Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This is “Lariat” by Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks:

Pavement is Stephen Malkmus’s more famous band, but he’s been doing albums either solo or as Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks for fifteen years now, and his/their body of work is, at least as far as my view goes, just as interesting and good as Pavement’s. I recently read Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, and though the book doesn’t have anything explicitly to do with Pavement or Stephen Malkmus, I was struck by how many hardcore punk musicians of the early 1990s expressed an interest in/admiration for the Grateful Dead. You don’t necessarily hear that influence in the music of Black Flag or Fugazi, but it did occur to me, while at a Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks gig earlier this year, that one way of thinking about Stephen Malkmus’s music is that it expresses an equal interest in the Grateful Dead (who get namechecked in this song) as it does in punk rock. Until I read Azerrad’s book, this seemed like a rare or unusual combination of interests, though thinking about it further, I don’t know why; I like the Grateful Dead and punk rock, and I know various other people who do, too. I suspect, at least for people whose lives were changed by punk rock, they either go through a time of denying they have or had any interest in the Dead, and then as they grow a bit older and/or their musical tastes develop further, they come back to that kind of thing, and realize the contradictions aren’t unreconcilable. Anyway, all of this is a longwinded way of saying that in the music of the Jicks you get the meandering, noodling music of the Dead in a head-on collision with the tautness of punk. Of course, there’s Minutemen in there, too, and that’s a lesson to us all.