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Once upon a time, there was a band. This band released a breakthrough debut album, which was lovingly coaxed into existence by a well-known musical figure, and which expertly capitalized on an emergent and particularly popular musical trend. This band took that trend and infused it with their own brand of self-conscious white nerdiness, and it was good.
Their album served up one monster hit and a couple of solid follow-up hits, and earned the band a large and immediate following. Predictably, there were critics who dismissed the band as superficial and credibility-challenged; essentially, a cartoonish sideshow exploiting a serious musical movement by serving up a diluted version for the know-nothing kids in the suburbs.
Then the band released a second album that was different, and in many ways much better, than the first. The album tanked. The critics dismissed it, and fans ignored it. Some true believers insisted that the band was still important, but for the most part the band was written off as a one-hit wonder, a minor footnote.
Then the story took a twist. Rather than disappear like an obedient one-hit wonder, the band retrenched and produced a third album and unleashed it on the world. And the fans flocked back. The true believers emerged from the shadows, smiling. The critics, somewhat bewildered, were forced to admit that maybe they were wrong. Maybe they'd missed something. Maybe this band had something to offer that wasn't easily dismissed, or ignored.
The band I'm talking about is, of course, the Beastie Boys.
But it's amazing to draw out the parallels between the Beasties -- a one-time vaguely caricaturish group of rappers -- and Weezer -- the one-time vaguely caricaturish group of ironic-popsters. In the same way that the Beasties's first album was decried as watered-down rap for the mallrat set, Weezer's Blue Album -- of "Undone (The Sweater Song)," "Say It Ain't So," and "Buddy Holly," along with several lesser known minor classics of power pop -- has been dissed by many a sniffing, Matador-loving purist as "Pavement for the masses." And just as I-told-you-so scolds gleefully pissed on the Beasties's Paul's Boutique -- even as it was winning a quiet underground following and a rep as one of the great lost rap albums -- Weezer's follow-up, the masterful Pinkerton, sank out of sight before its lone real single, "El Scorcho," had even a dozen radioplay spins.
Now, as the head-scratching articles in Spin and Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly can attest, Weezer is back, which, for a lot of people, is like finding out that Katrina and the Waves has released a new album and is mounting a major stadium tour. The general sentiment of these articles is, how can we possibly explain the enduring popularity of Weezer, the band we left for dead after "My Name is Jonas"? Well, let's give it a shot: the peculiar trick of Weezer is that they, or, more specifically, he -- he being Rivers Cuomo, the slightly unhinged, slightly brilliant frontman for the band -- managed gracefully to walk the line between irony and earnestness at a time when both were competing for dominance in popular culture. Weezer emerged in the early nineties, when slacker, air-quote irony was at the height of its powers, and yet the band was also born out of a musical movement -- grunge -- which was notoriously self-serious. (There's not too much clever word play in Kurt Cobain's lyrics.)
The most obvious elements of Weezer's music -- the testosterone guitar, the self-consciously virtuosic solos, the cutesy-poo references to Kiss and comic books, the too-ironic-by-half Happy Days video for "Buddy Holly" -- branded the band as tongue-in-cheek pranksters with little substance, an overeducated basement band gone horribly wrong. (Personally, the first time I ever heard "The Sweater Song," I thought it sounded like a self-parody of slacker angst, and had little patience for it; of course, the other song that had elicited this reaction was "Creep" by Radiohead, and that band turned out to be pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things, too.)
But repeated listenings to Weezer's Blue Album revealed that they were, in fact, earnest, if not entirely straight-faced, in their pursuits: when Rivers Cuomo sings about Kiss posters on the wall it's because, as a kid, he had Kiss posters on the wall. Underneath the irony, Weezer has a real affection for all the constituent parts of its music: guitar solos, arena rock, sunny melodies, relentless harmonies. Pinkerton confirmed this hunch. Of course, it was a rude shock to newly-minted Weezer fans everywhere when Rivers Cuomo subsequently dropped off the face of the earth, the band apparently disbanded, and Pinkerton seemed to linger as a brilliant, elegiac Dear John note to the world.
Thankfully, Weezer is back. Their new album, while not the another-great-leap-forward that the Beastie Boy's Check Your Head was, is a very welcome return for pop's foremost providers of joy doled out in three-chord packages. The rock press, having seen alternative music's best and brightest flare out, kick off, or recede into irrelevance only to be replaced by tab-A-into-slot-B boy bands and irony-free nymph pop, are only too glad to recant on earlier criticism and herald Weezer anew as saviours of the genre. Weezer's not likely to save anyone at this point, but it's nice to know that purveyors of happy music can themselves have a happy ending.
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