Cut Your Hair

Pavement made one song that people who have never heard of Pavement tend to know. It has a lurching guitar line, a chorus built from happy wordless syllables, and a set of verses that sound like a man sneering at the entire business he is currently participating in. The sneer is the point, and so is the fun.

"Cut Your Hair" is the lead single from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, released on Matador in February 1994^[3]. It reached the top ten on the modern rock chart and became the closest thing the band ever had to a hit^[1]. It is also a song about how absurd it feels to be sold, packaged, and pitched, written by a band that was suddenly being sold, packaged, and pitched.

A band between two records

Pavement began in Stockton, California, in 1989 as a studio project of Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg^[4]. Their debut, Slanted and Enchanted, arrived in 1992 and became one of the most influential indie rock albums of the decade, a record of hiss, fog, and fractured guitars that sounded like it had been assembled in someone else's garage, because it more or less had been^[4].

The follow-up was recorded in August and September 1993, at studios in New York City and Stockton, with the band producing itself^[2]. Original drummer Gary Young was gone, and Steve West had taken his place. The result was cleaner and more tuneful, trading some of the debut's murk for hooks, while keeping the odd angles^[2].

The timing matters. In early 1994 the alternative rock boom was in full swing, major labels were hunting for the next big thing, and the word "indie" had started to carry a price tag. A band with a reputation for sloppy brilliance was now expected to behave like a prospect.

A satire of the scene

The most common reading is that the song mocks the music business itself, in particular the idea that an "alternative" band can be a commercial product. One retrospective calls it a send-up of the oxymoron at the heart of the alternative rock hit^[5]. Another reads the verses as a wry catalog of scene anxieties: new bands appearing daily, the pressure to oversell yourself, the nagging doubt that any of it is worth the effort^[1].

Wikipedia's summary puts it more specifically, hearing the narrator as a mock recruiter reading out an advertisement for a musician, one that cares far more about image than ability^[6]. That framing is useful, because it explains the tone. The voice is not a bitter outsider. It is a deadpan insider, reciting the logic of the machine until the logic collapses under its own silliness.

Note that this is interpretation. The band has never offered a tidy explanation of the song, and the sources available here are commentary, not a statement from Malkmus. The song's refusal to explain itself is part of its method.

Hair as a metaphor for conformity

The title command is the song's clever hinge. Hair is the cheapest and most visible signal of belonging, which is why punk, hippie culture, and metal all used it as a uniform. Telling someone to cut theirs can mean "fit in," "get a real job," or "look marketable."

Across the verses the narrator drifts between advising an individual about a haircut and describing the larger pressure to shape yourself for approval. One critic hears the opening address as friendly advice to a woman who is considering changing her look for a man, which connects personal appearance to professional image-making^[1]. The song never settles which of these is the real subject, and the overlap is where its sharpest observation lives: the pressure to alter yourself works the same way whether the audience is a date or an A&R department.

The title also nods to an older tradition. The Who recorded a song about a character struggling to fit in with his peers, and one writer sets the two songs side by side, noting that the Pavement track turns that earnestness into mockery^[1].

The sound of not caring, carefully

A satire like this could easily have been sour. What rescues it is the music. The guitars lurch and stutter in a way that feels slightly drunk, the rhythm section keeps a bouncy pace, and the chorus abandons words entirely for a bright, sing-along vocal. The contrast between acid verses and cheerful refrain is the whole joke and the whole charm^[1].

That mix of cynicism and joy is the quality fans mean when they call Crooked Rain the quintessential slacker rock album^[2]. Slackerdom here is not laziness. It is a posture of ironic distance adopted by people who care a great deal and would prefer you not notice. The music has real craft, but it is dressed as an accident.

The same attitude runs through the video, set in a barbershop where the band members wait for haircuts and each is visited by a surreal moment: a sneeze that produces a cat, a gorilla suit, a crown and scepter handed over for no reason^[6]. It is silly, and silly was the correct response to the situation.

Success, and its irony

The song peaked at number ten on Billboard's modern rock chart in May 1994, the band's highest chart position in any category^[1]. It spent twelve weeks on the alternative airplay chart, reached 52 in the UK, and later turned up in films and video games^[6]. NME ranked it 28th on a 2007 list of the greatest indie anthems^[6].

There is real irony in that. A song mocking the commercial packaging of alternative rock became a modest commercial success on alternative radio. One writer links the song's upbeat feel to the months following Kurt Cobain's death in April 1994, when the scene was both grieving and still being mined for product^[1]. The band did not pretend this was a contradiction to be resolved. The following records leaned toward the weirder and less radio-friendly, as though they had learned what a hit felt like and decided to decline a second helping.

The album itself did fine. It sold roughly 500,000 copies by 2009, reached number 15 in the UK, and was praised widely at the time, earning a 9 out of 10 from Spin and an A from Robert Christgau^[2]. Pitchfork later placed it eighth on its list of the best albums of the 1990s^[2].

It helps to remember what the record around it sounds like. Crooked Rain draws on California folk-rock and psychedelia as much as on the noisier style of the debut, with fuzz, wah guitar, and cowbells turning up in unexpected places^[2]. The single is the loudest and most immediate thing on it, but it shares the album's habit of hiding sincerity inside a joke.

That habit is why the song has outlived its moment. Plenty of 1994 novelty is now unlistenable, but this track survives because the jokes are attached to a real feeling. Anyone who has been told to sand down their rough edges for the sake of an audience will recognize it, whether the audience is a record label, an employer, or a crowd at a party.

It also helps that the band is clearly in on the gag. Nothing in the performance suggests a group standing above the scene it describes. They sound like participants who have noticed the strings and cannot resist tugging on them.

Other ways to hear it

Not everyone hears a satire. A sincere listener can take the song at face value, as a catchy reflection on the pressure to change yourself to be liked. Others hear it as primarily a lark, a collage of scenester gripes with no unified argument, enjoyed best by not asking what it means.

There is also a reading focused on the performance rather than the words. For some fans the pleasure is mostly in the wobbling guitar interplay and the sense of a band holding itself together by instinct. On this view the satire is a garnish, and the real subject is the thrill of a group of friends sounding exactly like themselves at a moment when everyone else was trying to sound like somebody else.

The most generous reading may be the one that combines these. The narrator mocks the machine while obviously wanting to be heard by it, and the chorus is a tacit admission that a good tune is a good tune, whatever the market does with it. A song can be both a critique of the hit and an excellent example of one.

Why it lasts

Nearly every subculture eventually faces the moment when its look becomes a product. "Cut Your Hair" captures that moment without pomposity, which is rare. It laughs at the pressure and at the people applying it, and it laughs at the narrator too.

Later covers by pop-punk bands such as Motion City Soundtrack and Midtown suggest that younger listeners hear the song as a pure good time^[6]. That may be its final joke. The more cheerfully it is sung, the more perfectly it illustrates what it was making fun of, and the better it sounds.