straight independent release, in which case I think we would have sold just as many, or we should have done it as a full-fledged co-release with whatever major the band could have stomached working with at the time. But it was sort of this weird half-assed thing and it created some friction.”
The Song
Pavement, and Malkmus in particular, have generally remained oblique about their songs and meanings, leaving the puzzle pieces for their fans to enjoy and interpret. Indeed, for some that’s part of the fun, since Malkmus’ writing style is fragmented and elliptical, leaving it open to many interpretations.
“Gold Soundz” can be read as a romance about a pair of disaffected hipsters, two too-cool-for-school kids who are happy anesthetized, and in their emptiness can find commonality.
You’re the kind of girl I like
Because you’re empty, and I’m empty
That’s certainly there, especially the two-toned emptiness, which could be either empty of mind or of soul, a product of a poor education system or a dispiriting reality, respectively. But the relationship idea is just the most surface aspect of what may be a much deeper examination of indie hipster aesthetics.
There seems to be in the opening stanzas an answer to the generational clarion call of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which also grapples with the idea of coming of age into a highly commercialized world bent on pushing oddly shaped blocks through square and circular holes.
The first two verses weigh in on nostalgia (those gold soundz), but also perhaps the idea of canon. Who decides what a generation’s best songs are? Guys in suits two or three decades older? Malkmus asks that his arrival (my advent) be kept secret and implies he’s guilty of it (nostalgia?) too: It’s nothing I don’t like, which is equivalent to “it’s something I do.”
When he asks if it’s a “crisis or a boring change,” Malkmus is referring to the very basis of drama. If it’s a boring, commonplace change, nobody would sing about it. The irony of the next line, it has a nice ring when you laugh / At the low life opinions, is that Malkmus is potentially skewering the elitism of the lampooning of those whose ideas feel beneath you. Is this—bad taste—the real crisis? Are people getting really worked up over boring music?
This is similar to the twist in the middle of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” While Kurt Cobain complains about the high school hierarchy and the way we’re led to follow, he confesses his own guilt mid-song.
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end…
… And I forget, just why I taste
Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile
These cliques are but two sides of same coin, and finding what pleases you is the first step to finding a like tribe. Implicit in this critique is the idea that we’re animated by the same desire to belong.
Similarly, Malkmus protests Because I never want to make you feel / That you’re social, never ignorant soul. He doesn’t want to remind you that you’re a part of group, perhaps because our humanity and need for others is something we can never truly deny or be ignorant of. Our need to connect always drives us, so no need to revisit it—but be aware of what you’re doing: Believe in what you wanna do.
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Photo by Karl Walter/Getty Images
