Great Albums: Pinkerton

            There’s an old episode of the Fairly Oddparent’s where Timmy, the socially awkward 10-year-old protagonist, wishes to be the funniest kid in school. His fairy godparents grant it to him, but soon after he becomes the most popular kid in school, he finds himself miserable. No matter how earnestly he pleads to his classmates, no one will take him seriously. They can’t stop laughing.

            On the heels of the Blue Album’s quirky videos and catchy pop hooks, that’s roughly the situation Weezer found themselves in. They were popular, but they were at heart, a joke band. A novelty. A one-gimmick, cheap trick of a group whose sense of vapid fun flourished only because it served as the perfect antidote to the heavy Nirvana/Jeff Buckley/Pearl Jam soul searching of the era. Looking back on the album, frontman Rivers Cuomo said, “the language is so bizarre… [that the] reaction to that record was that these people are goofy… [that] there was no depth of emotion there.”

            From the opening of cracked distortion and slithering synthesizer notes—reminiscent of the thousands of old school videogame soundtracks that served as background noise for an entire generation’s pimply, overly caffeinated, blue-balled nights and early mornings of impotent discontent—it is clear that the band was eager to shake off the fuzzy image of the Blue Album and reveal the masturbating little spaz underneath the Eddie Haskell fascade. Cuomo’s voice breaks in, lethargically chanting “I’m tired” in a beaten down exhaustion, unheard since Lennon’s white album days, but just as you find yourself getting into the music, he finishes his thought, “so tired of having sex”. Immediately eyes begin rolling. Two minutes into the song and he’s yelping and carrying on about the shame and emptiness of tunneling through pussies that have been disconnected from any human or emotional contact; it really starts becoming too much. Yes, the emptiness of dehumanized sex—or on a grander scale, the ultimate despair that results from the aesthetic path in the Either/Or dilemma—is an artistically valid topic for a song, but do you have to be so goddamn trite about it? Do you have to be so fucking didactic?

            Actually yes, he does; that’s exactly the point. Like the plain-spoken howls and screeches and declarations of Plastic Ono Band before it, Cuomo aims to tear down the at-arms-length comfort of artistry, where things like metaphor and symbolism and even basic subtlety only stand to make the unsettling image safe or to relegate it to the detatched comfort zone of pseudo-intellectual conversation. In a sense, Pinkerton exists within the tradition of Accusatory Fiction—naked, first person accounts ranging from Camus’ The Fall to Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. These works, by bluntly thrusting a repellent or immoral charchter to the forefront, force the viewer, reader, (or in this case) listener to see that character in themselves, to be disturbed and unsettled.

            Of course, in its ragged production, distorted sound and rawly emotional lyrics, the album exists within another, more obvious tradition. From In Utero to Closer to the aforementioned Plastic Ono Band, Pinkerton exists within the tradition of the non-commercial follow-up—those albums in which an established artist, in a gesture of either artistic integrity or blind, fuck-you iconoclasm, delivers an unpolished, emotional screed of an album to the collective hand-wringing and threats of the record label.

But as the album moves along, hitting all the angsty notes in the non-commercial follow-up checklist, something seems off. After a lurching roller-coaster of an intro, the waltz, No Other One devolves into the pussy whipped cowardice of a man who chooses to stay with a girl who treats him like shit out of fear of being alone. The bursting rocker, Why Bother, devolves from its opening drum build into chanting choruses of emotional defeatism and self-fulfilling fatalism. By the time good ol’ Rivers is sneaking into girls’ rooms to read their diaries and fantacizing about a teenage Asian fan masturbating (the Asian fetish motif is a recurring one), it becomes clear that the despair and misery that Cuomo finds himself in isn’t some deep existential anguish, it’s just pathetic neurosis; the unsettling image he is presenting of himself isn’t of some grandiose darkness, it’s just sort of… creepy.

            Herein lies the album’s strength. Ask yourself: why is it that Taxi Driver works so brilliantly as a piece of Accusatorial Fiction, whereas something like There Will Be Blood fails so miserably. Both focus almost entirely on a single character and his path toward violence, after all. But whereas There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview exists within the operatic functions of the archtypical Heart of Darkness and speaks in glowering CAPITALIZED LETTERS, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle is just a guy who’s lonely, who makes clumsy passes at pretty girls and who desperately sucks up to authority figures for approval. Similarly, whereas an In Utero or a Closer showcase its darkness as an imposing black diamond gloom of existential angst and the turmoils of melancholy, Pinkerton, in its non-grandiose, non-romantic, downright pathetic darkness and angst, forces a more intimate experience. You can feel its warm, Cheeto reeking breath on the back of your neck. You don’t feel the need to go hang an image of Rivers Cuomo on your wall as you would for Ian Curtis or Kurt Cobain; you already see it in yourself.

I cannot tell you how hard I cringe every time I hear phrases like “artistically brave” or “edgy” used to describe some deep, dark portrayal or angst and depression. For something to be artistically brave or rebellious, it should be obvious that something needs to be risked—the way Lenny Bruce risked going to jail for saying “cocksucker” on stage. And yet, even today, any musician who slaps together some deep, brooding and vaguely suicidal imagery gets the nod. But what could possibly be cooler and more marketable than the image of the brooding, depressive artist? What could be less risky? Beyond the cringe-inducing absurdity of the depressive album as “bravery”—and that is not to say that an artist should withhold from expressing such emotions—is the more sinister question of why it is we are so drawn to them. After all, seriously depressive artists—Nick Drake, Sylvia Plath, Elliott Smith, Kurt Cobain—gain an undeniable aura of mythos. Their works become almost fetishized in their darkness. One obvious reason is that we want our emotional struggles to be validated through art. But there is something else in the psychology of why we are driven toward works that portray such depressive inescapable clouds.

