After Weezer’s self-titled debut in 1994 (Now known as The Blue Album), the band took a break from touring for the holidays. During this time Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer and frontman of the group, began writing Songs from the Black Hole, an unfinished rock opera. Giving up on the project, Cuomo applied to Harvard University to study Classical Composition, only to drop out a year before graduation. Feeling isolated from the world inspired him to write what I consider to be Weezer’s Magnum Opus, Pinkerton.
An album featuring themes of loneliness, sexual frustration, relationships and the loss of identity that comes with being a rockstar, Pinkerton is able to create a much darker and abrasive sound than their debut just two years earlier. With only ten tracks and roughly 35 minutes long, this album does more than nearly every Weezer LP that came afterwards.
While writing the album, Rivers became obsessed with the opera Madame Butterfly, about an American soldier named Pinkerton (We see where the album title came from) who has moved to Japan to live with his new wife, Butterfly. Pinkerton leaves Japan for many years while Butterfly (Who’s real name is Cio-Cio-San) gives birth to his child and waits for his return. Pinkerton eventually comes back with a new American wife and Butterfly kills herself. Along with adapting the name Pinkerton for his album, Rivers also took many of the themes from the show.
I would consider this record to be an example of a musical cult classic. With this album receiving mixed to negative reviews by critics and backlash from fans of their first album, it’s surprising how many view this as one of, if not Weezer’s best album to date. Many factors played into why fans didn’t enjoy this album upon release, like the band’s choice to self-produce, making the album sound much rawer and abrasive than their previous album, to create a sense that it was performed live. With The Blue Album being basically an overnight success, fans assumed they would keep going in that album’s direction, only to speed the opposite way and remove the surf rock and optimism that defined it, even in Blue’s darker moments. Another reason this album was hit with criticism was for Rivers’ extremely personal lyrics, often depressing and sex-obsessed.
What this album has brought in recent years, to the admiration of current-day fans, is the searingly honest lyricism and vocals that Rivers was able to give on the album, as well as the almost distorted guitar work from Brian Bell. It also can’t go without saying Matt Sharp’s bass sounds beautiful on some songs and haunting on others, and Patrick Wilson’s drums are top notch on every single song.
The cover art of the record is also pretty stellar, adapting the woodcut print Night Snow at Kambara by Utagawa Hiroshige from his series “53 Stations of the Tōkaidō”, adding to the overtly Japanese inspiration and references found on the album.
The very first track has its title fairly bold and anyone can figure out what it means, ‘Tired of Sex’. Starting off with nearly 10 seconds of feedback coming from a guitar, the album immediately sets it’s mood. This is gonna be heavy, this is gonna be brash, this is gonna be great. The song is about Rivers being tired of the rockstar lifestyle, mostly the sex that comes with it. During the verses he sings about losing his identity among his fans by being ‘Spread so thin’, while during the chorus he laments about having a new girl every night, wishing to one day ‘Make love come true’. Rivers wrote an essay at Harvard in a similar vein to this song, believing the only way he could get out of the lifestyle was to get married, which he did (Ten years after the release of the album but still). The vocals on this song are so strained and rough that you can’t help but feel bad for Rivers, who really did not enjoy his time while touring, and the breakdown at the end of the track where he is begging on his knees that someone free him from it all, mixed with the absolutely brutal guitar solo before it, makes this easily one of the best album openers in Weezer’s discography.
‘Getchoo’ is about confessing your love to someone. Specifically Jonas (The main character of the perceived Songs from the Black Hole, and possibly connected to the character from ‘My Name is Jonas’ on their previous record) confessing his love to a girl. Pretty simple stuff musically on this track, it’s a bit faster paced than the last song but I simply don’t think it’s as good. It’s still a good song, don’t get me wrong, I’m just not going to come back to it on it’s own as often as some other tracks on here. In the lyrics, it seems that the character and this girl were friends for a long time, only for the character to develop feelings and confess them to her. This leads to some tension in their friendship and in the breakdown it’s revealed that the main character might has been in this situation before, “I can’t believe what you’ve done to me, What I did to them, You’ve done to me”. This could play into a common problem with those with relationship problems, the idea that anyone who shows you any affection is in love with you, meaning that anytime this character is even friends with someone, he develops romantic feelings. The end of the song has the repeated phrase ‘This is beginning to hurt” sung by Brian Bell and Matt Sharp, implying that the character may give up altogether with trying to find love.
