weezer

Rivers Cuomo — vocals

















Brian Bell — guitar,backing vocals



















Scott Shriner — bass,backing vocals




















Patrick Wilson — drums

FORMER MEMBERS: Jason Cropper — guitar (up to September, 1993) Matt Sharp — bass (on The Blue Album and Pinkerton) Mikey Welsh — bass (on The Green Album)

One of the most popular groups to emerge in the post-grunge alternative rock aftermath, Weezer received equal amounts of criticism and praise for their hook-heavy guitar pop. Drawing from the heavy power pop of arena rockers like Cheap Trick and the angular guitar leads of the Pixies, Weezer leavened their melodies with doses of '70 metal learned from bands like Kiss. But what set the band apart was their geekiness. None of the members of Weezer, especially leader Rivers Cuomo, were conventional rockers -- they were kids that holed up in their garage, playing along with their favorite

In the closing days of the summer of 1994, the band Weezer emerged onto the alternative music scene with their radio hit “Undone (The Sweater Song).” A quirky song comparing failing romance to an unraveling sweater, “Undone” launched the band to national prominence and proved the first of three successful singles off of their self-titled first album. Over the next year and a half, the band developed a strong popular following, particularly among young people, and sold over a million copies of their debut record.

However, along with this popular success, the band attained a near-pariah status among the music press; framed by detractors as a packaged-and-sold novelty act, Weezer earned a reputation as a “flavor of the month” destined to be forgotten as a meaningless commercial act. The public’s reception of their 1996 sophomore effort Pinkerton seemingly confirmed this account of the band. Named the second worst record of the year by a Rolling Stone critics’ poll, Pinkerton proved a commercial disappointment, falling off the music sales charts in a matter of weeks. Following a series of tours that failed to revive the band’s popular appeal, Weezer, seemingly finished, went on hiatus in fall 1997.

Then, however, something peculiar occurred. After lying idle for nearly three years, Weezer reemerged in the summer of 2000 as a wildly popular and highly respected band. Weezer concerts sold out within minutes, a series of articles portrayed Pinkerton as a lost classic, and Weezer, at one point considered a throwaway act, suddenly garnered respect from the very same music press that had once reviled it. With the release of the band’s second eponymous CD in 2001, Weezer once again achieved chart success and critical, selling over a million copies of its new album and finding the record placed on a significant number of critics’ “best of 2001” lists. This remarkable turnaround is puzzling. How does an album named the second worst release of the year get transformed into a “classic” over a three year time span? Moreover, what does it mean for a record to be labeled a “failure” or a “classic”?

In the pages that follow, I investigate these questions by establishing a model of how the artistic merits of rock music are appraised. Utilizing the institutional framework and terminology Pierre Bourdieu establishes in his “Market of Symbolic Goods,” I frame rock music as a middlebrow art that regards itself as possessing certain elements of highbrow “legitimate” art – namely “symbolic value” beyond a work’s value as a market commodity. I then use this institutional framework and aesthetic ideology to investigate the process by which Weezer’s reputation changed dramatically over time.

Examining data from several sources: an original survey of 150 music writers, an original survey of 20,000 Weezer fans, original interviews with music writers and editors, and an analysis of a sample of 2000 articles and reviews mentioning Weezer, I argue that a strong fan following led to a reconsideration of Weezer’s artistic merits by the music press and altered the vocabulary used to discuss the band. I ultimately conclude that a number of parties play a role in deliberating claims of artistic value in rock music: music writers, artists, fans, and the commercial interests that employ writers and artists.

I briefly recount Weezer’s career between 1992 and 1997 and then provide an account of popular evaluations of the band during this period. Using the historical context outlined in the previous chapter, I lay out three tropes popular among writers during the period 1994-1995 to describe Weezer: Weezer as novelty act, Weezer as bubblegum alternative, and Weezer as an ironic alternative/hipster band. While these three labels are not mutually exclusive, they represent ideal types around which representations of Weezer were clustered. Specifically, I evaluate the role of irony/humor, commercial appeal, musical heritage, audience demographics, and various historical contingencies on evaluations of Weezer during this era. I then elaborate on how these visions of Weezer influenced the reception of their second record, Pinkerton, in 1996 and readings of Weezer’s performances through mid-1997.

