IN 2002, RIVERS Cuomo audaciously called Bob Dylan a “bad influence” on popular music. The Weezer frontman was referring to how the Bard flipped rock ‘n’ roll—initially a form of simple, proudly childish entertainment—into a vehicle for the loquacious intellectualism that’s core to traditional folk music. Cuomo’s targeting of Dylan was, of course, a ludicrously reductive view of rock history, but in the “Sweater Song” writer’s mind, the kind of dense, purposeful music Dylan helped popularize—where a song’s heady lyrical content often supersedes its sound—was anathema to the music Cuomo wanted to make.
“I like music to be pure and innocent,” he continued in the interview, cataloged in John Luerssen’s 2004 book Rivers’ Edge: The Weezer Story. “It shouldn’t have to carry the burdens of philosophy and scientific thesis. It’s just pop music.”
Indeed, Cuomo’s ideal songs are loaded with three distinct things: big, dumb feelings, sticky, whistle-able melodies, and even bigger, dumber guitar riffs. That’s the formula Weezer synthesized on their 1994 self-titled debut, “The Blue Album,” which remains their best, most enduring album even now, 30 years after its release. It’s a record where Cuomo applied the same level of craftsmanship to gut-punching choruses and ass-kicking guitar solos that Dylan applied to his protest poetry. An album where the messy, cringy—at times inexcusable—emotions of young male adulthood are wailed, pleaded, and defeatedly murmured over instrumentation that’s both neatly arranged and shit-kickingly uproarious. It’s an album that asks, “What if Brian Wilson grew up on Nirvana? What if Ace Frehley played with the Pixies?” And simultaneously an album that, much to Cuomo’s delight, is as central to the cultural id of the Nineties as Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited was to the Sixties.
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The cover of Weezer’s self-titled debut, known commonly as “The Blue Album.”
But what makes Weezer’s debut more than just a good album from 30 years ago? Why do the singles “Buddy Holly,” “Undone – The Sweater Song,” and “Say It Ain’t So” have the same grip on TikTok that they did on MTV? And why do guys of all ages, backgrounds, and levels of music fandom—from message board warriors to karaoke cavaliers, indie softboys to beer-chugging frat bros—still feel such a deep connection to “The Blue Album” three decades after its release?
The answer is three familiar words: Big. Dumb. Feelings.
Whether you just want catchy songs with crunchy riffs to sing along to in the car, or if you relate to the resentful introvert at the heart of the album, someone equally nostalgic for and traumatized by his childhood, constantly beleaguered by romantic failings—or if you check both boxes, because who doesn’t want their dejection to carry a tune?—then “The Blue Album” has got you covered. It’s an entry-level classic packed with eternal radio fodder that you’re still liable to hear spilling out of speakers at baseball stadiums and fast casual restaurant patios. But it’s also a siren call for music nerds who drone on about Weezer’s scholarly songcraft; guys who don’t just think “Buddy Holly” is a great song, but believe the way they like “Buddy Holly” is more valid than the way the masses like “Buddy Holly.”
But the cool thing about “The Blue Album” is that no matter what degree of depth you choose to engage with it, the maximalist feeling of those songs remains its central draw. Even if you don’t pick up on Cuomo’s childhood woes in “My Name Is Jonas” and “Say It Ain’t So”—songs about the singer’s fraught relationship with his brother and the role alcohol played in his parents’s divorce, respectively—you can sense the organic emotion in the way they’re delivered. You feel something even when you’re mindlessly humming along to those songs; in Cuomo’s strained singing, his plaintive guitar licks, and in the music’s overall disposition, which is at once casual and epic, unspooled and fastidiously buttoned-up, innocently droll and deadly serious.
Whereas the power in many rock bands’s music lies in their ability to make you think they’re more than human, that their sound is mightier than what their starstruck audience could imagine conjuring themselves, “The Blue Album”’s feeling derives from its plainclothes mortality. Cuomo’s everyman authenticity is uniquely relatable, especially to teenagers and twentysomething guys who are seeking music that gets them, even if they can’t identify exactly what it is they’re looking for.