‘No Other One’ starts with a scream. I love screaming in music, especially songs where you don’t expect it. While listening to a nice metal track there’s probably gonna be a scream of two, but listening to an alt-rock song about loneliness, you don’t expect it. The song features the narrator in a ‘toxic’ relationship with a drug-addicted girlfriend. He doesn’t want to leave this relationship because he is afraid that if he does break up with her, he will be alone again. That’s why he believes there is ‘No Other One’ for him. It is revealed in the second verse that she is also afraid of loneliness, and that’s the only reason she is still with him, so it can be inferred that the narrator also has some issues, most likely not with hard drugs, as the ones she does “Scare me real bad”. Rivers sings much softer on this song than the previous ones, explaining through why he chooses to stay in the relationship, while in the choruses he raises the pitch a little bit, and has an almost ballad-like cadence to say that they are the only ones right for each other.
The beginning of the next track, ‘Why Bother?’ reminds me of the groove from ‘Low Rider’ by War, which I’m sure many of us know for being the theme song of the George Lopez TV show. Nothing else in the song shares similarities, unless ‘Low Rider’ is secretly a song about the fear of rejection. Rivers sings/screams in this song about how he wants to find love, but in most situations he decides against it because he’d “rather keep whackin’”. In one verse he even contemplates having a lasting relationship, only to bring up the fact that she would probably break his heart whenever summer arrived. The title seems pretty obvious, why bother with finding love when in the end he’s just gonna be hurt, and he knows this because it’s apparently happened to him “twice before” and that “it won’t happen to me anymore”. Rivers has given up, he has tried and tried again at love and he has reached the end, showing even more context for the loneliness he felt while at Harvard.
Up next is probably the creepiest song Weezer has ever made, ‘Across the Sea’. A bit of background for it, During his summer at Harvard, Rivers received many letters of praise for The Blue Album, one in particular being from a young Japanese girl. It’s a pretty well-known piece of trivia that Rivers Cuomo has a fetish for Asian girls, and apparently just getting a letter from a Japanese girl turned him on. While in real life he’s not sure what the girl’s age is, he says in the song that she’s eighteen to make it a little less creepy. In the song he begins obsessing over this letter he received, wondering what kind of clothes the girl wears to school, how she decorates her room, and of course, how she masturbates while thinking of him. Rivers is mad at the girl and himself for being so far ‘Across the Sea’. After singing about this girl, he makes the song a bit more broad, talking about all of the letters he has received and how he can’t live and thrive off of just the fans, how he needs actual emotional connection with people. Throughout the song Rivers says how the only thing that connects himself to his fans is his music. As strange as it is to listen to the lyrics of this song, it’s pretty damn catchy and one of the best songs in Weezer’s entire discography.
‘The Good Life’ is the funniest song on Pinkerton. Starting off with Matt Sharp saying “Yeah, check me” in the suavest voice he can is pretty good, but when Rivers starts singing about looking in his mirror and not believing how much of a “funky dude” he is, it just sounds like he’s hyping himself up. Although getting into the chorus it becomes apparent that the song is about his leg surgery he had while at Harvard, forcing him to have to walk around with a cane, comparing himself to an old man. Rivers wants to go back to his old life, making songs, touring, having promiscuous sex, going against what he’s said in previous tracks about how he no longer wants to lead that life, but he can only blame himself for being in that situation. Back to the funny stuff, he compares himself to pigs and dogs, “so ‘scuse me if I drool”, going into how he just has to admit he does want the rock ‘n roll lifestyle again, and he should stop denying that it is his life now. I didn’t say that the song was very funny, just that it was the funniest on the record.