Weezer – A Brief History: 1992-1997

Among the bands signed in the early-1990’s rush to gobble up the next “alternative star” was Weezer, an alternative rock outfit from Los Angeles. Signed by Geffen, a major label, on June 25, 1993, Weezer was a relative newcomer to the alternative scene, having played the LA club circuit for about a year and a half. Unlike other alternative rock groups of the era, none of Weezer’s members – singer/songwriter/guitarist Rivers Cuomo, bassist Matt Sharp, drummer Pat Wilson, or guitarist Brian Bell – had been part of the 1980’s underground scene. Cuomo had played in a heavy metal band Avant Garde in his native Connecticut before moving to Los Angeles with his group to seek hair metal stardom; Sharp, too, participated in the heavy metal scene of his native Virginia. Despite these metal roots, the Weezer sound was markedly alternative. Having been turned onto college rock while working in a record store in Los Angeles, Cuomo began penning songs fusing the sound of the underground scene, such as the Pixies, and traditional pop/rock, like the Beach Boys.

Produced by Ric Ocasek, frontman of the new wave group the Cars, Weezer’s self-titled debut, which came to be known as “the Blue Album” for its cover featuring a lineup of the band against a bright blue background, was released on May 5, 1994. Upon its release, the album garnered little press attention as Weezer embarked on a series of club shows up and down the West Coast. The initial marketing strategy, offers Weezer A&R person Todd Sullivan, was to let the album take hold in the college scene. Coming from the Los Angeles hipster scene, the transition to the college radio market seemed like the natural first step. However, in June of 1994, a commercial alternative radio station in Seattle, KNDD, began playing the first single from the album, “Undone (The Sweater Song),” and noting Weezer’s success in Seattle, the Geffen promotions department began to push the song nationwide. Within a few weeks, “Undone” had become a staple of alterative radio nationwide. Convinced that “Undone” could be a “‘smash’ if it had a video,” Geffen set up a video shoot for Weezer, and soon the video was showing in regular rotation on MTV as a “Buzz Clip.” Young alternative music fans showed tremendous enthusiasm for “Undone,” which peaked at number six on the Billboard music chart.

However this commercial success invited a backlash amongst those who pinned Weezer as a novelty act with a jokey song about sweaters. Weezer’s follow-up single, “Buddy Holly,” did little to quell suggestion that Weezer was a novelty act. Although “Buddy Holly”‘s success ensured Weezer would not be a one-hit wonder, the catchy two-and-a-half minute pop tune with its pop cultural references to Buddy Holly and Mary Tyler Moore and its ironic use of jive (“What’s with these homies dissing my girl? Why do they gotta front?”) bolstered the claims of those identifying Weezer as a joke act. The video that accompanied the song used computer effects to place Weezer in a Happy Days episode, as they seemingly performed for the Fonz and company in Al’s Diner. Both the single and the video were tremendous successes, propelling the Blue Album up the charts, where it peaked in the sixteenth position in late January 1995. While its music streamed into cars and homes nationwide with heavy play on radio and MTV, Weezer toured intensely in support of their record, visiting some cities over four times within the year. After taking opening spots on tours with alternative acts Lush and Live throughout 1994 and touring in Europe in early 1995, Weezer returned Stateside to headline a tour throughout March and early April.

By this time, however, negative sentiment towards Weezer was peaking among the music press and detractors in the population at large; indicative of this backlash is a Village Voice piece run in April 1995 suggesting the United States counter Chinese indifference to CD piracy by “blast[ing] defective Weezer albums – eternally stuck on that irritating ‘sweater’ line – at the Chinese embassy.” Despite these negative sentiments, Weezer continued to have success on radio and MTV with the release of the third single from their debut album, “Say It Ain’t So.” Indeed, the growing audience led promoters to book Weezer several amphitheatre shows for the summer of 1995. However, slow sales ultimately led these shows to be switched to smaller venues – a move which vindicated those who regarded Weezer as a flavor-of-the-week.
In September 1995, Weezer went on hiatus as frontman Rivers Cuomo headed off to attend Harvard University, and bassist Matt Sharp released an album with his band The Rentals. While Sharp scored a radio hit of his own with the new wave-inspired “Friends of P,” Cuomo began writing songs for the next record. Despite Weezer’s having won accolades from some music writers, Cuomo became concerned that Weezer was being written off as a “one-dimensional, silly pop band,” and as such used the winter of 1996 to begin penning a series of more personal lyrics describing failed romantic encounters. The result was an album in the tragic Romantic tradition, depicting Cuomo as Captain Pinkerton, the villain of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly who has an affair with a “15-year-old Japanese girl, gets her pregnant and then abandons her.” Recorded in June 1996, the album, featuring noisy guitars and amplifier feedback, was noticeably rougher sounding than their first record, which was marked by clean production and was recorded to a metronome click to ensure rhythmic consistency.

