#5 - Weezer: Pinkerton

In which Rivers Cuomo, heartbroken weirdo and ace pop song writer, throws himself on the floor and yells out "What the fuck am I supposed to do?"

Write-ups of this album usually put a lot of consideration of its place in the Weezer discography. To hell with historical contextualization, let me tell you about this album and me. It was the spring of 2008 and I don't know why but I decided to finally spin it the whole way through, after knowing a couple of songs. I knew the general story (difficult, emotionally raw second album, largely disliked by the public but later vindicated by history) but until that point of my life was not keen to see if it lived up to the hype. At the end of my first year at university, I was dried up and embroiled in an ongoing mess of a non-relationship. Everything hurt like I was still in high school. It was the right time to embrace this album. I wanted something that sounded like destruction... not blind rage music, but something obviously in touch with the stupid form of heartache I was feeling. I was upset, and upset at myself for being upset. It's this contradiction of feelings that Pinkerton hits so well. It's pretty and vulnerable, but it hits all these sour notes of selfishness and neediness and bitterness, that makes it sound "real."

The first four tracks lay out a pretty direct strategy, using all these churning guitar noises that sound like somebody trapped in their own problems, like "Tired of Sex" and "Getchoo," and coming apart at the seams with squeals both vocal and instrumental. The lyrical conceit of "Tired of Sex" is pretty brilliant, because if you can't enjoy that most basic human pleasure, what have you got?

I don't often engage in lyrical analysis because a lot of albums I've been listening to go for the abstract and it would be wrong to try to impose my own interpretation on you and say this is why it's good or bad. In the case of Cuomo's writing here, at least it generally stays quite open with its meaning -- with one considerable exception -- so you can say "this song is about X, that's song is about Y," but it leaves things distant enough that the listener can decide for himself what X and Y in these cases really mean. Is "No Other One" a cry of defiant admiration for the flawed relationship, or a sigh of resignation to it? And I think "Why Bother?" speaks for itself, and it says a lot to me that Rivers could dig down and pull out something so harsh and resentful.

The album breaks open right around here. After four tracks of intensive guitar exercise, we get a breather to begin the first truly great track of the already-impressive album, "Across the Sea." Here is a breather, which affords a bit more introspection after raging against the world and the self. The verses bop along in this off-kilter, run-on-sentence rhythm, with a bouncy piano and some chipper drums, but as the song goes on, the background vocals (as throughout the album) fall out of sync, Cuomo's voice gets agitated again, and the hook of "I've got your letter / You've got my song" becomes more desperate and sad. It is, to me, the defining track of the album. Your best chance for happiness is unfathomably far away, it's killing you.

Starting with that track, the latter half of the album largely plays on the theme of wanting something you can't have and wanting to be something you're not. Take "The Good Life," the second in the string of the album's five consecutive excellent tracks, where Cuomo makes oblique reference to his time at Harvard following his corrective leg surgery (walking with a cane and growing a beard,) when apparently he was walking around amongst college kids wearing Weezer shirts for months without being recognized (and if true, wouldn't that bother you just a little bit?) That story may be apocryphal, but it's the sort of frustration the song indicates with its strangely-articulated lyrics. "I don't wanna be a nomad anymore / It's been a year or two since I was out on the floor / Shakin' booty, makin' sweet love all the night / It's time I got back to the good life." And how sad, "Makin' sweet love all the night" was the thing he was tired of half an album ago.

Speaking of strange articulation, there's the stream-of-consciousness "El Scorcho," which hangs on its chorus of "I'm a lot like you so please / Hello, I'm here, I'm waiting / I think I'd be good for you / And you'd be good for me" as the only indication what Cuomo's trying to get at, the feeling of a first impression, trying to get someone's attention that obviously isn't giving it out. The song doesn't take much pain to rhyme or sound like song lyrics: very Lennonesque, all patchwork digressions and references and non-sequiters. I can barely even call up anymore how strange it sounded to me the first time I heard it, having been normalized by about 3000 listens in the years since, but to listen with a critical ear, it's still very strange, with its unusually tempo and "bloop-da-bloo" riff. Importantly, I've gotta stop and wonder whether the narrator persona in this song is worthy of the attention he craves.

There's a bit of prettiness, though, linking this grit to "Pink Triangle," a song not only literally about falling for someone with incompatible sexuality, but with anyone you can't have in general, because you've always gotta ask "Why?" As insensitive to the LGBT community as it seems now -- and maybe things were less touchy in the 90's, maybe not -- the logic of "Everyone's a little queer / Can't she be a little straight?" is perversely solid, if still incredibly stupid. No, it probably doesn't work like that, but it does a good job indicating the level of hopelessness in our hero's story. Incidentally, I chose this song for an assignment in Grade 10 when my English teacher asked us to pick a love song to discuss, when we were studying Romeo & Juliet. What that says about me, I'll let you figure out.

Mostly the album sounds all the same, which is more important to building a great album than you might suspect, because it's never boring or repetitive because of it, but it builds a concentrated atmosphere. It's a sort of concept album, an indirect one linked together not by narrative progression as such but definitely by exploration of themes. The negativity expressed in all these songs very reluctantly turns to measured optimism as the narrator voice gets what he's been pining for and finds himself confronted by his own uncertainty. "Can't believe how bad I suck, / it's true / What could you possibly see in / little ole three chord me?" is such a fucking great lyric it hurts, but ultimately concludes, with guitar flourishes that sound like fireworks, "I'm ready, let's do it baby!" It's such a great song, really, both rough-hewn and catchy, it captures those contradiction of anger and delight, of pleasure and pain, of wanting to be honest, but wanting to have control over the story (and thus lying anyway.) The confounding thing is that quiet, acoustic closing song, "Butterfly," which seems to me to finally be the point of acknowledgment that other people have feelings, and sadly, Cuomo-narrator has been stuck in this unstoppable cycle of behaviour of hurting people without considering it, and might never be able to quit it. It's so sweet and so sad and so dark.

I often praise albums that provide some sort of catharsis... break down a mood and build you back up. An album maybe doesn't have to do that, but it always enhances the listening experience when you have a reason to listen all the way through, because it's put you someplace and you need it to pick you back up again. The appeal is, when you're feeling like a dickhead, there's music out there that resolves the tension for you, in melody and lyric and properly-abstract screaming noise.

This is an album for anyone who has had a relationship end and only had themselves to blame. This is an album for anyone who has been left by someone who didn't even know you wanted them to stay, and for anyone who has had something just too far out of reach. Rivers Cuomo, in retrospect was at a crossroads, a dilemma of being a very talented songwriter and musician who needed to work out his own issues before he could make the music people wanted him to. Strange, and I guess he has a right to be embarrassed by it, but this is the album that means the most to the most people, even if it's also "for" the least. It's ugly, and brutal, and if it's too honest, then it's a kind of honesty you don't hear much of. Few people are willing to plunk down a record that says "Maybe it's everyone else's fault, or maybe I really am the asshole." Uncomfortable truths. That's reality, and it's rarely sounded better.

Buy this album from iTunes now!