Weezer ~ Rock's Patron Saints of Authenticity
Musings on the Certitude of Dorkiness
When I was around 13, I almost went to a Weezer concert, and I still wish I had. I had just discovered the joyfully catchy Blue Album. Although it was released when I was a little kid, I didn’t really dig into the album in its entirety or its nuances until I was in middle school. Back then, I often confused Weezer with Ween, two bands I dig very much for entirely different reasons. But Weezer holds a special place in my heart for its unique blend of nonconformity, anti-pretension, and pleasant melodies.
Pop culture and industry have a long and detailed history of pushing easily dated and tired ideas about style, behavior, and rebellion, often imposed on younger audiences in an implicit, insidious fashion, which isn’t terribly surprising. We see this play out daily and have for decades, if not centuries. However, the mainstreaming of the counterculture often dilutes its authenticity, leaving us later to question its credibility, who’s actually rebelling, and what that rebellion means. It also frequently transmutes the revolutionaries into the gatekeepers. It’s awful, and it can get quite murky and messy.
Then there’s Weezer, a band that cleverly combines a Beach Boys-like aesthetic with garage punk and a touch of early, but heavier, Beatles with a straight-edge lifestyle. At a time when others around them indulged in debauchery and self-appreciative and overly sophisticated musical explorations, some might have seen the conventionally canonized music of that era as anti-conformist, but a closer look reveals it could easily be argued the other way: a form of conforming to a particular brand of revolutionary instinct. In contrast, Weezer’s childlike innocence felt fresh and invigorating against the backdrop of the excesses of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Their playful melodies, modern reimagining and reinterpretations of rock’s origins, and easy-to-listen-to riffs offered a cathartic release for those craving a new variant of punk that harkened back to classic conceptions of rock and roll, which, in turn, became both an ironic and unironic act of defiance, of giving the middle finger to the status quo.
Weezer’s mix of sock-hop purity and lovable nerdy anguish became a refreshing “fuck you” to poorly dated institutional norms, allowing them to be both earnest and badass simultaneously. Of course, not all of Weezer’s albums are masterpieces. Some of their middle-career work feels kinda lackluster, yet I find authenticity in their whole discography. Even their sucky albums still carry a charm and honesty that make them endearing. In a way, that makes them far more punk rock and badass than those who were swallowed whole by the rock-and-roll industrial complex system, as well as its ugly cousin, “situational narcissism”.
For me, Weezer is the polyunsaturated fat of contemporary rock, essential to balance out the less wholesome trans fatty acids of popular music’s past and present. This is not a judgment on the glitzy side of rock and roll; I appreciate sex, drugs, and rock and roll, too. But music, like art and academia, requires periodic recalibration and moments of dissent against the tide of popularity and uniformity, even if it means reinterpreting what rock’s sacrament initially aimed to challenge. Life would be so damn dull without those who defect from the norm; so often, it’s the dissidents and pariahs who remind us of what actually matters.
Weezer embodies the essence of unapologetic, hopeless-romantic, lovable, private-college, poetic dorks living their best life, utterly self-contained in their silliness and yearning for true love, appealing to any human with a heart and a set of ears. In a bit of an unlikely twist, I suppose they’re in a tiny way akin to Frank Zappa’s oddball-ness, if Zappa were less idiosyncratic and complex, and more focused on personal experiences and heartache than on having his finger on the pulse of international politics and domestic policy. In closing, in a world filled with uninspired imitations of the 1970s NYC art and music scene, go pull a Weezer. History will thank you for it.
~ alexej