The resulting album, entitled Pinkerton, was released on September 24, 1996, amid a flurry television ads sponsored by Geffen. However, unlike Weezer, the new record stalled commercially. A series of factors undermined the album’s success on the charts. For one, the first single from the album, “El Scorcho,” failed to achieve significant airplay on many alternative stations, possibly due to its un-radio-friendly sound or to a shift in alternative programming away from “grunge” sounding music. Second, Cuomo refused to do any interviews with the press in the first months following the release, which angered some in the press and limited the number of stories about the album. Third, Pinkerton Security Company filed an injunction against Geffen days before the album’s release which, though ultimately lifted, limited the amount of promotion the record company engaged in during the crucial few days before and after the record’s release. Fourth, Cuomo refused to make the type of clever videos that had propelled the first album up the charts, and the straightforward videos the band did make for the first two singles never caught on. Finally, due to Cuomo’s scholastic obligations, Weezer was able to tour only throughout the fall of 1996 until the end of January 1997, when spring semester commenced. These factors, combined with the relative inaccessibility of Pinkerton, resulted in limited commercial success for the album. After debuting at a disappointing nineteenth on the Billboard 200, the album slipped further down the chart each week, falling off the charts completely by February 1997, despite the release of a second single from the record, “The Good Life.”

When Cuomo’s semester ended in May 1997, Weezer resumed touring, opening for ska-rock band No Doubt. Increasingly popular at the time, No Doubt was able to play 7000-person venues in stark comparison to the club shows that Weezer had been playing during the first leg of its tour. The band hoped that the tour and the label’s current release of a third single from Pinkerton, “Pink Triangle,” might jumpstart support for the record. However, with Pinkerton still languishing at the bottom of the charts and “Pink Triangle” not making a dent on the modern rock chart, Geffen ultimately decided not to invest in a video for the new single. Then, tragically, Weezer fan club founders Mykel and Cari Allan died in a car accident in mid-August while following Weezer from Denver to Salt Lake City during the band’s short tour of the western United States. Devastated by this turn of events, Weezer cancelled a tour date to attend the funeral, and a month later, after having completed a 10-day tour of East Asia, performed a tribute show for the Allan sisters on August 15, 1997. This show would be the last Weezer concert for almost three years as the band again went on hiatus and Sharp left the group to work on The Rentals full-time.

Images of Weezer

When Weezer first emerged in 1994-1995, writers had difficulty assessing the band. Weezer’s music seemed to represent a number of different traditions. On the one hand, the music maintained the knowing attitude of the alternative scene and utilized the same brand of crunchy, distorted guitar tones as other hallmark alternative bands, like the Pixies and Nirvana. On the other hand, the music had a melodic sensibility particular to pop music, with Beatles-esque chord progressions and catchy melodies. Cuomo had studied Beach Boys records, picking apart the harmonies employed by group, and he employed them throughout Weezer’s songs. Further complicating matters was Weezer’s alternating use of irony and straightforward sincerity, leaving the listener unsure of what was plaintive and what was comical. As one writer from March of 1995 noted: “Putting a label on Weezer is a daunting task. – they’re too cynical to be pop, too peppy to be grunge, too melodic to be metal.” Moon argues that “you could ascribe many things to Weezer and try to triangulate them,” but that ultimately such efforts to pin the band down as a specific combination of genres “left something missing.”
Weezer’s being at the intersection of so many traditions resulted in pieces tending to use one trait or another to caricature the band in a particular light. Consequently, a series of tropes appeared with which to depict Weezer: Weezer-as-novelty act, Weezer-as-alterna-pop, and Weezer-as-clever-hipsters. The first of these characterizations, the novelty act, portrayed Weezer as either a corporate alternative rip-off or a college rock band that aimed to achieve notoriety through a shtick rather than through the works’ merit as pop/rock music; this was the most negative of the three characterizations and the one of the most common throughout the first year of Weezer’s national exposure. The second characterization, Weezer as lightweight pop, recognized Weezer as a band capable of producing catchy, radio-friendly music but derided it as an act that lacked substance; pieces utilizing this approach to Weezer emphasized the band’s fun and upbeat sound and colored the band as a “guilty pleasure.” The third general category was Weezer as an alternative/hipster act.

