Chapter 1:

INTRODUCTION

In the closing days of the summer of 1994, the band Weezer emerged onto the alternative music scene with their radio hit “Undone (The Sweater Song).” A quirky song comparing failing romance to an unraveling sweater, “Undone” launched the band to national prominence and proved the first of three successful singles off of their self-titled first album. Over the next year and a half, the band developed a strong popular following, particularly among young people, and sold over a million copies of their debut record. However, along with this popular success, the band attained a near-pariah status among the music press; framed by detractors as a packaged-and-sold novelty act, Weezer earned a reputation as a “flavor of the month” destined to be forgotten as a meaningless commercial act. The public’s reception of their 1996 sophomore effort Pinkerton seemingly confirmed this account of the band. Named the second worst record of the year by a Rolling Stone critics’ poll, Pinkerton proved a commercial disappointment, falling off the music sales charts in a matter of weeks. Following a series of tours that failed to revive the band’s popular appeal, Weezer, seemingly finished, went on hiatus in fall 1997.

Then, however, something peculiar occurred. After lying idle for nearly three years, Weezer reemerged in the summer of 2000 as a wildly popular and highly respected band. Weezer concerts sold out within minutes, a series of articles portrayed Pinkerton as a lost classic, and Weezer, at one point considered a throwaway act, suddenly garnered respect from the very same music press that had once reviled it. With the release of the band’s second eponymous CD in 2001, Weezer once again achieved chart success and critical, selling over a million copies of its new album and finding the record placed on a significant number of critics’ “best of 2001” lists. This remarkable turnaround is puzzling. How does an album named the second worst release of the year get transformed into a “classic” over a three year time span? Moreover, what does it mean for a record to be labeled a “failure” or a “classic”?

In the pages that follow, I investigate these questions by establishing a model of how the artistic merits of rock music are appraised. Utilizing the institutional framework and terminology Pierre Bourdieu establishes in his “Market of Symbolic Goods,” I frame rock music as a middlebrow art that regards itself as possessing certain elements of highbrow “legitimate” art – namely “symbolic value” beyond a work’s value as a market commodity. I then use this institutional framework and aesthetic ideology to investigate the process by which Weezer’s reputation changed dramatically over time. Examining data from several sources: an original survey of 150 music writers, an original survey of 20,000 Weezer fans, original interviews with music writers and editors, and an analysis of a sample of 2000 articles and reviews mentioning Weezer, I argue that a strong fan following led to a reconsideration of Weezer’s artistic merits by the music press and altered the vocabulary used to discuss the band. I ultimately conclude that a number of parties play a role in deliberating claims of artistic value in rock music: music writers, artists, fans, and the commercial interests that employ writers and artists.

In chapter two, I outline Bourdieu’s institutional framework and then investigate the various institutions within the rock community, evaluating the role each plays in the consecration of work as having this surplus symbolic value and outline the aesthetic criteria this matrix of agents advance. I briefly discuss the history of claims of rock as art and examine how the ideals of the rock community stem from these historical contingencies. I then discuss how such ideals structure the various institutions which make claims as to the artistic merits of rock music.

In the third chapter, I elaborate upon the culture of music criticism examining some of the norms of modern music criticism, ideological fractures within the discipline and occupational differences within the larger category of music writing. This discussion is built upon a national survey of music critics and interviews with several of the critics. I specifically explore the importance of historical context, genre histories, and authenticity, and explain how these concepts affect interpretation of alternative rock music from 1994 to 2001.

In chapter four, I provide a broad outline of Weezer’s career followed by an examination of Weezer’s reputation from 1994 to 1996. Utilizing a sample of pieces written on Weezer during this time and interviews with critics, I discuss the various images of Weezer presented in the press and held by various music writers. In particular, I examine Weezer’s placement in the traditions of “geek-rock,” “ironic” alternative rock, corporate rock and pop-rock, and discuss how those particular placements affected judgments of Weezer’s authenticity, originality and broader merit.

In chapter five, I outline the development of the Weezer fan base during the period 1994 to 2001. Using a survey of 20,000 Weezer fans, I outline the demographic changes the Weezer fan base has undergone and how those changes are reflected in taste patterns of the fans. I then show the importance of social networks in developing and growing the Weezer fan base, and how these fan networks have resulted in a particularly mobilized fan base. I explore the ways that this mobilization is evidenced in the development of an online community which developed in the closing years of the 1990’s and the means by which fans advanced an image of Weezer different from the those that had predominated in the music press between 1994 and 1997.

Finally, in chapter six, I examine how the music press has portrayed Weezer since the band returned from hiatus in 2000. I scrutinize images of Weezer as a cult favorite and the band’s sophomore effort Pinkerton as a classic album and argue that popular notions of Weezer advanced by its fans, the changing norms of the “modern rock” scene (the successor of alternative rock), fans’ importance as consumers, and the development of the “emo” music scene each played a significant role in the revision of Weezer’s image and history.





Chapter 2:

ROCK AS ART – AN INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS

Ask most any music critic and he’ll tell you that The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds was an “important” record, a great artistic achievement. Ask a rock aficionado about the Velvet Underground, and she’ll explain how the band laid the foundation for the gritty aesthetic of punk music and modern day “garage rock.” Rock music today has developed its own aesthetic ideology, its own history, its own standards of greatness that can be cited by its fans, artists and critics. Where do these aesthetic notions come from, who constructed this history, and how have the “great records” been anointed as great records?

