"Cut Your Hair"

Pavement
(Matador, 1994)

Rock used to teem with moments of transcendence, those go-for-broke gestures when a performer risked utter foolishness to bring a song to an emotional breakthrough and make the listener shiver in awe. In the ironic '90s, however, such naked emotional risk was unfashionable. So it's no small thing when Pavement, the decade's most ambivalent band, in the decade's most diffident song about pop stardom, hammer home their not-so-secret pop dream in the repeated climactic phrase "A career, a career, a career . . . " At that moment, the song bursts free of irony and vacillation to reach a rousing, brave, resonant affirmation, an instant of unexpected grace.

-- Gary Susman