This characterization played up the band’s use of ironic pop culture allusions, the band’s appeal to the college crowd, and the alternative music-style surface of the band’s music. These three conceptions, though, were not mutually exclusive. In a single article Weezer might be considered a hipster band ironically employing the retro-pop sensibilities of 1960’s, resulting in catchy songs.
Weezer as Novelty Act

Weezer emerged onto the national radar screen at a precarious time: a year when alternative music had become the mainstream. With a flurry of alternative rock acts being signed and with alternative now firmly mainstream, deciding what bands truly represented the underground became a central task; as critic Gina Arnold argued in 1995, “indie credibility” became equated with the “idea that a band is creating a valid artistic statement rather than merely selling a contrived, commercial musical commodity.” As such, the impressions of a band’s artistic merit, at least among writers who sympathized with the alternative rock notion of authenticity, depended in part upon whether the band was deemed truly alternative or one of the supposedly corporate-copycats flooding the market by 1994.

Emerging as a new alternative band with the class of ‘94 – the era when “tastemakers making decisions on ‘cred’ really came to a head” – Weezer’s indie credibility immediately came into question. By August of 1994, Weezer, a band with no traceable roots in the alternative rock community, had achieved, with “Undone (The Sweater Song),” widespread recognition based upon radio and MTV exposure. The single was almost universally pegged as being particularly jokey in character; the song seemed to borrow a hipster’s ironic and detached outlook in humorously comparing a failing relationship to an unraveling sweater. Weezer’s follow-up single, alluding to pop icons Buddy Holly and Mary Tyler Moore, seemingly adopted the same strategy as “Undone.” Both singles succeeded upon the significant radio and MTV support, and both used the humor of college radio bands such as Pavement. As such, Weezer became particularly susceptible to the charge of being a “cookie-cutter corporate-alternative act” that that had “adopted the Pavement sound for greater financial rewards. "Sonic Cool author Joe Harrington contends that this combination of humor and opportunism “is the essence of novelty – it’s just a pose – it’s a mass marketed thing.”

Responses to the critic poll I conducted corroborate this conception of the band as an overplayed and annoying flavor-of-the-week. One critic recalls that in 1994, he found Weezer to be “obnoxious, whiny and not particularly original.” Recounts another respondent: “lots of hype. . . made me wary of their music at first. [I] just considered them a buzz bin band before I sat down and really listened.” Another respondent recollects that despite being “hooked” by Weezer’s debut, he was “suspicious of the band’s meteoric rise while so many of their indie contemporaries and precursors languished.” Another offers that he felt Weezer was particularly “gimmicky” and “put more into their videos than their songs.”

Weezer as “Bubblegrunge”

While some used Weezer’s sense of humor to dismiss the band as a novelty act, a larger portion of the press found Weezer to be, in the words of one survey respondent, a “pleasingly accessible alternative to what had become a deluge of humorless grunge.” Grunge music’s extreme seriousness, which had dominated the alternative rock airwaves for three years, came to head in April 1994 with the suicide of grunge icon Kurt Cobain. Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis recalls that “that kind of moment of alternative triumph turned out to be so brief; no one would ever admit this, but I think it scared people, and it sent a chill up people’s spines.” In contrast to Nirvana’s dark irony, Weezer presented an ostensibly lighter take on the alternative sound. Whereas the lyrics of early 90’s grunge seemed weighed down with meaning, Weezer songs were described as “eliciting snickers instead of tears.”

