Teals for Feels

On Weezer’s Teal Album, nostalgia vibes, and the upside of embarrassment

It can take decades to recover from some embarrassments. When Weezer released their second album, Pinkerton, in 1996, frontman and principal songwriter Rivers Cuomo took the bad reviews personally. Though Cuomo had achieved fame with Weezer’s 1994 debut, the confessional geek-rock masterpiece known as the Blue Album, he later admitted,“I thought my songs were really simplistic and silly, and I wanted to write complex, intense, beautiful music.” The Blue Album went platinum four times over, and Cuomo focused on what little negativity the work incurred. “I was hearing that people thought we were kind of jokey and shallow and a corporate version of The Pixies,” he said. So, with an application letter detailing the loneliness of his rock star life, Cuomo enrolled in Harvard’s Department of Music to study classical composition and began working on what he then could not anticipate would be his last personal album.

After a year, Weezer delivered Pinkerton, its name an allusion to the opera Madame Butterfly (in which a character named B.F. Pinkerton marries then betrays a 15-year-old Japanese girl named Cio-Cio San). The album is a testament to Cuomo’s Japanophilism and his sexual and social hang-ups, most evidently on the song “Across the Sea,” inspired by a young Japanese fan about whom Cuomo was fantasizing at the time. Pinkerton was widely panned — not for its sexism or exoticism, but rather, because critics initially considered it a harsh, noise-rocky, too-drastic departure from the Blue Album’s cleaner sound: “sloppy and awkward,” as Los Angeles Times’s Steve Appleford put it.

The shame Cuomo experienced when Pinkerton flopped factored largely into the band’s subsequent five-year hiatus. By that point, the nineties were over and Pinkerton’s tar and feathers had flaked off, the album accruing appreciation for what it is — a distillation of Cuomo’s outsider angst expressed via tender, awkward confessions immolated in a blaze of frustration. Think of Cuomo, in the bridge of “El Scorcho,” a song about his timidity around a crush, morphing a visceral belly-roar into the ramble-fast lines: “How stupid is it? / I can’t talk about it / I gotta sing about it / and make a record of my heart.” Agonized, self-defeating, horny, egotistical yet sick of himself, Cuomo renders his misfit heart a testament to the intricacies of young adult suffering on Pinkerton. That he received, for his efforts, a place on Rolling Stone’s Worst Albums of 1996 list preoccupied Cuomo even while he was promoting the Green Album in 2001. Unwinding his bandages to reveal a still-fresh wound, he told Entertainment Weekly that Pinkerton was “a hideous record … a hugely painful mistake that happened in front of hundreds of thousands of people,” and likened releasing it to “getting really drunk at a party and spilling your guts in front of everyone and feeling incredibly great and cathartic about it, and then waking up the next morning and realizing what a complete fool you made of yourself.” Cuomo conflated hating his own work and hating how it was reviewed — to him, the whole episode was an unbearable mess.

There’s no telling how a musician will respond to artistic humiliation. For Cuomo, continuing to work necessitated retracting into impersonality lest he repeat the shameful over-sharing of Pinkerton. Bragging to Rolling Stone that the Green Album was “purely musical” with “no feeling, no emotion,” Cuomo signaled a change in the band’s direction. Where they were once confessional and raw, Weezer are now shallow and shiny, one of the most commercial radio-pop groups of their generation, dropping 12 uniformly disappointing albums through the 2000s. Rather than mature, Weezer have adopted a chameleonic tendency to imitate dominant pop trends of the moment — their 2017 Pacific Daydream sounds like Foster the People, their 2007 Maladroit album recalls the Strokes; the Green Album’s “Island in the Sun” could have been written by Sugar Ray. The “complex, beautiful music” Cuomo hoped to continue making throughout his career seems unlikely to manifest again.

