round 1
(4) weezer, “say it ain’t so”
scratched out
(13) 7 year bitch, “the scratch”
446-168
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 6.
emily costa on “Say It Ain’t So”
In 1999, Rivers Cuomo compiled a three-ring binder called “The Encyclopedia of Pop.” The binder contained a breakdown of every Nirvana song, a dissection of elements, lyrics, structure. Cuomo was trying to find math behind the songs. A formula. He broke down tracks by Oasis and Green Day, too. He documented his own songwriting methods, such as “Intellectually Acquired Emotionally Volatile Concept,” “Incipit-Melody-Guitar-Develop-Tea,” and “Arbitrary-Progression-Distortion-Open-Strum-Intro-Melody-Arrange.” A similar method of ultra-chronicling and transparency was the Catalog O’ Riffs—a spreadsheet he put online for a few years which not only listed important events in his life but each corresponding riff and song he’d ever written. (If I’m reading it correctly, “Say It Ain’t So” seems to have been composed on July 18, 1992 in a house on Amherst Avenue in Los Angeles. It was a Saturday.) In the liner notes of Alone II: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, he writes about his use of these musical experiments during those first few Encyclopedia years: “The music I produced cycled through various styles, from extremely abrasive to light and folky, but in accord with my new post-Pinkerton values, almost none of the lyrics had any personal meaning.”
Weezer formed on Valentine’s Day in 1992 and played their first show about a month later. They were trying to stick out in a grunge-dominated scene. The band intentionally went in another direction, turning instead to power pop and even barbershop quartets for inspiration. Drummer Patrick Wilson recalls bassist Matt Sharp’s idea for the trajectory of the band: “‘Yeah, let’s not be grunge. Let’s be more like the Beach Boys. But loud.’”
After recording a demo called The Kitchen Tape, the band was signed to Geffen. Their eponymous debut, dubbed the Blue Album. came out one month after Kurt Cobain died. Produced by Ric Ocasek of the Cars, it’s filled with mostly bright, catchy, sing-along tunes, the guitar slightly fuzzed-out and crunchy yet controlled and polished. Its release situated on the heels of grunge, the album did stand apart, a nerdy, sunshine-infused alternative. Even the more plaintive songs like “Say It Ain’t So,” as well as “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here” and “Only in Dreams,” have fun moments, apexes and triumphs, with the last containing a cresting guitar solo slicing through a background of crashing cymbals.
The album is a classic now, but the band wasn’t as well-received at first; according to Pitchfork, they “were considered alt opportunists or even Pavement ripoffs.” Cuomo remembers this kind of early hate they got, including being dubbed “Stone Temple Pixies,” a hollow, corporate version of the college alt-rock pioneers. Even though this nickname came from a local paper, the insult stuck, and Cuomo still hasn’t forgotten.
Cuomo mentions in the liner notes of Alone II that during his Encyclopedia days, when he was trying “to construct songs that were so compositionally perfect that no one could deny them,” he wondered if he was doing the wrong thing. “I kept thinking, maybe I should write a song with personal meaning–after all, that was what had always worked for me in the past (in the sense that it had generated songs that I loved).” Not, in the sense, that it had generated critical praise. The Blue Album was the first, but also arguably the last, example of when the band had fully succeeded on both fronts. In 1996, we get Pinkerton, Weezer’s sophomore album. On it, Cuomo shares intensely personal songs, going beyond the occasional vulnerability of the Blue Album to someplace stratospherically intimate and real. It was a critical and commercial failure.
However, the most personal song on the Blue Album is also probably Weezer’s most solid hit, a song that Cuomo could certainly describe as “compositionally perfect.” “Say It Ain’t So” strikes a balance among all the elements that make a strong Weezer track: lyrics with sincerity and specificity, perfect novelty/kitsch level (this is why “Buddy Holly” isn’t the ultimate Weezer song, since it could’ve left them in one-hit wonder territory had “Undone” not been the first single, although that song has its own novelty aspects; “Buddy Holly” just inches ahead in that race). Oh, and it rocks. Like big, jagged guitar parts. A chorus that comes in like a riptide, a vocal that’s pleading but angry.
The sincerity, though, seems to be the key. Cuomo writes from a child’s point of view, relaying the story of his worry surrounding his stepfather’s alcohol use. He says:
It's such a complicated story, way too complex to write a song about. I should never have done it. I was really afraid of alcohol at the time. I didn't drink till I was 21, not even a sip. I was petrified of alcohol. 'Say It Ain't So' was about when I was 16. I opened up the refrigerator, and I saw a can of beer. All of a sudden I made the connection that my step-father was leaving... because my father started drinking when he left my mother.