Pieces describing Weezer in this light accentuated the importance of the pop “hook” to the band’s music. In January 1995, Spin Magazine proclaimed Weezer to be “unabashedly pop.” The songs were described as catchy pop – “hooky” music that one could instantly like. One writer, describing the band in this vein, argued in a 1995 piece: “Weezer really thrives on catchy melodies laid gently over a foundation of loud guitars.” One respondent to this study’s critic poll argued that Weezer’s sound represented “a return to a more pop-oriented, 1980’s type style, something very different when compared to other bands in the mid-1990s.” Offers another respondent, “Weezer made fun pop-rock for an alternative audience.”
While often this characterization took on positive overtones, the flipside of pop’s appeal is its reputation for being shallow. This connotation of pop as unserious dates back to rock’s split from other forms of popular music; for early rock writers, distinguishing rock from pop was an important task as rock ostensibly spoke for youth while pop was a commercial genre marketed by adults. As such some writers who wrote off Weezer’s catchy music as essentially empty music explicated made reference to pop’s connection with commercialism. Spin’s January 1995 piece on Weezer proclaimed “Undone” to have a “monolithically lightweight choral hook” that was “catchy” enough to “invariably end up on some K-Tel greatest alternative rock compilation, or become a football cheer, or the first J. Crew ad jingle.” This characterization of Weezer’s music as being one-dimensionally catchy was touted by supporters as well as detractors. One Entertainment Weekly piece from 1996 reflected back on Weezer’s first record as “never amount[ing] to more than cotton candy – but just try to stop nibbling.” Although this writer seemingly was a champion of Weezer’s music, the description implies that the album lacks meaning beyond the surface of the music.

Weezer as ironic hip band

A great number of articles from this era utilize a trope coloring Weezer as a clever and ironic hipster band. Irony, argues Harrington, “played a major role in the hipster scene, starting with punk and moved through [alternative acts] the Talking Heads and the Smiths,” and indeed one of the most celebrated and vilified aspects of Weezer was its use of irony. With the success “Undone,” Weezer had established the reputation as the essentially jokey band that wrote the “song about sweaters”; a Seattle Times piece from October of 1994 pitched Weezer as a “fun band that blessedly doesn’t take itself seriously.” Indeed, Weezer’s debut record is sprinkled throughout with sarcasm. For example, the narrator of the album’s second track, “No One Else,” proclaims: “I want a girl who will laugh for no one else/when I’m away she puts her makeup on the shelf/when I’m away she never leaves the house.” One piece tagged this lyric, in which Cuomo rebuffs himself for controlling behavior by ironically presenting exaggerated demands upon his girlfriend, “poignant and wickedly funny.” Similarly, the lyric “Surf Wax America” sarcastically lauds the slacker lifestyle: “you take your car to work/I’ll take my board.”
Beyond its use of humor, Weezer earned the tag as an “ironic” band for its appropriation of various elements of rock iconography, its use of pop cultural references and the “retro” aspects of its sound. Harrington argues that irony had become rampant among the alternative acts with some acts “put[ting] a disclaimer on everything.” Some bands, argues Harrington, approached “almost everything [as] a reference to something in the past” as if to indicate that the band is saying “‘we know exactly what we’re doing here.’” Charges of this sort were often leveled against Weezer whose music contained references to figures like Buddy Holly, Mary Tyler Moore, KISS guitarist Ace Frehely, KISS drummer Peter Kriss, and the Beach Boys, among others. One Newsday piece from late March 1995 questioned whether Weezer made such allusions as “cynical culture recyclers,” while a Boston Globe piece reviewed Weezer’s Buddy Holly video as a “clever postmodern trick - a 1990’s band in a 1970’s show about the 1950’s.” Some critics argued that even Weezer’s sound itself represented an ironic play on the pop tradition, with the group’s use of Beach Boy-esque harmonies and Beatle-esque melodies.
While some writers enjoyed Weezer’s use of allusions, a sizable contingent felt the band exuded a hipper-than-thou attitude. A Dallas Morning News piece understood the entire Weezer concert experience as spoofing of the traditions of rock music, from the lit-up Weezer logo that alludes to the logo of arena-rockers Van Halen and KISS’s bulb-lit stage backdrop, to the Weezer t-shirts that reworked the “old rock slogan ‘If it’s too loud, you’re too old’” as “If it’s too loud, turn it down.” While some writers portrayed this use of allusion
in a positive light, as Weezer “hav[ing] fun with their own overblown image,” other pieces viewed the “jabs” as unfairly “toss[ing] off” the “traditions” of rock “left and right.” With Weezer emerging after three years of the alternative community’s assault on rock stardom and the rise of a “new generation of rock stars trying its best not to be rock stars,” one could not quite be sure how to take Weezer’s references to arena rock. Indeed, some interpreted these sorts of references to be integral to the character of the band; argued one critic: “A Kiss-style lighted ‘W’ that resembled the World Wrestling Federation symbol seemed awfully extravagant and wasteful just for an ironic joke. But so does a career as an ironic joke band.”

