Weezer’s first album is almost the blueprint (no pun intended) for the adolescence of my generation, those of us who came of age in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Released in 1994 barely a month after the untimely suicide of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, Weezer keeps the distorted crunch of grunge but eschews nearly all of its other encumbering detritus, favoring a Pop oriented songwriting style favored by classic 80’s bands like The Cars, whose lead singer Rick Ocasek produced the record. While music critics would point to Nirvana or Pearl Jam as the examples of the “regular guy” music trope (which they most certainly looked like in contrast to the hair metal clowns they deposed), Weezer were four actual regular guys. Their album cover features them standing in a straight line against a blue background, each wearing an outfit that looks cribbed from their closet floors. These guys could have walked right off of any college campus in America, and therein lay so much of the appeal.

As an adolescent, what I loved about Weezer was that they were cool while being decidedly “not cool.” They wore their geek and heavy metal influences on their sleeve without any irony, at a time in the 1990’s where pop culture was having a collective knee-jerk reaction to the excess of the previous decade. As children of the 70’s and teens of the 80’s, they understood and were able to connect with their generation on a level that transcended the usual reactionary nihilism championed by so much of the Seattle scene.

What was also easy to connect with was the way they used their music and its associated promotional tools (music videos, album cover, interviews) to each project their own identity. Like The Beatles or KISS, each member of the four-piece was distinct from the whole and yet was integral to it. While Rivers Cuomo was most definitely the frontman, composing most of the songs and singing lead vocals on all of them, Brian Bell, Matt Sharp, and Patrick Wilson each contributed to the band’s irreverent identity. This irreverence is on full display on the single “Buddy Holly” and its accompanying video which places the band in the TV show “Happy Days” with the use of reconstructed sets and some clever editing by Director Spike Jonze. With an opening verse that parodies contemporary Rap and a chorus that that appropriates two Pop Culture icons (Buddy Holly and Mary Tyler Moore) as romantic metaphor, “Buddy Holly” showcased the band’s enthusiasm for the Popular Culture of their youth, an enthusiasm that pervades the rest of the album.

The song that had the greatest effect on me was “In The Garage”, a song that finds Cuomo detailing his introversion by describing the one place he feels most safe and secure. Surrounded by the Dungeon Master’s guide and 12-sided die of Dungeons & Dragons, Kitty Pride and Nightcrawler of X-Men, and posters on the wall of his “favorite Rock group KISS,” Cuomo is openly and proudly identifying with his Geek roots without a shred of irony or self-consciousness. As a kid, I too spent long hours in my room listening to Rock music, playing video games, watching Television, reading Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. But like Weezer, I also felt like a “regular” kid. I had a lot of friends, I was not especially shy once I got to know my surroundings, and I very much enjoyed making people laugh. I did not fit in to the stereotype of a Geek as portrayed with such blatant exaggeration as the Popular Culture of the 1980’s and 90’s. And that is precisely because that stereotype did not exist in real life. Kids who liked Dungeons & Dragons, or Science Fiction, or classic Literature in the end were just kids like anyone else. They had different interests, but there were no real divisions except the ones that we created in our minds. Hearing “In The Garage” as an adolescent made me realize just how ridiculous those social divisions were. One could like Comic Books, Rock Music, Social Justice, Team Sports, Poetry, History, Video Games, Track and Field, and anything else they wanted to without fear of ridicule and stigmatization from any and all sides. I used the blueprint put forward on The Blue Album as a tool to become a social butterfly. It made no sense to me to be friends with one group of people I liked and not another. Whether intentional or not, Weezer created a manifesto for the great bulldozing of teenage social classes.

What is truly amazing is how often The Blue Album became a literal symbol of those barriers being broken down. When I was in Middle and High School, people who seemed to have nothing in common would almost inevitably both own a copy of The Blue Album. At school dances (which for some reason played an awful lot of Alternative Rock that one could absolutely not dance to) “Buddy Holly” and “Undone (The Sweater Song)” always elicited hearty approval from each of the cliques as they remained painfully self-segregated in our school cafeteria. Whether it was a stoner who wore one of two Nirvana T-Shirts he seemed to own every single day with the same pair of torn jeans or a well-dressed Sweeper for our Division I Field Hockey Team, Weezer would almost certainly be in that intersection of two sets on their interpersonal Venn Diagram. Weezer had something for anyone and were respected by pretty much everyone. It would play at almost every house party I attended up through graduation (back when people played full albums at parties), and when I made my first friends in college, the soundtrack was an old cassette of The Blue Album blared through the speakers of my friend Geoff’s Lincoln Town Car as we drove around the Pioneer Valley at all hours.

It’s been nearly twenty years since The Blue Album was released. In that time, the world of Pop Culture has seen more than its fair share of ebb and flow, with Rock music especially seeing a long, strange trip from the end of Grunge through the dark period of Rap-Metal, the millennial mainstream popularity of Emo, along with the long, steady stream of Indie Rock along the way content to follow its own path without making much ado about nothing. The Blue Album exists at a strange intersection of so many trends: The volume of Grunge, the slacker creed of Indie Rock, the unabashed intellect of Nerd Rock, the earnestness of Emo, and the melody of Power Pop. It is an album that continues to inform a generation of Millennials who see no contradiction in having a seeming disparate set of influences inform who they are and who they will become. But for me, most importantly, it is a tender reminder of my own coming-of-age (one that I am certain to see through rose-colored glasses) ever-waiting within the space of these 10 great songs.