Time & Perspective Quote by Stephen Malkmus

Malkmus is taking a cheap shot at rock snobbery by giving it its most extreme, almost self-parodying form: if the Beatles were peak guitar music, then everything after is just pointless epilogue. It’s a deliberately ridiculous premise, the kind of absolutism you hear in record-store arguments and online canon wars, where taste hardens into a verdict and history becomes a closed case. By pushing that logic to the edge, he exposes what it really is: not reverence, but a refusal to listen.

The subtext is very Pavement-era: irony used as a pressure release valve for anxiety about influence. Malkmus came up in a post-classic-rock landscape where every guitar band had to negotiate the shadow of the Beatles, the Stones, and a whole museum wing of “important” records. Instead of pretending that shadow isn’t there, he acknowledges it and then shrugs it off. The line “give new records a try” sounds almost modest, but it’s a quiet manifesto against cultural nostalgia as a personality.

Context matters: an indie musician from the ’90s arguing for openness isn’t just being polite; he’s defending the possibility of contemporaneity. The Beatles comparison is a trap that keeps guitar music stuck in reenactment mode. Malkmus’s point is that negativity can be made to sound smart while doing nothing but narrowing the world. Trying new records is framed as an active, slightly rebellious choice: not denying the past, but refusing to let it foreclose the present.