Nerd-rock nirvana

Who, back in 1994, would have thought that 25 years later we'd be hailing Weezer's self-titled debut aka The Blue Album as a classic? Not me, for sure - but here we are in 2019, and I've got to admit that it deserves the acclaim.

Neatly describing the record as "perfect Beach Boys harmonies and finely crafted bubblegum hooks [pumped] through megawatt amps and crunchy distortion pedals", Rolling Stone chose to mark the anniversary by publishing a list of ten things you didn't know about it (if you weren't a total fanboy, that is). These included: Brian Bell doesn't actually play a note on the album despite being credited as the rhythm guitarist; that awful cover was inspired by a Beach Boys compilation; 'Buddy Holly' was initially called 'Ginger Rogers' and only just scraped onto the album after much persistence from producer Ric Ocasek; 'Undone (The Sweater Song)' was an attempt to sound like The Velvet Underground but ended up being a rip-off of Metallica's 'Welcome Home (Sanitarium)'; and, perhaps most bizarrely, Rivers Cuomo's vision for the follow-up album was a sci-fi rock opera called Songs From The Black Hole.

For their part, Consequence Of Sound canvassed the thoughts of a range of artists for whom Weezer was life-changing, including members of Real Estate, Wavves, Saves The Day and Tokyo Police Club. Their comments make a mockery of Michael Hann's suggestion that "Weezer never really influenced anyone"; on the contrary, they were the catalyst for emo and (together with Green Day) for late-90s/early-00s pop-punk - whether Cuomo liked it or not.

That odd claim aside, Hann's article (for the Quietus) is an excellent read. He argues (rightly, I think) that the album is more squarely in the lineage of Cheap Trick than grunge and that its appeal lies at least partly in the comprehensibility of its pop culture references and the fact that Cuomo's angst is relatable rather than extreme.

Hann goes further, though, in asking what went wrong - how did Weezer become "the most crushingly disappointing rock band of their generation"? It's with some justification that he points the finger at Cuomo - at his apparent disinterest in making music (it's merely something he seems to do "out of weary duty") and his troubling attitudes towards women. In truth, Hann notes, those attitudes were already evident in 'No One Else' and were writ larger on Pinkerton, the rough, noisy and (in my view) equally fantastic follow-up that played In Utero to Weezer's Nevermind. But he's right to conclude with some certainty that there will never be another brilliant Weezer LP, and it's fair to say that no other album of theirs will be the subject of articles commemorating its release a quarter of a century later.