Even before he donned those iconic glasses (note their absence on the album cover), he was Clark Kent.Įpic closer “Only In Dreams,” with its hyper-specific imagery about toenails, makes the album’s headspace explicit, but there’s never any doubt we’re visiting a paralyzingly awkward introvert’s imaginary world. More than any other figure in his generation, Cuomo helped popularize the concept of the cool geek, the idea that rock stars didn’t have to dabble in satanism and shag groupies like Jimmy Page but could obsess over Dungeons & Dragons and unattainable crushes instead. It is a dweeb’s idea of what cool sounds like - rocking out like Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, riding a surfboard to work, sweeping a lovely lady away to a strange and distant land, monopolizing that lady’s attention - imagined from the safety of the garage, the scariness of the outside world given only passing acknowledgement. Aside from the devastating “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here” and the stirring dysfunction junction “Say It Ain’t So,” the first Weezer album comprises not sob stories but optimistic fantasies. Most people prefer music that makes them feel good, which is why the Blue Album (and, unfortunately, latter-day dreck like “Beverly Hills”) struck a mainstream chord the way Pinkerton never could. But much of Blue’s appeal was its romantic outlook on life, so much so that when they released Pinkerton two years later many fans didn’t know what to make of it. He would get around to fixating on heartbreak one album later on 1996’s Pinkerton, a harrowing breakup opus that did as much as Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary (incidentally, released on the same day as the Blue Album) to shape the face of emo. after high school in search of rock stardom.
Throughout Blue, Cuomo still comes off as the starry-eyed Connecticut kid who moved to L.A.
Nobody else was hearkening back to Happy Days. In that environment, Weezer’s major keys and doe-eyed story-songs stood out. Grunge was peaking and punk was breaking, which meant the default posture involved a dour disposition or at least heavy doses of snark. In keeping with the geeky identity that has always defined them, Weezer was out of step with popular rock trends when they landed on MTV and modern rock radio. For a vast cross-section of dorks, bros, basics, and aspiring manic pixie dream girls, it is their blue heaven. They pump their fists and drunkenly howl “The workers are going home!” and pour their hearts into every subsequent lyric and air guitar break until all they can do during “Only In Dreams” is gently sway with arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders. The Blue Album just inspires that level of devotion - a sacred text that people feel compelled to revisit it in its entirety. One of the two bands has made a regular thing out of it. As a fellow suburban native, I know two separate groups of high school friends who have assembled well into their twenties to bash the album out in full.
Weezer worship runs especially deep among suburban kids like the members of Real Estate, who got their start playing the Blue Album straight through at high school parties. The album was a hit from the beginning, but a few years later, in that dark period after Pinkerton when it seemed like the band might never come back, it became a religion. Weezer’s first self-titled album - henceforth referred to rightly and properly as the Blue Album - hit stores 20 years ago tomorrow, and people are still climbing up each other’s backs singing along to this day. In other words, I had a lot in common with Rivers Cuomo. I was the kind of child who stayed inside to invent my own X-Men while other kids were out playing basketball - so uncool that I could only imagine what cool might be. I don’t think I even knew who the recently deceased Kurt Cobain was at that point that came the following school year when kids in my fifth-grade class started wearing T-shirts with Cobain’s face plastered across the front. I was entranced by the idea of rock ‘n’ roll without actually having experienced much of it yet. I hadn’t yet crossed the threshold from sheltered church kid to faithful MTV viewer, but that world held immeasurable allure for me. I didn’t know my cousins from Cleveland all that well, so it was startling to see the two of them out in the street in front of my other cousins’ house, climbing up each other’s backs, shouting with loopy abandon, “If you want to destroy my sweater/ Hold this thread as I walk away!/ Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked!/ Lying on the floor, I’ve come undone!” It was summer 1994, around the time of my eleventh birthday.
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