Saw an interesting item on the ten year anniversary of the release of Weezer's sophomore album Pinkerton. I've dug Pinkerton from the first. It was released the day after I landed in Spain for my yearlong sojourn on the Iberian peninsula. I heard the first single (El Scorcho) on Barcelona radio and bought the CD at Virgin Records on the Passeig de Gracia. The album was considered a failure by the music industry. It only went gold and caused lead singer/writer Rivers Cuomo to spiral into a depression culminating with him living in an apartment with the walls all painted black for a year. The guitars were harder edged, the lyrics overtly emotional and the chords a bit all over the place for standard radio fare. I thought it was awesome.A strange thing soon happened. Other gen-x'ers, fed up with Nirvana clones, began picking up the album and digging it. Soon it became a cult classic. It is often considered the album that kicked off the emo movement...or at least one of the pillars of that style of alternative music. Several years later Rolling Stone changed its review from worst allum of 1996 to one of rock's classics. It has since gone platinum and is considered one of Weezer's best albums and one of the best albums of the 1990's.
The article I was reading compared it to The Empire Strikes Back, saying that Empire was darker and harder edged than Star Wars: A New Hope. Many people didn't get it at the time and only appreciated it later as the best of the trilogy (Don't even mention the other crappy films in the series!). Sometimes it takes time to recognize genius. I like all the songs on Pinkerton (named after the opera Madame Butterfly), but my favorites are The Good Life, Why Bother, and Across the Sea. Ten years. Man I'm getting old.