Such questions ultimately lie at the heart of a sociological study of art, an examination of the standards governing the activity and an inquiry into the institutions and norms that structure the discipline. The approach taken here is based on the model outlined by C.J. Rees in his piece “Advances in the Empirical Sociology of Literature and the Arts: The Institutional Approach.” Rees argues that an “institutional analysis makes it plain that the activities of all literary institutions jointly contribute – albeit in varying degree and in very different ways – to the kind of (surplus) value an artwork is thought to possess.” This research program entails, first, identifying the various institutions and agents at work to instigate this belief in the value of art as art and, second, examining the “kind[s] of statement . . .accepted as the model of ‘legitimate’ aesthetic judgment” and the “groups for which such statements acquire the status of (‘legitimate’) aesthetic judgments.”

While much has been written about various elements of the rock community – particularly the influence and character of the music press, the nature of fandom, and the sociology of the production of music –little empirical work has been done on the ways in which rock as an activity mediates disputes about the aesthetic value of its works. This project, then, seeks to provide a fuller institutional account of the assignment of symbolic value within the world of rock. It uses a specific case study to examine the micro-processes underpinning the institutions and agents that constitute this area of cultural production.

This chapter aims to examine claims of surplus symbolic value in rock music by identifying the agents and institutions that have yielded the aesthetic standards by which rock is assessed. Symbolic value, here, is used as a measure of a work’s artistic merit – some appreciation of a good beyond the item’s value as a commodity. Of course, this term begs the question of what artistic merit is and how one separates an item’s value as a commodity from its value as art. These however are precisely the issues this paper aims to address. In order to explicate these concepts, I examine how Pierre Bourdieu’s institutional description of a “highbrow/legitimate” art world and a middlebrow art world maps onto the world of rock music. I contend that rock music represents an “intermediate” activity – one that reflects elements of both highbrow and middlebrow art. I describe rock music as an activity that, like a highbrow art, claims its goods hold a surplus symbolic value but, like middlebrow art, lacks institutional authority and “autonormativity,” the ability for institutions to independently define aesthetic standards without input from the masses. I then embellish upon Bourdieu’s barebones treatment of intermediate activities by outlining the history of claims of rock-as-art, the ideology underpinning this conception of rock, and the composition and function of the agents and institutions mediating debates about the symbolic value of rock music.

Bourdieu’s Sociology of Art

Bourdieu establishes an institutional framework to investigate art from a sociological perspective. A proper sociology of art, Bourdieu contends, requires an investigation of the relations between a piece of art, its producer, and the various institutions in the “fields of production” in which cultural goods are created. Attempting to account for the “system of relations of production and circulation of symbolic goods,” Bourdieu sets out to explain how modern fields of cultural production function: the factors influencing the production of “symbolic goods,” the differentiated ways in which they are instilled with value, and the institutions which mediate such processes.

Accordingly, Bourdieu’s model regards the meaning and symbolic value of a cultural good as a consequence of the position of the piece’s producer “within the system of social relations and production and circulation.” Rather than arguing that an object’s meaning completely resides in the artist’s intentions, Bourdieu frames the artist as a single node in a web of institutions, including legitimating authorities and the market. This model of the art world, then, portrays aesthetic decisions as acutely social. Bourdieu argues that even “the most personal judgments” one may make about a work are the product of a series of social phenomena: how the artist framed her concept to the publisher, how the publisher presented the cultural object to its particular public, and the previous relations between the artist and the critic.

Bourdieu argues for the existence of two distinct fields of production: “the field of restricted production (FRP),” wherein “economic profit is secondary to enhancement of the product’s symbolic value,” and “the field of large-scale production (FLP),” wherein economic value is the primary concern and wherein products are “hardly rated at all on the scale of symbolic values.” For Bourdieu, each of these fields has its own institutions, its own means of legitimizing cultural products, its own means of defining itself in relation to other fields, its own economics, and its own ideology.

Bourdieu traces the development of the fields of restricted and large-scale production to the growing independence of artists from the “aristocratic and ecclesiastical tutelage” that marked the art world throughout the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the beginning of the classical age. The economic and social developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries stimulated a growing “public of potential consumers” and an “increasing social diversity,” factors which helped facilitate a modicum of economic independence for the artist and “competing principle[s] of legitimacy.” Against this economic backdrop, a “socially distinguishable category of professional artists and intellectuals” began to emerge and establish its own normative standards relatively independent from the demands of the mass market. Concurrently, a number of “competing” institutions “having the power to consecrate” works with cultural legitimacy began to emerge: academies, salons, publishers, “theatrical impresarios,” etc. With the spreading industrial revolution, the market for art exploded: literature became cheaper to print and widely available and the increasingly educated public formed a growing consumer base for the artists’ work.

However, this growth in the commerce of art revealed a fundamental tension within the art world. “Symbolic goods,” Bourdieu asserts, “are a two faced reality”; one the one hand, the art is culturally “consecrated” for its symbolic value, but on the other hand, art, as an item sold through a market for a price, is reduced “to the status of a simple article of merchandise.” Among artists, then, this commercialism fueled a backlash against “art-as-commodity” and an “affirm[ation] of the irreducibility of the work of art.” This “Romanticist reaction,” as Bourdieu tags it, ultimately aimed to redefine the “representation of culture as a kind of superior reality, irreducible to the vulgar demands of economics” as well as to “distinguish the artist and intellectual from other commoners by posing the unique products of ‘creative genius’ against interchangeable products” whose value was derived from their market value. These tensions within the art world, then, ultimately created of a rift between the “field of restricted production (FRP)”– art-as-pure-symbolism created for and judged by other artists – and the “field of large-scale cultural production (FLP),” which aimed to achieve “the largest possible market” for its cultural goods.

