This was more or less the mainstream music press’s reaction to Pinkerton. Rolling Stone magazine, and the vast majority of the people who’d bought and loved the Blue Album, weren’t ready for this kind of thing at all. Where were all the catchy little pop songs? Why is he screaming like that? The record-buying public stayed away in droves, reviewers were unkind, and Cuomo went into retreat.
After we put out the first record, it seemed like a lot of the fans were really interested in me and were encouraging me to expose myself more, so that’s what I did on the second record, and everybody hated it. I was really embarrassed.5
Pinkerton wasn’t a disaster — it was an acquired taste. Grownup rock journals like Rolling Stone felt let down by Cuomo’s failure to deliver on the promise of a bubblegum rock revival, and dismissed the album as morbid and self-indulgent. But younger fans loved it for exactly the same reasons. At this point, a parallel universe was created. In the world we know, grunge rose and fell, and rock-rap begat nu-metal. Meanwhile, in the other dimension, Pinkerton, not Nevermind, was the greatest album of the ’90s, and emo began its crucial second phase.
While the cult of Pinkerton was getting underway, Cuomo had begun writing non-autobiographical songs like ‘Lover in the Snow’, and judging their success not on their emotional authenticity, but on their formal qualities. Like Robert Smith (and for similar reasons) he was moving decisively away from emo toward what can only be described as ‘formo’. Toward the end of the ’90s, he began a study of rock structure in the form of his ‘Encyclopedia of Pop’, a ring binder full of hand-drawn charts in which Cuomo recorded the characteristics of hit songs by Green Day, Nirvana, Oasis and many other bands in an attempt to pinpoint the traits they share in common. This list has provided him with a set of models for songwriting, which he has been implementing ever since. The songs on the Green Album, he proudly told Rolling Stone’s Chris Mundy in 2001, contain ‘no feeling, no emotion’, just music.6 Cuomo was not being entirely honest — ‘Hash Pipe’ and ‘Island in the Sun’ are emotional enough. But he was making the point that he would happily sacrifice feeling for form. This new direction irritated Pinkerton fans as surely as Pinkerton itself had annoyed the critics. One fan, writing as ‘whatawierdo’ on Songmeanings.com, said:
I think Rivers has traded his personal touch of neurotic and clever songs for more standard, less emotional songs.7
Diehard fans gritted their teeth and put up with the ‘horrible pop songs’8, scouring the albums for the rare flashes of Cuomo’s old confessional mode that still showed up here and there. By the time of 2005’s Make Believe, those who’d been seduced by Pinkerton’s emotional authenticity had had enough of Cuomo’s songs about nothin’. Pitchfork’s reviewer wrote:
Pinkerton triumphed by being an uncomfortably honest self-portrait of Cuomo. On Make Believe, his personality has vanished beneath layers of self-imposed universality, writing non-specific power ballads like he apprenticed with Diane Warren, and whoah-oh-ohing a whole lot in lieu of coming up with coherent or interesting thoughts.9
Cuomo would probably have taken the Diane Warren comparison as a compliment. The author of dozens of monster middle-of-the-road hits in the ’80s and ’90s, Warren’s CV includes Starship’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’ and Chicago’s ‘Look Away’, as well as co-writing credits with Bon Jovi and Cuomo’s beloved Cheap Trick. The ‘universality’ and ‘non-specificity’ the pitchfork reviewer complains about on Make Believe is the key to the success of Warren’s mega-hits. They’re songs that (in theory) always work for everyone, because their structure is tried and true. That’s why Diane Warren is a hit-maker. Hit-makers don’t sit around waiting for painful personal experiences to happen to them — they sit down at the word processor and write hits according to the rules of hit-writing.
By compiling his ‘Encyclopedia of Pop’ Rivers Cuomo was learning these rules for himself. Pretty soon, he was rhyming ‘lady’ with ‘maybe’ and telling his girl that ‘you’re the air that I breathe’. He sang this stuff on stage in front of a huge glowing ‘W’ and played solos like he was in Van Halen. He left emo in the dust, and embraced its opposite — classic rock. He’d proved it was possible to write powerful music whose goal was something other than the sharing of feelings. But in the process, he’d demonstrated that the modern indie rock singer does so at his peril.
The Classics
THE KILLERS’ DEBUT album Hot Fuss is full of lyrics about nothing. What is ‘Somebody Told Me’ about? Who cares? The important thing is that the chorus contains the words ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’. These are words that sound good in the choruses of new-wave rock songs, and Brandon Flowers has fifty years of pop history on his side as he yelps them out over the song’s skipping beat and buzzing synths. What about ‘All these things that I’ve done’? The glorious sing-along refrain, ‘I’ve got soul but I’m just a soldier’, works like a charm. But as comedian Bill Bailey has pointed out, Flowers might as well be singing, ‘I’ve got ham but I’m not a hamster’. By the time it came to record the Killers’ second album, Flowers was feeling guilty about having got away with these powerful, but un-emotional lyrics. He made amends by getting his diary out and writing an album about his childhood.