After a delicate intro, the oh-yeahs and alrights kick in over a Reggae-like, hiccuping guitar, and Cuomo tells the story of the beer triggering his anxiety. He tries to ignore it and live out a normal childhood, watching TV and wrestling with his brother. (The “wrestle with Jimmy” line is often assumed to be about Jim Beam or masturbation; it’s more likely about his brother, Leaves, who took the name Jimmy when trying to assimilate to public school. Rivers went by Peter. They both took their stepfather’s last name, Kitts.) His worry permeates the song, brings us to the chugging guitar of the chorus.
The bridge takes us back to his real father, a letter reaching out for connection. There’s the little-kid point of view at its most heartbreaking: “Dear Daddy.” All he wants is safety, assurance, consistency. The language is raw and genuine, but clever. The use of liquids, bubbles, waterslides, floods all show the helplessness of an anxious child unable to reach out for a life-preserver. There’s the feeling of being uprooted and sent downstream, of drifting along, completely at the mercy of adults.
It’s also a sing-along, drama-filled heart song, and the music brings the lost-little-kid sentiment alive. There’s such power behind “the son is drowning in the flooood,” behind the climactic solo that follows, and then the chorus guitars tearing in again. The outro mirrors the intro, and we’re back where we started.
In 1990, Cuomo had been in L.A. for a bit attempting to succeed with a glam metal group, his Connecticut ashram childhood in the rearview. The band broke up, and he eventually got a job at Tower Records in ’91, where he was introduced to music that wasn’t the pop or metal he’d been listening to up to that point. He got schooled by the Tower employees, most notably in Nirvana. Everything changed for him when he heard “Sliver.” The lyrics “felt so nostalgic and sweet and painful,” he says. “It just sounded like it was coming from the deepest part inside of me—a part which I hadn’t yet been able to come close to articulating in my own music.”
His Nirvana obsession continued as he formed a pre-Weezer band, Fuzz, with drummer Pat Wilson. They’d listen to Bleach and Cuomo made the transition from lead guitar to singer. Recently he told Rolling Stone, “In some ways, I feel like I was Nirvana’s biggest fan in the nineties. I’m sure there are a zillion people who would make that claim, but I was just so passionately in love with the music that it made me feel sick. It made my heart hurt.”
But he didn’t talk about it back then. Not in interviews, anyway. On his 2020 website, one he created for a web programming class at Harvard, he has a section that functions as a sort of FAQ. Here, fans can learn little snippets about his life, his family, his influences. Rivers myths, decoded. There’s a Kurt Cobain entry. “Never met him,” it says. “I'm pretty sure I never said his name in any of the hundreds of interviews I did in the nineties...I was uncomfortable saying his name.” This matches up with a recent assertion in Rolling Stone: “I would love to have met him – but then again, I was afraid of it, because I was quite certain that he would despise my music and everything we stood for.”
Each element of the packaging for the Blue Album was deliberate and echoed the personal aspects of the record. On his website, Cuomo discusses the album’s design:
My parents said I could paint my room any color I wanted. I painted it my favorite color, a specific shade of blue. When I was thinking about a cover for the first Weezer album, I wanted it to be that same shade of blue. This mode of nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood was the same source of my "look" in the Blue album era—the glasses frames, bowl cut, dickies, blue t-shirt, and windbreaker from my childhood photos.
The single for “Say It Ain’t So” is black and a similar shade of blue. The cover design looks like a scratchboard, the black surface revealing something deeper underneath when you take a sharp object to it. But it’s a picture Cuomo drew when he was a child. It’s him playing soccer with his father, scoring a “goll” and winning a trophy. There’s cheering in the background. His dad is rooting for him, encouraging him, saying “yay my son.”
Rivers Cuomo on Nirvana’s “Sliver”:
It’s like, ‘Oh, my God. This is so beautiful to me. And I identify with it so much.’ Hearing him sing about Mom and Dad and Grandpa Joe, these personal family issues, in a really heartbreaking kind of innocent, childlike way, over these straightforward chords in a major key. But then the distortion kicks in, and he starts screaming. Shit! That’s what I want to do.
The first time I saw Weezer was in the summer of 2002. I was fourteen. This was a culmination of a few years of love, a love getting steadier and more intense as it went on, from casual “Buddy Holly'' admirer to website-trolling obsessive. I spent afternoons in chat rooms. I saved my money and sought out B-sides at the record store. I wrote an English essay on Rivers Cuomo, the person dead or alive I’d most want to have dinner with. My screenname was weezergurl887.