By 1995, many mainstream critics, particularly those who had come of age before the rise of the underground scene, found the irony of alternative rock distasteful – an affront to authenticity. Thus, while the college rock scene took music produced in its anti-establishment, uncommercial world as authentic, champions of the first counter-cultural revolution celebrated a separate notion of authenticity – one that idealized the sorts of acts that some alternative artists lampooned. Harrington argues that ironic acts “like the Pixies . . . cheapen[ed] the whole approach” by “not having the balls to stand for anything” and by portraying “sincerity as a bad thing.” Harrington argued that among the alternative set, authenticity, which “means you’re not in on the joke,” remains incongruous with an ironic approach to music. DeCurtis concurs that, “for want of a better term, if for the sake of argument, one posits irony as opposed to authenticity, it’s precisely that aspect of Weezer” that turned off a number of critics.

Weezer and the Press 1996-1997

For the most part, then, Weezer
was written about as a fundamentally unserious band. While some critics raved about the band’s use of catchy melodies and guitar hooks and admired the band’s pop cultural references as clever, the band was understood as a footnote in the history of rock – a nice pop/rock band adopting an endearingly geeky persona but not a rock outfit that could ever be regarded as important in the sense that the canonical artists are. Positive pieces outnumbered the number of negative pieces during this era, but the negative pieces tended to be particularly vicious with puritanical elements of the alternative scene regarding Weezer as a pretender and mainstream critics expressing a distaste for the alternative movement’s irony.
An awareness of Weezer’s reception as an ironic frivolous pop act informed Cuomo’s efforts in penning the band’s follow-up. Concerned that Weezer had come to be interpreted as an unserious pop act, Cuomo “learned to be careful” about what “image” to present to the public and as a result produced what he termed “an album without irony.” Released in the fall of 1996, Pinkerton did indeed make headway in steering the press away from using a “lightweight” tag to describe the band. In the year following the album’s release a new trope emerged. Informed by the particular sound and lyrical content of Pinkerton, this trope portrayed the band in a more serious light, and for the first time, more than a handful of pieces regarded Weezer as more than an enjoyable pop oddity. These pieces emphasized the introspective nature of the lyrics and the attention paid to detail throughout the album.

The pieces portraying Pinkerton as an artistic step forward highlighted the frivolity assigned to Weezer following its first release. For example, the Austin-American Statesman noted that with Pinkerton, Weezer transformed “themselves from a smarty-pants, goofy, tongue-in-cheek band to one of the most wildly-orchestrated, catchy and original groups banging away today.” Such a juxtaposition clearly outlines the distinction between the image of the band as clever jokesters and that of the band as capable musicians producing an original sound. Tagging the album “undeniable,” the piece praised Cuomo’s “self-absorbed, sensational love songs” as injecting stories of the “ultimate sexual swinger” with an endearing “sweet[ness].” Similarly, the Los Angeles Times’ review recognized Pinkerton as an irony-free effort – a “seemingly genuine, desperate search for sex and love.” The Spokesman Review also provided Weezer a ringing endorsement in May 1997, describing “Pinkerton” as a “pop masterpiece . . . brimming with brilliant . . . both lyrically and musically.”

However, lingering tropes utilized in describing the band’s previous release continued to be employed to evaluate the band’s new work. For example a Newsday review proclaimed Pinkerton to be “one of the most surprisingly likeable releases of the year” due to its “more tart and focused point of view.” However, while the piece applauds Pinkerton’s lack of sugar-coating, the writer contends that the group’s “misquoted Beatles” melodies and “overenunciate[d] vocals. . . make clear the group’s original intention to be” its generation’s Cheap Trick, an “aggressively marketed, hard-touring, self-caricaturing” late 70’s rock group. As such, some writers continued to perceive Weezer as an essentially ironic and whimsical act.
While a handful of positive pieces written about Weezer during this era emphasize Pinkerton as an artistic step forwards, most pieces built upon the notion of Weezer as a fun pop act, arguing either that Pinkerton proved to be another batch of catchy tunes or that the album failed to recreate the clean upbeat sound of The Blue Album. As such, despite the band’s intention of creating a darker record, reviewers continued to evaluate Weezer through the framework of thoughtless alternative pop. For example, the Toronto Star argued that while on Pinkerton “Weezer resists the easy hooks and harmonies of its runaway 1994 single ‘Buddy Holly,’” the album is ultimately redeeming due to the “pop still fight[ing] its way” through heavily distorted guitar arrangement. Similarly People endorsed Pinkerton as an album whose “lyrics make an Archie comic seem downright deep by comparison”; concludes People: “Pinkerton is a hoot, crammed with catchy, pop-punk melodies and defiantly incorrect song subjects.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as well, lauded the record for containing the “same catchy hooks and lyrics that rocketed the band to pop darling status last year.” One writer naming Pinkerton the third best release of 1996 dubbed the album: “a belter, brimming with big, dumb, impossibly catchy pop tunes.”

