Pavement was the indie rock band of the 90’s. Nirvana was the band that invented and popularized grunge music. Both bands grew out of the west coast, though they both had extremely different ways of doing things. Nirvana became huge while Pavement brushed the surface of success  but never broke through. The cultural lull spawned by the Reagan years, the rise of MTV and the charismatic authority generated by Kurt Cobain are only a few of the many sociological factors involved with Nirvana’s immediate rise and fall and Pavement’s stagnation within mainstream music culture.