The change in Weezer’s music has been alienating for early fans. It is, after all, upsetting to lose the joy of loving an artist wholeheartedly, to feel obliged to bifurcate loyalty into pedantic, defensive “before” and “afters.” Sometimes, wounded and entitled, we wish they would just go away and allow us to remember them fondly. To that end, in 2010, disgruntled fan James Burns launched a petition to raise a million dollars just to incite Weezer to break up and stop “disappointing” those who once loved them.

For his part, Cuomo appears to have taken from his experience with Pinkerton not the understanding that his best art required a certain ineffable element he now omits or has lost, but a rationale for handling bad feedback. “When we hear fans of the early music getting upset by what we’re doing, we know we’re on the right track,” he told Billboard, insinuating listeners will eventually come around to recognizing the genius within every flat release. Given the band put out the distressing single “Pork and Beans” a decade ago — “Everyone likes to dance to a happy song / With a catchy chorus and beat so they can sing along” — and its patina of brilliance has yet to develop, his logic feels more like denial, or delusion. Reflecting on Weezer’s career, it seems that Cuomo’s early brush with embarrassment inoculated him against ever being affected by it again.

Weezer’s most recent release, the Teal Album, is a 10-song collection of covers. Its single — a cover of Toto’s “Africa” — made its debut at 89 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it their highest charting song since 2008. If you’re wondering who asked for Weezer’s version of Toto’s “Africa,” it was created it in response to a Twitter campaign launched by a 14-year-old American named Mary, a fan with the earnest desire to hear her favorite band cover what has become the Internet’s favorite song, thanks in part to its corny-pure exuberance and use on the score of Stranger Things. The divided response to the cover illuminated the gulf between two camps Weezer fans — a niche pop cultural clash exemplified by a recent Saturday Night Live skit. In it, a man at a dinner party (Matt Damon) professes his love for the “Africa” rendition, sparking a debate with another guest (Leslie Jones) about whether Weezer’s entire 21st century output has or has not been, essentially, garbage. “Real Weezer fans know they haven’t had a good album since Pinkerton in ’96” says Jones. “’Pork and Beans’ is better than ‘Buddy Holly,’” spits Damon. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Jones replies, “you’re dumb.”

So that’s the hostile cauldron into which Weezer plopped the Teal Album this January. The album itself comprises nearly note-for-note if slightly grungified renderings of bygone hits unified by their mutual nostalgic, lovable cheesiness — “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”; “Happy Together”; “Take on Me.” Most of the Teal Album is serviceable, some it is cringe-worthy. Cuomo methodically recreates Michael Jackson’s signature ad-libs on “Billie Jean,” his yelpy “hoo!” and “hee hee!” sounding like the racetrack cries of Mario Kart characters. Were Cuomo to get up at a neighborhood karaoke joint and belt out “Stand By Me” it would be a great anecdote for those in the crowd to bring to their respective water coolers the next morning — but a recording of him singing it is a novelty at most. That these covers are so karaoke-like may suggest Weezer is requesting a certain generosity from listeners — for us to grant them, a 27-year-old professional band, the same leniency we would amateurs playing rock star. Perhaps they were scared to put their own spin on the songs — incredulous of their luck with diligently reproducing “Africa,” eager to please, and fearful of deviating from a proven formula.

What’s most interesting about the Teal Album is not its creative merit or lack thereof, so much as why Weezer made it at all. The album is in part a promotional stunt — the band’s Black Album is set for release in March, and the froth Teal has churned up may increase interest in what’s coming next. There is also the pragmatic truth that by releasing an album of 10 recognizable, enjoyable covers, Weezer can now pad their set lists with 10 songs audiences will recognize and enjoy.

Weezer needed hits, and who was going to write them, Cuomo?

