Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo just might be the most interesting man in music. On one hand he’s a small, quiet, awkward, geeky bundle of neuroses; yet on another, he’s a rock god, a stadium-filling, solo-shredding, lightning-Stratted riff machine.

He’s written songs and albums that sit comfortably in the pantheon of all-time greats, and some that everyone is best off pretending never happened. Occasionally there’ll be a year or so where it all goes weird and the band are suddenly an eight-piece and he claims he’s a rapper. Lots of his lyrics exist in a weird space where you can’t be certain how sincere or he’s being, and how many layers of irony or meta-ness he’s employing. How much irony is there in I Love The USA (his first song to ever employ profanity, a repeated ‘Fuck yeah, this place is great’)? What was the thought process during the creation of I Can’t Stop Partying? Are Weezer the only band to release a single (Back To The Shack) apologising for being a bit crap for the few years preceding it? And he’s kind of the world’s greatest troll. When people repeatedly got Weezer and Wheatus confused in interviews, Weezer started playing Teenage Dirtbag at shows. When a fan campaign to get Weezer to cover Africa by Toto went viral, they did so, but not before covering another Toto hit, Rosanna, and releasing that, baffling and infuriating people just for fun before delivering the real thing.

As befitting a band whose video came bundled with Windows 95, Weezer were early adopters of the internet, and the four-year break between Pinkerton and the Green Album coincided with a huge increase in online fan activity. Forums were where the action was in those pre-social networking, dial-up days, and Weezer were on it from the get-go, thanks largely to Karl Koch, the band’s archivist, webmaster, official historian and unofficial fifth member. In the days when there was still a huge barrier between artist and fan, they did more than most bands to tear that down, with daily updates from tours, live photos from every show and videos from a lot of them, all in an era long before technology made such things easy. The music video for Photograph, from the Green Album, uses a lot of the type of footage they were putting up there, in (if memory serves) now-defunct formats like RealPlayer.

Rivers himself would post in the forums, supposedly sometimes doing so anonymously as well. These days he’s rumoured to anonymously post on the r/Weezer subreddit, and has (along with his wife) contributed thousands of entries to lyric annotation database Genius, some of which have shed light on the meanings behind his songs and some of which are deliberately baffling. He has a mixed relationship with in-person fan interactions, sometimes shying away from them (describing his general response to people telling him their Weezer stories as “not gracious”) while sometimes going out of his way to meet them – he’s used Twitter to find football practice buddies in the past, and while writing the White Album used Tinder to chat with fans. In the past, he’s occasionally felt the need to clarify things after feeling he was being too flirtatious online, tweeting, “I would never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever cheat on my wife. Not in a million billion years.”

I would never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever cheat on my wife. Not in a million billion years. — Rivers Cuomo (@RiversCuomo) Thu Oct 08 06:02:41 +0000 2009

Rivers Cuomo seems to know exactly the place he inhabits, both in the pop culture landscape in general and in the hearts and minds of Weezer fans. Deciding to use that to drive his fans as nuts as possible is, well, up to him. It’s all part of his eternally interesting weirdness. He is king of the internet, and long may he reign. Words: Mike Rampton

Posted on July 20th 2018, 4:28pm