I listened to the Blue Album daily, memorized the track listing, even sang along with the guitar parts. I loved Pinkerton, but the Blue Album had my heart. When I was a sad teen dealing with shitty family problems, I didn’t want to wallow. I wanted catchy, happy music. Or, happy-sounding. Blue gave it to me—the feelings of loneliness but self-acceptance in “In the Garage,” the delicate, dizzying experience of having a crush in “Only in Dreams,” and the fucked-up-family song, “Say It Ain’t So.”
As I stood in the Hartford amphitheater in 2002, I was preparing myself for what I was about to experience. All the articles I’d been reading painted Cuomo as this anxious, depressed person who didn’t want to be famous, and the music I’d loved confirmed it to a degree. I’d read about him painting the walls of his tiny living space black, covering all the windows, hiding away from the world. This was after the release of Pinkerton.
My chest felt light as I waited for the drum and bass to echo within it, the anticipation of that buzzy high. And then Cuomo came out. He was wearing a suit. He talked quite a bit between songs. The huge, illuminated =w= spewed flames.
Something had changed.
I wondered if inside he still felt like the person in the black room. After all, the critics had reversed their views on Pinkerton by this point; they now praised the album, acknowledging its cult following and place in history as one of the foundational emo albums. Does that heal a wound? Revisionist history? How do you go on sharing your heart with the world when the reaction is rejection?
The best available performance clip of “Say It Ain’t So” is the one from Letterman in 1995. I say it’s the best because it’s the only one I’ve seen where Cuomo seems to be fully engaged with the level of emotion present in the song. That’s something that doesn’t really happen in the music video, even though it’s understated compared to the previous two. In it, Cuomo jokingly plays the intro, smiling open-mouthed. Oh, and there’s a slow-motion hacky sack montage during the solo.
The Letterman performance, however, seems to capture the song’s pain and heartache. It’s probably mainly physical pain, though, or at least discomfort. Underneath his wide-legged khakis, Cuomo is wearing a metal brace; he’d gotten painful surgery to stretch out one of his legs which was slightly shorter than the other. In order to do it, they broke his femur, and he’d have to twist some screws each day to increase the space between the bones.
Cuomo even looks like a kid during the performance. He’s staring out at the beginning, wide-eyed, drowning in his baggy clothes. Matt Sharp’s manic bass-playing more than makes up for Cuomo’s rigid stance. Both Sharp and guitarist Brian Bell fill the stage well, echoing the chainsaw rip of the chorus.
And then Cuomo seems to go inward towards the middle of the song, to be connecting to the pain, whether it’s the physical or the emotional. His voice cracks. The solo looks cathartic, a release. Another voice break, and we’re near the end. Cuomo’s eyes are closed during most of the song, but when they’re open, he looks lost.
It’s difficult to rewind back to “Say It Ain’t So” and forget all that has transpired since its release, to separate it from the trajectory of Weezer’s career since then. Difficult, too, to ignore the steady back-and-forth from critics for every subsequent album: They’re back! Wait, no, this isn’t what we wanted. Not to mention the toll the criticism has had on Rivers Cuomo himself.
Perhaps the Encyclopedia of Pop worked. The band is popular and successful. The songs keep flowing. But the question remains: did he have that formula all along? Or was he just simply trying to name it? Or, did he have the formula but extract the heart as much as he possibly could, separating art from the personal? The pain when the two combine seems to have wreaked havoc, to have become a destroyer.
It’s probable Cuomo’s acceptance of rejection came from his work with Rick Rubin during Make Believe, Weezer’s fifth album; this is when we see a shift to a more chilled-out, less anxious and controlling identity. He became celebate and started practicing Vipassana meditation after Rubin gave him a book of love poems by a fourteenth-century Sufi mystic. However, it seemed to come before this, when he started playing Pinkerton songs live, right around the time I saw the band for the first time. Before that—like, right before that—he said this to Rolling Stone: “The most painful thing in my life these days is the cult around Pinkerton. It's just a sick album, sick in a diseased sort of way. It's such a source of anxiety because all the fans we have right now have stuck around because of that album. But, honestly, I never want to play those songs again; I never want to hear them again.”
Despite all his transparency, his lists, his spreadsheets, his personal website, the overwhelming gift of access to hundreds of Weezer demos, and despite, of course, the fragility he’s shared through his music (when he’s allowed it), Cuomo remains a mystery.
But it seems he’s found this formula, whatever it is now, that’s allowed Weezer to remain a huge rock band, even if it doesn’t result in what every fan and critic has in mind. Ten years ago, someone even offered the band ten million dollars to break up. In a SPIN article from 2002, Cuomo comments on the love-hate fan relationship: “I’ve asked them, ‘What the fuck do you want from me?’ point blank…and they ask themselves that same question. They’ll be like, ‘Why the hell are we still here? We hate this music! We hate this guy!’”
