Music That Matters To Me: Weezer's first 2 albums.

It really just wouldn't feel right for the first installment of "Music That Matters To Me" to cover any band besides Weezer. Truly, they were first band I ever fell in love with. And this is fascinating to me because I was 12 when I discovered Weezer, which may seem perfectly normal, but consider the fact that I was 12 in the year 2005. The year Make Believe came out. So while thousands of longtime Weezer fans were sobbing under their bed covers, I was just a 6th grader with an iPod mini. And do you want to know how I found out about Weezer? Do you really want to know? I found out about Weezer because "Island in the Sun" was featured in the Mary Kate & Ashley home video Holiday in the Sun. I've never admitted this to anyone! But I've done so now to prove a point. Unlike Pavement or Built to Spill or Sebadoh, I didn't come across Weezer because I was looking for an instrumental 90's alt band. The only reason I discovered Weezer at such an early age was because I was partaking in the extremely normal tween girl activity of watching MK&A movies. And this makes for a slightly embarrassing story, but "embarrassing" only at face value or in a "totally laughing at myself" sort of way. I'm glad that I discovered Weezer in a profoundly uncool way because Weezer has forever and always been a profoundly uncool band. And this is why they are never going to put out another good album. Rivers Cuomo now has a wife, a child, a Harvard degree, and no pressing medical issues (that I know of). You really think he's gonna write another Pinkerton? He's not. And why would you want him to? He finally seems happy in his life, and I think music is still a big part of that happiness, even if none of "us" are necessarily feelin' it. Besides, maybe some kid is listening to "Magic" by B.o.B. right now and thinking to himself, "Wow, I really like this Rivers guy's vocals, I'm gonna go download his band's first album!" I'm telling you, there will always be 12-year-olds who will find a way to fall in love with Weezer. It's one of the world's few certainties.

"Undone (The Sweater Song)" // Weezer

Because I bought Weezer's music off of iTunes, track by track, it's hard for me to talk about Blue without Pinkerton and vice versa. My favorite album ever is Pinkerton 50% of the time, and the other 50% it's Blue. If Pinkerton and Blue were released in deluxe edition combo packaging, I would just call that my all time favorite music and I'd be set. For the record, I do also enjoy Green and Maladroit, but even in middle school I knew that the tracks off the first two albums were the ones that really "mattered." Yet, acquiring these albums song by song through iTunes meant that I didn't actually possess them in their entirety until I reached high school. Which seems strange now because never again am I going to spend four years getting into a record, but with Weezer I think it worked out because caring about music hard was so new to me. No use having "Tired of Sex" on my radar at 12, but at 15 I understood where Rivers was coming from. Not because the song was about sex, but because the song was about feeling empty. And I'm sure the whole sexual frustration element to Pinkerton would have spoken to me much differently if I were a boy, but as a girl, the most important track to me by far was "Across the Sea." And I never had a crush on Rivers or anything, but it was still incredibly exciting for me to think that if I had been a Weezer fan ten years earlier, maybe I could've written the fan letter that inspired the song (probs not though cause I'm not Japanese). Now, if I'd gotten into "Across the Sea" a couple of years later, it might not have been such a big deal to me considering I can now pretty much email any current band I'm into, but I didn't know how to maximize my internet usage at the time, so I felt pretty isolated in my interests. Last year I read this Pitchfork interview with Titus Andronicus' frontman:

"I think that for a lot of people my age, Weezer was the first indie rock band, kind of like the indie rock gateway drug. Weezer certainly became the band, the rock on which me and all of my buddies built our church, so to speak. Pretty much any band that our friends were in in high school probably covered at least two Blue Album songs at some point." - Patrick Stickles

He goes on to call Weezer a "tribal identifier," which I could never relate to in a tangible sense, and I assume this will continue to be a problem for many of the aforementioned future 12-year-old Weezer fans, but I definitely feel like Weezer shaped me for a good part of my early adolescence. And I can identify with the tribe he's referring to, even if it's never been a tribe of my own, per se. I think, in a big way, falling in love with Weezer and then coming to fall in love with so many bands on top of them, made me prefer to make up my own tribe. When you have things to love, it's a lot easier to stop caring about what other people think of you in the context of school. I mean, I'd have been way more upset if someone told me they thought Pinkerton was a lame album than I would've been if they'd told me I was a friendless loser. Maybe this all sounds incredible hokey because obviously no one actually said either of those things to me, and being called a "friendless loser" would definitely still suck, even outside of grade school, but I feel like Rivers has been extremely consistent in weaving trivial aspects of his life into his music. Yeah, it's a little cringe-worthy now when he sings about Rogaine and his skepticism toward Timbaland (see Red Album), but how is this any less legitimate than when he sang about Green Day concerts ("El Scorcho") and Dungeons and Dragons ("In the Garage") in his twenties? Funny thing about "In the Garage"...it's probably the most important song on Blue to me in terms of strongly relating to Rivers' sentiments, but the lyric "I've got Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler, too" I used to think was "I've got Kitty Pryde and I color, too." I was like, "Wow, Rivers likes Kiss, comics, Dungeons and Dragons, AND coloring!" It was a misinterpretation, clearly, but I feel like it put him on my 12-year-old level a little bit. And the more you listen to that song, the more you realize that the garage, while undeniably a sacred space, is also where Rivers is hiding from the world. So even though there's no such lyric about coloring, the entire song is extremely teen-girl-bedroom of him.

I guess, at the end of the day, Weezer being at its best on these two albums has a lot to do with Matt Sharp (he's the one major exception to Weezer being "profoundly uncool"), but even more so, I think it has to do with this brilliant balance between infectious pop songs, songs that are Heavy with a capital H, and songs that blend the two. "Surf Wax America" is an awesome track, but can you honestly picture Rivers on a surf board? It's just pop music. "The Good Life" is also super pop-y though, and it's about Rivers having a metal pole through his leg to extend the bone. Ouch, right? "Mykel and Carli" is also a great example of this blend. Mykel and Carli were some of the first Weezer fans ever, and they headed the Weezer fan club, but they died in a car crash on their way to a show in '97. "Mykel and Carli" was written years before, however, and this is why the "school bus came and took my friends away" lyric is especially haunting. But even so, I think the song is just Rivers imagining what it'd be like if Mykel and Carli were his childhood friends. Which really goes to show how genuinely sweet he is. As for the Heavy tracks, "Say It Ain't So" is about a moment in which Rivers feared his stepdad may have be an alcoholic, and "No Other One" is basically a song about being scared of your own girlfriend. There's something for everyone.

-Leah