FEATURE:
Rhapsody in Blue
Weezer’s Eponymous Debut Album at Thirty
_________
OTHERWISE known as the ‘Blue Album’……
one of the defining albums of 1994 was released on 10th May. Recorded at Electric Lady Studios, New York, Weezer’s eponymous debut album was a modest chart success when it came out - yet, in the years since its release, has been heralded as one of the finest of the 1990s. Weezer formed in Los Angeles in 1992. It was a time of Grunge music, so the band initially struggles to truly engage and capture the audience. By November of that year, they had recorded a demo, The Kitchen Tape, that brought them to the attention of DGC owner Geffen Records. Weezer selected The Cars’ Ric Ocasek to produce. Recorded mostly at the iconic Electric Lady Studios in New York City between August and September 1993, Weezer boasts standout tracks such as Say It Ain’t So, Buddy Holly and Undone – The Sweater Song. Whilst there are those who hail Weezer as a classic album and one that has stood the test of time, there is another side to it. Maybe a sound that has not lasted to this day. Out of step with what was happening in 1994. Lyrics that are problematic when it comes to attitudes towards women. A lot to examine. I am going to be mostly positive, yet there are also other layers that I need to explore. I want to start out with Pitchfork’s review of the Blue Album/Weezer. Arriving on 10th May, 1994 – just about a month after Kurt Cobain died -, it was an odd and rather challenging time to release an album like this. However, the fact it is so popular and played to this day shows that it has a big legacy:
“Weezer mastermind Rivers Cuomo was such a somber kid that his second-grade teacher trained the other students to tell him, in unison, “Let me see the smile.” Childhood in Yogaville, the ashram and Integral Yoga HQ led by “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda in eastern Connecticut, was isolating, devoid of much pop culture and adventure—until Cuomo heard Kiss. When a family friend brought their fifth album, 1976’s Rock and Roll Over, to the Cuomo house, it sent Rivers and younger brother Leaves launching off furniture in a way only formative music can. “I’ve pretty much based my life around that record,” he has said. With their comic-book personas and distorted riffs, Kiss cracked Cuomo’s young brain wide open and rewired it for good. He had little idea what debauchery they were singing of, but from that point on, Cuomo began having intense dreams about becoming a rock star, and he began obsessively studying the work of his songwriting heroes.
For Rivers, music offered both a coat of armor and an identity. As a pre-teen enrolled in public school for the first time, Cuomo went by a different first name and his stepfather’s last name (Kitts); his chosen moniker—Peter Kitts—was awfully close to that of Kiss drummer Peter Criss. And while Cuomo was still picked on as he made his way through puberty, he eventually found his people: the metalheads. In 1989, Cuomo moved from Connecticut with his high school band to Los Angeles, ground zero for the AquaNetted and Spandexed. There, he found himself in the midst of shifting tastes, both culturally and personally. He started working at the Sunset Boulevard Tower Records, where he was schooled on quintessentially “cool” music like the Velvet Underground, Pixies, and Sonic Youth.
Also in the mix at this time was a new band called Nirvana. When Cuomo first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio in late 1991 while washing dishes in an Italian restaurant, he was sorta pissed he didn’t write it himself. “Rivers says, ‘I should have written that,’” remembered early Weezer guitarist Jason Cropper in John D. Luerssen’s band biography, River’s Edge. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah. That’s totally true.’ Because the music he was writing was improving in quality every day.” Cuomo’s interest in Nirvana became an obsession. He’d taken notes from Brian Wilson, the Beatles, Scorpions, Yngwie Malmsteen, and, of course, Kiss. But for all his knowledge of rock history, he still cared deeply about writing anthems that spoke to his generation, even if he had trouble looking his peers in the eyes.
Weezer anthems were destined to be different. In 1994, the acts dominating the modern rock charts were pushing against something, from the British aesthetes (Depeche Mode, New Order, Morrissey) to the singular weirdos (Beck, Tori Amos, Red Hot Chili Peppers) to the disenfranchised youth (Nirvana, Green Day, Pearl Jam). With rebellion came a facade of cool, and that was something Weezer could never manage, at least not in the traditional way. Cuomo always tried a little too hard. He would become the fidgety anti-frontman with a thousand “revenge of the nerds” taglines and a Harvard degree to prove it. That dichotomy—the big-time rockstar in khakis and Buddy Holly glasses, who never seems totally comfortable in his own skin—is what launched his cult and anchored his unlikely sex appeal. And his band—drummer Patrick Wilson, bassist Matt Sharp, and guitarist Brian Bell—played along, accentuating their innate geekiness to make Weezer feel like a unified front.