The FRP has maintained the autonomy sought by the artists aiming to secure the purely symbolic value of art. Bourdieu argues that the FRP has developed its own private norms by which to evaluate and consecrate great works, thereby distancing this art world from the aesthetic whims of the public. The interpretation of artwork of the FRP – the evaluation of its meaning and symbolic worth – rests solely in the hands of those educated in the norms of the community; consequently, the “intelligibility of works” stems from the “‘inspired readings” of initiated critics, rather the judgments of the “public of non-producers.” Establishing a “public at once of critics and accomplices,” the FRP tends to “obey its own logic,” an internally validating practice wherein the field’s members retain the power to “define its own criteria for the production and evaluation of its products.”

Enabling the autonomy of the FRP are a number of institutions and agents that society views as legitimate authorities to evaluate highbrow art. Bourdieu argues that this constellation of institutions not only articulates and debates the meaning of works but also legitimates the autonomous art world and trains new generations of producers and informed critics in the criteria that have been developed and the histories written about the discipline. For Bourdieu, academies, museums, “learned societies,” and the education system form the core institutions within the field; “academies and the corps of museum curators . . . claim a monopoly over the consecration of contemporary producers,” while “the educational system claims a monopoly over the consecration of the past and over the production of consecration of cultural consumers.”

In addition to these “fully institutionalized” bodies, other agents play important roles in the consecration and interpretation of artwork: “literacy cenacles, critical circles, salons, and small groups surrounding a famous author or associating with a publisher, a review or a literary or artistic magazine.” The relations within the field ultimately define the role of any particular agent, and as such, the function of these partially-institutionalized bodies varies. The FRP’s network of agents and institutions “fulfills a function homologous to that of the church:” “defending the sphere of legitimate culture against competing, schismatic or heretical messages, which may provoke radical demands and heterodox practices among various publics, the system of conservation and cultural consecration.” Thus this matrix maintains the field’s independence from larger society, at once preserving the field’s ideology and legitimacy and acting as a locus for debate about how to incorporate new work into the field’s canon.

Having established this overview of the FRP, Bourdieu explains specifically how the “public meaning” of a work is mediated within the field by examining the work’s “circulation and consumption” throughout the “agents and institutions” of the FRP. Submitting his or her work to this network of consecrating agents and institutions, the artist initiates the arbitration of the work’s meaning, implicitly making a claim about the work’s place in the orthodoxy and its “cultural legitimacy.” In order to guide the interpretation of his or her work, the artist must place the work within “the historically available cultural taxonomies,” while articulating the distinct qualities – “a specialty, a manner, a style” – that the work offers. Various agents within the FRP – museum curators, art/literary societies, academies, other artists – then make particular claims about the meaning and value of the work.

Bourdieu contends that the circulation of a cultural good is a twofold process, at once generating a public meaning for the work and refining collective notions of cultural legitimacy. Within the field’s network of agents and institutions, a continual battle takes place between various claims to orthodoxy: “The FRP can never be dominated by one orthodoxy without continuously being dominated by the . . . question of criteria defining the legitimate exertion of a certain type of cultural practice.” Thus, in their judgments about the place of a cultural good in the canon, the consecrating agents reshape the boundaries of the canon, refining the aesthetic principles governing that activity.

In contrast to this autonomous, institutionally legitimized system, the FLP is marked by a dependence on the population writ-large, both as a source of economic support and as the determiner of the content of the work. Bourdieu contends that art produced within the FLP, or “middlebrow art,” is aimed at the “‘average’ public” with the goal being to garner the largest portion of the market possible. Whereas the value of high-brow art is mediated by the FRP’s institutions, the value of a piece of middle-brow art depends on its marketability, and as such, work within the FLP is driven by “the quest for investment profitability.” Thus, while art produced within both the FRP and the FLP may be assessed an economic value, the value of a cultural good produced within FLP is dependent on the number of individuals who are willing to pay, say, twenty-five dollars for a Danielle Steele novel, and the economic value of an object in the FRP is a consequence of the symbolic value the item has been accorded by legitimate authorities and institutions.

To flesh out his conception of the FLP, Bourdieu cites an interview with a writer who aims to write a book “to be easily read by the widest possible public.” Rather than aiming to satisfy the particular, possibly esoteric, aesthetic of the community of legitimized writers, the author wishes to resonate with the average reader who may not be particularly culturally literate. Bourdieu argues that a consequence of the economic focus of the FLP is that symbolic goods in this domain tend to be “socially neutralized” – products are made to be purposefully unchallenging in an attempt to maximize accessibility. Writing is seen as a technical craft for the producer within the FLP; the artist is challenged to refine his tools such that he can create a work that appeals to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people. The book, here, is declared a successfully written piece if it succeeds in reaching and affecting a significant portion of the market. One might contrast the task of this writer to that of an abstract painter whose works are imbued with meaning by legitimate cultural institutions. While in the former case, the voices of the populace are the measuring stick by which the work is judged, in the latter case, the opinions of the populace are subordinated to the judgments of legitimate cultural authorities: members of academies, museums, and high-brow art journals.

While “The Market of Symbolic Goods” provides a useful framework for evaluating two institutional networks that bestow symbolic goods with value –the market/population-at-large and a separate autonomous world of “legitimate” critics – most artwork seems to fall somewhere in between the two caricatured models Bourdieu constructs. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find an artist within the FLP who regards her work as a mere commodity without artistic value. While Bourdieu does seem to leave room for a “range of intermediaries,” including art “on the road to consecration” and art which imitates highbrow works, his account fails to articulate precisely how and by whom these intermediaries are assigned “symbolic value.”

