(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Stills)
Are you aware that, as of last count, there are six self-titled albums in the Weezer catalogue, and that those albums are each unofficially known, in The Beatles tradition, by the colour of their covers?
Going in reverse chronological order, you’ve got the Black Album, the Teal Album, the (other) White Album, the Red Album, the Green Album, and the Blue Album, but having a ROY-G-BIV discography wasn’t something Weezer set out to accomplish at the beginning of their career, with frontman Rivers Cuomo famously more of a whim chaser than a strategist.
The whole thing is really more akin to a long-running joke; a recurring callback to the band’s beloved debut album (Blue) and its distinctive artwork, which saw the four original members of the group posed awkwardly beside one another like a criminal line-up set against a blue backdrop. Fans gradually came to refer to the eponymous CD by its dominant colour, and three decades of self-referential re-shoots of that original cover were thus set in motion.
Considering the much-maligned decline of Weezer’s actual musical output in the 21st century, the colour wheel motif is probably one of the few lasting connections between whatever the band is now and what it was in the ‘90s, before mounting layers of irony and counter-irony turned Cuomo from an intriguing proto-emo ‘artiste’ into a sort of weird meme generator.
Now in his 50s, he has unashamedly driven Weezer into novelty band territory for years, either by recording viral covers of pop hits like Toto’s ‘Africa’ or by paying homage to Rivers’ other childhood heroes via concept albums like OK Human (a Pet Sounds-esque indulgence) and Van Weezer, a nod to over-the-top 1980s metal.
By contrast, part of what made the Blue Album such a massive, unexpected success in the mid-‘90s was that Cuomo’s songs seemed weirdly detached from any clear style or genre. Weezer was, quite correctly, never dumped into the grunge bucket, nor were they categorisable as a pop-punk band in the Green Day sense or as an indie rock band in the Pavement sense (despite sharing some of the aesthetic, slacker sensibilities of those fellow California bands).
One of the band’s first and still best-known singles, ‘Buddy Holly’, wasn’t any sort of stylistic reference to the man himself, but more of a statement about where Rivers Cuomo existed in the ‘90s ecosystem as a pleasantly out-of-step with the trends guy, cool in his apparent unhipness, sort of like Buddy Holly was in the ‘50s, I guess. In turn, we, the young fanbase for this weird new band, were more than happy to be the unapologetic Mary Tyler Moores.
The love affair reached an immediate apex with the 1994 music video for ‘Buddy Holly’, which has gradually become one of the strangest, multi-tiered nostalgia mind-fucks in the entirety of popular culture. Directed by Spike Jonze, this MTV VMA winner for ‘Best Alternative Video’ helped launch Weezer into the stratosphere in America.
Using archaic computer effects and trick photography, the four-minute video magically transported the band into an old episode of the hit 1970s TV sitcom, Happy Days, complete with cameos from a young Ron Howard and, of course, Fonzie AKA Henry Winkler, who dances along as Weezer play their anachronistic rock song, Marty McFly style. Of course, Happy Days was already a nostalgic comedy show about a group of teenage friends in the 1950s, so this was a rare manoeuvre of a satirical reference upon a satirical reference.
Things get even weirder when you jump to the present day; if you’re a Gen Xer or an elder Millennial feeling wistful for the ‘90s and the glory days of Weezer, you can go to Youtube and play the ‘Buddy Holly’ video any time you want, thus entering a portal in which you’re reconnected in the 2020s to the 1990s via a video that’s set in a 1970s TV show which takes place in the 1950s.
Suddenly, images of jukeboxes and sock-hops and Buddy Holly bring about memories of MTV and Blockbuster Video and Super Nintendo, and Weezer is simultaneously rendered the Blue Album and the Teal Album, the Black Album and the White Album. The world is an AI projection from either a very long time ago or a time yet to occur, and it all meets at this central vortex of the pop cultural space-time continuum that is Weezer’s ‘Buddy Holly’ video. A ‘90s chicken stuffed inside a ‘70s duck stuffed inside a ‘50s turkey, all perfectly suited to the present day: another recurring joke re-tellable into an unforeseen digital infinity.
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