By the summer of 1993, Cuomo had written a number of songs strong enough to convince the alt-rock major DGC to sign Weezer (this despite a lack of buzz around the L.A. scene) and have the Cars’ frontman Ric Ocasek produce their first album. When the group’s self-titled debut—typically known as The Blue Album—arrived in May 1994, Cobain had been dead for a month. A feeling of dread hung over the alternative rock world whose prominence was ushered in by the Seattle sound. With their wired energy, effortless power-pop-punk hooks, and Beach Boys harmonies, Weezer took the alt-rock explosion in a new direction. You couldn’t quite tell if Cuomo was mocking his song’s regressive narrators or sympathizing with them. But once you got past his defense mechanisms and sorting through the humor and cultural references, you found a portrait of a young man’s psyche, riddled with angst and insecurity. And it arrived on the wings of massive riffs and gnarled guitar solos that sounded like they were emanating from a Flying V—on every single song.
The Blue Album’s exploration of the fragile male ego is in full swing by the record’s second track, “No One Else.” Taken at face value, this is likely the most misogynistic song Weezer has ever released. “I want a girl who will laugh for no one else,” Cuomo sings while the band rushes through the fuzzy pop-punk changes, evoking the hyperbole of masculinity. But there’s more beneath the surface. “‘No One Else’ is about the jealous-obsessive asshole in me freaking out on my girlfriend," Cuomo has said. The song acquires even more resonance in the context of its sequencing on the record. Cuomo described the following song, “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here,” as “the same asshole wondering why she's gone.” In actuality, he spends most of “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” muttering to his ex’s wallet photograph and masturbating to her memory, getting in a joke along the way, saying she enjoyed the sex “more than ever.” It’s an absurd scene, but imagine the sentiment coming from the wrong person and it’s suddenly not so funny. Weezer were masterful at walking this line between knowing jokiness and legitimately creepy dysfunction.
This base kind of arrested development shifts back and forth between the narrator’s relationship with girls and his views on himself. If “No One Else” and “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” are mirror twins, so are “Surf Wax America” and “In the Garage.” Given that Weezer were named after a common term for asthma sufferers, no one expected them to be out on a board riding the waves. That tension animates “Surf Wax America,” a well-crafted jumble of harmonic puzzles and barreling punk guitars where the hedonistic surfer lifestyle is both celebrated and chided for its simplistic worldview. Even while the song sneers, the ferocity of Cuomo screaming “Let’s go!” juxtaposed with the solemnness of the band’s Wilsonian harmonies make you believe, once again, in Weezer’s sincerity. Meanwhile, “In the Garage” is an homage to that happy place where no one judges you for your comic books, D&D figurines, and Kiss posters. It seems like over-the-top self-parody, but the garage was indeed a real place where early Weezer practiced and recorded when Cuomo, Sharp, and original guitarist Justin Fisher lived together in the “Amherst House” near Santa Monica. The hopeless ambition of “In the Garage” would make it the defining song of nerd-rock.
In between “Surf Wax America,” a fantasy about someone completely different, and “In the Garage,” a hyper-detailed song about himself, lies a song about his father. There are two more nakedly emotional songs on Blue, which are set off further by Cuomo’s rare embrace of laid-back guitars. Atop a bluesy jangle, “Say It Ain’t So” details the moment when Cuomo’s deepest worries are realized: He sees a beer in the fridge and, remembering how his father drank before he walked out, he senses his stepfather is doing the same. He fears now that he, too, is destined for this fate. Pinkerton, Weezer’s sophomore album, is often described as the tortured confessional to end all tortured confessionals, essentially a diary of Cuomo’s notorious Asian fetish. But “Say It Ain’t So” is just as raw, and arguably has more that its listeners can use, throwing its arms wide open to anyone who’s known the trauma of dad issues. The music is constructed perfectly, building and building until what's left of Cuomo's vulnerability comes out as a bitterly frayed "yeah-yeah," all capped by a guitar solo worthy of the Scorpions.