Formalism in rock makes us uncomfortable. We’re just as suspicious of Rivers Cuomo reducing rock to a series of lists and graphs as we are with the idea of songs being made-to-order by Diane Warren, or with Brandon Flowers writing lyrics by choosing words that sound good over music. Robert Smith was faintly disgusted with himself after he wrote ‘Let’s Go to Bed’. The song did the trick, but Smith felt like he’d got away with something, not like he’d made a great work of art. That’s because in rock and roll, especially indie rock and roll, artists, critics and fans alike place an enormous premium on emotional authenticity. When an album is good, we say it’s ‘inspired’, ‘sincere’, ‘unflinchingly honest’ or ‘deeply personal’. If it misses the mark, it’s ‘formulaic’, ‘soulless’ or ‘unoriginal’.
The idea of art or music as a form of self-expression is virtually taken for granted today. It’s the artist’s ultimate authority — ‘I wrote it that way because that’s how I felt,’ says the artist. And this is no less than we expect of the artist — authentic self-expression, in defiance of fashion, sensible advice or the dictates of the marketplace. We accept the idea that music might have other goals — social commentary, political protest, making you dance, getting the singer laid. But in every case, what we’re mostly interested in is the artist’s feeling for these things. Emo is just an extreme and uncompromising variation on a theme which is universally accepted. From the rarefied air of The Wire magazine (where an almost unlistenable album will be lauded for the artist’s refusal to compromise his vision), to the set of American Idol (where week in, week out, the judges advise the contestants to ‘be yourself’), the mantra is the same. Authentic self-expression = good art. What we look for in music is passion, because passion, we feel, makes good poetry.
This wasn’t always the case. In eighteenth-century London, for example, nobody took much of an interest in poets’ feelings, or how sincerely they were expressed. Back then, nobody would have cared very much about Robert Smith’s depression, Gerard Way’s rage, Rivers Cuomo’s angst or Brandon Flowers’ diary. In fact, most of the artists whose lyric sheets we pore over today would have been chased out of the coffee house for having too many feelings, for devoting too many stanzas to their emotions while forgetting all about the things that really make for quality poetry — a sense of balance and symmetry, a sound grasp of metrical composition, and the advancement of a useful moral theme or accurate social observation. Not to understand these things was, in eighteenth-century literary circles, as disastrous for one’s career as to be seen about town in a poorly powdered wig.
In the pursuit of this ideal, the poet’s emotions could be of no particular use — in fact they were most likely to get in the way. What was needed to write great poetry was not passion, but carefu
l study of the classics. Alexander Pope was a master in this regard — he studied Horace to the point where he could imitate his style perfectly. He became famous, and it became the ambition of all young poets to imitate Pope’s imitation.1 And this was not impossible, since Pope took care to set out the rules of poetry he’d derived (and refined) from Horace in his Essay on Criticism. He even made them rhyme. Here, a poet could learn, if not how to write a great poem, at least how to avoid writing a bad one. These rules were more discussed than actually followed. ‘No great writer,’ literary historian Richard Barnard points out, ‘allowed himself to be imprisoned in neo-classical theory.’2 And yet the fact that this theory existed and was seriously discussed offers a glimpse of an artistic climate completely different to our own, one where order and stability were the qualities most admired in a work of art, and originality — far from being the poet’s goal — was something best avoided, since it meant you were more likely to screw things up.
The good thing about formalism is that it usually works, but often that’s about the nicest thing you can say about it. ‘The classic,’ wrote Walter Pater in his Essay on Style, ‘comes to us out of the cool quiet of other times: as the measure of what a long experience has shown us will at least never displease us’.3 In certain periods of history, Pater says, the classics assert themselves — and this is what happened in Europe in the eighteenth century. But eventually, there will be — there has to be — a reaction to this insistence on order and symmetry. A demand for the wild, the quaint, the passionate, and the unreasonable will make itself felt. The pendulum will swing back. Rules will be broken, books thrown aside.
Troublemaker
THE UN-EMOTIONAL, CLASSICAL phase that Rivers Cuomo had entered with ‘Lover in the Snow’ began winding down during the recording of 2005’s Make Believe. But the real change came with the release of a compilation of his home demo recordings three years later. In collecting the material for this album, Cuomo went through tapes dating back to the very earliest days of Weezer. He listened, mesmerised, to the Rivers of fifteen years ago emoting in his carefully soundproofed isolation on ‘The World We Love so Much’. He heard again the painful whimpering at the start of ‘Crazy One’, and the demo tapes of his wildly ambitious — and ultimately abandoned — space opera, ‘The Black Hole’. He began to speak approvingly of Pinkerton for the first time since its traumatic birth.1 When Weezer finally released their new album later that same year, it quickly became apparent that something had been fundamentally altered in the singer’s approach to his art. The Red Album’s opening song, ‘Troublemaker’, is a manifesto for this new direction, in which Cuomo finally throws out the ‘Encyclopedia of Pop’, and asserts the value of originality and sincere personal expression. The singer insists that he is an original man with original thoughts. So instead of looking at books, he’s looking inside himself:
Who needs stupid books?
