The Strange History of WEEZER (they were never “emo”)

wait look look can we all just agree that Weezer is the best band of all time and then they became the worst band of all time Weezer are one of the most iconic bands in alternative music they took alternative rock and gave it a pop sensibility that made them instant Sensations on MTV at a time when grunge was taking the World by a storm but just as they were peing they nearly destroyed their career with an album that fans and critics almost universally hated and yet somehow they came back and got bigger than ever with songs like Beverly Hills but at the same time there's always been this sort of LoveHate relationship with Weezer with the band building a very dedicated cult following that almost worships them and yet at the same time almost keeping Rivers quomo himself at arms length and as time goes on many people have said that there's a creepy almost incel like undertone to their music so what is the final word on Weezer are they the unintentional founders of emo or just another rock band and what is their lasting impact and Legacy those are the questions that I will answer in this [Music] video Weezer's Origins start out way back in 1989 when Rivers Cuomo moved from Connecticut to LA with his first band called Zoom and if you haven't heard them they're really more along the lines of like Sunset Strip hair metal with a little bit of a progressive Edge than anything you've ever heard from [Music] Weezer but that band quickly broke up and in the wake of that Rivers reinvented himself as less of a guitar Shredder and more of a pop rock songwriter inspired by Pet Sounds era Beach Boys The Beatles And even mainstream pop like Madonna but the real Turning Point came when he got a job at Tower Records where he was exposed to bands like the Pixies and Sonic Youth which changed the way he saw everything as Rivers said suddenly quote metal seemed kind of dumb so I consciously repressed it and in particular he was fascinated by a new band called Nirvana who combined the aggression of punk and metal with a sense of Melody and emotion that was very fresh and new at the time as Rivers said about hearing their song sliver it's like oh my God this is so beautiful to me and I identify with it so much hearing him sing about Mom and dad and Grandpa Joe these personal family issues in a really heartbreaking kind of innocent childlike way over these straightforward cords and a major key but then the Distortion kicks in and he starts screaming that's what I want to do and so after several failed projects and dozens and dozens of demo songs Weezer was finally born and played their first show on March 19th of 1992 just a month after forming closing for K Reeves band dogstar and on the back of those demos they got signed by by geffin and released their iconic self-titled debut AKA The Blue Album in 1994 with the first single being undone you want to destroy mywe I remember hearing this on MTV's alternative rock show 120 Minutes when it came out and it immediately caught my attention because although it did fit in with the sort of larger framework of alternative rock that was blowing up at the time it just didn't sound like anything else it was really catchy and pop like the Beach Boys or something thing but also with this sort of gritty element of grunge or Indie bands like Sonic Youth and with this like really thick sludgy production that almost gave it the heaviness and feel of a metal band the song was an immediate hit on MTV and alternative radio but their real breakthrough came with the song Buddy Holly that summer with its Spike Jones directed music video that referenced the classic 70 sitcom Happy Days the song Hit the top 20 of Rock charts and S R countries it was all over MTV and they had officially arrived as a breakthrough success but not in the way that Rivers Cuomo had imagined with a lot of people praising Weezer as being what they perceived as almost like a novelty or comedy band which is the exact opposite of what he intended as he said at the time I seriously thought we were the next Nirvana and I thought the world was going to perceive us that way like a super important super powerful heartbreaking heavy rock band and a serious artists it was just like a gut punch he he was also worn down from the grind of touring and kind of burned out on rock music in general and so he started saying that he wanted to become a classical musician and after failing to get into the highly respected music school juliard he even started attending college at Harvard to study music while he worked on the follow-up to The Blue Album the first version of this album was called songs from the black hole which was going to be a concept album about space there was really a metaphor for his LoveHate relationship with success but he abandoned that project and in between his semesters at Harvard they eventually wrote and recorded what would become their second album Pinkerton and anybody who was expecting the upbeat cheery power pop of the first album was not going to get that from Pinkerton it was much darker both sonically and lyrically than their debut the production was more raw and [Music] noisy it reminds me a lot of what Nirvana did with inudo where they tried to really deliberately alienate a lot of the mainstream audience that had latched on to them by coming out with this really raw difficult dark album and in this case