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If there’s anything 2014 wants to remind us, it’s that 1994 was a hell of a good year for music. We’ve already celebrated the 20th anniversaries of such classics as Jar of Flies, Dookie, Superunknown, The Downward Spiral, Smash, Live Through This, Illmatic and Parklife. And that’s only the beginning of it. Later in the year we’ll be celebrating the anniversaries of albums such as Definitely Maybe, Welcome to Sky Valley, MTV Unplugged in New York and Ready to Die among many more. It’s honestly shocking just how many great albums came out in 1994. For today though it’s the turn of Weezer’s self-titled debut, better known as The Blue Album.

Nowadays Weezer are generally considered a wasted talent and not without reason. While they may come out with something as great as “Pork and Beans” every now and then, for the most part their music since The Green Album has consisted of varying degrees of formulaic, boring pop rock. This isn’t a band that changed drastically since their debut, in fact quite the opposite. With the exception of 1996’s Pinkerton (which, not-coincidentally, is their best album), Weezer have stuck far too stubbornly to their formula, with diminishing results.

But returning to their debut I have to ask, were Weezer ever that great? Don’t get me wrong, I love The Blue Album, but honestly it has some pretty big problems and I feel like it, and Weezer’s career as a whole, deserve re-evaluating.

First of all, it’s worth noting that Weezer came about at just the right time. In 1994 alternative rock was dark. Nirvana were the biggest band in the world, having released the angry, disjointed In Utero the previous year. Nine Inch Nails scored a massive hit with the masochistic “Closer” and it’s album The Downward Spiral was a huge success despite its relentless dark tone. Alice in Chains, easily the darkest band to come out of Seattle scene, were at the peak of their careers. And through all this the spokesperson for alternative rock, whether he liked it or not, was Kurt Cobain. Of course, in April of 1994 Kurt Cobain committed suicide.

Understandably, a lot of the music of the era was now too dark for many to listen to. That’s when Weezer came along. With their first major hit being a dumb song about how frontman Rivers Cuomo looks like Buddy Holly, it was exactly what rock fans needed. It still had the simplicity that grunge had brought after the over-the-top 80s, but it was poppy and fun. Add in that Weezer were a bunch of massive nerds, and they were pretty much destined to be a cult band. But it was the songs music video, a parody of Happy Days, being included on every copy of Windows 95 that ensured that “Buddy Holly” would end up being one of the most endearing songs of the 90s.

With that The Blue Album was a success, and it’s not hard to see why. “Buddy Holly,” “My Name is Jonas,” “Say it Ain’t So” and “Only in Dreams” are all fantastic songs. But the album undeniably has problems, mainly lyrically. “Undone – The Sweater Song” was famously meant to be a sad and serious song that everyone found funny. You could argue that people didn’t really get the metaphor, but I’d say it’s pretty clear. The real problem is that it’s simply a dumb metaphor that kind of falls on its feet. Then there’s “In the Garage.” With references to Kiss, X-Men and Dungeons & Dragons all in the first verse, it was clearly written to appeal to nerds. Which is fine, it’s not like the band weren’t all massive nerds themselves. But I’ve always found the song a little too over-the-top. It somehow manages to be the most serious sounding song on the album, despite the fact that it’s an anthem for all the dumb, nerdy stuff Rivers Cuomo likes. It reminds me a lot of “Heart Songs” from The Red Album, another song that was far too grandiose for what it was, which was simply Rivers listing all the bands he likes.

By far the worst song on the album though, and the one that inspired me to write this post, is “Surf Wax America.”  Perhaps I only dislike it so much because I’m listening to it through the filter of modern Weezer, but it really does represent everything I dislike about many of their modern songs. Take a look at the chorus.

You take your car to work
I’ll take my board
And when you’re out of fuel
I’m still afloat
 

So we have Rivers singing about surfboarding to work. That’s what the entire song is about. Look, I’m not the kind of person to say that certain subject matters are more worthy of songs than others. But this is just inane and stupid. Ignoring the fact that it’s impractical (seriously, you’ll be wet when you arrive, and you have a big business meeting with the boss oh no), it’s that detached, ironic coolness Rivers likes to put into his songs. When he’s not painfully self-conscious he’s way too cool for school, and the fact that he knows he isn’t cool at all only makes it worse. “Surf Wax America” is a dumb, bad song and I don’t really see it as any different to later songs like “Troublemaker.”

