NOV 16 — Some bands mean more to people than others. By more, I mean that some bands have this effortless ability to connect with people on a deeper and more personal level compared to other bands.
Just look at how deeply connected so many people are to The Beatles (witness the hundreds of thousands of us being willingly conned into paying such ridiculous amounts of money for their remastered box sets), and how once big and popular acts such as Herman’s Hermits or Cilla Black are mostly remembered in a nostalgic way.
So yes, to have that rare ability to connect deeply with people is always a good thing, but it can also be a double-edged sword when you become too connected and people have a hard time letting go.
Last week I bought myself the new Weezer album titled “Raditude” (I know, rad title isn’t it? Ha ha). For those of you who don’t know Weezer, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of their classic ‘90s hit “Buddy Holly”. To those in the know, I’m sure there’s no need for me to tell you that they made two blindingly great albums in the ‘90s, their fantastically geeky self-titled debut aka “Blue Album” and the achingly personal masterpiece “Pinkerton”.
Those two albums left a deep, deep impression on a whole bunch of kids, who started their own bands like The Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World, and working with the sonic blueprint laid out on those two albums they then proceeded to carve their own niche in the Book Of Rock by staking the “emo” genre as their own.
Pinkerton’s legend especially, despite it being only a decade plus old, is something worth retelling again and again. It sold very poorly, reportedly around 100,000 copies only when it was released, which was a miserable amount compared to their debut which sold millions of copies worldwide. But those few copies left a deep enough impression on the kids who bought the album that so many of them started their own bands, inspired by the songs and sounds they heard on it. In short, that album changed lives.
After the failure of “Pinkerton”, which in reality was a highly confessional singer-songwriter type album with the singer-songwriter hiding behind the loudness of the band, Weezer went on a long hiatus, with their frontman Rivers Cuomo apparently regretting the decision to write such personal songs in the first place. But during that time off, the “Pinkerton” legend grew and grew and grew until it became so loud that the band couldn’t merely ignore it anymore, which led them to again record and release a new self-titled album, this time known as the “Green Album”.
It was when this album hit the stores that suddenly all those passionately loyal and loving fans (me included, but back then only!) turned violently vocal in their hatred for what Weezer has become. Where “Pinkerton” was painfully personal, the “Green Album” was positively faceless in its cheerful and generically impersonal lyrics.
The same thing happened to all their subsequent albums, with fans still stubbornly hoping to get another “Blue Album” or “Pinkerton”. I didn’t think much about how unfair this was to the band until I started making my own demos/EPs and albums.
Any genuinely honest artist will tell you that whatever art they’re making at any point in time will be directly or indirectly influenced by all sorts of outside forces. Their feelings, personal lives, the kind of music and films that they were heavily into at that moment, hobbies, the general political feeling at the time, recent historical events and so much more will have some sort of effect on the art being made by an artist.
In the case of post-“Pinkerton” Weezer, their frontman Rivers Cuomo probably just doesn’t want to get personal ever again after what’s happened the first time around. As a songwriter he probably just wants to try other approaches to writing songs and lyrics which are as equally valid as the personal approach. Or maybe, he’s just not depressed anymore and is a genuinely happy person trying to share his happiness with the world and have a bit of fun through his songs. As long as the song successfully serves its purpose, who are we to complain whether they’re genuine or not, right?
After the release of my band’s second studio album “Teenage Disc Fantastic”, I got quite a number of people saying that it is very different from our debut “Top Of The Pop”, and because of that they prefer our debut more than the second album and that they hoped that I’d write more songs like those on our debut. It is when I get these kinds of questions and read reviews along the same lines that I truly get how much I missed the point with Weezer when they released their post-“Pinkerton” albums.
It is good that I love them to bits and enthusiastically look for and buy their new records whenever one comes out, but somehow I’ve forgotten that bands are people too. That there are people in bands. And that people grow. Such a simple point and yet so easy to miss.
Just like how I’ve grown and how I’m at a much different place when I wrote “Teenage Disc Fantastic” as compared to “Top Of The Pop”, Rivers Cuomo has definitely grown and are at much different places when he wrote the post-“Pinkerton” albums.
We usually treat our favourite artists the way parents treat their child. We love them wholeheartedly, usually for some qualities we vaguely remember from when we first got to know them, but then we forget that they need to grow too, and that they need to do all that growing by themselves, and that we should love them enough to learn to let go and just watch proudly as they do their own thing and never forget to support them. Like that line we always hear in movies, “Love means learning to let go.”
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
