| Cut Your Hair | |
| Cover: | Pavement-Cut-Your-Hair-376720.jpg |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | Pavement |
| Album: | Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain |
| Released: | February 1994 (USA) |
| Recorded: | August–September 1993 |
| Studio: | Random Falls Studio (New York City, New York) |
| Length: | 3:09 |
| Label: | Matador |
| Producer: | Pavement |
| Prev Title: | Trigger Cut |
| Prev Year: | 1992 |
| Next Title: | Gold Soundz |
| Next Year: | 1994 |
"Cut Your Hair" is a song by American rock band Pavement from their second album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. It was written by Pavement songwriter and lead singer Stephen Malkmus. The song snidely attacks the importance of image in the music industry. In one verse, Malkmus sarcastically recites a fictitious ad looking for a musician to join a band: "advertising looks and chops a must/ no big hair".
The song was released as a single and became the band's best-selling and most popular song. "Cut Your Hair" obtained strong airplay on U.S. indie and alternative radio stations, reaching the top ten on Billboard's Alternative Songs chart in the spring of 1994, spending 12 weeks on the Alternative Billboard chart.[1]
Both B-sides are included on the reissue . The unlisted B-side track on the 12" version of the single is an instrumental recording of "Rain Ammunition," and has never been reissued.
In May 2007, NME magazine placed "Cut Your Hair" at number 28 in its list of the 50 Greatest Indie Anthems Ever.
The video, released in 1994, is relatively simple, showing the band sitting on a bench at a barber shop, waiting to get their hair cut. Some strange things happen to each band member when they go and sit on the barber's chair:
Each band member has different clothes on when they go back to the bench. After their haircuts, all the band members leave the barbershop very quickly, with Ibold taking a magazine he had been reading.
In an alternate version of the video, a black-and-white TV in the barber shop played a loop of the band acting silly in Malkmus' apartment.
"Cut Your Hair" was featured on the soundtrack to , A Very Brady Sequel, The Ultimate Playlist of Noise, The To Do List, and You, Me and Dupree. It is available as a downloadable track for Guitar Hero 5.