the second round
(5) garbage, “only happy when it rains”
rained out
(4) weezer, “say it ain’t so”
349-214
and will play on in the sweet 16
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 11.
“You’ll Get the Message By the Time I’m Through”: kristine langley mahler on “Only Happy When It Rains”
Fuck grunge right into the ground, like the freshman girls who sat at my art table in 2000, hornily bragging about how they were going to drive to Seattle and dig up Kurt’s corpse so they could have sex with it. A world-weary senior, I side-eyed them and internally scoffed what were they, like EIGHT YEARS OLD when Kurt died? I mean, I was at least ELEVEN, so. I could have been crueler if I’d been able to bolster my disdain by noting, “You know Courtney had Kurt cremated, right?” But like most grunge facts, that was one I didn’t know either.
All “grunge” ever meant to me was those dark phone calls from a “friend,” commanding me to recite the lyrics to “my favorite” Nirvana song, then messing up the line in “All Apologies” by saying “choking on the ashes of heredity” instead of “choking on the ashes of her enemy.”
Grunge was the flannel shirts I didn’t have, the second-hand Ralph Lauren corduroy pants I bought from Goodwill—like I was supposed to—but never wore to middle school because my mom told me corduroys were dressy pants and I didn’t know how to contradict her. I didn’t know what I was supposed to wear with them, but I knew it wasn’t a “nice sweater.” Grunge was Ben and Tate using Kool-Aid to turn their blond hair faintly pink, cool Amanda with low pigtails and dark lipstick in her 8th grade school picture, Jessie dubbing the classroom praying mantis Green Day when she won the naming lottery and me thinking her choice was super poetic until my “friend” scornfully informed me that Green Day was a band.
Grunge was a code word for all the things I didn’t know. Grunge was the perpetual feeling of never being cool enough, never knowing enough. Was every adolescent generation as plagued by insecurity as mine in the mid-90s? Was there ever a worse time to witness the collision of a cultural movement—where secret knowledge was the passcode—smashing into the age where a girl realizes everything she doesn’t know?
What a horrible time to be twelve: before the internet, when the only way to source information seemed to be through an older sister or brother who somehow, organically, had found it out and passed it down. A horrible time to be that older sister to two siblings. I didn’t know to read SPIN. I didn’t even know SPIN existed. I didn’t know how distinguish between the CDs in the racks at Camelot, to delineate between which bands were “over” and which ones were cool. I was too young to go to local shows, if there’d even been any (we still drove an hour to go shopping in the state capital). Grunge was defined by passwords that were constantly shifting, and when I think about grunge now, it only makes me angry. I suppose the anger is to mask the insecurity that never went away.
Grunge was nothing but sneering, and I swear it was worse than the disdain from indie band fans in the late 90s/early 2000s. Half the music I always thought of as “grunge” was rejected from this dang tournament. WHERE IS OASIS, I ASK YOU? Distortion and anger. That’s what grunge meant to me.
The only place I was ever able to enter grunge was through Shirley Manson.
Shirley Manson, the lead singer of Garbage, is wearing a satin black short-sleeve shirt in the November 1995 issue of Seventeen magazine, arms crossed behind her head, standing in an old-time elevator with the rest of the blurry band. Seventeen called Garbage the “band du jour,” and I can still recite the entire article, right down to the “Wha?” reaction, because I reread it so many times. Cool chick singing the bejesus out of a song you’ve never heard. You do the clueless and wait for the video’s postscript. But I didn’t learn about songs through music videos, I learned about them on the radio. If I wanted to watch MTV, which was forbidden in my house, I had to go to my friends’ houses. Which I did.
You decide the catchy pop-a-delic music is like the four elements.
I was intrigued by the idea that this perfectly-turned-out grunge girl with her dark black eye makeup and dark lipstick, posing like a prisoner, could control nature, harnessing all four elements—earth, air, fire, water—to bend to her will. In the photo, she was surrounded by three men—Butch Vig, Steve Marker, and Duke Erikson, her fellow band members in Garbage—but it looked to me like she clearly knew how to make those men fade out.
I know what you’re thinking. “How the hell are you gonna take BUTCH VIG, who produced Nirvana’s Nevermind—a credential which, since we’re not handing this championship over directly to Nirvana and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” should arguably mean we’re handing the championship to the man who produced it—and relegate him to the role of a background boy? Garbage was Butch’s PROJECT! Butch, Steve, and Duke had a whole thing going long before they called in Shirley!”