Weezer got what they wished for For Better or Worse fans and critics were not kind to the album when it came out they pointed to these somewhat creepy themes of el scorcho which is about rivers sort of obsessing about this girl at Harvard who he couldn't even get up the nerve to talk to or across the sea which is about his romantic feelings for this 18-year-old Japanese fan that wrote him a letter or the pink triangle which is about falling in love with a lesbian Entertainment Weekly called it sloppy and raw and quote a collection of Get Down Party albums for agoraphobics and Rolling Stones readers voted it the third Worst Album of the year it really felt like they were taking everything that they had built with their first album and basically flushing it down the toilet as Rivers said a couple years after the album came out it's a hideous record it was such a hugely painful mistake that happened in front of hundreds and 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 and so in the wake of Pinkerton Weezer went on Hiatus River sank into a reclusive depression locking himself up inside his house with his phone unplugged and even blocking out the windows and in spite of all that the band had sort of started working together again in fits and spurts during their hiatus but they didn't fully return until 2000 when they came back to play the Fuji rock festival in Japan and Warp Tour in America what they also didn't quite realize at the time is that the sentiment around Pinkerton had also dramatically changed largely thanks to their fans connecting on the internet and the album that was initially a flop and hated by both fans and critics alike had sort of quietly become a fan favorite and was cited as one of the most important albums in the emerging emo scene and in 2001 they came back with their third album another self-titled album but usually known as the green album and this album was really deliberately the anti- Pinkerton going back to that Beach Boys inspired power poop sound of the blue album but even more [Music] polished and personally I consider this to be the Perfection of Weezer's sound it's everything great about The Blue Album but with an even stronger pop Sensibility thanks to what rivers learned in his music classes at Harvard although I will say I don't think the singles really do it justice so listen to the whole album if you haven't speaking of which despite the label heavily pushing back on their choice of Hash Pipe as the first single the band insisted on it and it turned out they were right you got problem got the song went to number two on the alternative charts and quickly became a hit on MTV's show TRL which was easily the most important thing in pop culture at the time they followed that up with Island and the sun which personally is not one of my favorite Weezer songs but was another huge hit actually their biggest International hit to date and it was official Weezer was back Pinkerton somehow hadn't destroyed their career they followed that up with Malad in 2002 which once again changed things up this time kind of going for more of a guitar driven aggressive kind of approach that still sounds like we Weezer but really brings to mind classic' 7s Hard Rock like Boston at [Music] times and this might have been a surprise to some Weezer fans who only knew them for being the nerdy alternative emo band but if you know River's Origins as a metal head then it makes complete sense do you remember what the first lick you learned that made you think oh my god I've got it now I'm a lead guitar player yeah probably learning some of those inve licks far beyond the Sun that kind of [Music] stuff personally it's not my favorite Weezer album because I prefer more of their power pop material but I do think it's cool to hear rivers go back to his metal roots a bit and they followed that up with what would be their highest charting album ever make believe to me the story behind the making of this album is really great example of what makes Rivers who he is in the 3 years that it took to create makeb believe he wrote and demoed 377 songs according to an interview he did in Rolling Stone and not only that but he kept meticulous records of every single one of those you can actually go on their official wiki and see every single thing that they recorded during the sessions and see detailed notes on almost all those songs and just to sort of drive home how exceptional this is the majority of bands show up at the studio with the songs kind of unfinished finished they didn't really know how to resolve them and so a lot of the time spent in the studio is the producer just helping them finish the songs but in the case of Weezer Rivers already had enough songs written and demoed to fill literally a dozen albums he also started keeping a binder that he called the Encyclopedia of Pop where he wrote down his analysis on how many of his favorite artists approach songwriting it was originally inspired by Kurt Cobain but also included people like Oasis and Green Day and to me all of this is really the defining characteristic of of Rivers Cuomo this kind of obsessive insanely detail oriented analytical approach to the craft of writing incredibly catchy pop songs as the AV club Put It years later quote CUO really does deserve Brian Wilson comparisons for reasons Beyond being a hermetic weirdo with a solid grasp of Pop songcraft although I have to add to say