About Pavement's version simply turning the song into a Pavement song --

Agreed -- This fits the category of the cover that discovers the great [our] song hiding inside [your] song -- like Dinosaur Jr.'s "Just Like Heaven," or for that matter Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower."

This is an argument that I've never much understood. Much of rock music is simply taking another song and speeding up, or slowing down, the tempo. There's only so many ways for a band like Metallica to play three chords. There's lawsuites aplenty in the rock world because one rock act feels that another stole their music.

Even Willie Nelson's great "Redheaded Stranger" was just 17 variations on the "Minuet in G".