Weezer and Muse and oh no what have I done

CHAPTER ONE: WEEZER

I still remember the first time I heard Weezer. I was 14 years old and my friend Brian put on the Blue Album while we played Nintendo at his house. To set the scene: we lived in an extremely rural area of Texas in this pre-internet era, and neither of our households had MTV. Having listened almost exclusively to Country/Christian/Oldies radio in my formative years, I had never heard anything even remotely like this, so so when Rivers Cuomo earnestly pleaded “if you want / to destroyyy my sweaterrrr“, I… I thought he was joking. I thought it was a joke band.

I didn’t even see this music video until I was well into my 20s

But Weezer didn’t even fit comfortably into that category, which had previously been defined by VHS tapes of Ray Stevens singing about church squirrels and streakers. The more I listened, the more I realized: yeah, this band was funny, but they were also really good. They were something new altogether: my new favorite secret joke band that no one but me would ever love or understand.

Meanwhile, “The Blue Album” was in the process of going platinum in less than a year. I was part of the phenomenon, I just didn’t know it yet.

But I learned.

By 2001, I had traveled the world with “Holiday” in my Sony Walkman headphones. I had driven through warm summer nights with the windows down, singing along to “Buddy Holly” (both the lyrics and the guitar solo). I discovered fan forums where I learned about Rivers Cuomo going to Harvard and living like a hermit in the aftermath of fans’ initial rejection of the too-weird, too-dark Pinkerton. and I endured at least one breakup while “Why Bother?” provided solidarity for my sad-boy heartache.

Ah, Pinkerton. The formerly goofball garage-dwellers had made a serious album. It was a concept album, it was daring, it took risks… they grew! And fans hated it at first. I need to set this topic down before I go full Star Wars fan theory about Pinkerton. It’s not good to be mad online, and I can tell you with certainty that if I go any further down this road, I will get mad online.

seriously, though: listen to that guitar solo at 2:25. It’s so weird and dissonant and amazing

There’s something about the Nostalgia of the Young, and that something is: business execs love to market it. After Pinkerton, Weezer went on hiatus for five years. Five years! For my parents’ generation, that five-year gap between 1996 and 2001 was negligible, but for kids my age? Five years was a lifetime. We learned to drive, we graduated high school, we fell in love for the first time. No wonder the Nostalgia of the Young has such an abbreviated half-life; their world spins at a blurry rate compared to that of their parents.

To market the nostalgia of the Boomers, labels had to figure out how to reinvent Neil Diamond and Rod Stewart—aging rockers who looked silly trying to re-live the glory days. To market to us, they just had to let a 31-year old Harvard grad exact his revenge on the fans who didn’t think the last album was catchy enough. It was a perfect sugar-sweet warhead. My [super-secret joke band / breakup coping kit] was now poised to become one of the biggest bands in the world. I don’t think I have ever been more prepared to love any collection of songs than I was when the Green Album was released.

And it was a perfect pop-rock album.

Too perfect.

C’mon, you loved this song

The songs were undeniably catchy. But around the third listen, something stuck out. Where the Blue Album had included the nearly 8-minute-long “Only in Dreams”, and Pinkerton had experimented with irregular tones and structure, the now Matt Sharp-less Weezer had released an album that followed… a formula.

Guitar intro + verse + chorus + verse + chorus + guitar-solo-in-the-melody-of-the-verse + chorus = profit.

Not a single song deviated from it, and not a single song  clocked in at longer than 3:20 until O Girlfriend closed up shop at a tight 3:50.

Seriously, go listen to the first five seconds of the last four songs of this album.

it’s the same song.

I’m not one to begrudge my favorite bands a world of success. Why would you ever hope for the extended frustration of a band that is meaningful to you? I love it when the people I root for finally succeed. So I stuck with Weezer through Maladroit. After the anguish of the beard-growing Harvard days for Rivers Cuomo, it was super cool to see him get to be in a music video with The Muppets.

I do still smile watching this

But something had changed. The Weezer of the first two albums was an awkward band of misfit kids who seemed uncomfortable in their own skin, and just happened to write phenomenally catchy songs about who they really were. A kid raised in an ashram in Connecticut painted his solitude with such authenticity that a rural Texas cowboy kid thought Weezer was his secret band.

New Weezer? New Weezer had tasted defeat, and weaponized their embarrassment. New Weezer became a caricature of their most outwardly-presenting-as-fun selves, painted by Thomas Kinkade and marketed by lawyers.

And fans ate it up.

It was 15 Million Merits, a decade before Black Mirror explained why it felt so wrong.

It was time for a new favorite band.

(EDIT: a few of you have mentioned that The Red Album had its moments. That’s true – it was fine. They got back to a little of their weirdness, and it was their fourth- or fifth-best album. If I had to erase all the bad Weezer albums from the world, I’d keep Blue, Pinkerton, Green, Red and Maladroit and everything else would go.)

CHAPTER TWO: MUSE

I found Muse earlier than I should have, thanks to a friend from Liverpool who tipped me off to Origin of Symmetry just a month or so after its July 2001 European release. From track one, I was hooked.

