The only shitty thing about Pavement is its nameWelcome to my week-long rant about band names, in which I’ll be calling out five otherwise-good, iconic bands who, for one inexplicable reason or another, chose lame, nonsensical monikers to represent what is otherwise excellent music made by talented people who should’ve known better. Stay tuned for number one.2. Pavement”Pavement” might not be so bad if it was for a shoegaze band instead of a badass indie rock band whose main strength is the prowess of its lyricist. Stephen Malkmus knows his way around the English language, and frankly, he could have come up with something better Sure, one-word names are usually a safe bet. They’re snappy. They’re easy to remember. They can be printed in large type on LP and CD covers for maximum promotional impact. Unfortunately, most one-worders are spoken for at this point. But Pavement can’t use that excuse, because plenty of awesome one-word band names have surfaced after Pavement got together. It’s such a shame that Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks got a better band name than Pavement when the latter made much more interesting music. And if more people don’t know about Pavement’s critical contributions to ’90s indie rock in the year 2010, I’m willing to bet that the band’s boring handle might have something to do with it.