Maybe because, in a SPIN interview for the 25th anniversary of Garbage’s self-titled debut, Shirley spoke about her early days with Garbage, saying “I was shocked when I got to Madison and realized what a hot mess they were. I had come from bands that were very self-disciplined. But when I got to Madison, these dudes were so laid-back, drinking beer in their Green Bay Packers baseball hats. I’d never spent time with people like that before in my life.”
Shirley met the dude-bros in her new band where they were, but my Queen of Discipline and Control didn’t change herself to fit in with their lax-AF, just-keep-it-chill approach. I saw Shirley as a girl who had learned the things I wanted to know.
I saw Shirley in Seventeen magazine in 1995, but it wasn’t until the following spring when I finally saw Shirley in action, kinetic on the television at my friend’s grandma’s house in Buffalo, New York, where my friend and I had been dropped off for spring break.
Spring Break in Buffalo was about as popular as you might imagine—no one travels to Great Lakes New York in March, especially not when your actual home is only an hour from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but there we were, nevertheless. I was thirteen years old in March 1996, and my mom had allowed me to use a 7-10 day Clairol kit to dye my hair for the first time. With my freshly red hair, I sat in the backseat as my friend’s dad drove us up the inner Atlantic seaboard, away from my cooler peers who’d headed out to their families’ beach houses, and deposited us in the elderly, icicle-laden home of my friend’s grandma.
My friend and I slept in a small basement room, furnished with two blow-up mattresses which barely fit inside. The walls were whitewashed, and so we chalked it with messages like “Who’s the bomb? We’re the bomb!” We played Yahtzee. Walked to the neighborhood library and checked out books on temporary library cards. Took the train downtown to go shopping at DEB, where I bought a baby-doll ringer tee with yellow smiley faces pooling at the hem. Went to bingo with my friend’s grandma. Talked about Gone with the Wind, which I was obsessed with—a fact that tickled her grandma, who thought it was charming that a teen girl knew the same embarrassingly vast quantity of facts about the 1930s movie and book as she did.
In that TV room where we watched Gone with the Wind with her grandma, my friend and I also watched MTV. It was there, in Buffalo, that I saw the music video for Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” for the first time.
It surely was moody, gray, and rainy that spring break in Buffalo, but I don’t remember that—what I remember was how the brilliance of Shirley Manson, in her bright blue dress and blue eyeshadow, her pink dress, her knee-high black boots, outshone it all.
“Captivated” isn’t the right word. Do you remember what it felt like as an early teen, when you saw a person and thought that is who I have been waiting for? The way your mouth went dry and your heart rate sped up and you weren’t sure if you had a crush or a complex? Where your aspirations crystallized into a projection: if I were as cool as her, _____ would happen (_____ would never happen)?
I am here to defend a song—and as a Garbage devotee of nearly 25 years now, able to quote from all but the most recent album, I can crack the whip at my waist and harness plenty of textual/musical praise—but my love of Garbage’s actual music came way, way later.
I know I have to stay on topic.
Here: I never thought the lyrics to “Only Happy When It Rains” were making fun of grunge, the way some people have interpreted them. I thought they were a directive, a lesson plan. This is the method to belong, Kristine: only smile in the dark. Your only comfort is the night gone black. Now remember to make sure people know YOU DIDN’T ACCIDENTALLY TELL THEM THAT.
Everything was intentional.
Come on now, go ahead and tell me how you saw Garbage perform at a local show in 1995, just after they cut their album, before anyone had even seen the video for “Vow,” not a year-and-a-half later on an antennaed TV in Buffalo in a music video for their second damn single. I’m not surprised. Everyone has always had cooler grunge stories than me. The first time I saw Garbage live, I paid $22 to see them perform with Lit on the 1999 MTV Campus Invasion Tour. Yes I said 1999.
In an interview before Garbage’s 2017 tour, Shirley said “We’re exploring the idea of pulling out our Bond song because we haven’t played it in a long time and very few people have ever gotten to hear us perform it.”