They are for petty crooks
I will learn by studying the lessons of my dreams2
Dreams crop up again on The Red Album, on a song Cuomo describes as ‘a big symphonic art-type number’, ‘Dreamin’’. The tug of war between emo and formo in Rivers’ soul meant the song very nearly didn’t make it onto the album. He wrote it, and then somehow lost his nerve. He scrapped it, and started working on a reassuringly classic-sounding verse-chorus-verse type song that became ‘This is the Way’, which the band, and the record company loved immediately. But by the time Weezer started recording the album, Cuomo was feeling adventurous again. He argued passionately for ‘Dreamin’’ to be included and ‘This is the Way’ to be left on the shelf.3
‘Dreamin’’ is an ambitious ode to imagination and reverie, in which Cuomo expands on the idea contained in those lines from ‘Troublemaker’. All his life, the singer explains, people have been trying to tell him there are rules. You have to go to school, you have to get a job, you have to learn to be responsible. And all his life, the singer has known in some profound way that this is a crock. How does he know? He just knows. ‘Normal’ life — school, job, etc, terrifies him to his soul. But when he’s absorbed in his own imagination, he feels at home:
Dreamin’ in the morning
Dreamin’ all through the night
and when I’m dreamin’ I know that it’s all right4
The song moves through several different movements that illustrate the dreamer’s different moods. At the beginning, when he’s just staring out the window, the backing has a dreamy ’50s’ teen-pop feel to it. When the singer starts asserting his right to do what he likes and stops doing his homework, the guitars crank up a notch and the music takes a more defiant stance. Then, in the middle section, the city and its suburbs, the school, the freeways, disappear entirely. Cuomo leaps through a slightly hilarious Sound of Music soundscape, with choirs of angels echoing over the hills and taped birdsong twittering in the background. Here, the world of custom and convention seems far away — there are no teachers, no grownups, no cops and no record companies. As his voice rings out over the landscape, he starts to wonder if the natural world isn’t somehow connected with the source of his own creativity. He feels cramped and constrained by human society, with its rules and regulations. People are always telling him to ‘get with the program’. Out here, it quickly becomes obvious that there is no program, and the singer’s imagination finally has space to roam. He throws away his schoolbooks and his ‘Encyclopedia of Pop’, and starts listening to the birds and the bees.
Wordsworth: Books! ‘Tis dull and endless strife!
Wordsworth
THE SWING AWAY from classicism in eighteenth-century England began during Pope’s lifetime, as the classical poetry of the day was supplemented by a growing interest in popular ballads of the Middle Ages. The authors of these unruly old poems were mostly unknown, and the verses themselves had changed many times over the centuries as different singers picked them up and adapted them to their purposes. They were rarely written down, mostly because they were considered too rough and bawdy to be proper literature — ballads were not for polite company, and they found no place in the eighteenth-century salons. The ballad’s humble birth and lusty swagger landed it on the wrong side of the line dividing the Classical from its uncouth opposite, the Romantic. This made it the perfect vehicle for the poet who would knock the wig-wearers off their perch in the nineteenth century — a man who had no time for classicists or cafes. He announced his arrival in 1798 with a book of Ballads.
In William Wordsworth’s ‘Expostulation and Reply’, we find the poet by the side of the road, sitting on a rock, staring into space. A wandering classicist stops to lecture him: shouldn’t he be re-reading Horace or refining his couplets?
‘Why, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?
‘Where are your books? that light bequeath’d
To beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath’d
From dead men to their kind.’1
The man with the walking-stick wants Wordsworth to stop rambling about the countryside and get back to work. But what he doesn’t realise is that Wordsworth is at work — the forest is his office and the lake is his library. He doesn’t need the ‘spirit breath’d from dead men to their kind’, because he’s chosen to learn from the living. In the poem’s sequel, ‘The Tables Turned,’ he puts forward his case:
Books! ’Tis dull and endless strife,
Come, here the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music; on my life
There’s more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
And he is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.2
These two poems first appeared in a book called the Lyrical Ballads , published as a joint venture with Wordsworth’s friend Samuel T
aylor Coleridge in 1798. This little book would change English poetry forever, and the after-effects of its discoveries would be felt all over the English-speaking world. But the poet’s original intentions were humble enough. The previous year, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, had moved to Alfoxden, overlooking the Bristol Channel. Here, Dorothy had begun to keep a journal describing the sights and sounds of the countryside, and Wordsworth began some poems with the intention of doing the same thing in verse.
As he worked on these, it became increasingly clear to Wordsworth that the eighteenth-century’s rules for good poetry would be of no use to him whatsoever. Imitating Pope imitating Horace might help you make a big splash at the coffee house but out in the countryside, miles away from London and its whirlwind social life, different standards prevailed. It made no sense to describe the lives of tramps and cottage girls in the language of Pope and Dryden — who talks like that? Not the tramps and the little girls, that’s for sure. But classicism was equally useless for the task of describing Wordsworth’s impressions of nature, the ecstatic sense he had of a great spirit moving through all creation. How could he take a feeling like that and chop it up into pieces to make it fit some prefab idea of classical proportion?
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 3