A handful of writers, using the same radio-pop rubric, dismissed Pinkerton because the album’s messy-sounding mix of distorted guitars and wandering bass lines failed to capture the same pop feel of the debut. For example Entertainment Weekly gave Pinkerton a mixed review, arguing that while the album would please “indie purists” with its “sloppy and raw” sound, the record “will disappoint anyone who prefers a candy coating on the bubblegum.” Along similar lines, The Record lamented that “the melodies [on Pinkerton] have fallen prey to too great an onslaught of grungy guitars and bludgeoning power chords,” undermining the “smart mixture of singable melodies and distinctive guitar squall that marked Weezer’s debut album.”
Despite a majority of reviews of Pinkerton and its corresponding tours taking a positive tone, there does seem to have been a contingent of writers who detested the record. The Dayton Daily News’ account falls within this category; the piece tagged Weezer a “one-hit wonder” and declared that Pinkerton’s “loud, grating songs . . . fail[ed] miserably” and doomed Weezer to “the graveyard of forgettable bands.” Similarly, in January 1997, Rolling Stone released its yearend poll naming Pinkerton the second worst album of the year. Interestingly, the reason for this judgment remains unclear; of the 40 percent of respondents to Rolling Stone’s end of 1996 poll I contacted, none recall voting Pinkerton among the worst albums of the year, and in fact, several expressed positive evaluations of the record. None of the respondents published negative reviews of Pinkerton, indicating that perhaps the critics who continued to write about Weezer were only those who felt the band worthy of discussion. A number of critics did, in fact, write off Weezer, refusing to provide the group any ink in the pages of their publications at all. One critic responded to this study’s critic poll explaining that he was not familiar with Pinkerton because “Buddy Holly”’s “cute[ness] basically handed [him] all the reason [he] needed to never take them seriously.” Another survey respondent questioned my choice of Weezer as a case study citing them as an “uninteresting” band not worth discussing.

Conclusion

By the time Weezer went on hiatus in mid-1997, the most common interpretation held that Weezer represented a band particularly talented at writing catchy radio songs for alternative music fans. Whether individuals felt that Pinkerton lived up to the Weezer’s debut record, many in the music press felt that “Buddy Holly” exhibited a sharp pop sensibility unmatched in the alternative rock community. Such an assessment, while positive, proved consistent with the type of judgment made of a successful middlebrow work in Bourdieu’s field of large-scale production. Weezer, then, came to represent the serial novelist who succeeds at his or her craft by penning a bestseller; though Weezer’s work proved a technical achievement combining humor and catchy hooks into edgy pop/rock hits, few critics felt that Weezer’s albums represented some greater artistic accomplishment.

Pinkerton’s disappointing commercial performance seemingly vindicated writers who had depicted Weezer as a “one-hit wonder.” Weezer became an often-cited example of the volatility of the 1990’s music industry – a pop band that could rule the charts in one year and be forgotten the next. In a Grammy Awards preview piece run in hundreds of papers across the country, the Associated Press grouped Weezer with other “one-hit wonders” that the piece described as “either being consigned to oblivion or racing toward it.” Throughout the latter half of the 1990’s a number of bands deemed flavors-of-the-week were compared to Weezer, which had seemed to have finally burned out in 1997. Within portions of the music press, Weezer became synonymous with the concept of a disposable novelty act.
Even among those who trumpeted Weezer as a budding talent, few considered Weezer’s records to be of the same ilk as those that had already been inscribed into the alternative rock canon. While several critics gushed about Weezer’s “strong songwriting,” few held the band to be “important,” a term used to describe canonical records or acts – artists or works that constituted a unique achievement or proved to be particularly influential. However, as will be explored in the next chapter, by 1997 a number of individuals outside the music press had begun to champion Weezer as an important and meaningful act.