My Friends' and Neighbors' Least Favorite Song of 2008

Weezer :: The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)”
from Weezer
(Geffen/Weezer; 2008)

I am a mess. Not all the time. But I can be a mess: fuck the neighbors. I’m sorry, were you talking? I’m sorry I’d rather hear this song than you talk. There are times when apropos of nothing I will fall on my knees and begin screaming; there are times when, as a quiet hangout softly slips into a get-together and then a party, I will preempt all exchanges and become the roadmap of sloppiness to follow.

This song is the soundtrack to those moments. Alan and I already penned a near-Satanic exegesis of the implications of Cuomo’s “Red Album,” and Dave Ritter already addressed this song’s outrageousness, but I have spent the better part of the past six months doing victory laps with it just the same, dragging the muddied gore of Cuomo’s corpus about with me and creating rivers of ejaculant falsetto. I have regaled family members and acquaintances alike with my thoughts on it. I have run in place to this song, invented new dances. I have air-piano’d, conducted choirs of myself. I have transcended my most obnoxious personality traits, congealed them, become someone new within the singularity of this song’s expansiveness. I have ascended into Heaven to it. I am, after all, the greatest man that ever lived. I am a mess.