Why Weezer Is Absolutely The Best Band Of All Time
Weezer is the best band of all time. When I tell people this simple, objective fact, I am often met with a litany of complaints from people who know more about music than I do. They laugh off my claim. They viciously spew names of musical groups I have never heard of, as if they honestly expect me to look up a band with the name, “Foo Fighters.” Get real. Weezer is the best band of all time. Granted, there are better bands. In fact, there are even way better bands. To understand, then, why Weezer is the best band of all time requires a level of thinking to which average minds rarely ascend. It requires the ability to hold a tension of opposites, to embrace contradiction, to exist in paradox. I happily admit that there are better bands than Weezer, for to do otherwise would be scientifically untenable. But I am not claiming there are not better bands than Weezer. I am claiming only that Weezer is the best band, period.
Last week, Weezer released their newest album, OK Human, the latest chapter in a multi-decade epic of highs and very low lows. But to view Weezer through a linear lens and to place upon them expectations given to mortal musical acts is, of course, the primary sin of casual Weezer listeners. You may be one of those casual Weezer listeners yourself, someone who enjoys a nice “Say It Ain’t So” every now and then. If that’s you, I get it. For many, Weezer is a nostalgia band. They harken back to simpler times, when life was less chaotic. In times of civil unrest, it is only natural to embrace nostalgia, as it is cheaper and far more socially acceptable than returning to a literal womb.
Weezer is the best band of all time. In order to see how this is true, it is important to understand a few fundamental laws of the universe. The first is the idea of enantiodromia, which is the tendency of things to change into their opposites after enough time. Similar to osmosis, but on a psychological level, enantiodromia is the idea that the psyche desires balance. We see enantiodromia when a docile suburban dad suddenly purchases a motorcycle, or when I invest too much money in AMC stock because some Redditors told me to “Hold the line,” whatever that means. Weezer is an extension of Rivers Cuomo’s psyche. It is a business-first kind of band plagued by the insatiable expectations of its core fanbase, whose own psyches demand that the shallow, pop-centric output from the band in recent years be accounted for. This suprapersonal ecosystem of conflicting desires creates a never-ending tension that might lead a lesser band to drift off into oblivion. Somehow, Weezer persists, and that persistence alone defies other laws of the universe, such as time, space, and objective quality.
In “Numbers,” the fourth track on Weezer’s OK Human, Rivers Cuomo laments the disastrous effects of social media obsession. In true Weezer fashion, however, the cheeseball lyrics betray a raw sincerity that still packs an emotional punch 25 years after the release of their first album. Rivers croons, “All that we even really know is that every nail needs a hammer, but the numbers won’t compute when we love and the two becomes one.” To simpletons who define lyrical quality apart from the music it accompanies, this is a standard Weezer lyric. But if we look closer, Rivers is not only subverting the theme of the song; he is also undermining the entire field of mathematics. To that I say: it’s about freaking time. Anyone who has ever been in love or in heartbreak can attest to the impotency of mathematics when our hearts are involved. It could be interpreted that Rivers Cuomo is alluding the alchemical nature of relationships. After all, his own relationship with his fanbase has helped produce one of the most interesting music catalogues in rock history. With Van Weezer on the way, as well as rumors of four new albums next year, the paradox of Weezer and its fans has resulted in an explosion of output that defies, well, numbers.
Allusions to enantiodromia and alchemy are only the tip of the iceberg. As a 38-piece orchestra plays behind Rivers in “Here Comes The Rain,” one of the poppier tracks on the album, we are met with yet another fundamental law of the universe: “We’ll run away to paradise, did you hear the news, the universe will give you more of what you pay attention to.” Behind this on-brand Weezer lyricism is a case for the idea that we live in a participatory universe, in which our outlooks directly impact matter Schrodinger’s-box style. The Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty may only apply to little bitch-ass electrons, but it sure seems convenient that my view on Weezer as the world’s best band exists alongside the release of one of their best albums in decades. Correlation does not mean causation, but lest we forget: sometimes two becomes one… when we, uh, love? Exactly. Nailed it.
In this sense, there is no working rational argument against the claim that Weezer is the best band of all time — especially not against a living, breathing Weezer fan. Try as one might, appealing to a Weezer fan’s rationalism is to consciously ignore intangible factors, such as our highly repressed and deeply powerful pathological masochism. Besides, I could fill a java-soaked piano with complaints against Weezer. I may have forgiven them for their worst sins, such as Raditude, but I have not forgotten. It should be no other way, for it is my job and my job alone to protect my expectations from the whirling dervish that is Rivers Cuomo. In “Mirror Image,” Rivers sings, “She is my mirror image, showing me who I am,” an obvious tribute to the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose concept of the mirror stage purports that infants use their reflections to define their subjectivity. Does Weezer exist as a band or as a mirror reflecting their fanbase’s own unresolvable psychic contradictions? Are they a pop-rock act pining for their next big hit, or are they an apperception test against which we can explore our own consciousness? Perhaps the answer is neither, both, or either/or. “Nothing matters in the world, and everyone is free, but I’ll belong to you if believe in me,” Rivers sings in “Bird With A Broken Wing.” Once again, Rivers’ goofy-ass lyrics showcase subtle contradictions at every turn.