I distinctly remember one day during my freshman year of college when I woke up in a state of absolute shit. I trudged through my day and through my classes in an oppressive haze of discontent and despair. I brooded deeply over the futility of my efforts. I wallowed in self-pity at my own hopelessness. I found my mind trudging every guilt and flaw and shortcoming from within me to the surface, to serve as salted wounds. But when I got out of my last class, I walked toward the train that would take me home and noticed the way the sun was shining through the clouds. I noticed the pretty girls walking in groups in their spring-time clothes. Things weren’t so bad. I was done with class, I was getting to go home, and pretty soon I’d be in my underwear, eating a bag of microwave popcorn and playing videogames.

I stopped in my tracks and nearly laughed out loud at myself. This was my great existential despair! I had to go to classes, and I didn’t get to play videogames, and I didn’t get to sleep in, and it just wasn’t fair, goddamnit! But, without even realizing it, I had submerged myself in guilt and angst and despair, because if it had just been something so trivial as what I just described, well, that would’ve made me a whiny little bitch, wouldn’t it?

            See, we romanticize and fetishize all these great darknesses and depressions and angsts and anguishes so to feel validated, so to feel tragic. Yes, yes, it is the tragic futility of the human condition and the unbreakable cloud of melancholy! No doubt these things do exist, but we are drawn to the image of them because they support the comfortably self-pitying belief that there is nothing that can be done—that in fact, we are the victims of our own suffering. If we were to cast off such beliefs than we would have no excuse but to leave the warm cocoon of hopelessness and the perverse joy of self-pity behind. Yes, there is the far extreme of psychotic depression, in which no act or situation, no matter how wondrous, can trigger the pleasure receptors in the brain and create joy. But the vast majority of all miserable, quasi artistic young people occupy the middle ground, where they could be, if not happy, at least less miserable if they’d just get off their ass and do something about it.

            And it is this occupation of the middle ground that makes Pinkerton and a downright revolutionary album. Cuomo refuses to take the comfort of that far extreme in his artistic voice. El Scorcho, arguably the greatest drinking song of all time, starts with the usual grunge-style externalization of misery with Cuomo angrily lamenting the cosmic unfairness of a girl who won’t talk to him, only to reach the realization “How stupid is it?/ For all I know you want me too/And maybe you just don't know what to do/ Or maybe you're scared to say: ‘I'm falling for you’”

            But such a realization in and of itself means nothing. The admission of guilt and personal responsibility for one’s own lot often turns into merely another form of narcissistic self-pity that manifests itself in a million ways, all of which are reminiscent of poor, tragic Marmeladov from Crime and Punishment who cries out “I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!” before punishing himself with another pitcher of beer—paid for by the money he stole from his starving family.

            No, an admission of responsibility means nothing without corresponding action, and that is just where the album turns. Admittedly, Cuomo’s effort’s toward emotional outreach and connection begin a bit clumsily—turns out she’s a lesbian—but by the infectious power-pop of Falling for You, a crucial turning point is reached.

After a vaguely familiar opening—the album was released the year before OK Computer, hmm—the song breaks into its falling, grungy guitars with Cuomo sneeringly listing his flaws so to drive away the person with whom he has finally found emotional connection. It is the death rattle of self-pity, subconsciously forcing itself to the surface so that it may destroy anything that may prove its fatalism wrong. But in spite of the residual doubts of a long stay in the cocoon of self pity, a plunge is made, and the last verse ends, ““I can't believe how bad I suck, it's true/ What could you possibly see in little ol' 3-chord me?/ But I do like you and you like me too/ I'm ready, let's do it baby!” In the last line there is a palpable giddiness in his voice. It is as though in the final line, he internalizes Dylan’s truth that when ya ain’t got nothing you got nothing to lose.

            Of course, an album like Pinkerton could not end on a note of such cut-and-dry positivity and sunniness. It would be inherently false. Instead the album does something interesting. Like The Violent Femmes debut, that great pimples and blue-balls classic before it, the album ends on a soft and bittersweet note. Gone are the distorted guitars and oppressive synths that had dominated the album. In their place is a simple acoustic guitar and Cuomo’s voice. Having caught a butterfly, having finally attained what he thought was truly meaningful, he wakes up the next morning only to find that it has whithered, and he is forced to apologize for doing what his body told him to. In having such a closer, the album reaches a perfect symmetry. The emptiness of meaningless sex. But whereas the opener was the crackling rocker of a man searching out meaningless sex, the closer is the soft apology of a man who only realizes that there was nothing there after finishing. And this is the great paradox of romantic connection—as long as the two concurrant drives of emotion and sex exist, and as long as the human consciousness is unable to distinguish from where its urges come from, a person will never be able to make an entirely genuine outreach. Like this splotchy little shit of an album, it will be tainted somehow. But that effort—that genuine effort that is almost pathetic in its earnestness—is made all the more meaningful by its apparent hopelessness.