Review Summary: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” -1 Corinthians 13:11
What remains to be said about Pinkerton that hasn’t already been laid out somewhere on the internet? The story of Weezer’s sophomore album, critically panned upon release but eventually finding cult status in one of popular music history’s greatest ever slow burns, is very well documented across various reviews, thinkpieces and retrospectives. Plenty has been said as to the album’s history, its semi-radical departure from its precursor the Blue Album, the initial sour taste it left in the mouth of the press and its subsequent disowning by the band as well its slow climb to niche appreciation, but this sordid story leaves out the album’s true impact, that on the individual level.
Pinkerton is nineteen years old this year, which makes it the perfect age to get into itself. The author of this article was the same age when he initially discovered Pinkerton; old enough to think that weekend parties and steady tuition constituted adulthood but realistically young enough to have not even finished adolescence. In my teenaged eyes the word of Rivers Cuomo, patron saint of sad single straight dudes, was gospel. My adulation of Pinkerton’s message stemmed from the sheer relatability of its lyrics; prior to this album I had never identified with the emotional frankness of any piece of media in such a visceral fashion. I was convinced that Rivers had, at some point, felt exactly the way I felt about popularity, romantic conquest, and whatever else occupies the top priority slots in a teenaged male’s hierarchy of need and that these feelings were what had inspired the writing of the album. Pinkerton’s music was the metaphorical hand that patted my back during early college emotional bouts, and Rivers, despite being in his forties and writing the material that would be featured on Hurley at the time of my listening to album fifteen years in his past, was a kindred soul who understood exactly how good it felt to metaphorically vomit up your real feelings on Saturday night and how painful it was when those same feelings kicked you between your vertebrae while you actually vomited on Sunday morning.
Now time has passed and I look back on my years of taking Pinkerton at face value with the cringes they deserve. Rivers was twenty-six when the Pink album was released, and while seven years is a hop-skip in the grand scheme of life the difference in maturity between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six is nigh incomparable. Self-awareness comes naturally with age and I realize now that Pinkerton is not a self-help guide but is more of a cautionary exploration of the grungier aspects of being a young straight male. At nineteen I saw “Pink Triangle” as a hopeless exaltation of unreciprocated love in an unattainable relationship; the only thing holding Rivers back from the love experience he, in my mind, obviously deserved was the simple, trifling fact that the object of his desire happened to be a lesbian. After all, in his mind, “everyone’s a little queer, why can’t she be a little straight?” Listening to that song now I realize that that line is a tongue-in-cheek demonstration of how dangerous idealizing potential romance can be, a theme that is dealt with heavily throughout both Pinkerton as well as the Blue Album. Rivers, within Pinkerton’s narrative, constantly puts women on an unfair pedestal, believing that his problems will evaporate if he can find a girl good enough to satiate his desires. While this theme is far from uncommon throughout popular music, it becomes evident early in Pinkerton that Rivers’ idea of love has been shaped by too many hours in the garage, too many groupie hookups, and not enough observation of the way that women actually work. The Blue Album preluded this mindset, with “No One Else” containing a checklist of Rivers’ ideas of what a woman should be: subservient, obedient and ultimately lifeless:
“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
I want a girl who laughs for no one else”
These lyrics are appalling with good reason: very few people who aren’t living under an abusive system out of their control choose to live like this. This idea of love is shaped by the influences on Rivers’ character as outlined in another Blue album song “In the Garage:”
“I’ve got a dungeon master’s guide
I’ve got a twelve-sided die
I’ve got Kitty Pride
And Nightcrawler too
Waiting there for me yes I do”
Weezer has long been caricatured as the nerdiest rock band in existence, and these lyrics serve to expose the warped views that the nerd lifestyle can inflict: Rivers, maybe influenced a little too much by Kitty Pride and Conan the Barbarian, sees himself as the knight in shining armor who ultimately deserves his perfect damsel in distress. Only this knight is actually a twenty-something Connecticut native devotee of both Yngwie Malmsteen and Dungeons and Dragons and the women he chases are certainly not royalty. The warped ideals of “No One Else” come back to bite Rivers in the ass in its followup song “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” where he throws himself a pity party when the relationship built on his anachronistic views unsurprisingly doesn’t work out.
