(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 28 September 2025 23:00, UK
“We’ve always been disappointed by mainstream culture,” Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus told Salon magazine back in 1999. “Things slip through, like The Simpsons or Nirvana, but you’re always making the best of a bad situation.”
That’s a very on-brand Stephen Malkmus quote for the era, as the 33-year-old indie icon was out promoting what would prove to be the final Pavement studio album (probably), Terror Twilight. The general malaise with the culture was nothing new, of course, but after a decade or so in the business, with somewhat diminishing returns and an unexpected drop in critical adoration, Malkmus sounded like a guy with one foot out the door.
A quarter-century later, with a recent re-issue to re-argue its case, Terror Twilight has gained a little more appreciation among Pavement fans who originally balked at its relative slickness and spacey Nigel Godrich production. It was the only time Pavement worked with an outside producer, and they seemed to regret the choice themselves for a while. Still, pound for pound, Terror Twilight has some of the best licks and lyrics in the band’s catalogue, with Malkmus really on his oddball A-game as a combiner of words that have never been sung together before or since.
“Watch out for the gypsy children in electric dresses, they’re insane,” he warns on ‘You Are a Light.’ “I hear they live in crematoriums and smoke your remains.”
If you judge lyrics on their literal meanings, that’s just some wildly ignorant misinformation there. But Malkmus, much like another California-born slacker icon named Beck, is a different sort of lyric writer. “Making a song is about trying to create a mood,” he told Salon, “or make some sort of game. But not so much a tricking game. The lyrics aren’t planned. Whatever comes out comes out.”
That approach is part of what hooked Malkmus and Beck with the slacker tag to begin with; the sense that they were irony-obsessed, middle-class smarty-pantses with nothing meaningful to say. But Malkmus’s approach to wordplay probably wasn’t much different than prime Bob Dylan—supposed “voice of a generation”—who had great tomes written to decipher his lovely-sounding nonsense. The quest for hidden meaning was ultimately no different among hardcore Pavement fans.
“The secondary stumbles ’cause the cadence of the count has led them astray,” Malkmus sings on Terror Twilight’s ‘The Hexx.’ “Pray their intuition leads them crashing into bodies in a perfect way.”
Actually, that line is just an extended reference to American football for some reason, so that kind of makes sense. It’s just harder to attach it to the lines just before it: “Epileptic surgeons with their eyes x’ed out attend to a torn up kid / Who salivate and reckon with all the sick things that you did.”
There isn’t a story there or an obvious, relatable observation about life, but there is certainly a mood or a feeling created by it; quite an unnerving one at that. Malkmus has always had the general vibe of a writer who wound up in a band, and he certainly wasn’t drawn toward playing music by the traditions of the rock and roll lifestyle.
“Johnny Thunders and Sid Vicious, they were all stupid,” Malkmus told Salon, although he acknowledged that a different life in high-brow literature would have had its own version of the same shit. “Writers are smart and they’re also getting wasted,” he said. “To be a good writer, like Hemingway or Robert Stone, you have to get all wasted. And that’s even more lonely than being in a band.”
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