30 Years Wearing The Bruises Of "Pinkerton"

Looking back at the past, we often say it was a 'simpler time', but we don't stop to think about what that actually means. Often, what was simple is that we were either ignorant or oblivious to things  we should have been addressing earlier than we ever did. Saying 'that's the way things were' is the truth, but it doesn't address that the simplicity of the time was only for the people who were privileged enough not to have to worry about how society was treating them. For everyone else, the past was something they were running away from, in the hope that the arc of history does indeed bend toward justice.

When Weezer released "Pinkerton" in 1996, it was before we had entered the never-ending story of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, which brought blowjobs and the word 'fuck' to newspapers for the first time, and before we had half of our politicians try to remove a President for an affair while soon promoting an accused pedophile to their leader in Congress. That all feels quaint compared to today, when accused pedophiles have moved all the way to The White House, and we argue about the lack of accountability for misogynists rather than quietly shrug our shoulders at it.

I say all of this because the last time I wrote about "Pinkerton", it was to excoriate the record for being a toxic morass of psychological abuse framed as soul-bearing honesty, which allowed the album to become a blueprint for the entire emo scene in the following years. Rivers Cuomo's lyrics exposed the faults in our society's attitudes toward women at the time, and what is sad is not how the initial rejection of the album turned into reverence, but how our entire culture has now evolved to the point where an album like "Pinkerton" would hardly garner attention for everything it does wrong.

In 1996, "Pinkerton" followed "Jagged Little Pill" in re-writing the rules of being honest in popular songwriting. Together, the records showed you could be your truest self, you could explore the depths of your traumas and issues, and find an audience willing to listen and care about what you had to say. Platitudes were no longer needed if you were willing to cut yourself, in both the literal and figurative senses.

"Pinkerton" would also become prescient for all the wrong reasons.

Consider the case of "Pink Triangle", wherein Rivers becomes angry that the girl he has a crush on is a lesbian, so he both wishes her identity could be changed for his sexual benefit, but also that people like her would wear marks on their clothing so people like him would not find themselves blue-balled by people who want nothing to do with them. These issues were troubling enough when taken as the self-absorbed ramblings of someone who dehumanized such women to the point of considering them to have no identities outside of his desire for them, but consider where we are today. There is an entire movement within our politics trying to deny that certain identities even exist, and still fighting to keep conversion therapy a thing parents can do when their children don't turn out the way they want. I am not blaming Rivers for those developments, don't get me wrong, but having that kind of thought put into the mainstream and absorbed by ears that were not paying attention to what the words meant, softens the floor for the next time someone wants to dig a deeper bottom to sink to.

I have never heard anyone else read the song the same way, but I hear "Butterfly" as a rape allegory, which also plays into our current state. Would writing a song about such a thing be any different than having heard the supposed leader of the free world talk about being able to grab women whenever and however he wanted to? We have entered a backlash to cultural acceptance, where those who are losing their majority status cannot handle having to accept people who are different from them the same way those people have always had to accept them. This is the people who wear the biggest and most garish crosses telling people of other faiths they have to keep their religions in the background.

To return to "Pink Triangle", it can also be seen through the prism of the 'tradwife' movement, with Rivers erasing everything from the woman's identity except what she can do for him. After writing about being so bored by meaningless sex that he has to fantasize about barely legal (if we're generous) foreign girls, he still returns to the fantasy of being someone's entire world. Through all of this Rivers falls into a pattern of not knowing what love is, and blaming others when they don't submit everything to his pleasure. If you listen through the album, at no point does Rivers ever talk about why he pines for these women, why he wants to be with them, other than to save himself the supposed indignity of masturbation.

Throughout the record, Rivers is mired in a sense of entitlement to whatever he wants, which is usually women. We see this playing out in society, as we hear a lot about a generation of men who are upset that many women refuse to date the kind of men who have politics that seek to subjugate them as second-class. That is a sense of entitlement, for sure, and the sort of obliviousness that "Pinkerton" helped push onto many of those very same men. In my previous essay, I ended things by talking about being aware of the psychological damage "Pinkerton" could inflict, and the terrible things I could have done if I was in positions to listen to those base instincts Rivers was writing about. Those did not arise for me before I started to see more clearly, but I was lucky. Too many people didn't figure this out in time, if they ever did, or if they ever wanted to.

"Pinkerton" is a cautionary tale to something I talk about often, where important messages and sad stories are paired with catchy and infectious songs, as a bit of a trojan horse. The inverse to that is when those songs are used to deliver messages we shouldn't be hearing, and cannot ignore because they got stuck in our heads. Every disgusting thought Rivers shared on "Pinkerton" has echoed in our heads for thirty years now, because melodically the record is probably the best thing he ever wrote. There is power, and emotion, and unforgettable hooks all throughout the album. Rivers' honesty unlocked the best side of him as a musical craftsman, as the inspiration he felt shines through in the melodies and the playing. "Pinkerton" should be a magnum opus, and yet...

Once again, I come to the point of having to wrestle with my own thoughts. While I am fully aware of the ways "Pinkerton" can infect the soul, I will admit I have listened to it nearly as much in the last few years as I did in those before I put my thoughts in writing. It's funny... I have an entire extended family I have not seen or talked to in a decade, and I give that no thought. I have this album sitting on my shelf, and I still feel the urge to spend time with it, even knowing I shouldn't.

Maybe reminding me of my own flaws is what the legacy of "Pinkerton" means to me.