Here, I'll do it for you:

Of course S+E is careless, its careless because its a nice, even superior, little collegiate pop record but ultimately slightly sappy and suburban, the sort of record that would shed tears over some unattainable cheerleader.

While, on the other hand, Let It Be is a a rock n' roll album with a tornado for a soul, that spins on pure adrenaline, that careers out of control, unstoppable, a force of nature, disintegrating everything it touches

Let's not quibble and lose sight of the fact that we need to round up at least two more votes for "Let It Be" in the next 26 hours or else Rads and I may very well wipe out the whole of civilization between Austin and Vancouver.

Focus, people. Focus.

they have a whole song built around a tennis metaphor

they've never been shy about their suburban lives, if that alone disqualifies them as a worth while band that's the listeners issue.

Obners, I implore you, vote for S&E.

Radiohead will destroy either one of these so it doesn't really matter.

I'll be really amazed if the winner of this pairing can defeat any of the other three semi-finalists.

Is it going to be Pavement vs Pixies and Stones vs Beatles?

Can't focus I'm too busy listening to Fleet Foxes!!!

How can you claim that Let It Be is not "suburban"?

Actually, no one really is, if you'd take the time to read the thread. Konstantinl tossed out the word "suburban" as a pejorative against Let It Be, as if the word didn't apply to Pavement.

Of course, any reasonable human (ie: not you) will admit that the Replacements and Pavement are, indeed, two very different beasts when one takes into consideration a descriptive comparison that includes the phrases "rock n' roll... tornado for a soul... pure adrenaline... careers out of control, unstoppable, a force of nature, disintegrating everything it touches". One of the two bands under discussion has a mythology based on such terminology, and one of them doesn't. It's fairly simple really.

You didn't counter that by saying it applied to both. You said he had it backwards. Now you're saying it applies to both, but...



I mean, you called me a douchebag?

And who cares which band built their career on what mythology, that was just one person's personal set of descriptors for a particular album. Like, how he actually feels about that album versus the other, not one band's image versus the other.

To my mind, this tournament has produced the best exchanges on Obner/CMJ in years. This is a great discussion of the merits, impact, and cultural claim of two watershed bands... two of my favorite bands and albums. I actually can't remember how I voted on this, it's pretty close for me ... but reading this thread makes me wish I'd voted the other way.

Well first of all make the distinction between 'Let It Be'/''Slanted and Enchanted' and 'The Replacements'/'Pavement'. I'm talking about the former. Pavement are without doubt middle class but they are not suburban in terms of the only thing that matters in this discussion, the sound that comes out of the speaker.

It is, in fact, The Replacements that fall back on the mythologized suburban setting. From the cover shot of the band sneaking out a bedroom window as if they had been grounded by Mom and Dad for not putting gas in the car, to the essentially polite and well mannered songs ('I Will Dare'), to the exasperation and frustration of 'Unsatisfied' (frustration and exasperation being the very milieu of the suburbanite, young and old), to the purely populist musical referencing in the form of a Kiss cover and an album title borrowed from The Beatles, to the woebegone Holden Caulfied-isms of 'Sixteen Blue' and wounded heart of 'Answering Machine' ("Call-waiting phone in another time zone, How do you say I miss you to, An answering machine?").

The album is very obviously about 'escaping' some situation by projecting it through the prism of the modern folk tale of the romanticized suffering of the young man in a suburban setting. This is not some radical, flight of fancy interpretation, its patently obvious to anyone who can see past their own likes and dislikes and for the record I should say I actually like Let It Be quite a bit, in fact I voted for it earlier in the competition.

Contrast with Pavement. Whether you love or hate, its clear there are no conventional songs of love or loss and no recognizable situations or connotations employed in art or lyric or song titles. It's detractors might say its all meaningless, it's supporters might respond by saying it nods its head to absurdity and willful confusion as an intellectual credo but it doesn't really matter for the basis of this argument, what is markedly clear is it does not employ established suburban teenage themes as a concept. Of course some people might see, in retrospect, the slacker phenomenon as a suburban youth movement but that would be a back dated overtone and in any case its wrong to judge an artist by his disciples when we are talking about the music.

'Let It Be' very calculatedly sets its self up as a suburban record while 'Slanted and Enchanted' doesn't really tell us anything. By all meaning criticize 'Slanted and Enchanted' for being blank and meaningless but its clear that its not a suburban album as 'Let It Be' deliberately and obviously models itself.

So you see, I did not use the word 'suburban' as a pejorative and neither in this case does it apply to 'Slanted and Enchanted' making my original opinions quite valid.

I'm with you on almost everything you said except maybe this. I'd argue that Pavement were a product of their times. Most pop culture usually reflects a movement in said culture. As left field as Slanted was, if it came out 5 years earlier I don't think it would've resonated the way it did. The Slacker Rock tag was probably unfair though.

FWIW, I never thought of Pavement as suburban at all. In fact, for years I thought they were a New York band coming out of some art rock scene.

That said, I think to label The Replacements as suburban music is to diminish Let It Be. Just because the themes are familiar does that make it any less universal? Can't everyone relate to pining for the "unattainable cheerleader" or the girl pining for the guy who doesn't know she exists?

Regardless, it really depends on the ear of the beholder. Slanted, to me, was more arty and absurd, yet melodic. It's kind of indefineable and willfully obscure yet hooky at times.

Let It Be is more straight forward but still manages to resonate in a much more universal way IMO.

Both are excellent but for very different reasons.

If I was Konstantinl's prof I'd give that bit of writing a gold star, but the quality of the prose doesn't necessarily lessen the faint smell of bullshit in the air.

Slacker most definitely was a cultural movement. The general credo was "let's not try too hard", which was a mandate that Pavement fully lived up to. I like S+E, but to pretend that it's anything more than artifice, or at the very most, a fetishism of form, is ridiculous.

As for the charges against Let It Be: guilty. Rock 'n' roll, and its tradition, is ALL about escape. Springsteen, Chuck Berry, the Stones - their very essence involved squeezing a transcendent moment of escape into a teenage pop drama. Call that suburban if you will. But if you bring up the notion of rock 'n' roll (and you did), then small matters such as meaning and grasping-for-the-stars make all the difference.

"the exasperation and frustration of 'Unsatisfied' (frustration and exasperation being the very milieu of the suburbanite, young and old),"

So, does this mean I Can't Get No Satisfaction is really the ultimate suburban anthem?

S&E

This should be over now, eh?

The following album will move on to the Final Four:

Pavement - Slanted & Enchanted