Weezer: The Lamest Band in the World

For those of them that know them, Weezer comes across a joke. No Weezer fan would deny their lack of taste and subtlety. To be a Weezer-ite is instead to acknowledge their serial dearth of coolness and to show a willingness to run with it. Headed by needy social outcast Rivers Cuomo, the band pioneers a form of gritty, emotional and aggressive rock-pop. Most often, songs riff around a couple of themes that share in a common desperation – notably fame, happiness and most often of all, the opposite sex and whether it is willing to sleep with Cuomo. Cuomo is mercilessly personal, often having no creative barriers. This can, of course, be a way of testing the realm of the possible – innovative and brave in equal measure. However, when what you are sharing is your sexual frustration and sense of ineptitude, things can get pretty grating pretty quick. This is the duality of Weezer – its emotional honesty is both refreshing and childish. Weezer plays a high-risk game – Cuomo’s frankness hits hard or falls flat. Twinned with an acerbic, yet technically precise playing style – when it works, Weezer’s music can have a spiky angst. When it doesn’t, it can feel like aimless dad-rock.  

Harvard alumnus Cuomo is clever – and it shows. He’s capable of carefully crafting metaphors and getting a well-articulated message across. Take the song, ‘The World Has Turned and Left Me Here’.  Off Weezer’s first (and best) album, the so-called ‘Blue Album’, the idea is total obsession. Obsession with a now-unattainable former lover acted as an opiate for the tough questions of life. Without her, these questions return in a worse form. For now, the narrator faces these questions after the bitter experience of a dead-end relationship. The narrator laments that he used her as a crutch – ‘and in your place an empty space has filled the void behind my face’. Looping and messy amplified guitar adds to a feeling of lost control and desperation. To finish the song, Cuomo screams the repeated refrain ‘do you believe what I’m saying now?’ – a desperate cry for comfort in his former lover.  Security is preferred to a leap into the unknown. It’s very Weezer: desperate, tense and reflective – it paints a picture of a man perennially dissatisfied.   

In 1996, Weezer takes this to a new level. In Weezer’s second album, ‘Pinkerton’, Cuomo spends half his time complaining about how no-one will sleep with him. ‘Pink Triangle’, a song about Rivers’ crush on a girl who turned out to be a lesbian and ‘Across the Sea’, a very odd number about Rivers’ sexual longing (as a 22-year-old man) for a Japanese child fan are just two examples. The other half of the album can be loosely characterised as whining. Cuomo’s ‘Tired of Sex’ describes how he believes he now (in an abrupt U-turn) has too much sex. Cuomo also moans about his painful leg surgery in the worst track on the album, ‘The Good Life’. Here we find some wonderfully childish Weezer. Lyrics include ‘I don’t wanna be an old man anymore, it’s been a year or two since I was out on the floor shaking booty, making sweet love all the night’. The song is horribly, horribly catchy, and this makes it worse. You may question what self-respect you have left as you catch yourself humming its infectious chorus.

These two albums are the best of Weezer – and I would not recommend a foray into their post-2000 material. The narrative of post-2000 Weezer is one where they sell out, loose relevance, double down on selling out and then finally, regain some zeitgeist power in a half-hearted renaissance. The low point is an album called ‘Ratitude’ – a sickening name for a sickening album. I have never listened to a song from this album the whole way through – and frankly, I have better things to do. Gems like ‘Can’t Stop Partying’ make the serial mistake of trying to make Weezer look cool. It’s pure delusion. Weezer is not cool – never will be – it’s whole schtick is a big F you to being cool. Weezer is the reductium ad absurdium of Rock n’ Roll. Rock n’ Roll was the harbinger of the counter-culture – where rejection of established social and political values was paramount. When these values in turn become the norm, the spirit of Rock n’ Roll split– the violent rejection of social norms encapsulated in set-mutilating The Who decouples from the effortless cool of The Doors. Mainstream outfits like Radiohead may take up the mantle when it comes to ‘cool’ – but Radiohead and co. are tepid, spoilt and conformist. The attitude – or dare I say ‘Ratitude’ – of Rock n’ Roll instead lies elsewhere. Punk, sure, but bands or artists who embrace their inability to be cool have equal claim to the crown.

Weezer is a much-maligned band, often denigrated to a meme and nothing else. Weezer should be considered a meme – Cuomo and his band is undeniably eccentric – but also something more. Weezer is, in fact, revolutionary. They break the ultimate taboo of popular music – that it should be cool. That it should have come this far shows both that rock is resilient, but ultimately rotting six feet under. The death throw of rock is Weezer, the lamest band in the world. Once rock gives us this absurdity as an answer as to ‘what is next?’, I don’t think we should ask it again.