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Tuesday, June 10, 2008
New Weezer
Neweezer, indeed. Waxbanks doesn’t much like it:
I’m so irritated by this album’s insufferable, constant spoofing on (sub)urban pop music that every time the six-minute ‘The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’ comes on, like Rivers Cuomo’s parody of Beck’s parody of Queen, I’m shocked into something like enlightenment. This is not, unfortunately, a good album. (The bonus tracks are good - I can’t keep from smiling at ‘Miss Sweeney.’ Yet Cuomo’s doing accents, damn it.) Like apparently everyone else, I’ve not had much affection for the post-Pinkerton Weezer I’ve heard. I suspect this is more about my limitations than the band’s, but I can’t help thinking Cuomo’s outreach is misguided, that he’s better suited to paranoid self-obsession and triviality wedded to wall-toppling chords. Sure he knows how to write perfect pop tunes, but what difference does that make? He’s not the only one, and ‘Beverly Hills’ isn’t funny enough to not be an affront. That’s how The Red Album feels: insufficiently funny.
I really couldn’t disagree more. The Red Album has, pretty much overnight, become my new favourite album. And it has largely achieved this distinction on the strength of its front-of-shop. For whilst the bonus tracks at the end are OK, and the album sags a little in the middle (the fanfic ‘Heart Songs’ is bland, and ‘Everybody Get Dangerous’ forgettably adolescent) the first three songs on the album are just superb. Not funny? It’s a laugh riot. Check out the indie-rock Village People look of the band on the cover! ‘Pork and Beans’ is a better song than its slightly self-satisfied YouTube-released video suggests, because it approaches the Platonic form of a Weezer song: a piece of mulish self-disdain delivered with Cuomo’s heartbruised Gen-X whine-drone and laid out in sections that alternate quiet verses (that are pinned to a goofy, likeable guitar hook) and loud choruses in which all the guitars flood through the band’s wall-of-soundifying pedals. The opening track, ‘Troublemaker’, rocks back and forth on the most idiotically catchy syncopated rhythmic seesaw ever cut to record, and the lyrics articulate a hilariously preening petty-arrogance: ‘Who needs stupid books?/They are for petty crooks ... I’m gonna be a star/And people will crane necks/To get a glimpse of me and see if I am having sex.’ But the dumb-ass tone keeps collapsing into a sort of Sesame-Street or Mr Rogers mode:
I’m such a mystery
As anyone can see
There isn’t
Anybody else
Exactly quite
Like me.And when
It’s party time
Like 1999
I party by myself
Because I’m such
A special guy.
(Isn’t that ‘exactly quite like me’ nicely Pooh-bear-esque?) ... so that the impression is not of egotist ranting but a kid desperate for attention: simple music; faux-naif words. Of course he parties by himself. Sure, that’s because he’s ‘such/a special guy.’ Its not because he’s a lonely nerd, still quoting Prince from a decade ago for crying out loud, whilst all the cool kids are into whatever it is cool kids are into nowadays.
The full title of ‘The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’ is ‘The Greatest Man That Ever Lived; (variations on a Shaker Hymn)’ which might sound pretentious if the song itself weren’t so awesome. It’s awesome because it takes the step beyond the calculated aesthetic dumbery of ‘Troublemaker’ and ‘Pork and Beans’. It’s dumb, alright: almost six minutes of Cuomo asserting over and over again that he is the greatest man who ever lived (who was ‘born to give and give and give’); but its dumb as a way of being clever, and I like that. The theme is from ‘Lord of the Dance’, and the song is a portmanteau, more like The Incredible String Band’s ‘A Very Cellular Song’, or They Might Be Giant’s ‘Fingertips’ than Queen, I’d say. In fact, unlike ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, it actually is a set of musical and lyrical variations. The lyrical variations move from the rap-star-style aggressive and hypersexual self-assertion with which it starts, and which marvellously it doesn’t quite get right (’I’m like the mage/With the magic spell/You come like a dog/When I ring yo’ bell’) through wonderfully awkwardly articulated hubris in the face of critics (’After the havoc that I’m gonna wreak/No more words will critics have to speak’ ... man, that is a splendid couplet) to a statement of bizarre humanitarian philanthrophy at the end: ‘I am the greatest man that ever lived/I was born to give and give and give.’
The way the song hammers away at its vainglorious central assertion drives home the point that this speaker, so far from believing he is the greatest man that ever lived, has significant problems with self-esteem. The word for this is irony; in performing the role of self-belief, hypertropically magnified, he ends up declaring the exact opposite.
Somebody said all the worlds is stage,
And each of us is a player.
That’s what I’ve been tryin to tell you.
In Act 1 I was struggling to survive.
Nobody wanted my action dead or alive.
Somebody said it, sure. He’s pretending not to know it was Shakespeare; but even the kids who are too cool for school have heard of Shakespeare. Variations on a Shakespeare Hymn; except that, working a hymnal into a rock song raises the specter of Christian Rock. If you asked Americans today ‘who is the greatest man who ever lived?’, we all know what name would top the poll. Singing a deliberately dumb-ass guitarry hymn from the perspective only Christ can occupy that articulates self-loathing via poorly ventriloquised vainglorious assertion (’And I can’t help myself because I was born to shine/And if you don’t like it, you can shove it’) ... you really want to tell me that’s not funny?
Comments
My rednecked guess would be that his primary reference is the King rather than the Bard.
That’s some pretty clumsy inversion in that splendid couplet.
At least one thing is true: “A Very Cellular Song” is very good.
Ben: The splendour is in the clumsiness, I’d say.
I once met a geezer in a pub who claimed to have been in the Incredible String Band. Which may or may not have been true; I had no way of checking. But it occurred to me that, if one wanted to pretend to have been in a band, and one were of a certain age, the String Band would probably be the best bet ... as opposed to (for instance) claiming to have had been in the Beatles.
Ray: you’re right, of course.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Weezer, since the blue album. Straight up, post-punk, songs about girls and being dorks and coming to learn that this is a good thing. I pulled away form Weezer for a few years but AmazonMP3 had a special deal last week, where you could download Pinkerton for $2. And I rediscovered the brilliance of El Scorcho.
Well, I’m not saying it’s not genius, but Cuomo is definitely plagiarizing his non-attributed Shakespeare quote from the monologue portion of “Are You Lonesome Tonight.”
And Ray has beaten me to it!
still quoting Prince from a decade ago for crying out loud
Let us all take a moment to feel very old and confront the fact that this is Prince from over 25 years ago.
Speaking of ten years ago, I always felt that The Rentals did a better job of being Weezer than Weezer did, after the blue album.
JPool: but you can’t be right about this. Because if you’re right about this, then I must be ... old.