Artist: Weezer
Album: Raditude
Year: 2009
Grade: 0.5 pretzels
Some bands reward fan loyalty. Other bands are Weezer.
What a rollercoaster career Weezer have had. They started as a nerdy little rock band in California, championing Cheap Trick while everyone else had moved on to embrace Nirvana. Then there was 1996’s Pinkerton, which was a startlingly frank and revealing window into frontman Rivers Cuomo’s inner life. Then the first of several hiatuses, then the return in 2001 with The Green Album, then the confusing and oft-forgotten Maladroit in 2002. Finally, in 2005, they released the horribly disappointing Make Believe, dominating the charts with “Beverly Hills” but dividing their fan base in the process. Breakup rumors flew like crazy and it looked like Weezer were finally over. They would end on a low note, but the strength of their previous work was still fresh in people’s minds.
But that’s not what happened. Instead of bowing out when it was clear the creative juices weren’t flowing, Weezer rose from the grave and released last year’s The Red Album, which featured one classic Weezer single (“Pork And Beans”) and nine other songs that weren’t even worthy of being b-sides. That album felt (and continues to feel) overwhelming lazy, as if the band were rummaging through every dusty corner of their past to throw an album together with a minimum of work. For fans already reeling from the sting of Make Believe, The Red Album felt like the last straw. Please, lord, let Weezer disappear before they embarrass themselves any further.
Again, that’s not what happened. Instead, they recorded Raditude, an album so confusing and contradictory to everything that Weezer has released previous to this that it makes the listener wonder if they’re even listening to the same band that recorded “My Name Is Jonas” so long ago. Listening to Raditude is like falling through a vortex of the worst modern pop culture trends, all blended together into some excruciating smoothie. You’ve got the cloying ballad “Put Me Back Together”, co-written with half of the All-American Rejects. You’ve the club-synth-driven “Can’t Stop Partying”, featuring a guest verse for none other than Lil’ Wayne, delivering his usual scattershot of batshit lyrics (“Please don’t shoot me down because I’m an endangered species”). And if that wasn’t enough, you’ve got “Love Is The Answer”, which, I shit you not, is a Bollywood song. A fuckin’ Bollywood song, with sitars and everything. Just…wow…there are no words that can express my sense of betrayal.
It’s not the genre experiments that are irritating about Raditude; it’s the fact that they’re done so badly. Rivers’ lyrics have degenerated from piercing jabs at a culture that shunned him (see Pinkerton’s “Tired Of Sex”) to desperate, pitiful attempts to be accepted by that culture instead. The hard-rock-ish “In The Mall” is so brain-dead (“no place better…in the mall…”) that it makes a running joke on the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother (featuring a fictional Canadian 90s hit titled “Let’s Go To The Mall”) sound preferable. Add in songs with titles like “The Girl Got Hot” and “Trippin’ Down The Freeway” and you’ve got to wonder just who exactly Rivers is writing these songs for. Once he wrote for the losers and creeps that defined the 90s. Now, he seems to be writing for a non-existent suburban audience that enjoys ham-fisted clichés, depthless lyrics and overproduced power chords.
Raditude sounds like it wants to liked so much. Cuomo’s songs feel like they were written with a “something for everyone” approach, carefully calculated to be what Rivers perceives the world to want. The problem is that, in doing so, Weezer (let us not forget the other three band members involved) have destroyed any sense of their own identity as a band. There’s almost nothing tying these ten mismatched songs together. They literally could have been recorded by ten different bands. Even the lead single, “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To”, is a song that should be left off all future Weezer best-of compilations. Raditude is a complete embarrassment from a once-great band, proving that this group of misfits we loved a decade ago have changed beyond all recognition. This is an album that cannot be forgotten soon enough.
What a rollercoaster career Weezer have had. They started as a nerdy little rock band in California, championing Cheap Trick while everyone else had moved on to embrace Nirvana. Then there was 1996’s Pinkerton, which was a startlingly frank and revealing window into frontman Rivers Cuomo’s inner life. Then the first of several hiatuses, then the return in 2001 with The Green Album, then the confusing and oft-forgotten Maladroit in 2002. Finally, in 2005, they released the horribly disappointing Make Believe, dominating the charts with “Beverly Hills” but dividing their fan base in the process. Breakup rumors flew like crazy and it looked like Weezer were finally over. They would end on a low note, but the strength of their previous work was still fresh in people’s minds.
But that’s not what happened. Instead of bowing out when it was clear the creative juices weren’t flowing, Weezer rose from the grave and released last year’s The Red Album, which featured one classic Weezer single (“Pork And Beans”) and nine other songs that weren’t even worthy of being b-sides. That album felt (and continues to feel) overwhelming lazy, as if the band were rummaging through every dusty corner of their past to throw an album together with a minimum of work. For fans already reeling from the sting of Make Believe, The Red Album felt like the last straw. Please, lord, let Weezer disappear before they embarrass themselves any further.
Again, that’s not what happened. Instead, they recorded Raditude, an album so confusing and contradictory to everything that Weezer has released previous to this that it makes the listener wonder if they’re even listening to the same band that recorded “My Name Is Jonas” so long ago. Listening to Raditude is like falling through a vortex of the worst modern pop culture trends, all blended together into some excruciating smoothie. You’ve got the cloying ballad “Put Me Back Together”, co-written with half of the All-American Rejects. You’ve the club-synth-driven “Can’t Stop Partying”, featuring a guest verse for none other than Lil’ Wayne, delivering his usual scattershot of batshit lyrics (“Please don’t shoot me down because I’m an endangered species”). And if that wasn’t enough, you’ve got “Love Is The Answer”, which, I shit you not, is a Bollywood song. A fuckin’ Bollywood song, with sitars and everything. Just…wow…there are no words that can express my sense of betrayal.
It’s not the genre experiments that are irritating about Raditude; it’s the fact that they’re done so badly. Rivers’ lyrics have degenerated from piercing jabs at a culture that shunned him (see Pinkerton’s “Tired Of Sex”) to desperate, pitiful attempts to be accepted by that culture instead. The hard-rock-ish “In The Mall” is so brain-dead (“no place better…in the mall…”) that it makes a running joke on the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother (featuring a fictional Canadian 90s hit titled “Let’s Go To The Mall”) sound preferable. Add in songs with titles like “The Girl Got Hot” and “Trippin’ Down The Freeway” and you’ve got to wonder just who exactly Rivers is writing these songs for. Once he wrote for the losers and creeps that defined the 90s. Now, he seems to be writing for a non-existent suburban audience that enjoys ham-fisted clichés, depthless lyrics and overproduced power chords.
Raditude sounds like it wants to liked so much. Cuomo’s songs feel like they were written with a “something for everyone” approach, carefully calculated to be what Rivers perceives the world to want. The problem is that, in doing so, Weezer (let us not forget the other three band members involved) have destroyed any sense of their own identity as a band. There’s almost nothing tying these ten mismatched songs together. They literally could have been recorded by ten different bands. Even the lead single, “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To”, is a song that should be left off all future Weezer best-of compilations. Raditude is a complete embarrassment from a once-great band, proving that this group of misfits we loved a decade ago have changed beyond all recognition. This is an album that cannot be forgotten soon enough.
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