According to Bourdieu, these intermediate symbolic goods, with aspirations of a symbolic value beyond their material worth, ultimately fall within the FLP and as such are “condemned to define [themselves] in relation to legitimate culture”: borrowing legitimate aesthetic codes from the FRP, “aping” the tone and character of highbrow criticism, and displaying “ambivalent aggression” to the legitimating institutions that consecrate highbrow art. Bourdieu argues that an “activity on the way to legitimization” ultimately faces a dilemma about how to regard its own legitimacy, given its veering away from widespread public acceptance and the resistance from “priests of legitimate arts,” whose ultimate aim is to protect the autonomy of the FRP and shield it from attempts by outsiders to alter the existing orthodoxies. Thus, Bourdieu’s model, arguing that intermediate goods lack the same recognized institutions as highbrow art to authorize a legitimate “inspired reading,” begs the question of how the assignment of symbolic value to these intermediate goods occurs.

Rock: An Aspiring-Highbrow Activity

Rock music ultimately takes on many of the attributes Bourdieu ascribes to an intermediate activity, emulating key aspects of the legitimate art world while waging an internal struggle against the art-as-commodity within its ranks. In his piece “Producting Artistic Value: The Case of Rock Music,” Motti Regev outlines efforts by critics and “interpreters of music” to reshape rock music as a legitimate art.” Regev traces claims of rock-as-art to the late 1960’s, when rock began to be seen as particularly “subversive” to “dominant culture” in a way that represented a significant social division. Mary Harron, in her history of rock-as-commodity, locates this change in 1967 – the year “mods turned into hippies and pop into rock.” Harron argues that by this time the “pop audience” had begun to view rock music as outside the boundaries of their parent’s cultural world, and consequently started “to take itself and its idols seriously” as voices of an alternative cultural vision. Deena Weinstein concurs that this “counterculture, [as] the last major romantic movement,” proclaimed an “art-commerce binary” – one that “pitted the romantic artist” against the white-bread commercial culture of their parents.

Several institutions emerged to codify these popular notions: namely FM radio and the “serious” rock press. Regev argues that in the late 1960’s, album-centered FM radio emerged as an alternative to AM radio stations whose playlists were determined by top-forty singles. These FM stations played a mix of “less commercially successful songs” culled from entire long-play records, in contrast to early pop’s emphasis on the “single” which had become a hallmark of the rock genre in the 1950s. Regev argues that in Britain, radio stations increasingly added “special programs” featuring “‘alternative’ and ‘art’ rock” to their schedules. These programming choices corroborated the claims of those rock fans asserting a distinction between “artistic” and “commercial” popular music.

At this same time a series of periodicals emerged “devoted to ‘serious’ treatment of rock, as opposed to the ‘entertainment’ oriented press.” It is from within these pages that the history and ideology of rock music as an art emerged. Among the publications that emerged during this time were, in the United States, Rolling Stone, Creem, and Crawdaddy and, in Britain, Melody Maker and New Music Express. Writers for these publications picked up on the popular conception of rock-as-counterculture and wrote a series of narratives incorporating these ideals. Michael Coyle and Jon Dolan argue, that during this era writers such as Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus “mixed leftist sociology and what they could salvage from hostile critical theory with techniques previously associated with jazz criticism and even literary criticism,” bolstering the status of “rock ‘n’ roll star” to “artist.”

Regev notes that over the next decade, these “serious” writers “began to recapitulate, summarize and conclude their interpretations of the aesthetics, value and social meanings of the music in book form” as “biographies of musicians, rock encyclopedias, rock histories, record guides” and collections of articles. These books and articles organized the existing body of popular music into a particular history centered around “great” or “influential” records. The histories of the 1970’s describe a trajectory from grassroots activity to art form, beginning with the development of rock ‘n’ roll by “pioneers” in the latter half of the 1950’s, and culminating in the ascendancy of the music in the latter half of the 1960’s.Regev argues that, starting with this literature, the “periodization” of music – that is, the production of certain eras marked by a certain kind of music – has played a significant role in the development of a canon for rock music; for Regev, “the formulation of a history of rock involves the acts of consecration and crowning, with the relevant criteria being the evaluation of the creators and their works as musically innovative in relation to the preceding historical moment.” Custodians of rock history continue to debate what “great” records are, where the boundaries of eras should be placed, and how one particular era is responsive to the ones that came before it.

Ideology in Rock

Rock’s attempted transition into an autonomous art world has revealed a tension between the activity’s claim to be a mass-based, “grassroots” sound and its aspired self-image as a discipline “based in the traditional ideology of ‘superior reality’ of art and of the autonomous creative ‘genius.’” Whereas Bourdieu’s model envisions aesthetics as a top-down process, wherein autonomous art worlds create their own aesthetic ideals, are imitated by the population-at-large, and then develop new “untainted” aesthetic codes, rock music has both “top-down” and “bottom-up” influences. Heinz-Deiter Meyer, in a work describing “taste formation in pluralistic societies,” argues that this two-way process marks aesthetic judgments in the United States; contends Meyer: “Taste formation answers to different forces in different institutional and social contexts. It is essentially a local phenomenon.”

Meyer argues that evaluation of any novel item – be it a painting, a song, or a new style of jeans – depends on existing “rhetorics” about how to interpret the item. In pluralistic societies, particularly the United States, the two main rhetorics are the “rhetoric of refinement” – characteristic of Bourdieu’s FRP – and the “rhetoric of authenticity,” which frames aesthetic judgments as inherently personal rather than inculcated through education. Meyer traces this latter rhetoric to Rousseau:

By basing his discourse on the idea of natural man (who, however, is corruptible by civilization), Rousseau arrives at a rhetoric of taste that [that] challenge[s] the aristocratic monopoly on taste by arguing that ‘true taste’ is natural and accessible to all men, not just an exclusive few, that its object is the pleasure of the greatest number, not whimsical distinctions arrived at by connoisseurs, and that delicacy and refinement are corruptions rather than articulations of good taste.