So The Blue Album has faults but it also has some great songs. It would surely be unfair to dismiss these as flukes, at least not before looking at their sophomore album Pinkerton. Generally regarded as the only other Weezer album that’s mostly good, Pinkerton was actually hated by critics at the time of its release, including Rolling Stone who named it the worst album of 1996. It’s not hard to see why Pinkerton failed to grab fans and critics at first. Weezer shed the care-free attitude of their first album for something a little more personal, as Rivers Cuomo spends the entire album singing about his sex obsession.

Not only that but the album is just disjointed and weird sounding compared to the clean pop sound of their debut. Tracks like “El Scorcho” jump all over the place and are honestly pretty bad at parts. To me that is part of the charm of the album. Pinkerton shouldn’t sound clean, it isn’t a clean album. The tracks jump about and change styles so often as if they’re having an identity crisis, which honestly is quite fitting with the main themes of the album.

I mean just listen to “El Scorcho” and tell me that it’s honestly good. Sure, it has a great, catchy, sing-along chorus but is that really enough to make up for the terrible verses, or lyrics like “I can’t even look in your eyes/Without shaking/And I ain’t faking/I’ll bring home the turkey if you bring home the bacon.” That’s just dumb (and fits in with Cuomo’s ironic coolness that I was talking about earlier). And yet it works. Rivers sounds like he’s going through a genuine crisis on these songs. What makes Pinkerton so much better than any other Weezer album isn’t just the fact that it’s so different to anything else they recorded, but that with the arguable exception of The Blue Album it’s the only time where they’ve sounded honest.

And make no mistake, Rivers Cuomo doesn’t hold back any punches on this album. He sounds like a pathetic, desperate loser, just as he intended. Take these lines from “Across the Sea” for example.

They don’t make stationary like this where I’m from, so fragile, so refined
So I smell, and I lick
Your envelope and fall to little pieces every time
I wonder what clothes you wear to school
I wonder how you decorate your room
I wonder how you touch yourself and curse myself for being across the sea
 

How pathetic does that sound? How many other hugely famous musicians do you know that are willing to degrade themselves so much in their lyrics? Kanye West is the only other one I can think of. It was really quite brave of Cuomo to release such a personal album, and in the end the backlash affected him a lot. Even after most critics had reappraised the album as revolutionary and one of the best rock albums of the 90s, he was still decrying it as garbage.

It’s most likely this backlash that led to Weezer never trying anything new again. Every album from them has been a formulaic retreading of their first. The best of these would be their third album, another self-titled this time commonly referred to as The Green Album, but even it is ok at best.

So were Weezer ever any good? There first album was a right place, right time situation, and while it does have some great songs have a good album doesn’t make a good band, it makes a band that got lucky. Pinkerton is fantastic, but a lot of that is because of its weaknesses. It’s unclear if the album was meant to sound as disjointed as it is, or if they stumbled into writing an accidental classic. There’s certainly no doubt that a lot of the problems were there from the beginning, but they’ve been exacerbated with time. Part of that is due to the band stagnating, part of it is due to Cuomo getting older. Singing about how much of a nerd you are just isn’t endearing when you’re in your forties.

But there’s one piece of evidence that proves to me that somewhere in Weezer there is a good band. They’ve always had good songs scattered across their albums, it’s not like they didn’t produce anything good after Pinkerton. But 2008’s “Pork and Beans” is something a little different. Released on Weezer’s third self-titled album (AKA The Red Album), it’s directly takes on the notion that Weezer are has-beens. They proved they can still write a great hit song by writing a great hit song about how they can still write great hit songs. It’s a work of sheer genius.

“Pork and Beans” surmises everything great about Weezer, and yet explains just where they went wrong. The truth is, with most bands, they longer you go on the harder you have to work to produce a good album. In the beginning creativity is flowing and you have a lot of great ideas. That inevitably dries up, but that doesn’t mean you suddenly stop making good music. You just have to put a lot more effort into what you’re doing. Weezer put a lot of effort into “Pork and Beans,” but they never thought to do the same with the rest of The Red Album. Or the album after it for that matter. Weezer could produce a good album, they just don’t put in enough effort to do so. So honestly, I remain cautiously optimistic for their next release. Sure, it’ll probably be more of the same, but I’m not entirely ready to write Weezer off just yet.