And yet I had gotten to hear it live, eighteen years earlier. Trying to sound cool later, listing my concert attendances to my college friends, I mocked MTV’s poor choice of “campuses to invade”—they invaded ISU? In TERRE HAUTE? But at the time I was grateful, because I was only seventeen and even though it was a school night, my parents had allowed me to drive down to our basketball arena—the one where Larry Bird had famously played twenty years earlier—to see my dream girl. The arena was set up much like it had been when I’d gone two Octobers previous, in 1997, to attend the Harvest Moon dance (unfortunately escorted by my best friend’s brother, not my actual crush, Ryan): the fabric wall was up at half court, because Hulman Center wasn’t going to fill up that night.
Garbage opened with “#1 Crush”—a dreamscape of orgasmic sighs—and then tore through the entire first half of Version 2.0, layering in the radio hits from their first album, before devastating with the last song of the set, “You Look So Fine.”
It still sticks with me, all these years later, the way Shirley left the stage first during the outro for “You Look So Fine,” followed by all of the band members slowly leaving, one by one, as their parts ended. Shirley said what she’d wanted to say before leaving us all there, breathless, waiting. In October 1999, my boyfriend had recently broken up with me and I could hardly bear it. My best friend and I were seated pretty high in the bleachers, but there were a few filled rows behind us, where Ryan (my ’97 crush) and Ben were seated, but I was too focused on watching Shirley emote my pain for my ex-boyfriend to care; Ryan’s presence was, momentarily, negligible.
After Garbage played the encore, including their Bond song, “The World is Not Enough” (it never is) and—of course—closing with “Only Happy When It Rains,” my best friend and I stayed in our seats, unwilling to leave. Ryan and Ben came down the stairs and stopped beside us, saying something about my dancing during the show. As I turned to face them, so surprised they had noticed me that my heart was still in my teeth, I didn’t have time to disaffect—tell me you aren’t going to make fun of me and that, instead, you thought I was beautiful—and the thing was that they did tease me anyway, but I think Ben saw something in my face that must have made him soften because it was gentle, gentler than he’d been in school.
My best friend and I stopped at Taco Bell on the way home and Ryan and Ben were, surprisingly, there too. We would have never hung out together in the daytime at South—Ben was cool, Ryan wanted to be—but we had shared an experience together. So we shyly waved, and the boys motioned us over to their table, and we ate our post-concert bean burritos while making small talk. Ryan mentioned my dancing one more time, kindly, and as my best friend and I drove home, it occurred to me that I’d made an impression. I had been someone he hadn’t expected me to be, and he was still stunned by it.
That was power.
Garbage gave me the language for a tormented kind of longing, the sort of crushing desire that makes you crawl on your hands and knees across the carpet to a ghost. As a teen, I was frightened and exhilarated by the intensity of my emotions. I was confused by how badly I wanted to fit in and, simultaneously, how badly I wanted to be seen. Those years were a fluorescent-lit smear, every mistake highlighted and yet indistinguishable, at the time, to anyone other than myself. I was only happy when it was complicated. I carefully listened to the lyrics of Garbage songs, deciding that I could actually brandish power by basking in my obsessions, as the bittersweet pleasure of unfulfillment became an obsession.
Shirley was a give-me-what-I-want-or-I-will-take-it revelation, the Dark Princess from “Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealers” brought to life, a flame-haired, black leather siren. I didn’t even realize how much I’d idolized the Dark Princess until I saw Shirley.
I dyed my hair red for decades, starting in summer 1998 (right before Version 2.0), trying to mimic the prominence Shirley innately carried with her presence and I wanted to believe I could still grow into. At Prom 1999, I wore a gunmetal gray dress, and for years afterward, when I would describe how I looked that night, I wrote “flame-haired and ready to fuck someone up, just like Shirley.” If I’d owned the black Doc Martens I would buy that summer (I have always arrived at the party too late), I would have worn them that night as well. There is beauty, and there is power. I wanted both.
When Kurt died in 1994, I was eleven years old, listening to R&B like SWV, although when pressed by a waiting circle of kids at a middle school church lock-in that fall, I would claim my favorite song was “Tomorrow” by Silverchair. Later that night, as the other girls who already knew each other pulled their sleeping bags closer and loudly whispered and giggled about things I could never know, I slid across the cement floor of the social hall to lie near my mother, a chaperone, because I was homesick for someone who knew me. Within the week, after the sort of pre-teen fight that loses its reasoning over the years but felt so important at the time, what I remembered most was my mother throwing my lie back in my face, telling me she didn’t even know me anymore, didn’t even know the song I’d claimed was my favorite. But my mother did know me—the me I was, not the me I wanted to be—because my true favorite song was “Something in the Way She Moves” by James Taylor, the first song on the first side of the white cassette we listened to in the minivan after church, driving the rural highways of Pitt County, my mother and sister harmonizing as I tried to stay on key.