It’s true. We have hated him. We have hated the music. And perhaps we’re part of the problem. But diehards have surfed the waves of weirdness and life changes along with him, holding on for bright spots in the band’s long career. The Rick Rubin love poems thing is not the weirdest event we’ve witnessed, really. We’ve seen a Weezer cruise, a World Cup song, a collaboration with Lil Wayne. We’ve cringed at the list Cuomo made breaking down the ethnic/racial make-up of his songs’ subjects. Being a Weezer fan means existing in a state of perma-heartbreak and disappointment, but filled, eternally, with hope.
And the way to enliven that hope is to listen to the early stuff, back when Cuomo had thinner skin, when the veil was lifted a bit. To remember the first riffs that grabbed, the vulnerability we’ve been privileged to witness, albeit rarely. To listen and think, oh my God, this is so beautiful to me, and I identify with it so much.
Emily Costa teaches freshmen at Southern Connecticut State University, where she received her MFA. Her work can be found in Hobart, Barrelhouse, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. You can follow her on twitter @emilylauracosta.
ea ramey on “the scratch”
It's the mid 90's, and leads Chris O'Donnell and Drew Barrymore are in a club in Seattle, moving their heads to the beat as 7 Year Bitch is on the stage, performing "The Scratch"—O'Donnell swings his head side to side, and it's contagious, apparently, as Barrymore follows with the same pendulum motion. As the song nears the end, Barrymore closes her eyes and mouths the lyrics. O'Donnell turns his attention to Barrymore, watching her lost in the song.
"Yeah!" he shouts.
Barrymore doesn't open her eyes, mouthing the lyrics to the end. Then she thrashes her head, smiling. O'Donnell stares a second longer, then turns his attention back to the stage.
I didn't watch Mad Love in 1995 when the film was released. But like Drew Barrymore, I knew the lyrics of "The Scratch" by heart. I still sense that teenage irritation when I think of the film. I knew 7 Year Bitch way before Drew Barrymore, my teen self thinks. I mean, Chris O'Donnell? that teen whines. He's such a frat boy.
That same teen saw Bad Girls in the movie theater the year before—but, surprisingly, that was not what deterred me from seeing this film.
In 1995, the novelty of seeing Seattle on the big screen had already faded. Kurt Cobain was dead, and Seattle had long become an adjective in advertising. Singles, Sleepless in Seattle, Frasier. Did we need another production set in Seattle? I had grown up hearing my parents, who had moved out of the city before I was born, joke about the Billboard in the early 70's that, in response to the Boeing layoffs, asked the last person leaving Seattle to turn off the lights. "Is that true?" I'd ask, eyebrows raised in skepticism. By 1995, part of me wished Seattle was still just a small city somewhere out west, waiting for someone to hit the light switch. But it wasn't, and the Seattle hype kept me from running to the theater to catch a glimpse of one of my favorite bands on the big screen.
My parents hadn't moved far from Seattle, relocating to a rural area in the foothills to the east of the city, which is where I grew up. Public radio stations would usually just tease us with a few notes followed by static, mocking us for living in the middle of the woods. But at some point in my early teens, I discovered KCMU 90.3 (now KEXP) was listenable enough, at least in a few corners of the house. They played an eclectic mix of music that included many Seattle/Pacific Northwest bands, including many local bands not played on commercial radio stations. I wanted to listen to that station all the time, to keep learning about bands most of my classmates had never heard of (oh to be superior at something!), but I had to wait until I started driving to listen in the car—not because my parents couldn't stand the music but because they couldn't stand the static.
Listening to that radio station was the coolest thing about me. My attempt at fashion (or anti-fashion) was a combination of a pair of ankle-high, brown, knock-off Docs purchased at the discount shoe store and an olive-green trench coat—one that I closed the car door on as I piled into the back seat of a friend's car the only time I skipped school, prompting a Good Samaritan to roll down his window to tell us something was hanging out of the car. I opened the door, pulled in the coat, and acted as if nothing had happened. This was the same coat my geometry teacher grabbed from the back of my chair and threw in the trash, saying I was using it to hide behind, and it had to go. What I needed, according to him, was confidence not a trench coat. I quietly stood up, walked over to the garbage can, pulled it out, shook it, and put it on. Maybe I was more punk rock than I knew.
