Rivers Cuomo and co. still have lots to say, but to mixed results
The first thing anyone heard from Weezer’s new record, Everything Will Be Alright in the End, was “Back to the Shack.” Debuted in February on the second Weezer Cruise, the song shocked fans with its candor. “I’m sorry, guys, I didn’t realize / that I needed you so much,” confessed singer/songwriter/guitarist Rivers Cuomo to a boatload of adoring fans.
This wasn’t the first time Cuomo apologized in song. He did the same years ago, on Make Believe, when he begged the world to “Pardon Me.” Back then he had relatively little to apologize for: nothing more than a few records that didn’t measure up to Weezer’s first two discs, plus a reputation for being a bit of a tyrant. In the years that followed, Weezer jumped the shark more times than most fans care to count, utterly trashing their reputations with a series of witless PR moves, including some terribly goofy cover art and a truly horrendous song with Lil’ Wayne. If Cuomo had addressed Weezer’s alienation from its fanbase before that balmy February day in the tropics, he had never done it so frankly or so well. Upon first listen, “Back to the Shack,” in which Cuomo dedicates himself to “Rockin’ out like it’s ‘ninety-four” (the year Weezer released The Blue Album, their beloved debut record), charted a course for comeback paradise.
After a few further spins, however, the song revealed unsettling inconsistencies. Sonically, “Back to the Shack” hardly resembles the band’s acclaimed early material, as Cuomo himself indicated in his appearance on comedian Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. Then there’s the fact that the apologetic first verse gives way to a self-satisfied second verse and an absurdly dismissive bridge: “And if we die in obscurity, / oh well. At least we raised some hell.” If “Back to the Shack” is EWBAITE’s mission statement, what mission, exactly, does it state?
The rest of the album hardly clears things up. Of the other songs, “I’ve Had It Up to Here” speaks most explicitly to Weezer’s jeopardized legacy, but it’s no less bewildering. “Don’t wanna compromise my art for universal appeal,” declares Cuomo in what seems to be an extended reference to the mistakes made on Weezer’s last two records, Raditude and Hurley, both of which feature, much to the chagrin of Weezer purists, mainstream pop songwriters. But in the chorus, Cuomo lashes out at his fans: “I tried to give my best to you, / but you plugged up your ears.”
Before attempting to resolve these contradictions, let me just say that they probably won’t matter to most listeners. If you’re interested in huge hooks, off-the-wall solos, and compelling (and only occasionally clichéd) lyricism, there’s no need for intellectual backflips. Without a doubt, EWBAITE features the most consistently rewarding tunes that Cuomo has written in over a decade, tunes like “Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Da Vinci,” and “Foolish Father.” Even the record’s sillier moments possess a level of craftsmanship worlds away from the artless idiocy of Raditude’s “Can’t Stop Partying.”
The confusion of purpose apparent on EWBAITE and the records that preceded it are usually taken as the product of a songwriter long past his “best-before” date. Yet interviews with Cuomo—including the aforementioned WTF appearance—reveal that he revels in accidental ambiguities. For all his reputation as a perfectionist, he likes to lose control a little bit. If we are meant to see those parts of Weezer’s discography that seem most misshapen, ill-conceived, and stupid as beautiful for being so, everything post-Make Believe (Weezer’s last transparently coherent effort) comes into sharp focus as part of the tradition in art that asks us to appreciate the messy, the shallow, the broken, the random, and the ruined, a tradition that includes Coleridge, Duchamp, and Jeff Koons. Cuomo begs his fans’ forgiveness one moment and berates them the next, but that’s not because he’s a bad songwriter. It’s because he’s a better one than the pious practitioners of music criticism have made him out to be.
Most commentators presume Cuomo’s music to be utterly sincere, disregarding the distinct disingenuousness of “Beverly Hills” and most of Pinkerton, Weezer’s most lionized record. To such objectors, I point out that Cuomo insists, in interviews, that even the title of the new record may be read as both earnest and asinine. But Cuomo’s intention is beside the point. In the end, it is we listeners who decide whether everything will be alright, whether we choose to writhe in dissatisfaction over a new record that isn’t like The Blue Album and Pinkerton, or to adopt a new mode of listening that reveals untold value in even the most embarrassing parts of Weezer’s back catalogue.
Weezer are, and have always been, interested in staging a sort of moral dilemma, in asking the listener to sympathize powerfully with a deeply distasteful subjectivity; on Pinkerton, a self-absorbed, Orientalizing misogynist, on EWBAITE, the addled geek we might think Cuomo has become – the “Foolish Father” who stages historical re-enactments and cranks Lil’ Wayne in his Honda. Confronted with such an individual, we must face the question of how we connect to another person and what kind of people we want to be.
And what, then, can we do but forgive our foolish Weezer?