The desire to write a perfect song can drive some songwriters mad, as their belief in music as a vehicle for emotional expression reconciles itself with the belief that pop is a puzzle that can be solved. On Blue, Cuomo found the ideal balance, as he rarely has since. He understood the rules so well that he also knew when to break them, from Sharp’s super silly new-wave keyboard in “Buddy Holly” to the mumbled dialogue that runs through “Undone” (the band and their friends chatting were a backup plan after DGC refused to clear dialog from an old sci-fi film, “Peanuts”) and more.
For as classic as the album is considered now, Blue didn’t make the 1994 Pazz & Jop year-end critics’ poll. Back then, Weezer were considered alt opportunists or even Pavement ripoffs—a comparison that seems silly now, looking at the distinct rock strains since indebted to Cuomo. But MTV and radio airplay for “Buddy Holly” and “Undone — The Sweater Song” made Weezer huge, and The Blue Album went double-platinum within 15 months of its release. Over the next three years, as Weezer 1.0 slowly imploded (bye-bye Matt Sharp, hello rotating door of bassists), the record would sell a million more and be well on its way to canonization. By 2003, Pitchfork named it one of the best records of the 1990s; two years later, Rolling Stone heralded it as the 299th greatest album ever. And so Blue now sits in a sweet spot of commercial accessibility and critical adoration, a combination that guarantees the album will make its way into the hands of a certain kind of bespectacled teenager for decades to come—the ones who really need it. Cuomo never wrote a song as indelible as “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but he did reach generations of rock kids, proving that coolness is optional if you study hard enough”.
I want to add some contrast before coming onto some positive reviews. The Quietus, in a feature from 2019, highlight the bittersweet nature o the album. Whether you call it Weezer or the Blue Album, one cannot argue the fact it came into the world at a strange time. If the band burned brightly for a short time, it is clear that their debut was important and impactful:
“With hindsight, though, The Blue Album feels almost unrelated to grunge. Even when it skips closest to Seattle, it's different. 'Say It Ain't So', on paper, sounds like a parody of Pearl Jam: lad worries stepdad will become an alcoholic and leave, just like his biological dad did, with gentle verses exploding into furious verses. But it's softer, somehow: it's less forbidding, filled not with rage but sadness: you can sense Cuomo's uncertainty and his desire to be comforted, not a need to hit out.
Musically, too, its lineage was different. Like the grunge bands, Weezer looked backward, but not to Sabbath, or the Stooges. Their ancestry lay more in powerpop, in Cheap Trick, especially: they share that group's suburban alienation, and also sweetening of that with melodic sunshine. It's a lineage that has often attracted clever and sly American songwriters – Fountains Of Wayne, a few years later, tacked to the same wind.
But Weezer, somehow, didn't end up being one of the great groups. I wonder sometimes if that is because Cuomo is so clever – Weezer's career was interrupted several times by his on-off completion of a degree at Harvard. I wonder if perhaps having created two albums that became totemic, it just became too easy for him. I wonder if, perhaps, he ended up with the problem very clever people doing something populist often have: contempt for his own work and his own talents. When you look at Weezer's subsequent catalogue – rarely actually terrible (with some exceptions: Hurley is a truly excruciating record), but rarely sounding much more than tossed off – it's easy to conclude the whole shebang is something he does out of weary duty, rather than any genuine passion.
There was a curious interview with Cuomo in Vulture a couple of years back. It was conducted by someone who had been at Harvard during one of Cuomo's spells there and had previously interviewed him for the student paper, the Crimson. Cuomo was asked about his time at the university. "Such a deeply satisfying time in my life: intellectually, and spiritually, and creatively, and socially. I really miss it. I've had nothing like that since then. I've been deeply lonely. This is going to sound weird, but it wasn't until I discovered Sam Harris's podcast [Waking Up] that I started to feel some of that need for intellectual-hangout, cafeteria, lunch-room conversation to be satisfied. Now, I listen to him every day and it's like, I'm listening to smart people talk and debate the issues, and I feel a little less lonely … It's the same loneliness I felt touring on The Blue Album, on the bus. It's like, there's got to be something more to life than just the grind of touring and performing and doing interviews."
Those don't sound like the words of someone in love with what he does. That, in itself, is hardly uncommon among musicians. It's the specific desire for something else, something already experienced – a life of the mind – that is unusual. It's not an inchoate desire to be a country squire, or try his hand at painting, or act. He wants to do something that requires more mental exercise than being a pop star.
