It's Still Not Easy Being "Green"

At its core, art is humanity. Yes, art is also a commodity these days, and we are all well aware of the ways it is produced and marketed for the sake of making money, but I like to think there's still some nobility in the hearts of most artists. They dig within themselves to pull out art because they have something they are trying to say, something they are trying to share. Art is the way we connect to one another that goes beyond words.

So what happens when art strips away all the pretense of being... well... art? That's what we faced when Weezer returned from their post-"Pinkerton" exile. Rivers Cuomo reacted to that albums very public failure by going into seclusion, and when he returned only doing so with music that stripped away everything personal that could be seen as a criticism of the man behind the music. He filled notebooks analyzing the formulas that created hit songs, and as he wrote through Adderall-fueled binges, he assembled songs as if they were Lego sets.

The funny thing about all that is that it worked. It really worked.

In hindsight, that isn't such a jarring statement to make. Given everything we have heard over the last twenty-five years, it's now clear that the less Rivers reveals about himself and his own tastes and proclivities in his music, the better off we are as listeners. "Pinkerton" was filled with toxic attitudes, but the records that followed "Green" were just as offensive for the blatant ways they tried to chase trends, manufacture hits, and basically laugh at anyone who ever took Weezer seriously.

"Green" was the turning point, and its success taught Rivers that he didn't need to bleed for his art, so to speak. As we had been told a few years earlier by Blues Traveler, "it doesn't matter what I say, so long as I sing with conviction". The idea that the hook of a song is all that really mattered was already out there in the ethos, but Rivers too it not to new heights, but to new levels of being obvious. He did nothing in interviews to hide the fact he had written dozens, if not hundreds, of songs that meant absolutely nothing to him, all in the hope of striking on a few hits.

The songs on "Green" are the most basic and obvious of platitudes, if they mean anything at all. No one can even agree on what the lyrics in "Hash Pipe" are supposed to be, but that's because whether Rivers is singing about having his 'eye swipe' or his 'ass wide', it's a collection of nonsense words regardless. Arguing over what gibberish means is a futile experience. And with the complete dispassion he sings with as he closes the album by telling us he's "love without [her] love", the delivery doesn't invite us to care either.

And yet, despite the mechanical nature of these songs, Rivers proved a point on this album. His study of the pop charts did reveal something about the songs that became inescapable, something he was able to capture and funnel into his own work (although why he lost that ability soon thereafter is a thorny issue). Even when we know these songs are cookie-cutter, and came from an assembly line of chord progressions he was scribbling by the dozens, it's hard to say they aren't power pop doing what power pop does best. These songs are tightly constructed balls of infectious melodies, and time after time they do exactly what they were written to do.

"Hash Pipe" is Weezer rocking more than they did even when Rivers went through his beard and cranked amp phase. It takes the absolute most elementary note progression (A-A-B-C), and becomes a statement on the communal power of the riff. Does it matter that he's singing about turning tricks on the street corner? No, because he's also obscuring the words with a falsetto that is telling us the song is an absurdity to him. The performances, both the hammy and apathetic, are signals to us not to get invested.

The smartest thing Rivers did with this album is keep it comically short. At just twenty-eight minutes, it punches the clock and ducks out of sight before the illusion can be figured out. The repetition of melodies as guitar solos would be an even more obvious formula if we heard it three or four more times. The vapid lyrics would be more cloying if Rivers had to recycle the same phrases another time (or if they were printed in the booklet). Like Slayer's "Reign In Blood", being short might have been an accident, but it was the album's saving grace.

In the years since "Green", two things have been made very clear about Weezer; Rivers has no idea what he's doing anymore, and I don't want to know anything about Rivers the person. Rivers is the guy who didn't want "Buddy Holly" to be on "Blue", he's the guy who wrote "Beverly Hills", he's the one who thought revealing his fully selfish sexual desires was a good idea. We have more than enough examples of Rivers being a very uncomfortable person to have in our minds that "Green" becomes a soothing antidote to everything else we have been subjected to.

That brings us back to the fundamental question of what art is. I do believe art should say something about the person who made it, but when we are cognizant that we don't want to know more than we already do about them, that thinking starts to shift. Maybe the boldest artistic statement someone like Rivers can make is to admit he has no art within him. He has songs, he has melodies, but he has no art. In a way, "Green" is anti-art; in its construction, and in it's own theft of a gimmick from "Blue".

Weezer is not a band you go to for art, and enough time has now passed to admit that's ok. We live in a commercial world, and Weezer provides us the jingles for the ad breaks. If we keep them in that role, I won't completely burn down their legacy... not yet at least.