that Rivers has a solid grasp of songwriting to me is an almost insulting understatement in my personal opinion Rivers is one of the absolute best songwriters of this entire generation Rivers was also going through a personal Journey at the time taking a 2-year celibacy after as their official wiki page says being quote disgusted at himself for spending the last 15 years having sex with groupies without ever being in love and out of all of that makeb believe emerged in 2005 featuring their biggest song yet Beverly Hills B and for all that commercial success many of the old school Blue album and pink inton fans hated what in their minds Weezer had become as one example of that Pitchfork gave it a04 out of 10 saying Pinkerton triumphed by being an uncomfortably honest self-portrait of quomo on make believe his personality has vanished the creative driving force behind the we is asleep at the wheel and so if the green album was the beginning of the transition from old Weezer to new Weezer this album really completed that transition if you're an old school fan of Pinkerton and The Blue Album this is probably where the band lost you but if you're just a normie fan that likes Weezer songs when they come on the radio well then this might actually be the very best version of Weezer for you and so the band was kind of at a Crossroads here whether they knew it or not and they followed up make believe with another self-titled album aka the red album which was another kind of more experimental album that did well commercially but is mostly hated by their fans and in 2009 they released what is almost universally considered to be Weezer's Worst Album ratites personally I don't think it's nearly as bad as a lot of people make it sound but it's certainly not their finest moment it's really kind of just the straightforward kind of rock you would expect to see in a car commercial for like the brand new Ford Escape you're and I'm not going to go over the rest of their albums in detail one by one because there's something like eight more they released after this and I don't want this video to be an hour long but essentially it's more the same a bunch of straightforward catchy rock albums that did well commercially but keep disappointing fans who are really looking for a Return to the Blue Album or especially to Pinkerton which brings us to the last question what is Weezer's lasting impact and Legacy the first thing is that they kind of inadvertently became one of the most important bands in the second wave of emo thanks to their first two albums which is ironic because Rivers himself doesn't seem to see things that way as he said years later quote I love how Limp Biscuit managed to combine metal and wrap and pop so seamlessly I really see us as moving in that direction I have no interest in emo I'm all about rap metal but regardless of his thoughts or whether you consider them to be Emo or not they certainly played a big role in making it cool to be a nerd with songs like in the garage off the first album where the lyrics reference things like DND and Marvel Comics when it was totally socially unacceptable to like those things and nearly a full decade before Seth Cohen mainstreamed nerd culture even more on the OC and personally I don't really see laser as part of emo at all at the risk of sounding like the real emo copy pasta emo came from the hardcore scene starting with bands like Embrace rights of spring and fugazi who obviously came out of Minor Threat and dag nasty and bands like that and then bands like Saves the Day get up kids and Fallout Boy whose roots are all very much in the hardcore scene and Weezer just doesn't have anything to do with hardcore or really even anything to do with Indie they've been a major label powerp band since the beginning and they were really never part of any scene at all there's obviously some similarities to emo and the way that they dressed but that's a very surface level thing and on Pinkerton there's also a lot of thematic similarities as far as being just kind of this depressed lonely nerd who Pines for girls who seem just unobtainable Out Of Reach but the truth is that Pinkerton was really an outlier in their discography it was the product of a really specific moment in River's life that he really never went back to and as much as fans want that to be representative of Weezer as a whole I just don't think it is at the end of the Weezer is rivers and like I said earlier he strikes me as something much closer to his generation's Brian Wilson the Oddball genius who channels his obsessive energy into becoming the absolute master of his craft and in this case his craft is the art of writing incredibly catchy pop songs all right my friends that does it for this video as always let me know what you think in the comments also I would like to thank everyone who supports me on patreon especially those of you who support at the true cult level or above patrons get access to all my videos early I do q&as that are members only channels in my Discord that I'm super active in I do giveaways sometimes and there's a way to have me review your music so if any of that sounds cool hit the link in the description of this video and with that I'm going to sign off but I will see you next time

Channel: The Punk Rock MBA

Views: 114,965

Keywords: weezer, rivers cuomo, pinkerton

Id: 1aybRcuCFko

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024