Video: Pavement- Shady Lane

Of all the Pavement videos, 'Shady Lane' struck me as the most true to their aesthetic. While videos like 'Cut Your Hair' and 'Father To A Sister Of Thought' are good fun, they could be for anything, really, other than the barber setting for the former and the country-ish vibe of the latter. No, only 'Shady Lane' really matches Pavement.

I won't bother with a play-by-play because you're supposed to watch the damn thing, but I will point out--helpfully and politely--that the seemingly random scenes it presents to you are every bit as self contained and fleshed out as the average Pavement lyric. Stephen Malkmus is infamous for often writing lyrics that sound good but don't seem to mean anything. In my book that just puts him in the absurdist/poetic camp of writing, in which images or concepts are thrown out to exist on their own, sound good, or juxtapose with each other. Each line becomes like a mini-story or movie scene of its own, just as we see in this video. The car driving without any driver, the vacation slideshow, the super-real looking breakfast, the gas station dance...all seem to have nothing in common; even if they don't, they all make up a tapestry of mini-stories, as if we're being presented with vertical slices of bigger story pies.

Also, the image of a headless Stephen Malkmus is oddly affecting and memorable. I'm sure there's some kind of symbolism hidden within that which I could use to retroactively prove that he was already thinking about breaking up the band, but I'll leave that up to you to puzzle out.