This ideal, then, directly refutes the central assumptions of the autonomous art world: that only a select few can properly interpret work and that accessibility, rather than learned aesthetic codes, defines great works. Meyer ultimately concludes that these two rhetorics “organize and structure” how we understand cultural goods; these rhetorics are “what we see with.”

Simon Frith, a sociologist and rock critic, constructs a similar model arguing for three sources of “evaluative discourse.” Frith’s “bourgeois” taste public, analogous to Meyer’s “rhetoric of refinement” “has been institutionalized in universities” and portrays music as a “transcendent experience that is, on the one hand, ineffable, and on the other, only available to those with the right sort of knowledge, the right sort of interpretive skills.” This discourse dominates the aesthetic judgments of Bourdieu’s FRP and limits the proper experiencing of music to “the right people with the right training.”

The second discourse Frith identifies is that of “folk music,” which stresses authenticity, the importance of tradition, and the importance of ritual. Like Meyer’s rhetoric of authenticity, this discourse understands music as both a “participatory” and mass-based “subjective meaningful experience.” “Folk music” involves rituals such as festivals where artists socialize with the concertgoers and the concertgoers effectively join the artist on stage by singing along with the acts; the result, argues Frith, is “an integration of art and life.” Frith also proposes a third discourse, that of the “commercial music world,” wherein the “musical value and monetary value are equated.” This third discourse maps onto the concept of art-as-commodity proposed by Bourdieu.

Rock, then, exists at the intersection of these three aesthetic discourses: a folk art analyzed with the vocabulary of high culture that is packaged as a commercial product. The history of rock has been written as an interplay between these three “competing” discourses, and particularly as a struggle by “serious” listeners to exorcise the commercial elements from the other two. Regev argues that the folk ideal of authenticity constitutes the foundation of the rock aesthetic; rock has been colored, in contrast to high art forms, as an activity that “grows from ‘below,’ from the daily reality of its musicians and audiences.” Consequently, evaluations of whether the music authentically reflects the life of the artist underlie judgments of the artistic value of rock records, and suspicions that an artist’s sound is “deliberately stimulated mass market” form a critical component of the evaluation of a record’s value.

The folk discourse’s Romantic conception of art as expressing some higher inner truth and its wariness of the influence of commercialism parallel the key concepts of the rhetoric of refinement. Regev argues that the high brow ideology of art, which the rock world has come to adopt, is based on three criteria. First, to be hailed as “art,” the cultural good must exhibit both “formal-aesthetic sophistication or genuineness,” and “philosophical, social, psychological or emotional mentions.” Second, the work must be inspired by some “spirit and ‘inner truth’” in its creator, and, third, the piece must be produced with “some commitment to that ‘inner truth,’ beyond considerations of practicality and usefulness – the ideological theme of ‘art for art’s sake.’” As such, both the folk and high art discourses stress the need for a cultural good to distance itself from its use as a commodity.

Thus while the folk and highbrow discourses may agree that commerce should play no role in art, these two rhetorics disagree sharply about the sources of aesthetic appeal and how accessible works should be to the initiated. While highbrow culture argues that art should instead reflect the aesthetic ideals developed by the autonomous art world, folk art demands that works should amount to an aesthetic representation of the subjective reality of the daily lives of average individuals. Such tensions complicate the aesthetics of rock music by, on the one hand, stressing the desirability of novel and complex/intricate techniques while, on the other hand, emphasizing the necessity of abandoning pretension and representing the sensibilities of a mass audience. Particularly problematic is the tension between the folk discourse’s praise of communal/mass-based elements of rock and the highbrow discourse’s claims that art’s accessibility is indicative of aesthetic compromise to the demands of the market. For example, a critic might frame a wildly popular record, on the one hand, as tapping into the zeitgeist of the era, capturing some real elements affecting the lives of the masses or, on the other hand, as a carefully marketed sound, designed to appeal to as many people as possible and be profitable for the record label and artist.

Kembrew McLeod’s study of the rhetoric adopted by critics to evaluate popular music notes reveals how the interaction between rock’s two dominant and contradictory discourses complicates the evaluation of music. McLeod finds that, for example, evaluations of authenticity are most often framed in terms of “‘rawness’ – that is, having ‘primitive,’ ‘stark,’ ‘savage’ or ‘brutal’ qualities”; however, the “flipside of ‘rawness,’ sophistication, [is] a trait that is equally revered by rock critics (that is, unless a critic is writing about ‘overproduced,’ ‘polished’ pop).” Similarly, McLeod observes that “simplicity – even stupidity – is seen as a virtue” in some contexts and, conversely, “sophistication and intelligence can be equally valorized in other circumstances,” with charges of “vapid simplicity” and “banality” being leveled against music which fails to exhibit such cleverness.

As a result of these internal conflicts, the aesthetic codes of rock amount to a contradiction, a series of clashing norms that are ultimately mediated in a local manner, on a case-by-case basis, by the agents and institutions that constitute the activity. While competing orthodoxies mark any art world, the incongruous foundations of rock’s claim as art either doom the activity to a particularly incoherent value system or bless the activity with an aesthetic code containing tremendous subtleties. In either case, the interpreters of rock find tremendous leeway in evaluation of the works. Ultimately, how any one agent locates a piece in the tangled ideology of rock has an important impact on how other agents interpret the music. Although one may argue that there are real distinctions between “raw” authenticity and oversimplification, given the ambiguity of musical “stimuli,” the potential that such judgments are ultimately guided by how others have framed the music is particularly high.

