Power-dweeb frontman Rivers Cuomo could do angry, but he was much more fun when playing melodramatic, as he did with gusto on “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here.” Atop a bed of crispy-crunchy power chords, Cuomo wallows over getting dumped. Weezer’s Blue Album was the perfect emo antidote to the raging alternative rock that dominated the airwaves in 1994. To enjoy it is to laugh off its absurdity - good luck finding a girl who won’t see through your “only wear mascara on date night!!!” rule, my dude - while bouncing along with one of the Blue Album’s most irresistible beats. “No One Else” remains a notable crowdpleaser in their set, one that’s often met with fists pumping and groups of friends jumping up and down in time with Cuomo’s strumming. The words are bitter and the music is buoyant, all barreling power chords and a shout-along chorus before the 30-second mark. In 2019, the lyrics of “No One Else” read like a text that should never be sent or a Tinder profile in desperate need of a revision: the details sketch a portrait of a scorned Cuomo whose dream girl won’t flirt with other guys or have a life when he’s not in it, unlike his girlfriend. “No One Else” is a jealous, petty, confessional blurt that’ll roll the eyeballs right out of your head, sure - but that’s kind of the point, and damned if it isn’t one of Weezer’s catchiest cuts. Didn’t quite understand it at the time, but that’s Weezer’s sweet spot. A car ride necessarily means you’re in between, and letting your cooler friends share something with you makes you feel just as liminal. There are children’s toys, family members, a construction site and that perfectly evocative phrase: “The workers are going home.” Add it up and you have a big-hearted but hesitant yearning for, I guess, adulthood. The lyrics are the kind that sound better when you squint - in other words, the fansite I just encountered claiming it was inspired by The Giver and offering line-by-line explication is something I could do without. “My Name Is Jonas” is as good as black coffee for starting your day, the finger-picked intro a calm fake-out before the gnarly riff drops like a brick.
“Discover” is a bit of a fib - I knew the big singles by the time of this road trip through northern Virginia on a clear fall morning but had never heard the Blue Album in full. In a car with two friends you think are cooler than you is an ideal way to discover Weezer. Its electric-blue cover announced a brand-new sound that coaxed pop culture nerds out of the garage and onto the Billboard charts.īelow, Billboard staffers break down each track on the seminal album to spell out just what makes it live on, 25 years later. If grunge was the response to the pretty boys of hair metal, Weezer was a response to the druggy darkness of grunge. Yes, grunge had its fair share of angst, but there were no mentions of Dungeons & Dragons or X-Men in any Alice in Chains songs. With the help of The Cars’ Ric Ocasek, who produced the album, Weezer went against the mumbled-lyrics-and-muddled-colors grain to offer up songs that are fun and funny (think “Buddy Holly” and its revelatory Spike Jonze-directed video) and a distinct melancholy that isn’t far from the surface (third single “Say It Ain’t So” or the histrionic “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here”). WWE Superstar Damian Priest on His Upcoming Match With Bad Bunny & Why the Musical Icon Is…Īnd that’s precisely why we’re still thinking and talking about this album all these years later: It didn’t chase any current trends or templates, but took an entirely new, decidedly uncool path.
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