In 2009 my cool aunt sent me a mix CD in the mail. I called her my cool aunt because she worked in publishing and lived in a beautiful apartment in Sunnyside, Queens. Her habit of sending new music to my sister and me began when we were very young. Whenever she visited us in Kentucky with her musician boyfriend, they would play songs by R.E.M., The Pretenders, and INXS while we danced raucously in the hallway. As I approached middle school and decided that having a body was miserable enough, never mind the dancing, I transitioned my music-listening to my bedroom. I received a huge stereo set for my 11th birthday, and my aunt sent me a new CD with which to christen it. The mix was titled something like ‘Party Mix’, and I slid it into one of the six (six!) CD slots. The first song burst through the stereo: “That’s Not My Name” by The Ting Tings. I tapped my foot in approval. Then, the second song began. What’s with these homies dissing my girl? Why do they gotta fro-o-ont? What did we ever do to these guys that made them so vio-o-lent?
I laid on the floor and listened to the rest of the CD, then held my finger on the rewind button until it returned to track two. I replayed “Buddy Holly” probably ten times while scouring the homemade track list for the band’s name: Weezer. I hummed the song on the school bus, I snag snippets of it under my breath in class, and bang, bang, a knock on the door buzzed in my head like an intrusive thought. I logged onto the family computer in the basement and searched for the music video — it was uploaded to YouTube later that summer, but my first exposure to it was via someone’s digitally-shared tape recording of their own TV set. I watched Brian Bell foppishly mouth ‘I love you’ at a screaming teeny-bopper while Rivers Cuomo made puppy-dog eyes at the camera. I think Bell’s appearance in that video could be solely responsible for my taste in men: rail-thin, tall, a little loose around the joints. As an 11-year-old, “Buddy Holly” might have been my first exposure to kitsch; it was eye-rolling, it was ironic, it was men in nerdy cardigans. I was in love.
I didn’t yet have an iPod, just a generic MP3 player that I filled with music burned from CDs, and so my exploration of Weezer was carried out primarily via the internet radio app Pandora, which I used on the computer. I shuffled through most of their debut album — the ‘Blue Album’ — in this haphazard way. After the faux doo-wop tones of “Buddy Holly,” I was entranced by the darker lamentation of “Say It Ain’t So”, and I learned the tab for “Only in Dreams” on my dad’s old electric blue bass. I wasn’t aware at the time that Weezer was aligned incidentally with a sort of angry-boy-rock that sometimes verged on misogyny (verged being a generous word choice). In middle school I was a nerdy tomboy cursed with getting boobs too early. I had crushes on boys, but I wore the same clothes as they did because I wasn’t yet ready to be seen as a sexual object. In other words, like Rivers, I was utterly divorced from my own desires; even if I had been able to articulate them, I never would have felt confident acting on them.
I was mostly devoted to their debut album, but occasionally Pandora would tease me with “Pink Triangle” and “El Scorcho.” In my early teens, I never looked too far into the murky pond that was Pinkerton. Even the cover art scared me slightly; it seems silly to suggest that it projected an ominous aura, but it did! It was such a departure from the apologetic, now iconic Blue Album cover shot by Peter Gowland. It wasn’t until later in my life, when I was faced with disgusting late-teenage feelings of unbearable yearning and doomed love, that I turned to Pinkerton in earnest. Any port in a storm, as they say. It reveals itself to you once you are ready. When I heard the first hazy thrum of “Tired of Sex” I knew I was home.
For the uninitiated, Pinkerton is Weezer’s second album, and it has a storied past. It began as a never-to-be-staged rock opera conceived by Cuomo, titled Songs from the Blackhole. It was meant to be an inward-facing reflection upon the band’s insane success and the curse of public image. At the time, he was undergoing painful surgery to correct the fact that he was born with one leg longer than the other. Holed up in a hospital room, high on painkillers, and temporarily unable to walk without using a mobility aid, he was very far from the rockstar lifestyle that he had so briefly enjoyed just a year earlier. Angry with rock music and angry with the world, he found solace in the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly, which tells the tragic story of an American naval officer who falls in love with a Japanese woman. Cuomo eventually abandoned Songs from the Blackhole and conceived of Pinkerton, named after the male love interest in Madame Butterfly.
Upon its initial release, critics were largely unimpressed with the raw, self-recorded sound and huge departure from the tongue-in-cheek nerd rock that had been their bread and butter. Before the album’s release, Cuomo even sent this disclaimer to the band’s fan club: “There are some lyrics on the album that you might think are mean or sexist. I will feel genuinely bad if anyone feels hurt by my lyrics but I really wanted these songs to be an exploration of my ‘dark side’.” If the Blue Album reveled in the kind of defanged misogyny espoused by your friend’s older brother, then Pinkerton was more aligned with the fringe ramblings that most people would keep contained to underground internet forums. In the following years, Cuomo disowned the album, proclaiming his embarrassment that his most twisted thoughts from a horrible time in his life were being praised and commodified by early 2000s emo-rock bands who cited Weezer as an influence. We were thus punished (just kidding!) with the Green Album and a return to form/radio play. By 2010, Cuomo had changed his mind again, playing the entirety of Pinkerton on Weezer’s Memories Tour. The trade magazines followed suit, retroactively declaring Pinkerton to be one of the greatest rock albums of recent history and thus righting the historical wrongs that occurred in the mid-90s and led us to “Hash Pipe.” Again, just kidding!
But what is Pinkerton? Why has it garnered such frenzied adoration and abhorrence? The source material can provide some obvious clues. It is, of course, a deeply ‘problematic’ album (to use modern parlance), and it comes from a place of hurt. In fact, the hurt is so raw and so on-the-surface that it’s almost hard to look at. I’m less interested in the autobiographical aspect of Pinkerton. It’s self-evident why Cuomo wrote it, and it’s equally self-evident why young men in the late ‘90s and early 2000s felt drawn to it. I am more so fascinated by its almost feminine depiction of love and longing; it’s girl-coded, to once again use modern parlance. Pinkerton is about the feelings of alienation that you don’t know what to do with, and nothing is more alienating than being a young woman. In my late teens and early 20s I remember feeling truly monstrous because the universe was telling me that I was fuckable. I would lie on my bed and try to reconcile my outward appearance with the sickness I felt inside, and it somehow ideologically aligned me with Weezer. It’s the body/brain dissonance. “So tired, so tired, so tired of having sex,” Cuomo moans, and I was. My guy friends might read this with a distinct sense of “Boohoo!” but this alienation was very real and very painful. I felt that by sleeping with men I was telling a lie. I could say anything to them — that I often felt disconnected from my body, that I worried I had no agency— and they’d still happily take me back to their sterile apartments. I felt like the communion between my body and my mind had been severed, if it was ever there in the first place.
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