Indeed, a series of studies have found that how a person interprets a piece of music varies depending upon the information he is given about it. In a paper on the influence of a social setting on listening to music, Ray Crozier notes that researchers have found that listeners not only like music more or less based upon how the music is framed, but they also hear it differently. Crozier cites a study by Chapman and Williams in which participants who expressed a fondness for “progressive pop” and an “antipathy towards ‘serious’” music were either told they were going to hear a clip of “progressive pop” or “serious” music or they were not told anything about the piece at all. Although all three groups heard the same clip, the manner in which the music was framed influenced how much the participants liked the music as well as what they heard in the music; participants’ ratings of descriptive elements of the music varied by group. Crozier notes that, although the findings are “tentative,” the results display “a cognitive reorganization of the material being judged, that is to say, the meaning of the music has changed.” What’s important here is that how one agent frames music to another may not only impact whether that agent likes it, but how they interpret the music’s basic properties. Considering the fine line between “raw” and “vapidly simple,” the social organization of the rock community – how individuals communicate aspects of the music to one another – seems crucial to an understanding of how claims of the activity mediate claims of artistic merit.

Given the flexibility of the aesthetic code, legitimizing agents within this art world possess a higher degree of discretion in the evaluation of a work – for example being able to frame a work’s complexity as desirable sophistication or undesirable “overproduction” or being “too clever.” However, as will be explained later in the chapter, the weakness of rock’s institutions and the plethora of legitimizing agents render any particular individual’s voice weak. As a result of this chorus of voices and the availability of strong cases for wildly contradicting interpretations of the same piece of music, a number of competing interpretations of a particular work, and similarly variable estimations of the cultural good’s symbolic value, may flourish.

The Agents and Institutions of Rock

While there are numerous actors that shape what and how music gets produced, four main groups of agents mediate the process by which artistic value is conferred upon rock music: the music press, fans, artists, and record companies. As per Bourdieu’s discussion of the FRP, it is the process of consumption and circulation that produces the meaning and cultural value of a work. Each of these actors plays an important role in the production of artistic value, and each checks and balances against the other actors. The value assigned to a particular work, then, is the product of a social process – a dialogue among these agents and institutions about normative standards in rock.

The Music Press

The rock critics essentially constitute the metaphorical clergy Bourdieu ascribes to the FRP; critics are at once the educator, the museum curator, the art historian, and the member of a literary society. As such, the music press constitutes the most significant authority in the production of artistic value. As explained above, the rock press first advanced claims for the artistic value of rock and played a crucial role in the early construction of the history of rock. Published in newspapers, music magazines, general interest magazines, books, and numerous other forms, these writers continue to play an important role in the consecration of art, the production of aesthetic standards, and the revision of rock’s constantly evolving history. These writers, bolstered by their historical claims as legitimate cultural authorities, constitute a community of professional listeners hired for their expertise and able to articulate to a large number of people and codify in print their positions on various matters.

The professional position of the music writer ultimately grants her legitimacy as, in Shuker’s terms, “a gatekeeper of taste and arbiter of cultural history.” Mark Fenster, in a piece describing the “political economy” of the rock press, argues that critics write from a “position of expertise and authority that differentiates them for their readers” while maintaining a position of being “similar to their readers.” Nathan Brackett, the current Reviews Editor of Rolling Stone, concurs that the music writers presumably have an expertise the average listener does not: “If the writer is doing their job right, they’re bringing a little more perspective [than the average fan], and they’re able to get at a deeper idea of whether the music really does succeed.” As such, the music writer fulfills Bourdieu’s conception of the initiated audience able to make “inspired readings” of a work. This position then lends critics “monumental influence” and the “authority to present cultural products as fulfilling” criteria necessary to be bestowed with “artistic recognition.” Indeed, Steve Jones and Kevin Featherly, in their “Reviewing Rock Writing,” note that “of all periodicals, Rolling Stone has had the power to ‘consecrate’ popular music in Bourdieu’s terms.”

From their privileged position, critics are able to articulate certain aesthetic values and inculcate their version of history in their readers. In reviews, rock critics are able to at once construct a history, articulate certain aesthetic values, and locate the work being reviewed in that history and aesthetic milieu. For example, the critic may reference a series of records or artists culled from rock’s history, articulate a relationship between the particular album being reviewed and those reference points, and explain the normative criteria by which the album should be evaluated. Reviewers’ writing, then, serves to “imbue particular products with meaning and value, and even their internecine arguments strengthen an artist’s or record’s claim to being part of a selective tradition.”

The influence of the writer is not limited to the readership of his weekly column. Shuker notes that the more popular “critics – and their associated magazines – have published collections of their reviews . . .[which] become bibles in the field, establishing dominant orthodoxies as to the relative value of various styles or genres and pantheons of artist.” In addition, notes McLeod, “rock critics are part of an interconnected network, a network in which it is not unusual for people to change positions, moving from one type of job to another.” As such, a writer might work as a publicist, find a job in “college radio,” or eventually land a job as an A&R person, who scouts talent for a record company. McLeod concludes by emphasizing the tremendous influence the critic’s position in the network affords them; argues McLeod, “Discourses that emanate from within rock criticism are not simply isolated to the rock critic community, but the larger community of which they are a part.”

