(The answer to the first part of the headline can be found on the home page, link above. If you don’t care about the second part of the headline, you can just skip this whole post. I don’t care. It’s fine. Whatever.)

Why Weezer?

Good question. I think it all goes back to grunge. Grunge was a big deal for me. I was born in 1982, which means most of the music that I grew up with was terrible. It’s not that good music didn’t exist in the 80’s, it’s just that what reached my ears (via the radio in the family car, or via the little boombox my brother and I shared, and originating from the local top 40 station) was largely composed for the keytar by people whose hairspray requirements outweighed their artistic aspirations. I mean, I’m sure everyone in The Jets was awesome as a person, but their fashion sense left a much deeper impression than their music.

When your age is in the single digits, you don’t have a lot of control over the music you’re exposed to, but I did have my favorites: Michael Jackson was there, of course, and my mom had a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on cassette, so I did have an idea of what was good and what I liked. One of the artists that really clicked with me was “Weird Al” Yankovic.

“Weird Al” introduced me to grunge, and therefore kinda changed my life.

Sure, “Smells Like Nirvana” was a dorky parody of what in hindsight is kind of a shitty song, but for a kid who had never rocked any harder than “Smooth Criminal” (Moonwalker was pretty intense, actually) it was an awakening. Because while Al contributed some funny lyrics on top of it all, he still used the same crunchy power-chords from the original song. And I remember being so fascinated by those sounds. It all felt dangerous. I was ten years old and felt like I was getting away with something, somehow. I didn’t have oppressive parents or anything, but I was very into the idea of being swept away by something that was so far from “Freak Me, Baby” or whatever was climbing the charts on FM radio.

And I did get swept away. I got a cassette tape recording of Nirvana’s In Utero, and the first CD I personally owned was Soundgarden’s Superunknown. Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy was not far behind. I started listening to the “rock” station. Kurt Cobain died when I was in 6th grade, but all through Jr. High, his influence (and that of grunge in general) dominated the airwaves, and my CD player. I had come a long way from listening to Silk on Z100.

But at some point, things changed. I blame the Goo Goo Dolls.

A certain type of music started to creep into the zeitgeist only about a year after Kurt died. In 1995, this monstrosity of a band came at us with “Name,” an abomination. The next year, The Verve Pipe would have a hit with “The Freshmen.” Third Eye Blind would hit it big in ’97.

To be honest, I kind of love Third Eye Blind now, and I can’t explain why. But at the time, they, and the other aforementioned awful bands, represented all the reasons I retreated from the radio to listen to bands like The Melvins and Nirvana (and The Beatles, for that matter). Popular music had seemingly returned to being safe and bland. TEB may have been singing about heroin addiction, but the way they presented it, they might as well have been singing about holding hands and dry humping at the Jr. High prom. And meanwhile, the Goo Goo Dolls were channeling Bruce Hornsby, or whatever the fuck adult contemporary bullshit they were eager to propagate. The “wuss rock” (as I cleverly dubbed it as a dumb kid) revolution was in full force in the mid-to-late 90’s, and it was awful.

Luckily, I found out about these guys:

So, I need to be honest about a couple of things here. First, yes, Weezer are a bunch of wusses, too (I’ll address this later). Second, I didn’t even start listening to them until 1996, a couple years into the mid-nineties wave of mediocrity. Weezer (The Blue Album) came out in ’94, so I was a little behind the curve. But during the summer of ’96, I immersed myself in that record. My family went on a big road trip through California and Texas and my head was compressed by headphones the whole way, my CD player mostly spinning Blue over and over.

But what was the appeal? Weezer wasn’t hard-edged. If anything, the tone of their music had more in common with the Goo Goo Dolls than Nirvana or the Melvins. They weren’t dangerous. I didn’t feel like I was getting away with anything when I listened to them, like I did when I listened to grunge. I still don’t know exactly why it appealed to me as much as it did, but I think it might have something to do with their complete lack of pretense. Obviously music should be judged by its musical merits, but image is important, too, and I think an image that rings false can bleed into the music itself. For example, the members of Nirvana, Mudhoney, and just about any other grunge band dressed like, you know, people. Dudes who hang out in basements and drink a lot. Normal folk, you know? And they made a raw, unpretentious form of music for other normal folk to enjoy.

Now scroll back up to that pic of the Goo Goo Dolls.

The fuck is going on up there? They look like Mötley Crüe went to Goodwill, but instead of actually buying any used clothes, they just took notes and then hit Rodeo Drive to buy thousand-dollar versions of everything they saw in the thrift store. To be fair, they were probably dressed by their record company for that photo. It’s a promo shot, after all. Okay, fine. But Weezer was on a major label, too, and this is how they dressed on picture day:

This was the photo shoot for the album cover, and there’s not a faux-vintage band t-shirt or distressed denim jacket to be seen. The lack of pretense in their image carried over into their music, particularly in “In the Garage,” a song about being a nerdy loner who likes D&D, X-Men and Kiss and just wants to be left alone. The dudes pictured above are those nerds, and they don’t try to hide it. I mean, you could argue that Weezer’s nerd aesthetic was a cultivated image (I would disagree), but even if it was, at least their aesthetic was one that I, and a lot of normal folks, could relate to.

Lyrically and thematically, they weren’t exactly hard-edged (no songs about being molested and tortured by beloved T.V. characters, for example), but they introduced to me an element of emotional honesty that I hadn’t been exposed to before. Whereas the Goo Goo Dolls might say “I don’t want the world to see me/’cause I don’t think that they’d understand,” and come off completely generic and disingenuous, Weezer will come at you with “This bottle of Stevens/awakens ancient feelings/LIKE FATHER/STEP FATHER/THIS SON IS DROWNING IN THE FLOOOOOOOOOD,” and go and make you get a little choked up from the blunt honesty.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was basically “emo.” I was never an emo kid, but maybe at 14 years old I was primed to hear someone tunefully screaming about their alienation and frustration with life and love. When I listened to grunge, I never really cared about the subject matter (which was just as well, considering the garbled nature of most of the lyrics). All I cared about was the dark, dangerous sound of it all. And when the post-grunge backlash happened, it seemed like everything on the radio was trying to counter that darkness so forcefully, even while singing about grim subject matter, and it all felt so wrong to me somehow.

But Weezer’s Blue Album struck that perfect balance between clean production and personal, emotionally honest subject matter that ventured at times into dark territory without the need to counter-balance that with exaggeratedly stupid syllables like the “doo doo doo”s in Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life.” Look, there’s nothing wrong with using wordless syllables in a pop song, but we’re talking about the only lyrics in the chorus, here.

Ultimately, Weezer entered my life at a time when I was ready to appreciate things like songcraft, lyrics and production value. They filled the void left in the wake of grunge, at least for me, because they were one of the only interesting bands to come around during that time period.

Am I actually answering the question posed at the top of the page? I think so. The answer is that I’m doing this blog about Weezer (for now) because Weezer was important to me and my personal and social development as a teen. I had so many “Weezer friends,” and so many positive Weezer-related experiences. They were a big deal. The first two reviews in this blog are going to be soooo ass-kissy, I’m warning you now. And, predictably, this blog is going to get painful, for both of us, when the dark times come.

I want to know if I’m wrong about Raditude and Hurley (there’s just no way those records are good), and I want to know if I’m right that the most recent albums aren’t as good as people think they are. I might be kind of a dick to Weezer in this blog. Sorry Weezer.

Anyway, I’m gonna stop writing now. You probably didn’t read this anyway. There’s no quiz, but I will give extra credit if you can name all the records shown in the top photo.