A lot of bands work very hard to make you appreciate their meticulous craft or browbeat you with hooks, but Pavement tossed off brilliantly composed pop songs with a shambling, carefree swagger. They made it sound easy, and maybe it was. The best kind of genius tends to come very naturally to people, like a side effect of just being themselves.

The very best Pavement songs delight in curiosity and imagination, drawing connections between images and ideas as if everything in the world was full of character and significance. This is part of why, for example, a playful joke about the voice of Rush's lead singer in "Stereo" never gets stale. It's in the middle of a song that may as well be a sub-genre unto itself, bouncing about gleefully, utterly fascinated by the all the obscure details of the world. They found the magic in the mundane, and could make small enthusiasms, silly in-jokes, and skewed observations seem profound and glorious.

Stephen Malkmus' lazy, pitch-imperfect California drawlin', Spiral Stairs' shredded almost-guitar-playing, and the album's seemingly unfinished half-songs encapsulated the slacker ethos of the time with the hyperactive, restless energy that only hits after long bouts with boredom. Pavement's stream-of-consciousness lyrics and one-take anthems achieved genius through apathy. And in a time when apathy seemed the only option in life, no one said everything by saying nothing at all like those bored Stocktonites.

Matthew Perpetua