Still Feeling "Blue", 30 Years On

I'm sure I saw the "Buddy Holly" video when it was in rotation on MTV, but the first time I remember Weezer being a focal point was in high school. Someone who was in my social circle would regularly wear a Weezer t-shirt, and at some point I was asked if I listened to them. At the time, I wanted to think myself too cool for such a thing, so I truthfully answered I didn't, all the while thinking they were too much 'nerd rock' for me.

As time would prove, that would be entirely wrong. Weezer may not have been the only starting point for that description, but they are the one for my generation that blurred the lines between the coolness of being rock stars and the utter lameness of being nerds/geeks/dorks/dweebs. I think what kept me from embracing them at the time was a misunderstanding of the rainbow of possibilities when it comes to being lame. My lameness came in a different form than the traditional stereotypes, and as such I was looking for a closer analog, missing the proverbial forest for the trees.

I didn't start listening to Weezer until "Hash Pipe" hit the airwaves, which is rather hilarious to me, considering that an Adderall-fueled song about cross-dressers on the street corner has precisely zero to do with me, my life, or my own proclivities. Until much later on when Rivers Cuomo went off the deep end, you couldn't have picked a song I would have less of a connection to, and yet it was perhaps the only one I would have been won over by.

I found myself in an online Weezer community, which was something I didn't know I needed as much as I did until it fell apart. Caught between the in-jokes and the other nonsense, the question we kept debating over and over was which album was better; "Blue" or "Pinkerton"?

Even today, I can go back and forth on that one. "Blue" is now thirty years old, which is a depressing fact. It means I'm older than I want to admit, it means I've spent far too much of my life listening to Weezer, and it means not enough has changed in all of this time.

What we couldn't have known at the time was how the record set up most of the Weezer story, and should have been a warning we were in for a bumpy ride.

Everyone knows "Buddy Holly", which is the song on the record that sounds most dated. The approach of filtering power-pop through grunge is palpable, but it is neither the production nor the pop-culture references that date the song. No,it's the bridge of the song, where Rivers sings in a rhythm that always felt to me like he was co-opting a different musical trend of the time. Little did I know that he was indeed dissecting everything popular to later use in cynical ways for his own songwriting. It sounded out of place then, it sounds calculated now.

Rivers was too smart for his own good. His audience was not watching old reruns of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" or listening to 50s rock and roll, nor were they likely to be reading Kerouac. It's that reference that makes "Blue" such a sad album to me. In "On The Road", Kerouac spends hundreds of pages tearing through the story of his life, and how he and his friends were on a manic quest to live as much life as they could. The story is ultimately depressing, because they travel from one end of the country to the other, again and again, never finding anything they could savor long enough to stay put.

That reflects in Rivers' career, where Weezer keeps getting reinvented in the quest to find the same level of success they started out with. "Hash Pipe" would get there, as would (sadly, I would add) "Beverly Hills", but what gets lost in the search is the core. Rivers would toss aside the idea of making music for any purpose other than finding success, as he famously stopped putting anything of himself into the songs after "Pinkerton" failed so miserably. Given what he wrote about on that album, having less Rivers isn't exactly a bad thing, but it stripped the passion out of Weezer so much there's no way to listen to him sing about how he can't stop partying without wondering if the only one he's ever attended was through a telescope from the other side of the street.

We need to reckon with the level of honesty on the record. There are certainly pieces of Rivers in these songs, with the references to his familiar issues and his love of KISS. How much of the record is true colors how I can think about it, because while at times he is playing the part of the hopeless romantic who hasn't found his place yet, there is also the "Pinkerton" foreshadowing in "No One Else". That song is controlling and nearly abusive, and was a warning of how ugly Rivers' views of women were going to become on the next record. This is where it would be nice to think "Blue" was just another of Rivers' academic experiments, but that doesn't quite mesh with the other songs. Rather, it sounds like a blemish that was the first sign of a toxic bloom that would soon come to the surface.

The three singles from the record are still staples of rock radio, and for good reason. Rivers was a key figure in bringing back the power-pop aesthetic into rock, and he did open doors for people who were never going to be conventionally cool. "Blue" became an album of anthems for those of us who didn't fit in, even if our own formula of uncoolness tipped the scales in different ways. It didn't matter if you actually wore horn-rim glasses, or wore sweaters, it was the idea of being together as outcasts that spoke to us.

"Blue" is the album that can still make us feel like someone else understood, whether we have moved past those days or not. While we would learn on "Pinkerton" that sometimes people are shunned for good reason, "Blue" is still the defining record of nerd culture.

As a quasi-member of that group, thirty years hasn't been enough time to figure out if I think that's a good thing or not. Some days...