# 998 Pavement “Folk Jam” [Matador, 1999]

Ah, yaaaaaaasss – Terror Twilight’s crown jewel. This Johnny Knoxville-lookin’ dude’s take on the tune got me to thinking about it last night in bed whilst wrestling with some wicked insomnia, and I’ve come to the realization that “Folk Jam” is, in fact, the best thing Pavement ever committed to tape. Traditionally, new Silver Jews albums have driven me to write oodles of oblique poems, but “Folk Jam” represents complete and total lingual perfection, word-crafting domination, a flawless diamond; no-one can step to Steve Malkmus at this level. Silver Jew David Berman, Britt Daniel, Lil Wayne, Liz Phair, Ghostface Killah, Matthew Friedberger, Clipse, Bob Dylan, and many, many others bust out (or busted out, past-tense) zinging lines or couplets regularly, but none of them have put together an entire song that sparkles so bright or hits the same personal pressure points.

I Can’t Sing It Strong Enough insists, probably rightly, that Malkmus’ narrator is ashamed of his ancestry/family and seeks to escape it. Valid, sure, but to me “Folk Jam”’s protagonist so despises himself that his self-loathing predates even his own conception, extending back to and condemning his very national heritage and its assorted myths (and at one point going off on an apparently meaningless, but amusing, tangent). The masterful last lines – which pop into my head on occasion, unbidden – can be read two ways: a sarcastic prelude to a suicide attempt in order to escape this unrelenting self-disgust, or that the entire song has actually been a sarcastic, MFA-worthy “Dear Jane” letter. I prefer this second possibility, myself; when, in the summer of 1999, I drove around Caroline County, Maryland blasting the bootleg Twilight tape Matthew made me, that’s how I interpreted “Folk Jam.” I’d just graduated from college, was suffering through my first journalism day-job in the sticks, and was constantly bored, stressed out, stranded, alienated, depressed, and lonely. I never saw my friends and didn’t know how to make new ones; long-distance, certain people were starting to burn bridges that I still wanted to cross, and it hurt. “Folk Jam” condensed all of these emotions into a couple intense minutes. Spritely minutes, mind you. The contradiction here is that this is an incredibly lively, fiesty song; it sounds as though a three-armed American Gladiator is banging, plucking, and picking it out on a banjo as if his/her life depended upon it, probing every last crevice of the melody for different slants and angles and approaches, a hailstorm of boisterous hoedown notes overwhelming in its happy-happy-joy-joy onslaught – as is the idea was to temper the heavy pathos of the verses with a pharmacist’s perscription of Xanax. Here are those stunning closing lines: “Be as it may, I'm glad to say I'm around/Miles accrue and passengers add up/The message on the mirror says "stick with me"/Cause no one's there to read your reflection when I'm gone/Get it on.”