Sometime in the new millennium, Rivers was turned on to meditation, specifically Vipassana meditation, by then-producer Rick Rubin. Whatever the scientific benefits of meditation may be, it is clear that almost two decades worth of ritualistic meditation has somehow connected Weezer’s lead singer to an inner life still rife with problems that do not add up. It is no wonder that OK Human’s lead single, “All My Favorite Songs,” has him wondering what the heck is wrong with him. In “Grapes Of Wrath,” he laments, “I can feel my breathing, it’s no nice, it’s like a blanket on my life, let me stay here for forever in this state of classical denial.” Rivers is an avid meditator, who has no doubt mastered the art of mindfulness. The Wikipedia page for Vipassana says:
“A synonym for vipassanā is paccakkha “perceptible to the senses” (Pāli; Sanskrit: pratyakṣa), literally “before the eyes,” which refers to direct experiential perception. Thus, the type of seeing denoted by vipassanā is that of direct perception, as opposed to knowledge derived from reasoning or argument.”
Here we are getting to the heart of the matter. Despite being a long-time practitioner of Vipassana meditation, Rivers recognizes the legitimacy of some Western criticisms toward Eastern practices — namely that an excess of these practices can result in many people, especially from the West, using them as forms of escapism. In “Grapes Of Wrath,” Rivers opens one of the only single-worthy songs on the album with a confession confirming this criticism. There is no doubt that meditation has plenty of benefits, but those benefits are not often easily accessible to minds steeped in Western culture, where reason and rationalism reign supreme whether we like it or not. In turn, these ancient spiritual practices, when not engaged with properly, can actually help turn off the spigot of the unconscious and produce instead a “blanket” over our lives. None of this is meant to criticize these practices themselves but rather our own grab-happy and greedy tendencies that might treat these practices as means to some fictional utopian end. Naturally, the best band of all time is here to offer an example of what one must do when confronted with an unresolvable contradiction: rock your Audible headphones and drift off into oblivion.
Weezer exists at the center of a spectrum. To one side is the extremist fans, who at times have ensconced themselves in their own oubliette of reason and logic so as to shut themselves off from the joy that this band’s batshit craziness might bring them. On the other side of the Weezer spectrum is the infinite voices which push and pull the band’s lead singer in whatever direction they deem best. Some of these voices undoubtedly include record labels, managers, band members, and so on. But my guess is most of these calls are coming from inside the house. Rivers may not know if Kim Jong Un has blown up his city as he plays his piano, but that does mean he is not engaged in a never-ending psychic war with himself. Even lines like, “I never see the sun like I’m living in a womb,” suggest a repressed Freudian impulse being made conscious. This act of using pop music to make conscious the tensions within Rivers Cuomo’s psyche, whether through lyrics or (God forbid) slick and vapid productions like Raditude, is a sign of both mental health and a barely-tapped well of artistic libido, broken wing or otherwise.
Weezer also exists at the center of a spiral, which has at its center absolute nothingness. Only in the absolute nothingness of a vacuum can we get both the universe’s very existence and a Li’l Wayne verse on a Weezer song that Rivers gets wrong. That’s right. If you listen carefully to the song, “Can’t Stop Partying,” you can hear Rivers try to rap along with Li’l Wayne and get his own song’s lyrics wrong. But circling out and away from the center of the Weezer spiral leads one to as many moments of brilliance as cringe. Weeks prior to the release of OK Human, Rivers Cuomo released decades worth of his own demos to diehard fans as an experiment to test his recently-learned coding skills. Do you see what I’m getting at? Who does that? Only the lead singer of the best band in the world.
It is time to set Weezer free from the simplistic idea that time is not on their side. With the release of OK Human, Weezer has once again transcended time. To appreciate Weezer fully is to embrace the contradictions at the core of Rivers Cuomo’s psyche. It is time to free ourselves, as Weezer fans, casual or diehard, from the Western world’s idolization of rational arguments. Weezer is not the best band in the world because there are no bands better than them. That is patently absurd. Weezer is the best band in the world because they are, among other things, a model for individuation, the psychological process through which one develops a unique personality. Their newest album’s sudden release might have been inspired by the Coronavirus and the ensuing lockdown, but Weezer has been playing this game for years, subverting expectation after expectation by refusing to play our games. In “The Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology,” Carl Jung says. “The collective unconscious, moreover, seems not to be a person, but something like an unceasing stream or perhaps an ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind.”
In “Basic Postulates,” Carl Jung refused to define too precisely his ideas about the collective unconscious, attempting instead to offer non-rational arguments for an unspeakable concept. The essay itself has a spiral form, shifting in tone and always speaking around the topic at hand. Similarly, Rivers seems not to be a person, but something like an unceasing stream. Go figure. Weezer itself seems not to be a band, but more like an ocean of images and figures which drift into our consciousness every few years. Music outlets trash them. Their fans scream at them. They disappear. And they return once again with some fresh hell for me to pompously defend, like the dumb simp I am. And so it goes. The spiral keeps spinning, as it will do until the masses finally recognize Weezer’s inherent superiority among all the musical acts that have ever or will ever exist.
Anyway, I give the album a 7/10.