The overarching narrative of Pinkerton follows in a similar vein as Rivers bumbles through interactions with other people wondering why his ideal woman won’t come swooping out of the sky to save him from his oh-so problematic life of being straight, male, single, white and famous. Most of Pinkerton reads like a first world problems rap sheet, “everything I need is denied me/And everything I want is taken away from me” is a statement that must have required an impressive amount of cognitive dissonance to be uttered from the mouth of a world famous rockstar Harvard student. This statement within “The Good Life” is preceded by an exclamation of “screw this crap, I’ve had it!,” something that would sound witless coming out of the mouth of a twelve year-old. “Tired of Sex” chronicles Rivers’ dissatisfaction with the apparent line of women crowding into his bedroom; the vaginas of Jen, Lyn and Jasmine don’t satisfy him because of course he’d rather be “making love” to the ill-defined woman of his dreams. When he does eventually have a girlfriend he becomes consumed by her flaws, unable to align the realistic traits of this real person with the falsified qualities of his imaginary damsel. “No there is no other one/I can’t have any other one/Though I could/Now I never could with one” is the chorus to “No Other One,” a song that may as well be the sister song of “No One Else” in which Rivers tries to convince himself that the real person he’s dating measures up to the imaginary ideal he’s built in his head. Apparently this comparison proved unsatisfactory because Rivers goes against his promise of “there is no other one;” there is indeed another one, which leads to Rivers apologizing with his tail between his legs in “Butterfly.”
But “Butterfly” contains the album’s most climactic, meaningful moment in which the opera of Rivers and his love conquest has finally concluded and its protagonist has learned the album’s moral lesson over a typically Weezer half-step down chord progression: girls are people too. “Butterfly” is a song packed with the catharsis that the rest of the album needs; each line reads like a synopsis of or conclusion to the album’s major themes. The songs initial verse tells the story of Rivers catching a butterfly to keep as a pet only to discover “her” dead the next morning, just like the his interest in all the girls in “Tired of Sex.” “Every time I pin down what I think I want it slips away/The ghost slips away” details Rivers’ belief that he can “pin down” love like an entomologist preserving a specimen; however, that love dies as quickly as a butterfly pinned to a board. Rivers’ saving grace is his realization that love can’t be treated like science and that girls are not pawns in some greater game in the song’s revelatory line “I guess you’re as real as me, maybe I can live with that.” The next line states “Maybe I need fantasies/A life of chasing butterflies;” Rivers is still resolved to search for a significant other only this time he’s willing to accept that there is no “perfect” person to be his lover. This is the climactic moment that the loose storyline of Pinkerton has been building toward: in this manner the entire album becomes a discourse on gained experience and maturity as Rivers becomes a full, functional person capable of holding meaningful relationships based on trust and affection as opposed to artifice.
The process of feeling good about having done something then immediately regretting that thing and hating yourself for it for an extended period of time before finally coming to view that thing in a positive light and realizing the emotional growth you gained as a result identically mirrors Rivers’ own feelings towards his creation; critical response to Pinkerton was infamously so negative upon release that it affected the trajectory of Weezer’s career, turning them from the loveable dorks who blended pop sensibility with genuinely heartfelt lyricism in tunes like “Buddy Holly” into a radio-friendly pop band that refused to take risks and churned out catchy but ultimately empty ditties like “Beverly Hills.” Though nowadays Rivers seems to appreciate Pinkerton for its true meaning and has quit publicly shaming the album in recent years, the journey that Pinkerton took between conception, release and reception was no doubt a painful one for everyone involved except for those listeners who disregard the opinion of Rolling Stone. But Pinkerton isn’t about being a radio staple or a critical darling; it’s about self-evaluation and improvement no matter how painful working on yourself can be. And painful it is, Rivers’ principal reason for distancing himself from the album after its initial critical failure was that he found the broadcasting of its intensely personal subject matter to be embarrassing. After all, this is an album where Rivers fantasized about a Japanese girl masturbating, told a childhood story about shaving his head and blamed every one of his problems on his mother all within the space of two verses. But this emotional frankness is the album’s crowning achievement; Rivers Cuomo the basement-dweller turned famous rock star exposing himself, wounds and all, is the fertile soil from which Pinkerton spawns its importance. The most emotionally honest parts of Pinkerton, Rivers innermost reflections on girls and romance, can be brutal to listen to, but his character is redeemed when you realize that he’s looking back at how he used to feel instead of listlessly search for an easy external solution to his internal problems. Pinkerton is the Catcher in the Rye of pop music, it’s a relic of how you felt when you were young that seems so lifelike and important when you’re the same age as its protagonist that you look at with disdain when you’ve moved past the life stage it presents. It’s steel wool for the teenaged soul. Listening to Pinkerton will make you terrified at how much you identify with it, but hopefully also make you realize how far you’ve come since then.