But the problems of the later Weezer records aren't all down to character traits developed in later years. Many of the problems are present on The Blue Album, except they didn't present as problems, so much. There's the attitude to women, which stretches through the catalogue (notably on Pinkerton's fetishisation of east Asian women). 'Thank God For Girls' from 2016's The White Album has an extraordinary set of annotations on Genius from Cuomo: "I'm so jealous of the hooker-uppers. Seems like it's so easy to get laid now. All these good looking atheletic young guys r getting so much free sex it kills me. Laxitutes. Such a bummer. Such a bummer. To be evaluated by women. To be graded. To be rated. Where do I stand? How big? How strong? How enduring? How energetic? How inventive? So sad that it comes to this. So sad. It IS a competition and I AM being compared." Cuomo was a married man of 46, a father of two, when he wrote that. Maybe it's a take on radical honesty. Maybe. But it's much the same as he felt in his early 20s, on 'No One Else', when all he – or his narrator – demanded was "a girl who will laugh for no one else / When I'm away, she puts her makeup on the shelf / When I'm away, she never leaves the house / I want a girl who laughs for no one else”.
I am going to wrap up with a couple of other reviews for an album approaching its thirtieth anniversary. Audioxide shared their thoughts regarding Weezer’s debut in a feature from 2016. I know that the album divides some people, though it is clear that it has also made a huge impression on so many others. Clearly inspiring to so many other bands:
“André
A key part of what makes Weezer’s early albums so enjoyable is the sincerity of the music. They avoided the bullshit fallacies that other alt-rock pretenders were so keen to churn out, and did so without even thinking about it. Rivers Cuomo was merely an awkward bedroom poet with an ongoing infatuation for metal guitar solos, and these personal traits somehow became key ingredients when creating quirky power pop.
His lyrics on the Blue Album are honest, funny, and often clumsy, which of course is all part of the classic Weezer charm. They wore their influences on their sleeves, yet produced a sound that was fresh and peculiarly original — qualities helped emphatically by the band’s natural humility. Weezer were, after all, a group of nerds who enjoyed chugging away at power chords. There’s more to it than that of course, and though it took some time, Weezer’s unusual lure successfully captured the spirit of the younger generation of the ’90s.
Impressive still, the Blue Album continues to carry that same youthful tone today. It’s a rich selection of seriously catchy tunes, with essential highlights in the form of “Buddy Holly” and “Say It Ain’t So”, the latter thriving on a damaged vulnerability that reaches its climax through a guitar solo of Iron Maiden proportions.
the Blue Album is simple, but immensely enjoyable, and happens to be one of the most iconic albums of the ‘90s. Weezer were unapologetically weird, yet strangely glamorous, which in itself brought a warming message; they showed us that it was cool to be uncool.
8out of10
Favourite tracks //Say It Ain’t So/Buddy Holly/Surf Wax America
Fred
Feeding off a host of tangled, damaged, and gritty rock influences from the late ’80s and early ’90s, Weezer’s debut album is a really lovely reminder that rock bands don’t need to be tangled, damaged, and gritty to sound great. Clean-cut and pleasantly neurotic, the Blue Album shuffles in and winds up rocking out pretty flawlessly.
Power chords, stonking solos, and bashful lyrics about girls and losing your friends and Dungeons & Dragons and going surfing combine into something immensely likeable. the Blue Album is unpretentious to a T, and I love that. There’s some stellar song-writing, too. Rivers Cuomo knows his hooks, and his songs don’t lack variety here. There’s not enough room to swing a cat without (you or it) being snagged by something in the bands repertoire. That tracks as disparate as “Buddy Holly” and “Say It Ain’t So” can fall into place and make the album feel as complete as it does is a testament to the care with which it was put together.
the Blue Album isn’t profound in the way the word typically suggests, but there is a purity in simplicity that misery and mess can’t touch. ‘I write my stupid songs,’ sings Cuomo, and it’s easy to see why listeners often wind up loving every one.
8out of10
Favourite tracks //Say It Ain’t SoUndone – The Sweater SongMy Name Is Jonas
Andrew
Weezer’s debut was released alongside many similar bands at the time, but it seems they’ve found success in outlasting the majority, as well as producing an album that has aged well. the Blue Album is, without doubt, a signature ’90s album, but where many albums of the time now sound stale, cheesy, or simply cringe-inducing, Weezer’s eponymous debut manages to avoid all of those pitfalls.
