This song is about trying to act cool to get girls to be interested in you. This approach to picking up girls has no mixed results. It always fails.

"Stolen rooms, or the alloy of chrome "... actual lyric is "stolen rims are they alloy or chrome".

Probably my favorite Pavement song... Like many of their early songs though, it's pretty hard to say what it is actually about. To me it appears to be a song about unrequited love...

i love how they can say this shit and not sound pretentious -'Well I've got style/ miles and miles/ so much style that it's wasting' is probably one of my favorite lyrics ever.

"Well I've got style- miles and miles, so much style that it's wasted."

yeah, my favorite thing ever. i don't know why this never made it onto one of the albums.

It made it onto the wonderful Watery Domestic EP, which is awesome on it own. Last EP with Gary 2 Sniff...

Anyways this song is about moving on, progressing past mistakes and negative emotions, and bad circumstances around you.

Start with the chorus: Empty homes, plastic combs, stolen rims are they alloy or chrome?

This is a snapshot of daily life, and one thats not very attractive. Using cheap plastic combs, empty abandoned houses, someone's rims got stolen.. were they alloy or chrome?

"Be quiet the weather's on the night news" Parents yelling at kids while they watch monotonous weather reports. Who hasn't experienced these things?

The rest of the lyrics echo this sentiment: migrant workers who slave away at cheap labor, souls are crumbling, in the way a dirt clod crumbles in a firm grasp, I like that simile btw ^_^. And the famous "I've got style" lines. SM says them as if its a burden, trying to have style, miles and miles... i take it almost as if he is tired of trying to have style; of trying to establish himself, and so the skills he does have are wasted.

The fabric (his life) is torn ( hard times) but theres the hope of weaving something beautiful regardless, we are all still weaving it out.

In the live version at Brixton Academy Sm says before they play: "Frontwords in the name of this song, it's about moving forward.... obviously" The live version is quite good as well.

I take SM's lyric about style in relation to the rest of the song as having multiple meanings- on one side he is kind of giving an f-u to rat-race middle america and some of its banal everyday bleakness- and on the other, through a hint of sarcasm, giving an f-u to anyone that actually believes a line like that about themselves. By the contrast of these meanings to the lyric's statement he spaces himself from either camp.

One of the great Pavement openers along with 'Grounded'.

Ripping on the middle class coming from someone who's from a fairly affluent family. come across as sarcastic I think,.

I much prefer the live version that's at the end of the second disc of the Slanted and Enchanted deluxe edition release, as opposed to the studio version. But great song either way. I also love the Los Campesinos! cover.

Their souls are crumblin'
Like a dirt clod. Hold
Your cigarette cupped to the inside.