The Fans

Critics may hold titles conferring special status upon their interpretations of rock, but fans also play a significant role in the bestowing of artistic merit on groups. Four properties of rock culture facilitate fan participation in the development of rock’s history and aesthetic standards: the widespread availability of rock knowledge, the social importance of rock music, the folk norms underpinning the activity, and rock’s status as a commercial activity. Although critics may constitute a specially consecrated group of initiated listeners, the bar for entrance into the community of initiated listeners is lower than in established highbrow arts. One may need to attend the “right” school or university to be initiated into the aesthetic world of modern classical music, but accumulating the cultural knowledge to enter into dialogue with the “priests” of the rock world merely requires access to music magazines and CD’s. With both literature and pirated music freely available on the Internet, the material constraints on this type of knowledge continue to decline.

Roy Shuker argues that knowledge-seeking of this type is an intrinsic part of youth culture. Shuker cites a finding that in the United States almost 81 percent of the students cited music as an important part of their lives and argues that “interest in rock music” constitutes “one factor youth have in common.” As a consequence, contends Shuker, “‘young people’s musical activities, whatever their cultural background or social position, rest on a substantial and sophisticated body of knowledge about popular music.” Young people, in Shuker’s estimation, are able to differentiate genres and “to hear and place sounds in terms of their histories, influences and sources.” Argues Shuker, buying music “means gathering information from peers, older siblings, and retrospectives in the music press; and systemically searching for items out of the back catalogue.” Shuker also finds from research he conducted in New Zealand, that “older students’” taste includes a greater variety of noncommercial music than their younger counterparts and that such students speak of “diversifying their musical preferences.”

Shuker identifies a subtype of fan, which he labels the “aficionado,” who exhibits interest in rock “at more of an intellectual level and focused on the music per se rather than on the persona of the performer(s).” Fans who fall into this category view themselves “as ‘serious’ devotees” and constitute the “large numbers of young people now do their own archaeologies of popular music history to particular musical styles or performers.” These fans engage in what Shuker terms “secondary involvement” in the music by reading “fanzines and commercial magazines,” attending concerts, and displaying an interest not only in bands but also in “record labels and producers.” These aficionados, who display cultural knowledge on par with critics, “have no hesitation about making justifying judgments about meaning and value.”

Thus, while in highbrow culture a select few have access to the knowledge necessary to make distinctions in the music, in the realm of popular music, learning the aesthetic codes is an integral part of growing up. Indeed, Fenster argues that fans today have learned the vocabulary of the critic and are able to utilize this language to “perform the function of the critic.” To highlight this point, Fenster relates an anecdote wherein a music critic arrived late to a concert and, having missed the opening act, relied on fan accounts to write his piece; the story printed in the paper the next day, a collage of fan accounts, seemed no different from any other review. Unfortunately for this writer, the opening band had never arrived, and the fan accounts merely parroted back the vocabulary of rock criticism they had internalized. Fenster concludes that with the widespread ability to exercise rock knowledge “we are all, to a certain degree, critics” due to the “critical discourse” that permeates our day-to-day lives, “entering into our . . . conversations with others and into our own evaluation of music we hear on radio and television, as well as our own stereos.” As a consequence, Fenster concludes, “music criticism and canon construction are everywhere.”

The second fan-empowering attribute of rock is its communal nature, resulting in social networks that bolster novel aesthetic claims. In his article “Birds of a Feather Sing Together,” Noah Mark argues that music preferences spread through social interaction; argues Mark “people develop musical tastes similar to those of the people with whom they interact,” particularly via “kin and close friends.” Thus, those within the same social networks ultimately come to share similar tastes, as individuals hear one another’s music and exchange knowledge about this shared music. George Lewis concurs with Mark in his discussion of music taste, arguing that “the central fact is that we pretty much listen to, and enjoy, the same music that is listened to by other people we like or with whom we identify.” Lewis argues that “bits of musical trivia are hoarded and exchanged” between friends and this “kind of musical knowledge” ultimately constitutes a type of “cultural knowledge that has deep social implications.”

Not only do social groups shape music preferences, but musical preferences, acting as a symbol of identity, come to impact the formation of social groups. With popular music playing a significant role in our daily social interactions, especially among youth, one finds that music acts as an important signal of identity, and consequently that social groups tend to adopt similar tastes in music. Among adolescents, Lewis finds a tendency to “constantly check out the music collections of their influential friends and of newcomers seeking admission to their group (to see if they ‘fit’).” Lewis concludes that “music preference, then, is a powerful cultural signal” – an important “means of showing others (and ourselves) to what cultural group, or groups, we belong or aspire to belong.” Lewis also cites studies by David Reisman and Simon Frith that reveal adolescents to “use popular music to create socially shared meanings and common states of awareness,” “to define” their groups and to serve as a “source for determining and achieving in-group status.”

Social networking built upon shared music may ultimately yield a subculture of sorts, a coherent set of aesthetic ideals backed by a robust social apparatus. Dolf Zillmann and Su-lin Gan argue that groups formed around certain aesthetic ideals – centered on a genre, a constellation of groups, or even a single group, such as the “deadhead” fans of the Grateful Dead – are able to “define themselves as members of a cultural elite (in their own perception) and attain the emotional gratification of belonging, [while] defin[ing] themselves as distinct and different from other peer groups and attain[ing] the gratifications of being somehow superior (in their own perception).” As such, the group finds itself in a position to advance its aesthetic conceptions while portraying themselves as priests of their own refined orthodoxy, though of course the aesthetic itself may be anything but refined (as was the case of the punk networks of London in the mid-to-late 1970s). Ultimately, this clustering effect reveals the ability for aesthetically-minded individuals to organize themselves and successfully make claims on the aesthetic codes of rock.

