Backtrack: Weezer
By: Christian Hagen
Who they were: Much has been made of Weezer’s splash on the alt-rock scene when they first started in 1994. An unabashedly nerdy, unabashedly sunny band of punkish poppers waxing tongue-in-cheek about glasses, D&D, Kiss, and sweaters, Weezer’s self-titled, blue-covered debut album stands as one of the most fun records of the 90s, and of the alt-rock movement in general.
Who they are: After four albums of addled nonsense, and one which still polarizes fans to this day, Weezer has become one of the most divisive rock bands of their era, scoring top 40 hits while remaining mostly shunned by the mainstream they’re courting, and losing credibility with their fanbase while still dressing and posing like the same bouncy teens they were two decades ago. Weezer is a band without a demographic.
Best Album: Weezer (The Blue Album)
It’s not a large stretch, or an overstatement, to say that Weezer peaked early. From the time many fans were introduced to their in-your-face nerdery, in the classic and hilarious video for “Buddy Holly,” Weezer were already changing the subculture. It says a lot that thick, black-framed glasses almost instantly took on the qualifier of the “Rivers Cuomo look,” a fashion still maintained by indie kids to this day.
More than the trends it started, however, Weezer holds up as one of the definitive pop-rock albums of the last few decades, charmingly simple, peppy but with a clear punk mentality and more than a little heart, as evidenced by songs like “Say It Ain’t So,” which somehow doesn’t seem at all out of place even next to a song as discordant and ridiculous as “Undone (The Sweater Song).” Not perfect by any means, but that’s its beauty, and it’s the frays at the edges of this album that Weezer has lost, to their detriment and ours, as they’ve gotten older.
Worst Album: Raditude
If one were to argue, as some fans have, that Weezer’s apparent pursuit of making the most grating sounds in the universe and committing them to record is merely a ruse, a chance to piss off their label and troll the critics, Raditude would undoubtedly be the centerpiece of their case. The trouble is, no amount of intent or hidden cleverness can save this album, which is, and I mean this, the absolute worst album I’ve ever had the displeasure to review. Whether you tape garbage to your forehead as a joke or not, you’ve still got garbage on your face, and Weezer’s face is absolutely plastered with it on this record.
It starts off bleakly, with “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To,” which finds Cuomo singing about a high school sort of romance with all the musical intelligence of a middle school rock outfit, as though nearing 40 somehow doesn’t preclude him from pretending to be 16. And things spiral from there, from the almost incestuous “I’m Your Daddy” to the maddeningly cheap “In the Mall” and, in one of the most insidiously unlistenable collaborations ever, the Lil’ Wayne-featuring “Can’t Stop Partying,” which, if it is their attempt to write the worst song of all time, hits the mark of awful dead in the center. This album should have been shot out of a cannon, not distributed in stores to masses of Weezer fans while the band reaps the bountiful rewards.
Most Over-praised Album: Pinkerton
Not to say it isn’t a great album, or that it didn’t herald the generation of emo music as we know it today, because it is and it did, but Pinkerton’s “classic” status is far more reactionary than many are willing to admit. The album features sloppy, at times painful music produced as though they were holding their hears in the studio, without a focus half as clear as its predecessor. Frankly, as time wears on, it’s just not an album I, or many people I know, return to consistently. But its initial critical reception was hyperbolic and negative, far more harsh than was merited by even the album’s most difficult elements. Fans, and younger critics who are now the elder statesmen of the music scene, have revolted and won, crowning Pinkerton as a masterpiece of its time. Its recent re-issue garnered impossibly high scores from seemingly every reviewer alive.
Again, this is not to dispute the album’s merits in history, but Pinkerton is not the classic that the first Weezer is. A classic still? Possibly. But if there can be said to exist levels of “classic-ness,” Pinkerton is a step down, at the very least. The band apparently thought so too; Cuomo has stated his hatred for the album, and Weezer nearly broke up after it was finished, resurfacing on the second Weezer with a new-found zest for radio-friendly hits and totally rejecting the spirit of their sad-sack sophomore effort.
Most Under-praised Album: Maladroit
If Pinkerton is a sloppy, somewhat brutal classic in part because of its emotional content, it’s baffling that Maladroit, itself a highly emotional record that, while equally unfocused, features a significantly more mature songwriting technique than the band has utilized before or since, doesn’t garner at least a modicum of the same sort of praise. True, it still adheres to Weezer’s latter-day love affair with hit-making, as evidenced by songs like “Dope Nose” and “Keep Fishin’.” But it’s undeniably the most rock-oriented album the band made post-Pinkerton, and likely it will be remembered as the last gasp of the band’s human side before they became a mutant hybrid of MTV tween icons and forty-something creeps.
Rocking, replete with the band’s best guitar work to date, the whole production also finds the band experimenting with heartfelt honesty in a way they hadn’t since “Pink Triangle.” “Death and Destruction,” “Burndt Jamb,” and “Slob” find Cuomo in a surprisingly fragile state, surrounded though he is with grandly chugging riffs and cymbal-laden backbeats. Perhaps the songs don’t hold up as well on their own; I’ve rarely started the album by listening to “American Gigolo,” preferring to believe it doesn’t exist. And it’s easy to understand how one could be turned off by the raw style of many of these songs on their own; they might come across as overwrought or somehow false. A song like “Slave” might sound fun and in keeping with the band’s usual pop aesthetic on its own, but within the context of its surrounding songs, it’s strikingly sad. Taken as a whole, the collection of songs reveals a side of Weezer we might never see again, one which looks fans in the eyes and tells the truth and tries new things without inflating their egos beyond recognition.
What Have They Done For Us Lately: Not much. From Make Believe to Hurley, Weezer has done everything in their power to shred any evidence that they ever had credibility to work with. Now in their 40s, the band continues to act like kids, and not in a fun, “we’re still the same band we always were” kind of way, but like a bunch of spoiled kids who keep taking more and more without giving anything of worth back to the Weezer fanbase.
However, in the last week, Weezer posted a video on YouTube that may be their most worthwhile contribution to the world of music in years: a straight-forward, hard-rocking cover of Radiohead’s best song, “Paranoid Android.” Is it original? Hardly. And yes, Cuomo does fudge the words here and there. But it’s extremely refreshing to hear the band playing rock and roll again, even attempting to shred, and posting it for fans to enjoy without making a hard dollar off of it. It’s not totally redeeming, but it’s a pleasant reminder of the band we knew and loved. Now if only we could get them back for real.