Another very good song coming up next, ‘El Scorcho’. No idea what the name means, but I just assume it goes with the word salad, have fun and let loose approach to the song. While the song is still about relationships, this one has a much more positive ending, with Rivers seemingly getting into a good one with a half-Japanese girl (obviously). The vocals on this song fluctuate, some parts of the song are whispered, while others are screamed at the top of his lungs. I say the song has word salad lyrics because things are just thrown out “I’m jello, baby”, “Watching Grunge leg drop New Jack through a press table”, “I’ll bring home the turkey if you bring home the bacon”. The lyrics also reference that the girl of Rivers’ fancy is listening to music by Cio-Cio San, going right back to Madame Butterfly and the title of the album. The guitar work during the verses is also very twangy, as if it were a bluegrass song. This song is a lot of fun to sing along to, but I’m not sure if it fits with the rest of the albums more serious themes. Not that I don’t love the song, it’s just a weird pick to throw on.
“Pink Triangle” may not have aged very well with modern audiences. Rivers has found himself and a slump and wants to find love. He has seemingly found a girl to fall in love with, but is stopped in his tracks by a certain marking on her sleeve. A certain triangle shaped symbol. A certain Pink Triangle. A certain Pink Triangle that denoted the homosexuals during the holocaust. Rivers has fallen in love with a lesbian, not great on his part. Of course, the pink triangle has been reclaimed by the LGBT community but we cannot shy away from the fact that it originally emerged in concentration camps. Rivers wonders if this girl is actually a lesbian or just a supporter of the cause, but eventually his nerves crack him and he doesn’t even bother asking her, just assumes that yep, she’s into girls and will never be into him. While, in real life, the girl really was just a supporter, the dude didn’t even bother inquiring about the symbol in a non-romantic and non-sleazy way, just went away sad about it. In the song, Rivers pleads with the girl, “Everyone’s a little queer, oh, can’t she be a little straight?” Dang. That’s a hard one to get by man, I wouldn’t go slinging that phrase around my local Old Navy if I’m being completely honest, but I suppose 1996 was a long time ago.
The next track starts off so nice, so calm, until a quick guitar pops in and destroys that serene. “Falling For You” follows Rivers as he finds a girl (again) that he thinks is a suitable mate. He starts out freaking out over how he found the perfect one, except for the fact that she says ‘like’ too much. He then goes on to offer away his rockstar membership in favor of growing old with her by his side. Back in the present, nothing seems to go wrong for this relationship and everything ends happy. Quite a strange ending for this song considered the rest of the album, but a nice bookend to an otherwise sprawling and treacherous landscape of failed relationships and general depression. Except we’re forgetting something aren’t we. We’re forgetting the closing track.
“Butterfly” is the only completely acoustic song on the album, about Rivers as a young boy catching a butterfly, only for it to die the next day and feeling remorse for it. Very simple, right? Let’s not forget the namesake of the album, Madame Butterfly. If you recall, Butterfly was the name of the Japanese woman who kills herself because her husband goes away and finds another woman. So instead of it being a simple song about a butterfly dying, it’s about Butterfly dying. The song is told from Pinkerton’s perspective as he comes home to find Butterfly dead, but could also be from the perspective of Rivers himself. While maybe not actually ‘dying’, the woman Rivers has fallen in love with has ‘withered away’, after being looked at as a ‘pet’, or a ‘fantasy’. I believe the song could have some connections with sexual assault, as during the chorus Rivers sings, “I’m sorry for what I did, I did what my body told me to,” then going onto the second verse when he can still smell her blood on him. The song also has the line “If I’m a dog, then you’re a bitch,” connecting to various times in other songs he calls himself a dog, finally retorting against this insult by throwing out a fun play on words insult. The final words of the track, and the album, are “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” Pretty sad for an alt-rock record.
Pinkerton has exceeded everything Weezer made previously and everything they created afterwards. While it’s influences can be found in later albums, none of them come close to the beautiful hodgepodge that defined the album in the first place. I can see why many critics and audiences panned this album upon release, but there is no doubt in my mind that this album will stand the test of time and always be considered one of Weezer’s best, that’s why I’m giving this one a 10/10.
