Pinkerton at 20: A too honest five-track memoir for Weezer’s too honest record
Weezer’s sophomore album, Pinkerton, wasn’t Blue Vol. II, and when it was released 20 years ago today it was largely rejected on those grounds. Blue is a great record, but it doesn’t hit me like Pinkerton hits me, e.g. like a lipstick-sealed note from a high school crush with “I just want to be friends” written inside. Over the past two decades, Pinkerton slowly became the album for leagues of hopeless romantic dweebs like me, eventually earning the admiration it deserves — the record finally hit platinum earlier this week.
Weezer’s leading man Rivers Cuomo claims Pinkerton as his most embarrassingly autobiographical record, largely written during a year he spent in New England recovering from an intensive procedure to correct a congenital short leg. In that time he enrolled at Harvard, began classes in English and music theory, and like any hopeless romantic, obsessed over women. Cuomo’s feelings leak openly out of Pinkerton’s grooves.
Those same grooves cradle the heartaches, longings, and regrets of thousands of star-crossed Weezer fans. As of today, for the OGs, that’s 20 years of feels. Sixteen for me. And in that time, Pinkerton’s been a staple of my own ham-fisted navigations of the tumultuous romantic seas.
To commemorate Pinkerton’s 20th anniversary, here’s my own embarrassingly autobiographical unpacking of feels attached to some choice Pinkerton tunes, presented chronologically by my own experiences across the past 16 years. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and otherwise.
El Scorcho
“How stupid is it? For all I know you want me too.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okthJIVbi6g
Laura was 15, and I was 17, enamored and terrified. She put “El Scorcho” on a mix CD for me and it sounded nothing like the Weezer I knew. I felt an immediate connection with the lyrics. They described a boy too shy to confess his love to his crush — but I never got the message she tried to send me by including it in the mix. I still didn’t get it when she gave it to me in person, in frustration, the two of us reclined on her bed on the second story of that old white farmhouse I still drive by sometimes when I’m visiting home. “Take what you want.”
Butterfly
“I’m sorry for what I did, I did what my body told me to, I didn’t mean to do you harm.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlZF6Ud3AaU
I met Anna after the implosion of a five-year-long relationship — my first. I was lost and deflated. She was cute, smart, and sort of nerdy. And she, for reasons I couldn’t understand, liked me. When I finally kissed her I didn’t feel a thing. The alienation of kissing someone you’re attracted to, expecting sparks, and getting nothing was a disturbing new entry on the list of life’s casual cruelties. I slept with her anyway, all summer long. Our last night together I pretended to be asleep while she quietly sobbed in my arms. I still hate myself for this and I still think of her when I listen to Butterfly.
No Other One
“My girl’s a liar, but I’ll stand beside her, she’s all I’ve got and I don’t want to be alone.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65p6grAGYIM
I learned to play this song in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest in grad school when I was drowning in infatuation with Jessica, whose kiss triggered acute, opiated euphoria at cellular levels. I’d pick up my guitar and belt this out in my apartment while I waited for her to call me to hang out like she said she would, usually falling asleep on the couch hours later in a self-inflicted weed coma. She always apologized but never stopped. I found out later she spent many of these nights with someone else. What did he sing the nights she spent with me?
Pink Triangle
“I’m dumb, she’s a lesbian, I thought I had found the one.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjy3XbxMW1A
Laura’s a lesbian now.
The Good Life
“I don’t wanna be an old man anymore.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkroIXktjgE
After grad school, I moved to a small college town in Western South Dakota to start a newspaper job, and to stay with Angie, who dumped me a few months in. Riston is a bartender at my favorite bar there, a place that still feels like home even though I’ve since moved away. He’s 32, like me. Adam M. is 23 and into metal and weed, also like me. I met them after months of self-indulgent hermitage. Riston put on Pinkerton one night at the bar, and the three of us drunkenly sang our way through every song. We were casual buddies before this. That night, we became close, “I can talk with you about anything” friends. That’s the kind of record Pinkerton is.