“Oh, so it’s like Jeff Buckley, but like… buck wild?”

No one has ever accidentally believed Muse to be a joke band. This was nothing like the tongue-in-cheek coyness of Weezer’s Nerd Power Marketing Squad™. Instead, here was a band emoting pure energy into songs that somehow bore up under the weight of some haircuts that took themselves very seriously.

“Yeah, yeah – kinda like Tool, but with less loathing of the audience”

But if Origin of Symmetry was Muse’s announcement that they were ready for the big stage, 2003’s Absolution was the closest thing I’ve ever heard to a band picking up the Earth and huffing white-hot fire into its inhabitants’ souls.

From moment one, it was a genre, perfected. The heft of the opening track, transitioning seamlessly into a song called “Apocalypse, Please” which saw Matt Bellamy unflinchingly and earnestly sing lyrics like: “Declaaaare this an emergency / Come on and spreeeaaaaad a sense of urgency” and later “It’s tiiiiime we saw a miracle. Come on, it’s tiiiiime for something Biblical.”

And the craziest thing is: they pulled it off.

The soaring vocals, the classical piano trills, the frenetic instrumentation, the fearlessly Byzantine arrangements of the record only got better when the trio escaped the studio and shoved their way onto stage shows with gaudy lights, or hit screens in music videos that nodded towards the existential confusion of seeking hope in a dystopic techno-future.

It was immaculate.

You’ve invested this much time in this article, go ahead and just listen through to this whole thing. It’s still a masterpiece.

It might be my favorite album of all time.

In early 2004, I drove all night from Dallas to St. Louis to see Muse on their first U.S. tour in years, since that was as close as they were getting to Dallas. My friend Jake and I slept in the parking lot of the venue all morning, then groggily walked around for food before packing into a now-closed club that heaved to accommodate us and about 400 other people, many of whom were only there because a radio station had sold tickets for a dollar and change. But by night’s end, the strangers had become converts. It was clear from the first note that they were auditioning for much bigger stages in the U.S., having already conquered the festival circuit in Europe.

It was transcendental. How do three guys make such a deafening (yet beautiful) cacophony?

(a sound guy playing tracks off-stage, is how. BUT STILL.)

But where it took me a few listens to realize that the Green Album was a formula, I can tell you exactly where I was when I knew that Muse’s peak was past us. It was June of 2006. I was standing at my office in Birmingham, England with my friend Jo. We had been waiting all morning for the BBC to reveal the new Muse single.

Here it came:

Hang on, did you make Super. Massive. Black. Holes. sound campy?

I reached over and turned off the radio and we both scowled for a moment. This was in the immediate aftermath of The Killers’ rebirth of disco, and the influence was obvious: “Did they just try to start a dance party?” I asked. “Yeah mate, that–” Jo paused, then nodded in agreement. “That was rubbish.”

Like Weezer, it’s not like Muse never had another good song. There were a handful of pretty okay songs on “Black Holes and Revelations”, but even Knights of Cydonia had a cheesy old west-themed video.

What in the name of John Wayne is happening here?

The band that had made an all-time great album out of pure ambition, earnest scowling, existential ponderings and virtuosic instrumentations was now flippantly dance-partying space. It’s a fine direction to try, I guess, but beginning with that June morning disappointment, Muse’s subsequent releases became a slow descent into “I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this dance song about the end of the world before.”

You don’t have to watch this one, I just put it here to prove my point.

CHAPTER THREE: THANK GOODNESS HE’S ALMOST DONE TALKING ABOUT THIS

So what’s the conclusion? Overproduction? Nah. Muse was nothing if not overproduced in their best years. Did they get too catchy? Nope. Weezer and Muse both tamed the earworm in their primes.

I think the common failure was this: Cynicism.

 

Weezer took a black eye when they stepped out and made a masterpiece that their fans hated, so they spent the next twenty years making formulaic hits. Cuomo basically said as much in interviews in the early aughts. From there, they started incorporating as many celebrity cameos as possible. People love celebrities! No one likes to hear a whiner. And it worked (for them, anyway). Weezer has gotten rich for the last fifteen years by being the Kardashians of White Guy Pop Music.

Muse went from being World-Exploding Rock Stars to a guy standing outside a robot bar in 2043 taking a drag from a cigarette, telling you about when it all went wrong in painstaking and boring detail (…he typed, with a complete lack of awareness about the subject of THIS WHOLE ARTICLE).

I’m less certain about my theory on the origin of Muse’s cynicism, but here it is anyway: I think they are such consummate musicians that—having scaled the mountain and made a perfect record—they Icarus’d everything up by adding synths and looking to the next biggest thing after the apocalypse (Black holes? Sure. Revelations? Yeah everyone is confused by that part of the Bible). Eventually, the songs finally buckled under the weight of their ambition, and they never recovered, ultimately throwing up their hands as if to say “Oh, bollocks, let’s just call this one ‘Drones’ and see if people catch the irony“.