Harmonised vocal lines, characteristic of ’90s rock, are sprinkled across the album, and they, along with the chugging bass lines in tracks like “No One Else”, draw clear influence from bands that came before them, Pixies and Nirvana especially. Clean, picked guitar lines hark back to ’60s American rock, the consistently minor riffs adding a cynical twist to the surf music influences.
It’s a well put together album from the tracklist down to the riffs and instrumentation. It’s genuine, it provides just enough angst, and it doesn’t attempt to draw needlessly deep emotion. It’s very enjoyable to listen to, and easily allows for return visits. Simple, catchy rock.
8out of10
Favourite tracks //No One ElseUndone – The Sweater SongBuddy Holly”.
I am going to end with a review from AllMusic. Maybe there was a weird kind of snobbery around Weezer in 1994. Those reacting to the godfather of Grunge dying. The genre still alive. This different and slightly nerdier sound somewhat at odds with what was deemed cool and acceptable in 1994. It is quite strange. Regardless, I do feel like the years since have been kinder to Weezer’s incredible debut album:
“Even if you lived through it, it's hard to fathom exactly why Weezer were disliked, even loathed, when they released their debut album in the spring of 1994. If you grew up in the years after the heyday of grunge, it may even seem absurd that the band were considered poseurs, hair metal refugees passing themselves off as alt-rock by adapting a few tricks from the Pixies and Nirvana songbooks and sold to MTV with stylish videos. Nevertheless, during alt-rock's heyday of 1994, Weezer was second only to Stone Temple Pilots as an object of scorn, bashed by the rock critics and hipsters alike. Time has a way of healing, even erasing, all wounds, and time has been nothing but kind to Weezer's eponymous debut album (which would later be dubbed The Blue Album, due to the blue background of the cover art). At the time of its release, the group's influences were discussed endlessly -- the dynamics of the Pixies, the polished production reminiscent of Nevermind, the willful outsider vibe borrowed from indie rock -- but few noted how the group, under the direction of singer/songwriter Rivers Cuomo, synthesized alt-rock with a strong '70s trash-rock predilection and an unwitting gift for power pop, resulting in something quite distinctive.
Although the group wears its influences on its sleeve, Weezer pulls it together in a strikingly original fashion, thanks to Cuomo's urgent melodicism, a fondness for heavy, heavy guitars, a sly sense of humor, and damaged vulnerability, all driven home at a maximum volume. While contemporaries like Pavement were willfully, even gleefully obscure, and skewed toward a more selective audience, Weezer's insecurities were laid bare, and the band's pop culture obsessions tended to be universal, not exclusive. Plus, Cuomo wrote killer hooks and had a band that rocked hard -- albeit in an uptight, nerdy fashion -- winding up with direct, immediate music that connects on more than one level. It's both clever and vulnerable, but those sensibilities are hidden beneath the loud guitars and catchy hooks. That's why the band had hits with this album -- and not just hits, but era-defining singles like the deliberate dissonant crawl of "Undone - The Sweater Song," the postironic love song of "Buddy Holly," the surging "Say It Ain't So" -- but could still seem like a cult band to the dedicated fans; it sounded like the group was speaking to an in-crowd, not the mass audience it wound up with. If, as Howard Hawks said, a good movie consists of three great scenes and no bad ones, it could be extrapolated that a good record contains three great songs and no bad ones -- in that case, Weezer is a record with at least six or seven great songs and no bad ones. That makes for a great record, but more than that, it's a great record emblematic of its time, standing as one of the defining albums of the '90s”.
On 10th May, it is the thirtieth anniversary of Weezer. The Blue Album. This amazing release from 1994. I was eleven when it came out (it was released the day after my eleventh birthday). It was quite a big deal. Songs such as Buddy Holly have become iconic. I hope that there is some attention and new celebration around the album. Even if it was an early – and perhaps ultimate – peak from the California band, they did go on to record other great albums. I still think their debut is the best. Not just because of the songs throughout - Rivers Cuomo one of the most distinct songwriters of his generations –, but the time in which it arrived. One of change and exceptional evolution in music. One of the best years ever. You can put the mighty Weezer with…
THE best of 1994.