Pavement crushes Breeders, but in the Cut Your Hair v. Canonball? Canonball smashes. Its catchier and poppier and weirder at the same time. If you go by merits, its better and if you were to project which would be a hit, its much more striking a song.
I'd give you that.
On the other hand, I'd say that Cut Your Hair is way catchier than "The Sweater Song", which I always considered a Pavement rip off, but the fact is if Pavement wrote three albums of Cut Your Hair and were on a major label, they'd probably be rich. In the end, they wrote like 5 radio-ready pop songs over the course of 8 years or whatever, and hundreds of awesome shit that was a little too weird for normal people. Part of me thinks if they had continued in the Crooked Rain veign for one more album they may have struck it rich, but instead they came out with Wowee Zowee, which cemented them as legends and buried them as cross-overs. One thing I think is cool about Malkmus is he just throws out these references in interviews and songs and he's really just acknowledging that other bands exist and they're not all necessarily in a big love club together... I always thought it was cool that he respected the Stone Temple Pilot's singer's not taking the bait (or complete obliviousness) of the Range Life "dis", while Billy Corgan was going batshit about it. I think Kim Deal wouldn't feel so threatened if she hadn't smoked and shot up all that "Cannonball" cash.