Teal is also Weezer’s way of participating in the current cultural appreciation of eighties-nineties aesthetics and nostalgia: Half the songs on the album are eighties synth pop and the most contemporary track covered was released in 1999. Much has been written on why the last decades of the 20th century are hot right now, largely boiling down to the cyclicality of style and the comfort retro entertainment provides in a fearful present. The same impulse that draws audiences to watch the new remake of She-Ra, or Netflix’s nineties teen drama Everything Sucks! could plausibly endear listeners to throwback covers by a nineties breakout band. Teal is also an effort to engage with “meme songs” — a Gen Z term for instantly recognizable music that reflects something of the listener’s cultural experience and/or is abstractly funny in a corny way, a criteria every song on the album fits. Weezer’s “Africa” cover deftly leveraged some meme-based Internet good will, perhaps the band hoped the other tracks might inspire similar passion.

Saliently, Weezer still fills stadiums, although the popularity they sustain today relies on a painful and playful prolonging of their career by any means necessary. Cuomo panders — doing what he must to appeal to whatever demographic seems penetrable. After all, in 2009 the band collaborated with Lil’ Wayne, dad-joking about being “Weezer and Weezy” to court the cool-youngs. In 2010, they filled the “Pork and Beans” video with Youtube personalities. In the 2014 single “Back to the Shack,” Cuomo gave his original fans another shot, singing “thought I’d get a new audience” before admitting he wants to return to “rockin’ out like its ’94.” In 2019, they’re capitalizing on the strain of goofy Gen Z humor that inspired Mary to request the “Africa” cover to begin with, the wild popularity of teenaged Stranger Things actor Finn Wolfhard, who stars in their “Take On Me” video, and the authenticity-appeal out of a charming story about one fan’s quest to have Cuomo bless the rains.

The Teal Album is also a joke. It is bait set to rile up critics like Spin’s Israel Daramola, who prefaced his review of the album with the pearl-clutching Roger Ebert quote, “Sometimes I think I am living in a nightmare. All about me, standards are collapsing, manners are evaporating, people show no respect for themselves.” The sky has been falling over Weezer fans for decades, and Teal may be Cuomo’s way of completing the collapse and definitively alienating the early fans who have plagued him with reminders of how uncool he’s become. The album’s corniness is deliberate; from its deadpan renditions of mainstream radio pop to its self-parodying color — a tertiary shade associated with the scribble design of nineties-era paper cups and perhaps best defined as being “not blue.”

However, the most compelling evidence that the once thin-skinned Cuomo is laughing at us laughing at him is embedded in the music video the band made for “Africa.” In it, Weezer recreates their own 1994 video for Blue Album hit “The Sweater Song,” shot-for-shot. Slowly, the camera moves through a grayscale backstage, spinning around and towards the band, who stand against a cobalt backdrop. It’s not instantly apparent that in the “Africa” video, the musicians are not Weezer, and the lead singer is not Cuomo. Rather, the man in early-era Cuomo-drag (a cardigan, glasses, and a short brown wig) is in fact “Weird Al” Yankovic lip-syncing over Cuomo’s recorded vocals. Yankovic, whose skill is to simultaneously lampoon and validate other musicians through parody, suggests by his very presence that Weezer are reclaiming their narrative. Weezer delivered the punch line to their own legacy. And it landed. Teal is the most pleasurable way I have ever groaned and rolled my eyes at the band.

Instead of trying to ratify the love of fans of their early work, Teal finds Weezer experimenting with their own retro appeal to a generation for whom Blue and Pinkerton are cool vintage finds, rather than precious personal heirlooms. All the while, until August 2019, Weezer are continuing their tour with fellow nineties alt-legends The Pixies, the band Cuomo once feared being seen as a lamer version of, and now sees as a partner with whom to market a package deal of trendy nineties vibes.

This sell-out state of affairs would be grim if not for the goofy triumph with which Weezer are embracing a post-embarrassment career epitomized by the release of an album that’s insouciant enough to be beyond criticism, and meme-ish enough to troll their detractors, too. It is, after all, amusing to imagine an early Weezer snob unable to escape the ubiquitous radio-play of Toto’s “Africa,” of all songs, covered by their once-“important-to-me” band; haunted by its earworm hook just as Cuomo has been haunted by two decades of unrealized potential.