What More Do You Want From Weezer?
Weezer’s latest album, Weezer “The Black Album”, was released on Friday. As what seems routine when the band re-enters the public eye, the reception is divided, with the consensus opinion being driven by those frustrated that this album fails to recapture the signature sound and emotional honesty that endeared so many music lovers to the band in the mid-90s. It is often said that Weezer’s only two “good” albums are 1994’s “Weezer” (The Blue Album) and 1996’s “Pinkerton”, and those who malign Weezer’s latest release almost certainly fall into the camp that firmly believes that to be the case. SNL even played with this perception of the band and their recent work for an entire sketch in 2018, which features a fight over which era of Weezer is best between characters played by Leslie Jones and Matt Damon. To Matt Damon’s point in this sketch, Weezer’s career extends far beyond these two albums, “The Black Album” is their 13th LP and 2019 marks the 25th anniversary of their debut album. Is it fair to judge Weezer by a standard set that long ago?
I will start by saying I am a huge Weezer fan. I have seen them nine times and have joked often that they are my version of the Grateful Dead. I formed my connection to the band during the doldrums of my high school experience, a time in my life where I found myself frustrated with the opposite sex. Weezer’s lyrics, which openly celebrate the comic books, movies, and proto-meme culture I loved while also very bluntly describing lead singer/songwriter Rivers Cuomo’s frustrations with women, resonated profoundly with me. “Pinkerton”, in particular, describes angst in such intimate detail that it’s hard to imagine it could even exist in today’s pop music climate.
While “Pinkerton” has experienced a renaissance of appreciation since its release, with music critics and fans appreciating this blunt honesty and fuzzy, intense production aesthetic, it was originally met with heavy criticism and floundering sales compared to their debut album. How could the band who rose to popularity on the back of quirky songs like “Undone (The Sweater Song)” and novelty videos like the “Buddy Holly” video follow up their success with such a left-turn? In the wake of this, Rivers Cuomo famously experienced a meteoric psychological collapse. He receded from the public eye and returned to Harvard to finish an education he put on hold for the band’s first two albums.
This hiatus was so formative to the band’s future, that fans and critics alike refer to the first album to be released afterwards as the beginning of the “post-Pinkerton” era. Their first release after “Pinkerton” came in 2001 with “Weezer” (The Green Album), and saw not only former bassist, and signature falsetto harmonizer, Matt Sharp swapped out but also saw a Rivers Cuomo changed from the Pinkerton experience. Gone was the emotional vulnerability of “Pinkerton”, and it was replaced with pure power-pop. The bands output from 2001 through 2010’s “Hurley” saw successful radio play from singles like “Hash Pipe”, “Island in the Sun”, “Pork and Beans”, and “Beverly Hills”, but gone were lines like “I know I should get next to you. You got a look that makes me think you’re cool. But it’s just sexual attraction not somethin’ real so I’d rather keep wackin’”. This left fans have feeling disillusioned with the band and feeling as those they are a shell of the band they first fell in love with in 1996.
This, in turn, seemed to also disillusion Rivers himself as it was the public backlash to “Pinkerton” which led him down this path in the first place. He spoke openly about this in the run-up to 2005’s “Make Believe” about the guilt he felt in the actions in his personal life that inspired “Pinkerton” and the frustration over what he felt he owed fans of Weezer. To attempt to provide an antidote to this, Rick Rubin, producer of Make Believe, introduced Rivers to meditation, specifically Vipassana style meditation. Rick is quoted as saying in a piece in Rolling Stone from this time “It’s worked for him — you might see him smile or laugh now, and before you would never see that”. While the topic of meditation is one that could inspire multiple other op-eds, reading interviews like this from the time and onward when Rivers discusses his practice, you can see one of the biggest benefits he as derived from it is peace with the guilt he felt that drove him to create something as anguished as “Pinkerton”. Meditation and the benefits thereof is a very subjective and personal experience, so I can only speak from my perspective and say that my experience with meditation has produced a similar effect. Emotions no longer fester. I quickly identify them, identify the root cause, and move on. As I deepen my own meditation practice, I also don’t feel the need to trap myself in a room and listen to “Pinkerton” on repeat as a cathartic experience. If I feel that way about my own practice, and I assume similar positive effects for Rivers, why would I expect Rivers to create art in that way anymore either?
Additionally, Rivers has spoken extensively about his songwriting process over the past five or ten years as well. Perhaps most poignant example was the explanation of his process behind the song “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori” from 2016’s “Weezer” (The White Album), given on the podcast Song Exploder. Rivers revealed that he has catalogued most of his twenty-year history of demos and notes on his computer in searchable spreadsheets and databases. This allows him to experiment by combining elements and idea fragments into songs that form one cohesive whole. He details this again in an article in Entertainment Weekly leading up to the release of “Weezer” (The Black Album) saying “The way I write now, I have a folder of about 1,400 demos. And I look at it through a program called Mp3tag. I’ll be writing a song, and I’ll know: ‘All right, I need a bridge that’s at 132 bpm, in the Key of A-flat major, and the bridge needs to start on the two chord, and the melody needs to be on the fourth degree of the scale.’ I press ‘Go,’ and Mp3tag returns the ten matching demos I have”.
This approach is fundamentally different than how “Weezer” (The Blue Album) and “Pinkerton” were born out of early 20s dreams of rock stardom. The effects of Rivers’ meditation and songwriting process seem to have, on some level, add a layer of abstraction between art and the artist, or at least adds a layer between Rivers and Weezer’s art that was not present when the band first broke through. A common refrain is that there seems to be even an ironic detachment and inauthenticity in Weezer’s music and lyrics that turns off many fans, especially those expecting the music that evokes shades of “Pinkerton”. But Rivers is no longer that anguished 26-year-old anymore and is living an examined and mindful life now, one that allows him the space to create wild systems to optimize his songwriting process. The result, in my opinion, has been an amazing run of form since 2014’s “Everything Will Be Alright in the End”. Each album sees different songs take jumps in perspective lyrically, with Rivers sometimes embodying a female perspective, male perspective, and even Revolutionary war soldiers, while peppering in references to philosophy, science, Shakespeare, love, romance and Charles Darwin. All of this is set against amazing and inventive production with infectious melodies and hooks.
Weezer is not trying to be the band you want them to be. Their goal, implicit in Rivers’ approach to crafting an album today, is to make fun pop music with lyrics specific enough to have focus but vague enough for anyone to find meaning in them all while experiment with sounds in the studio to add the vibrancy needed to make these songs stand out among a crowded pop rock space. They want you to feel good listening to their music and enjoy going to their concerts. Rivers exploration into meditation and mindfulness combined with his scientific commitment to systematically cataloguing a 20-year history of lyrical and melodic ideas has allowed the band to have one of the most consistent runs of form in modern pop-rock. For that, they deserve respect and admiration, just maybe not the respect and admiration they first earned from you in 1996.