The following year, I heard 7 Year Bitch for the first time. I was already a Nirvana and Screaming Trees fan, but Selene Vigil's voice, with its fury, said hello, said listen to me. That, I thought, is what I need, Mr. Geometry. I went to the record store, bought the CD, and was a self-declared fan. The trench coat went on the hanger and got shoved into the back of the closet.
The band had been around since the grunge explosion, forming in 1990, with their first album, Sick 'Em, released in 1992 on C/Z Records. Their guitarist Stefanie Sargent had died while recording that album—a tragedy mentioned in most early reviews and later articles about the band. I'm not sure how I learned that information first, but it is something I could have discovered by opening up the liner notes of Sick 'Em: "This record is dedicated to Stef. 'Here I am—here I go.' (June 1, 1968-June 27, 1992)." I was surprised, after opening up the liner notes recently, how much I remembered that image of Sargent, in the middle of a crowd, smiling, holding up a beer. I must have spent hours studying that dedication. "Death is the fear it brings you," I scribbled on a notepad, feeling oh so poetic. It probably wasn't just the band's grief that affected me then, but the thought that Sargent died before the album was released. She would never know anyone was listening. Was that the fear I had equated to death?
Tragedy would follow the band. "The Scratch" was first released as the opening track on their second album, ¡Viva Zapata! in 1994. The album title is in reference to Mia Zapata, the lead singer of The Gits, and a friend of the band. Zapata was murdered in 1993, and her death is the subject of another song on the album, "M.I.A." The liner notes of that album open up to a photo of Zapata. Another song on the album references Sargent's death. Those songs aren't sad but angry, yet even they have the same playful language and rhymes found in "The Scratch." Perhaps that is why it was chosen as the opening track. This wasn't meant to be a mournful album but a refusal to surrender.
I hadn't listened to any of these songs in a long time. 7 Year Bitch would eventually move out of Seattle and then quickly split up in 1997. Without new music, my interest in them faded, but they had sent me on a path to riot grrrl bands and their descendants. A Bikini Kill sticker became the one decoration on the rear bumper of my first car, a white Honda Civic wagon. I've always been grateful to 7 Year Bitch for that but still collected my memories of them with other early grunge bands and filed them under Adolescent Interests.
Listening to the band now, I can see why my brain filed them under grunge rather than riot grrrl—I can hear the early 90's Seattle so clearly now. "The Scratch" is a perfect example: a rock song with punk energy or a punk song with rock energy. I also heard another influence I couldn't place at first. Then I dragged out my old copy of ¡Viva Zapata! and saw the cover of a Jim Carroll song: that was it. The film Basketball Diaries was also released in 1995, a month before Mad Love. Six degrees of 90's.
I wasn't being entirely honest earlier. Though I did eventually file 7 Year Bitch away as a grunge band, it was most likely a betrayal that made me stop listening. I used to grab issues of The Stranger and The Seattle Weekly whenever I was at the record store, and quickly turn to the personal ads in the back. I never had any intention of responding or placing an ad (no, really), but somehow it made life less lonely reading ads by other lonely folks. The internet, of course, changed all of that, but this was still the early days of the World Wide Web. At least, I'm really hoping this memory is from the mid-90's.
The I Saw U section was where I placed all my hopes and dreams. I just wanted the universe to tell me I wasn't as invisible as I felt. I was skimming through the ads when my heart sped up a few beats and my hands started shaking as they do whenever I get nervous. I had just noticed an ad addressed to someone driving a white Honda with a 7 Year Bitch bumper sticker. Wait, what? I drove a white Honda. The ad went on, something about the driver catching their attention, but it was becoming a blur. Wait, did someone actually notice me? My whole body was now shaking. White Honda. 7 Year Bitch.
And then I reread the ad.
7 Year Bitch bumper sticker.
It was as if a glass door had been placed between me and my fantasy, and I walked right into it. I didn't have a 7 Year Bitch bumper sticker on the back of my car. Mine read Bikini Kill. Not that I would have argued then or would argue now that 7 Year Bitch and Bikini Kill are interchangeable bands, but for a moment my desire to be noticed merged the two bands. I came so close. I was a fan of 7 Year Bitch, and I drove a white Honda. A white Honda wagon, but let's just call that an insignificant detail.
I have a feeling this is from some time after Mad Love was released, but it's the perfect excuse for not wanting to see Chris O'Donnell and Drew Barrymore listening to "The Scratch" while falling in love. Even so, I think I'm ready to forgive the band. I've been fantasizing lately about going back in time, seeing my past self staring at that ad, and giving them a hug, saying, "You're okay." I wouldn't mean "you'll be okay," but "you're pretty cool, you know." How ungrunge of me.
EA Ramey has not lived in the 90’s or the Pacific Northwest for a very long time.