Weezer

Watching Weezer perform is a surreal experience. Cuomo, male-pattern-balding and dressed in sweater vest, no longer crouched behind a guitar but walking the stage with mic in hand and fist pumping, is less the boy-man abandoned on an ice floe during his post-Pinkerton (1996) sabbatical than an approximation of that boy-man. A reproduction that is ever so slightly off. He climbed scaffolding, ran into the crowd, and got so excited that he opened a bag of garbage all over the stage. (He apologized, noting it was “stupid” and that he “got carried away.”) They didn’t so much play “My Name is Jonas” as cover it, Cuomo climbing into the nearby VIP section and jumping up and down just like the overexcited Weezer fans standing up there. Other weirdly disorienting moments came when I realized that the drummer plays guitar now and has been replaced by some kind of arena-ready studio professional; when I noticed the girls next to me knew all the words not just to the old stuff—you know, that stuff with charm and guile, which I had taken for all that people actually liked, at least unironically—but to shit like “Beverly Hills” and the truly awful “Can’t Stop Partying”; or when the band covered MGMT and Lady Gaga.

Because though Weezer have been a really terrible band for a long time, you still assume they’re musicians. But they’ve moved steadily from semi-aware rock act—the one to which we extended all manner of assumptions, first and foremost that they were only as cheesy as they calculated was necessary to write something like “Buddy Holly”—to completely sincere rock act. A band not just for the fans, but for all intents and purposes by them; a mirror to the audience that swills back its immediate, sun-crazed desire to have some unthinking fun. The flip side of the nerd-pop they once wrote, one realizes with horror, is popular rock n’ roll—the notion that even if the meek did inherit the earth, they’d probably fuck it up in all the same ways as the popular rich jocks did. We should have known that Cuomo wasn’t telling us that KISS was his favorite rock group as a joke, or as adolescent nostalgia; KISS is actually his favorite fucking band. It’s a strange epiphany to have when you see his arena fantasies realized so successfully. The result is a band that is a complete riot to see live, but also totally empty—their hour and a half of throwing horns not so much communicating with the crowd as signifying at them.