The 1 Thing I Learned from Weezer, and the 1 Thing I Should Have
It must have been 6th grade.
If my memory serves me, (which it does, in that it serves the motives of my present moment), I was sitting in the middle of the back seat, friends filled the car. An adult must have been driving.
Weezer came on the radio. Probably “Buddy Holly”. Quickly, it became subject of discussion and let me tell you, Weezer was a divisive band among preteens in 1995.
They had just enough pop appeal, just enough perceived nerdiness, to make 12 year-old boys insecure, which makes 12 year-old boys pick on other 12 year-old boys.
Somehow I was put in the position, as people who constantly calibrate their response, gauging every opinion in every room, selecting each statement for maximal lack-of-confrontationality, find themselves in: pure panic at being asked their opinion.
Not only was this situation the nightmare fuel of socially anxious children who had no idea what anxiety was, much less what social anxiety — and just assumed that, paradoxically, there was both something wrong with them, and that the universal, natural state of existence was one of constant worry — in this particular instance, I had previously answered this exact question incorrectly.
Sitting there in the backseat, literally in the middle of the conversation, feeling eyes turning towards me, I flashbacked to a day earlier that week (or month, or semester) where I had said that I didn’t like Weezer because I sensed that the person asking me didn’t like Weezer only to be scoffed at for not liking Weezer.
I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
This time, I like Weezer!
And so I responded in the affirmative and suddenly everything slowed down, the scoffs reverberated in slow motion, a cacophony of displeasure, echoing through a canyon.
Once again, I was wrong.
I had miscalculated and paid the price.
That was too much. A bridge too far.
Through a quiet anger I vowed I would never again like or dislike any music because someone else liked or disliked it.
Because the truth was that I loved Weezer. And I had sold them out, and myself, only to find I was a terrible salesman.
The Failure of Pinkerton
It’s a hideous record… It was such a hugely painful mistake that happened in front of hundreds of thousands of people and continues to happen on a grander and grander scale and just won’t go away. It’s like 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.
Rivers Cuomo, from The Pinkerton Diaries
One of Rock’s most famous Phoenix’s, Pinkerton, was originally destroyed by critics upon its 1998 release, only to become one of “10 Classic Albums Rolling Stone Originally Panned”, a list that includes Jimi Hendrix’s debut, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and Blood on the Tracks.
The follow up to their visually groundreaking, self-titled debut Weezer, Pinkerton had a lot of expectations placed upon it.
It didn’t live up to them, so said the people who say words about such things for a living, upon first review.
“El Scorcho”, the albums’ lead single, and a song I immediately fell in love with, “failed commercially; several radio stations refused to play the song, and the video was not played on MTV. This is considered to be one of the causes for the initial commercial failure of the album.”
Rob O’Connor, in the now infamous 3 (of 5) star Rolling Stone review, reads Cuomo’s childish take on love as immature, missing the vulnerability in stripped-bare stanzas like,
I’m beat, beet red
Ashamed of what I said
(What I said) Oh
I’m sorry, here I go
I know I’m a sinner
But I can’t say no
Reading the title literally (and ignoring the end of the chorus, “why can’t I be making love come true?), O’Connor originally described “Tired of Sex”,
a look at a brooding stud’s empty sex life, is as aimless as the subject’s nightly routine.
In The Pinkerton Diaries — a collection of Cuomo’s diary entries taking place between The Blue Album and Pinkerton — it is clear Cuomo is struggling with intimacy and shame, amplified by the world stage he suddenly found himself on.
A section titled “Scene I In The Black Hole, Act I” is a scene of two men dialoguing about a woman, the object of both their sexual desire and scorn, playing out their pathos (all Cuomo’s, as he’s the only one writing) with eachother and, later, her (“it will never be love”).
This is a man who would later announce his celibacy, a vow he self-reportedly upheld for 2-and-a-half years.
A lead singer with a hit album whose next career move was…to attend 0Harvard.
A person whose diary contains such passages as,
1 A.M Brian and I practice French verb conjugations to kill time before Sleep, that fickle wench, condescends to rescue us. I wish I were an alcoholic.
Cuomo was injured during the post-Weezer tours. For a two month European run, he “crutched onto the stage, crying for pain, singing for dear life”.
He was physically vulnerable, writing “dark” passages in his journal, attending college, touring the world. It was a lot to take in, and Pinkerton puts a lot out there.
That lesson which I over-learned from the world as I grew older — amplified by my anxiety over disagreement — was that which Rivers Cuomo learned from Pinkerton: vulnerability will be punished by the public.
What I should have learned from Pinkerton was quite possibly the same lesson Rivers Cuomo should have: over time, vulnerability wins out.
Pinkerton’s critical standing continued to rise. In 2002, Rolling Stone readers voted it the 16th greatest album of all time.[81] In 2003, Pitchfork gave Pinkerton a perfect score and named it the 53rd greatest album of the 1990s.[82] In 2004, Rolling Stone gave the album a new review, awarding it five stars out of five and adding it to the “Rolling Stone Hall of Fame”.[73] Over the following years, it appeared in best-of lists by publications including Spin[83] and Drowned in Sound.[84] By August 2009 it had sold 852,000 copies in the US[85] and was certified gold.[86] In 2016, almost 20 years after its release, it was certified platinum for sales of over one million copies in the US.[87]
The failure of Pinkerton turned out to be its greatest success.
But the acclaim might have been too little too late.
Cuomo had since changed course, his lyrics no longer deeply personal.
He had this to say about The Green Album on its press tour,
“This record is purely musical,” Cuomo proudly told Rolling Stone. “There’s no feeling, there’s no emotion.”
And while fans and critics found new ways to overreact to this post-Green Album direction, I still liked Weezer and still like a lot of the songs they’ve made since Pinkerton. And to an extent, since The Green Album, they have touched on the more painful, the more personal, from time to time. See, “Perfect Situation”.
People were mad at Cuomo for his vulnerability on Pinkerton and mad at his lack of vulnerability after Pinkerton.
The middle of a backseat, all eyes turning towards you, panic in your opinion.
…Its Greatest Success
So it was through Weezer, in middle school, that I learned to never dislike something because of others, because of the ways people mis-attach their identity to the things you like.
What I should have learned was: this applies to everything.
Liking something is being vulnerable. Stating dislike for something is more often than not, the easy way out.
In life, “liking” is a lot deeper than saying words about music to friends.
It’s not knowing what you want to study in college, because you’re not valuing the things you like to learn about.
It’s not following the career path that might make you happy because you don’t realize that the things that make you happy are in any way particular to your self.
It’s thinking everyone likes movies, and reading articles about bands, and writing articles about 25 year old albums and vulnerability.
Not realizing that liking those things are a strength, and further, expressing and pursuing the things that make you happy is an invaluable gift you can give yourself.
Several years ago, two of my favorite people married each other. I got to be the best man. My speech was from the heart and went over well.
It was an experience — giving and receiving — that all my years of performing music had failed to produce. It was satisfying to speak truths to a room full of people, and feel those truths be connected with. It was a level of honesty I had not allowed myself to reach in my music. It was a turning point. And this time, unlike that kid squirming in the backseat, I sensed it.
And so, I write things like this on the internet for people to read, often feeling, post publication, an intense vulnerability hangover, very similar to Cuomo’s early take on the public’s take on Pinkerton, often struggling — nay, doing the hard work — to remind myself that if Rivers hadn’t felt so ashamed of Pinkerton he might have made a different follow up album, art he was on the path to creating, and that people, eventually, would have caught up to him.
