Jeff Miers Sound Check: Weezer has fans seeing red
Wait a minute. What’s Rivers Cuomo doing, rocking that serious ’70s mustache on the cover of the new Weezer album? He looks like Burt Reynolds, circa “Smokey and the Bandit.” What happened to the thick-rimmed geek glasses and indierock guy haircut? My music-nerd universe has been thrown completely out of whack.
It isn’t just the fact the Weezer appears on the cover of its new, self-titled album, out last week, like some sort of post-modern rendering of the Village People. The quartet has been known to have a laugh at the expense of various pop-culture icons, and self-deprecating humor has always been one of frontman and songwriter Cuomo’s abundant gifts. No, it’s what’s underneath that album cover that is perhaps most surprising.
Of Weezer’s three color-coded self-titled records — the debut, known as the “Blue Album,” the midperiod “Green Album,” and this one, which for obvious reasons, we’ll call the “Red Album” — this new slab of power-pop epics is my favorite. I admit this knowing full well I’m sacrificing whatever indie-rock credibility I might’ve still had, for everyone knows that the “Blue Album” is the best one, right?
That debut album introduced the world to Weezer as the poster- punks for nerd rock, which essentially meant that Cuomo employed irony in his writing, and balanced underground rock’s sonic sludge with the demeanor of a record-collecto r geek living in his mom’s basement well into his 20s. Cuomo became the unlikely hero for a generation of college- educated indie dweebs, the sort who found Green Day far too commercial and guarded their Pixies albums with an obsessive’s zeal.
When Weezer released “Pimkerton,” which didn’t sell, and traded the “Blue Album’s” pop smarts for torturous self-examination set to complex tunes, the faithful took the gesture as one of solidarity between Cuomo and themselves, an outsider’s secret handshake. It is, after all, a great album.
But let’s face, it has been downhill from there for the old-school Weezer fan, a point underscored by the Cheap Trick-like classicism of the “Green Album,” an effort much maligned among the studied Weezer elite. It was starting to look like Cuomo just wanted to make records he liked. He didn’t necessarily feel like being anyone’s poster boy.
This may not be the equivalent of Bob Dylan giving his folk music fan base the one-finger salute by squawking his way through a high-decibel “Maggie’s Farm” at Newport, but then, it’s not wholly dissimilar — Cuomo intended to grow artistically, with or without his previous fans. This made him a hero to me — or, more accurately, an irreverent anti-hero. In my estimation, this type ends up making the most relevant rock music, simply because they really don’t care what anyone else thinks of them. What a concept!
It’s a concept, in fact, that is wrung out like a wet sponge all over the “Red Album.” Cuomo has always done snarky well, but this new effort brings snarky to new heights. To wit, the a l r e a d y -a -s i z a ble-hit-via-download “Pork & Beans.”
“I’m ’a do the things that I wanna do/I ain’t got a thing to prove to you/I’ll eat my candy with the pork and beans/Excuse my manners if I make a scene/I ain’t gonna wear the clothes that you like/I’m fine and dandy with the me inside/ One look in the mirror and I’m tickled pink/I don’t give a hoot about what you think.”
Now that’s punk rock.•
