“I beg you Weezer – take our money and disappear”
This was the plea of Brian Burns, who in 2010 tried to crowd fund Weezer out of existence. Burns wanted to raise $10 million to buy Weezer out of ever making music again, describing their musical output as an ‘abusive relationship’, where they repeatedly let fans down with shitty records featuring songs like ‘We Are All On Drugs’.
Unfortunately when I heard of this campaign it rang all too true for me. Weezer were the first band to truly let me down. Their first two albums – Weezer (aka The Blue Album) and Pinkerton – were the first records I remember caring about enough to feel genuinely hurt by crappy follow ups. It took three terrible records before I was able to accept that their best days were behind them.
My abusive relationship started when I saw Weezer chugging out the opening hook of ‘Hash Pipe’ on Top of the Pops (if anyone remembers, the chorus had been sanitised for radio to ‘You’ve got your problems / I’ve got my ass wide / You’ve got your big G’s / I’ve got my half pipe’ – it’s no coincidence that I was also a budding skateboarder at the time…). As an avid listener to the likes of Blink 182, The Offspring and Green Day, I took my thirteen year old self down to the local HMV for my latest all American pop punk fix.
Fortunately for me, I was only able to find one Weezer record. It was called Pinkerton, and rather than the cartoonish album artwork I was accustomed to (the image of a sexy nurse pulling a latex glove over one hand springs to mind), this record featured a strangely delicate Japanese woodblock print for the artwork. With hindsight, I’m amazed how little I listened to the lyrics of that album – Pinkerton is an uncomfortably stark record about frontman Rivers Cuomo’s sexual frustration and conflicting feelings about his new-found fame – but at the time I liked it primarily because it was catchy and a little bit odd (playing into the ‘outsider’ niche I was starting to try and carve out for myself). Even though I wasn’t paying close attention to the lyrics, on some level the sense of narrative progression and considered structure must have resonated with me. This wasn’t the moronic ramblings of an over-the-hill pop-punk band. Whoever wrote this record had actually thought about it at both a musical and conceptual level, rather than relying on power chord bashing, singalong choruses and expensive record label marketing efforts alone.
Shortly after discovering Pinkerton, I bought Weezer’s first record, the Blue Album. I played it relentlessly over the course of a family holiday, and for the first time in my life I really listened to the music. It wasn’t just background noise or something to bop my head to – I paid attention to the album’s lyrics, its structure, its narrative arc. I studied its details and intricacies, I listened through the layers of the music, picking out each instrument, soaking up each vocal harmony, hearing both the said and unsaid in every lyric. It was a revelation. Over the course of that holiday, I must have listened to Blue a hundred times. Amazingly, a decade later its still one of the only records I can never seem to get bored of.
Much has been said about both of these albums in the last 20 years (Stereogum posted this excellent write up of Blue to celebrate its 20th anniversary). For me though, these albums shaped my taste in music in a few very specific ways. Firstly, the more I listened to Blue, the more I picked up on its idiosyncrasies. Underneath the simple, straightforward music was a certain weirdness. I enjoyed that unlike most of the music I had been listening to up until this point, I had no idea what these guys were on about. More than that, the album is punctuated with so many off-kilter moments – yelps before guitar solos, the falsetto bridge to Surf Wax America, the way the band sing over each other about lying around in ‘superman skivvies’ on Undone – The Sweater Song… All these things added so much colour to what I was hearing. Even now, I relish in hearing these kinds of divergences in the music I listen to. The Blue album taught me how to listen to music at more than a surface level and enjoy those small, unexpected moments.
Secondly, both albums (Pinkerton in particular) tapped into my nascent teen angst. While I was still yet to fall down the rabbit hole of emo, screamo and hardcore punk, Rivers Cuomo’s lyrics embodied all the frustrations I was feeling as a young teenager – unrequited love, the feeling of being an outsider, the sense that nobody understands… It wasn’t until later that I started seriously considering the lyrical content of Pinkerton, but from day one of listening to the Blue Album, I felt like Only In Dreams had been written specifically for me. It’s the first song I remember completely disappearing into – feeling the yearning behind the plodding bassline, wallowing in the lyrics “You say it’s a good thing that you float in the air / That way there’s no way I will crush your pretty toenails into a thousand pieces”, being pulled along by the slow crescendo into the explosive final chorus of the album.
Last year, Weezer released their ninth studio album. I tried it out, it had some passable tracks. That one with Beth Consentino from Best Coast is alright… Fundamentally though, all the things I cherish about Blue and Pinkerton – the direct lyrics, straightforward music, the outsider humour – have been warped and distorted under the weight of their success in increasingly moronic ways as their career has gone on. Unfortunately, I tried to cling on for too long.
It was only recently that I accepted that I can’t stop Weezer. Constant bad reviews can’t stop Weezer. Brian Burns’ campaign can’t stop Weezer (drummer Pat Wilson’s depressing response was “make it $20 million and we’ll do the deluxe breakup”). What I can do though is strive to protect the place they have in my own musical history. Every now and then I come back to one of these albums, almost as if to check I haven’t grown out of it without realising, and every time without fail the finger-picked opening bars to My Name is Jonas immediately make my heart soar. Long may it last.
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