I was only happy when it rained, but not for the dramatic reasons you might expect from an adolescent. I was still homesick for Oregon, where I had lived before moving to North Carolina, and where the rain was a constant moody drizzle. When I grew into moodiness as a teen, it felt like a return to the person I had meant to be. No, that is not true. I was not morose when I lived in Oregon. The weather was morose, but I didn’t know any different. I was happy when it rained in North Carolina because it reminded me of something I actually knew.
I am sitting in a yurt in rural Nebraska now, cows in the fields surrounding me, wind battering and pattering rain against the canvas walls. I packed a Shirley-like outfit to write in, a cropped mauve furry sweater and pleather leggings. I brought the red lipstick I seldom wear, black eyeliner, and the pot of *jane eyeshadow I have had since high school. I didn’t use a brush to apply it, because I didn’t have a brush in high school. I didn’t know I needed a brush, because no one ever told me or showed me. I always used my ring finger on my right hand, so when I applied it to my eyelids this morning, it was a sense memory, knowing how much to pat, how to smear, remembering the residue that I always wiped against the inner palm of my hand instead of on a tissue.
I am as Shirleyfied as I can be, at 38. She was 29 when “Only Happy When It Rains” came out, which means that 25 years later, she must be 54. Duke Erikson (Garbage’s bassist) is from Lyons, Nebraska, a tiny little town up in the northeast corner of my state. He is 69 years old this year; will be 70 by the time this essay comes out. Butch (drums) is 65, Steve Marker (guitar) is nearly 62. We have all grown past who we were in 1995; our cells have regenerated through at least three selves by now.
I tried to co-opt Shirley’s style for years, listing her as my icon in countless email questionnaires. In that viral 2010 commercial for a glasses brand, where Shirley and Elijah Wood are bored on Sundays, it felt like validation, because for many years, I had been told that my husband looked like Elijah Wood. In 2013, I chopped off my hair (very “Androgyny”-era Shirley) to take control over what I admired in men, realizing I could actually embody it in myself.
After all, Shirley modeled the power in growing beyond who others thought we were meant to be. “I think of how different I was as a person, compared to who I am now. I was so young and so afraid.”
Garbage is not the grungiest band in this tournament. And “Only Happy When It Rains” isn’t nearly grungy enough to define the era; it’s a pop song with grunge sensibilities and grunge cred, thanks to Butch. I think it’s pretty remarkable that Shirley was able to call out all the tropes of grungedom in that song—you fucking sell-outs, you’re “only happy when it’s complicated”? Fine: here’s your song—while simultaneously embodying them. I’m telling you that Shirley was the representation of grunge that brought me in, showed me the girl I could become: a girl who didn’t give a fuck whether or not she belonged. So fuck the best grunge song, fuck the way grunge made me feel. The only thing that matters is how Garbage and Shirley made me feel. Like I could finally say FUCK GRUNGE.
MAHA Music Festival, August 11th, 2012. Shirley has a high ponytail, ripped black tights, black shorts, short sleeved black shirt, black wristbands. Rain starts to fall just as Garbage begins to close their set with “Only Happy When It Rains.” Shirley smiles and calls it a “precious moment,” says this has never happened before.
I was at that concert, four months pregnant with my third daughter, and when Butch pounded the drums, my daughter pounded on my stomach. I took my Elijah Wood-alike husband’s hand and made him feel how our daughter moved only when the beat thumped. I am reporting a fact: when Shirley demanded “pour your misery down on me,” God himself responded. Shirley said, “I’m only happy when it rains,” and the air thickened, condensed into water to put out a flame on earth, all four elements wanting to please her. Power.
Kristine Langley Mahler wants to hear about your new obsession. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie of Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine's previous Xness essays include an impassioned defense/condemnation of NKOTB's "Hangin' Tough" for March Badness, an extracurricular on Stabbing Westward and goth confusion for March Vladness, and a link-laden essay on Great White's "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" for March Shredness. Non-Xness work can be found at kristinelangleymahler.com, and you can always find her on Twitter at @suburbanprairie.
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.