Weezer's 'Blue Album' turns 20 and it's still the best gateway album ever

by Mark Teo

May 9, 2014

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If you’re anything like us—and we’re guessing that you are—you received your copy of Weezer’s self-titled debut, affectionately titled the Blue Album, sometime in middle school. And it came at a time before you even had a real taste in music, before you crystallized a high-school identity (wussup, ginos and skaters), and before you even had a conception about what made music good. Ole Blueprobably came in the mail with a Columbia House package with some of your first records—with Nirvana’s Incesticide,Offspring’s Smash, and some pseudo-Christian album by Collective Soul.

Right from the hop, though, we never knew how to classify The Blue Album. You saw the video for “Buddy Holly,” but didn’t get any of the Happy Daysreferences. You heard “Surf Wax America,” and while it vaguely stirred up an affection for beach sports, in reality, surfing was impossible from your subdivision in, like, Newmarket, ON. (Unless your town had a snazzy wave pool. If so… JELLY.) You recognized that “In the Garage” was undeniably dorky—remember when Weezer were classified as “Nerd Rock”?—but this wasn’t an asset: This was an era before Dan Harmon made it permissible for DND players to get sloppy handjobs, before board game bars were a real thing, and before Neil Degrasse Tyson made fucking science! a fucking thing!people fucking loved!because particle fucking physics! for! the! fucking! win! GET THAT COCK SAUCE.

No. Nerds never got laid.

So you forgot about The Blue Album, at least publicly. From that middle-school pupa emerged an awkward, eyebrow-ring toting butterfly—surely, the shittiest, most awkward butterfly in existence—and, as you became a more-or-less functioning human, your musical identity was formed, too: First, you might’ve scored a copy of I Mother Earth’s Scenery And Fish, and dabbled in a Randy River-inspired Cancon phase. Then, you discovered punk throughSmash or Dookie, and depending on which you favoured, a cascade of new bands followed—Smashfans went in harder patterns (Offspring led to AFI, which led to Rancid, which led to that regrettable period where you tried to be a skinhead), while Dookie fans went in snottier directions (Green Day led to NOFX, which eventually opened up the world of Fat Wreck Chords, and now, you can’t get pizza stains out of your clothing). Then, you bloomed even more.

You started hanging out with skateboarders who listened to Orange 9mm, Nasum, and whatever was on that Shorty’s skate vid. (Skateboarders try to pretend that they listened to like, the Necros in high school. Bull fucking shit.) You got into backpack hip-hop, back when Kanye embodied the tag. You went to college. Some first-wave emo got mixed in. Hardcore changed your life. You got tired of it all, and started listening to electro. Then, you got fascinated with punk again, but only the type of punk that wears Smiths shirts: Power pop, garage, post-punk, kraut, and twee all became relevant again.

This, at least, is what you told people about your musical arc. But you were lying. Your tastes shifted, sure, but one thing remained a constant throughout all those years: Weezer’s Blue Album.In reality, you never forgot about ole Rivers and co. It was the album that you put on when you got tired of listening to Smash, Through Being Cool, or even fucking The Queen Is Dead.

And there’s one reason that it remained: It’s because The Blue Albumisn’t cool. It never was, and never will be. But it’s perfect.

Perfect, sure, but complicated. See, Weezer is a complete garbage band: Rivers Cuomo is basically collaborating with Muppets now, and his new songs, without fail, sound like Smash Mouth. The Blue Album isn’t even their best, aesthetic-solidifying album—that belongs to its follow-up, Pinkerton, an album that was so singular in tone, so emotionally resonant, and so career-defining that we forgave Cuomo for admitting to the world that he’s a bad, bad man who, at the slightest mention of a questionably young Japanese girl, would sprout a penis that could cut diamonds. But he wrote Pinkerton,an album so distinctive—and lovely—in aesthetic that we’ve been waiting for him to recreate the album ever since.

But while Pinkerton is a better album, The Blue Albumis more significant. No, it’s not cohesive, but every single offering is a bona fide hit: There’s acoustic tracks rewritten as fuzzed-out power pop (“The World Has Turned And Left Me Here,” “My Name is Jonas”), spindly college rock (“Undone,” “Say It Ain’t So”), even simmering long-form explorations (“Only In Dreams”). Heck, even the b-sides, like “Suzanne” and “Mykel and Carli,” are stone-cold classics.

We’ll say this, though: Unlike Pinkerton,The Blue Album‘s approach to pop led us down very distinct sonic paths—and ones that we follow to this day. It was the essential gateway album.

See, The Blue Album didn’t only make nerdy music permissible—it taught us that rock needn’t be muscular and testosterone driven. Thanks to it, we discovered brainy British pop, the D.I.Y. indie pop of Beat Happening, the twee-pop of Scotland, the jangle-pop of New Zealand. Its power pop inclining led us to obsess over The Cars, Nick Lowe, and Elvis Costello, and that even led us down the path to the Buzzcocks, The Exploding Hearts, and so much more. Cuomo’s love of retro rock led us to dig through our parents record collection—and there, we found Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak, the entire Beach Boys discography, and even a few KISS records. Its fuzzed-out garage and faux-surf moments got name-checks when we discovered the Nuggets comps, got into psych shit, and saw the rise and fall of Jay Reatard. We owe our musical tastes to a creepy, Japanese-fetishizing nerdburglin’ dweebhole. And while he surely deserves a swirlie, today, Rivers gets our eternal gratitude.

So,The Blue Album,we raise our juiceboxes to you.

P.S., if you’re in an fighting mood, I’m just going to throw this out as Weezer’s best-album hierarchy: 1. Pinkerton, 2., The Blue Album, 3., Maladroit, 4., The Green Album (for “Island in the Sun” alone).

 

Tags: Music, News, weezer

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