There’s no rockstar swagger on “The Blue Album,” but the songs still rock. Weezer combines the balls-out confidence of heavy-metal with the adolescent earnestness of power-pop, and deliver it all with an unpretentious punk sincerity—providing a way in for almost every type of rock fan. They showed that Van Halen-tier guitar solos and wistful tenderness aren’t mutually exclusive. That guys who fancy themselves as macho headbangers could get down with barber shop quartet harmonies in a song about surfing to work (“Surf Wax America”), and that guys seeking catharsis in unabashedly emo breakup ballads could have their anguish served back to them with a side of sword-clashing guitar heroics (“Only In Dreams”).
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Patrick Wilson, Matt Sharp, Brian Bell, and Rivers Cuomo pose for a portrait backstage in the basement of the 400 Bar in Minneapolis Minnesota in September 1994.
At no point on “The Blue Album” do Weezer attempt to put any distance between themselves and their listeners, which is especially effective on loner anthems like “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” and “Only In Dreams.” Cuomo’s sensitivity is heightened by the dry, reverb-less production on his vocals and guitar, a novel choice for a hard-rockin’ record both then and now that lends the songs a conversational intimacy. Cuomo doesn’t sound like he’s singing his “stupid words” to you from all the way across your local arena. He sounds like he’s right there “In the Garage” with you, humbly rocking out in his t-shirt and khakis in front of his wall of Kiss posters and shelves filled with X-Men toys and Dungeon Master’s guides.
The approachability of “The Blue Album”’s sonic demeanor is one of many subtleties that make the record so endlessly replayable and almost unnaturally perfect. However, its happy-go-lucky pop handiwork and “aw man, you want a beer?” spoken-word silliness can, if you’re not paying close attention, cunningly obscure some of its glaring imperfections. In “Buddy Holly,” the gooey “oo-wee-oo”’s emasculate the gnarled power chords below, and whatever pheromones emanate from Cuomo’s muscular guitar solo are quickly Febreeze’d away by his effervescently dorky rap-rock bridge. The song sounds like getting socked in the face with a big ball of cotton candy, friskily aggressive but also laughably non-threatening. In fact, Cuomo’s dulcet cooing of the line, “You need a guardian,” is so delightful that it almost makes you forget that the phrase before it contains a racial slur.
That indefensible line and the caustic misogyny throughout the deliriously tuneful “No One Else”—where Cuomo breaks up with his girlfriend for laughing at another guy’s joke, and yearns for a girl who “never leaves the house” when he’s away—are unignorable blemishes on the otherwise ageless “Blue Album.” The singer-lyricist’s unvarnished honesty wasn’t always pretty, and even moreso on Pinkerton, “The Blue Album”’s rawer, yikesier, though still cultishly adored, follow-up. The way Cuomo’s melancholic vulnerability could veer into coarse misogyny on Pinkerton and, to a lesser but still undeniable extent, “The Blue Album,” has complicated the way Weezer’s best work is considered. In modern internet parlance, fans and haters alike have either playfully or wholeheartedly categorized “The Blue Album” as “incel music”—meaning music for “involuntarily celibate” guys who hold a chauvinist worldview and believe women owe them fealty and sexual submissiveness.
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Rivers Cuomo of Weezer performs on stage , United Kingdom, 1994.
Most guys who blast “No One Else” with the windows down aren’t actively considering Cuomo’s hyperbolically pathetic pleas for a girlfriend who “will laugh for one else.” But sadly, the aggrieved social outcast Cuomo plays on this album, which was an honest reflection of his lived experience at the time, is a relatable component of “The Blue Album” to some listeners. There’s a delicate balance male fans have to strike between feeling healthily validated by the record’s timeless melancholia and relating too much to its breezy sexism. Some of those big, dumb feelings are a lot dumber and more boorish than others.
But that’s the conceit of Weezer’s music. You’re not coming to “The Blue Album” for insight on the world or guidance on how to be a better person. And if you are, you’re not finding it here. Like Cuomo said, “it’s just pop music.” And like the best pop music, “The Blue Album” provides the service of feeling. The feeling of hearing a perfect guitar solo. The feeling of trying to mimic Matt Sharp’s falsettos in the “Buddy Holly” chorus. The feeling of screaming along to “Say It Ain’t So” with your best friends. And the feeling of cringing. Face-palming. Holding that thread and watching Cuomo unravel, until he’s naked and lying on the floor for all to see.
Bob Dylan could never.
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