Nostalgia Kick: The Weezer Mix

As this is vaguely a music entry, it goes in the Vox and gets LJ-linked.

So, in cleaning out my room (a momentous task - getting everything off the floor has left my bed full; I am sleeping on the couch tonight) I have, understandably, come across a great many burned CD of yesteryear. They all induce some form of nostalgia, whether embarassing anime mixes of my high school days or my "summer mixes" of my college years. A few of them are cromulent (hell, I found the Utena soundtrack and, being a sucker for pretentious rock chorales and elephant-chasing curry adventures, felt compelled to rip it) but one stood out to me as I gathered up the mix-cds of my past for garbage consideration: a single emblazoned =W=. At some point in my shady past, I made a Weezer Mix CD.

The memories came flooding back: "I remember listening to Weezer for a week or two several years ago!" Specifically, I remember that it was the week I had my wisdom teeth out. I liked the barbershop-style harmony in "Don't Let Go" and for some reason decided that the Green Album - and whatever else I felt like downloading that week - was the perfect accompaniment for painful dental surgery and vicodin-hazed recovery.

Try as I might to enjoy Weezer, and guilty pleasure they may have been, I can't entirely forgive them for the creation of sweater rock. Sure, Pinkerton's fucked-up contradictions and generally destabilizing vibe had a certain charm back in the day, but the spell's been broken. (There's another serious problem I have with Weezer, and that's their sweatered, bespectacled, indie-music-store fans: the ones who think everything after Pinkerton was blatant selling-out. I will happily argue that The Green Album and Maladroit were perfectly well-crafted albums, if only to piss these people off. Said fans moved on to deep-throating Thom Yorke years ago, anyway.)

The simple truth is that I do enjoy some of Weezer's songs, but never felt myself immersed or enamored with a particular album. Thus the mystery deepens: Why did I opt to spend a week of painful surgical recovery exploring a band I had never been particularly deeply into? Perhaps it was because Weezer had essentially come and gone; I had the band's history to contend with, and could listen to  and trace the evolution of their sound. Maybe the stars were just misaligned and I missed the fad until that week. Or maybe Weezer was just bland and comfortable, like the broth and soups I had to eat for a couple of days. (Fun fact: I insisted on going out for Pho IMMEDIATELY after my surgery.) It wasn't a bad way to start off the summer in which I discovered some of my favorite bands - that was the year I discovered Metric, after all. But last week I fired up the Metric discography and took a binge. Up until today, I had literally forgotten Weezer existed. Why?

Ignoring the fact that Metric is undoubtedly a much, much, MUCH  better band, I think the key lies in diversity of style and energy. Plus, Weezer is all well and good when you're sitting in your room with swollen cheeks and a vicodin-induced coma (they are warm and comfortable, like a sweater that comes unraveled by the hand of a vaguely oedipal fixation on TV moms and Japanese girls), but have you ever tried driving to them?

We can trace Weezer to an era of beige/brown combos and analogize them to clothes from the Gap or Old Navy. Hello Stranger, and the bands I tend to really love, on the other hand, embody a resurgance of energy and color - American Apparel, if you will. And frankly, I never shopped at the Gap, and only liked Old Navy for a short month of some forgotten summer, too.

Even then, I felt the need to make Weezer a little more interesting: the mix CD ends with numbers from The Jealous Sound, Spitz, and Reel Big Fish (oh, ska music, you came and went far too soon).

Speaking of which, my holiday mix CD for 2006 is complete. Anyone who wants a copy should email or IM me your address. In a year, will I listen to this mix again and reflect the same way? Oh, and there's no Weezer on it. I promise.