Ever started to hate a band you once loved?

[The Curmudgeon]

So I think I hate Weezer, you guys.

Sad story; when the first Weezer album came out (the "Blue" album) it captured a moment in time, of the everyday loneliness and isolation some teenage kids feel ("In the Garage", a song about playing dungeons and dragons surrounded by your favourite bands posters and pictures of comic books could pretty much be my youth, minus the D&D). The second album was where I took the band to my heart like they were family. Pinkerton was, and is, a broken-hearted masterpiece. One of my favourite albums of all time. They took a lengthy hiatus as oddball frontman Rivers Cuomo went nuts, went back to college and then got his shit together again. Their third album was like meeting old friends and realising they were still as great as you'd remembered. The "Green" album was great.

And then.

Well, they never went away after that, content to write and record new albums pretty much every year, and the law of diminishing returns was never more apt than it was with Weezer. The fourth record, "Maladroit" had a few gems but nothing worth obsessing over and then.. well, shit. They recorded songs at the Playboy mansion. They recorded songs with Lil' Wayne. They recorded songs called "Everybody Get Dangerous" and songs about getting it on with girls, fucking everything that Weezer and Rivers absolutely were not. I get that you write about what's happening, and as the records sold and the likes of "Hash Pipe" became MTV friendly hits partying and getting laid will have become a regularity. But Weezer began to sound poisoned by their own success. This was not the same band I fell in love with.

I bought "Death to False Metal" recently, released after their eighth (fuck, EIGHTH!) album, and it's a bunch of out-takes and such that never made any album. It's not only not great, as is the standard with Weezer albums now, but it's the sort of album that makes you wonder why you liked them in the first place. If this was the first ever Weezer album I ever bought, there would not be a second.

For starters, check out the lyrics to "I'm a Robot."

I ride the train to work every day
I reach my cubicle about 9 am
I have to earn money to pay my bills
But I don't know how my life turned out this way

I'm a robot
I'm a robot
I don't have any feeling in my heart

Well, yeah, you'll find that's what everyone listening to this fucking album does, Rivers. It's called a job. Sucks, I know, but that's life. If this was the lyrics from some 19 year old kid hating the daily grind that would be one thing, but when it's coming from a 45 year old millionaire rockstar, you kind of sound a bit like a patronising prick. Some could see it as being "ironic", but when you think Weezer, you don't exactly think ironic tongue in cheek lyrics. Fucking Morrissey they ain't. And when the last track is a by the numbers guitar cover of the Toni Braxton ballad "Unbreak My Heart" I almost grabbed the disc and threw it out of the window. What. the. fuck. happened?

So yeah.. I'm pretty sure I hate Weezer now. A band I once loved, genuinely loved, are now officially out of the club.


Has this ever happened to you?

[trashcanman]

Nah. My love just fades to cold indifference. Aerosmith took over 30 years to get there, but they managed. Cuomo is a weird motherfucker, man. I saw an interview with him were he seemed so insanely clueless about anything that I wondered if he was joking a few times. He claimed their original sound was super-technical like Rush but when that didn't work they wrote the simplest songs they could and it worked. He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that a lot of people take his lyrics ironically. Nah, bro, that song was literally written about destroying my sweater and those homies really were dissin' my girl.

Is he not aware that without people growing, harvesting, trasnporting, and preparing his food he wouldn't have anything to eat and that people also get paid to build his instruments, home, vehicles, etc? It's one thing to take the capitalist system to task, but to shit on people like every last one of us should to be a professional musician and all of the menial tasks that make up a society would just take care of themselves so we can all rock is moronic at best.

[Ben]

Weezer has always been hit or miss for me, but I haven't heard a song I like by them in a decade. I can empathize with you, too, Curmudgeon. I used to be the biggest Megadeth fan around, and part of me will always love the vast majority of their catalog. But good Lord, their last two albums... It's one thing when a band gets boring after 15 years of quality music, but Megadeth traded away complexity, speed, and heaviness (the things that defined the band for two decades) for slight boosts in melody and accessibility. And the lyrics, my God, the lyrics!

"Burn, baby burn... 'cause it feels so good / Burn, baby burn... like I knew it would"

"It doesn't matter what car you drive, she'll wreck it
It doesn't matter where you sleep at night, she'll wreck it
It doesn't matter where you go to work
Doesn't matter where you go to church
Doesn't matter just how bad it hurts, she'll wreck it"

This coming from the man who once wrote songs about the Punisher and conjuring the dead. Can it get any more generic?

They've got a new album coming up soon, and I wasn't going to put my ears anywhere near it, but the first song released sounds pretty good so maybe hope isn't all lost. Nonetheless, for the past few years I've felt pretty distant from a band I used to eat, sleep, and breathe.

[trashcanman]

Those totally sound like Nickelback lyrics or some shit. I think I'll stick with their 80's stuff with occasional forays into the early to mid 90's if that's alright.