A third, and related, property of rock culture that empowers fans to shape the ideology and history of rock is the activity’s grassroots ideals. Although the rock community may put its writer-scholars on a pedestal, rock’s folk ideals lead the activity to oppose elitism, and, as such, efforts exist within the rock community to reign in and discredit those interpreters, be they writers or aficionados, who attempt to fully distance themselves from mass opinion in a move analogous to the FRP’s autonomous art sphere. Reflecting the inevitable tensions between folk and highbrow ideologies, artistic interpretation at once privileges certain readings of the music while simultaneously demanding that those privileged readings take into account the voices of the masses. Brackett argues that bands that can remain popular for “5 or 10 years” earn “a grudging respect no matter” how they have been reviewed by critics; Brackett notes, “You see it again and again throughout the history of Rolling Stone and pop music.” Brackett cites bands initially blasted by critics, such as AC/DC or Led Zeppelin, who, though still lampooned by critics today, are nonetheless “inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.” The process reveals that while the connoisseurs of rock may attempt to forge a more sophisticated reading of rock music, ultimately, the legitimacy of their decisions are dependent upon the approval of the rock community at large.

The fourth and final factor that empowers fans is rock’s status as a commercial enterprise. Aside from the ideological reasons to hear fans’ voices, writers ultimately produce a good that needs consumers. While special interest magazines can cater to the aficionado and daily newspapers’ bottom lines ultimately are not affected by whether the average individual agrees with the critic, general interest music magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin may perhaps feel this pressure. Brackett argues that the popularity of a band does not necessarily influence how an album is reviewed in Rolling Stone but that more popular acts will be covered more in other areas of the magazine or will have their albums reviewed more prominently, though this position of course does not assure them a more positive review. Indeed, new, popular commercial acts are often hounded by the music press.

Fan power, then, stems partly from the fans’ role as consumers of writings of the music press and partly from rock’s idealization of art as a grassroots phenomenon. Because commercial success and massively popular cultural phenomena coincide, however, it is difficult to tease these two apart. In any case, the judgments of the masses, though perhaps lacking the refined aesthetic codes developed by critics, ultimately limit the autonomy of the highbrow elements within rock and help to guide the process by which a record or an artist is consecrated as part of the canon.

Artists

As in the FRP, artists play an important role in the construction of rock’s history and in the consecration of works. Artists influence the meaning-creation process in several distinct ways. As producers, artists are in a position to cast their work as being part of a certain tradition. By framing their work in a particular manner, the artist can make claims about the place of their work in the orthodoxy. Such a process not only influences how their work is viewed; this process also constructs a history as the band often locates itself in a certain tradition. Much like the critics, who are members of a profession claiming an expertise on musical knowledge, artists have particular authority to make claims about aesthetic codes and the history of rock.

Artists also act as consecrating agents through their constructions of traditions. Bands give a great number of interviews as they tour the country, providing them plenty of opportunity to place their views in print. Of particular interest in rock music is the notion of musical influences, and as such, artists are placed in a position to act as “reputational entrepreneurs” for the acts in which they find meaning. Roni Sarig, in his The Secret History of Rock, argues that early 90’s bands such as Nirvana and Sonic Youth “made a point of name-dropping the groups that had inspired them.” As a result of such references, “little known names like Half Japanese, Glenn Branaca, Wire, and Can began popping up regularly in the pages of major magazines”; thus “young fans” of popular bands of this era became exposed to a new set of bands. These acts, then, earned a second chance at consecration. Indeed, Sarig’s book itself, a collection of quotes from artists about their favorite “underground” bands, serves an important role in consecrating acts that have been overlooked in the construction of the rock canon thus far. In this way, the artist can act as a particularly vocal and influential “fan,” advancing her favorite band’s claims of artistic merit.

Record Companies

Having a financial interest in seeing their acts succeed, record companies also play a considerable role shaping the interpretation and evaluation of artists and records. Record companies set into motion “circulation and consumption” of a record, sending off the album along with promotional materials and advertisement campaigns. Consequently, record companies play a significant role in locating the band in rock’s landscape through materials sent to the music writers and radio stations. For example, in his investigation of how cultural industries cope with the uncertainty with which cultural products are received, Paul Hirsch has found that record companies may find it more cost-effective to target “autonomous gatekeepers, or ‘surrogate consumers’ such as disk jockeys, film critics and book reviewers employed by mass-media organizations” rather than the population-at-large. Cultural industries, then, can frame their cultural goods in a particular light – as having a certain type of symbolic meaning or fitting into a particular tradition – to the “fashion experts and opinion leaders for their respective constituencies.” However, the mistrust of commercial enterprises ultimately undercuts the influence of these record companies on agents and institutions that aim to separate art from commerce.





Chapter 3:

THE MUSIC PRESS AFTER THE “ALTERNATIVE REVOLUTION”

This chapter aims to provide a background for types of judgments made by the music press about Weezer since the mid-1990’s. In the following pages, I will further explore the culture of music criticism, including a discussion of how recent historical developments in popular music have impacted the ideology that guides the descriptive and normative elements of music criticism. I begin by constructing a widely-shared account of the rise of the “alternative rock” music scene of the 1990’s, discussing the ways in which its cultural attributes and aesthetic norms impacted the practice of music criticism. I then use this historical background to describe some of the different perspectives that have developed within the music press and to explain what types of judgments critics of the 1990’s made about music. This sketch will then enable me to put in context the various interpretations of Weezer’s music developed in chapter four.

The Counter-Counter-Culture

In the mid-1970’s, rock experienced a counter-cultural movement of its own with the rise of punk rock. Taking its cues from the raw garage-rock sound of the early 1970’s, punk emerged in both England and the United States as a reaction to increasingly commercial rock music, which represented the remnants of the previous generation’s music. The punk movement arose from disparate sources – on the one hand, art school students in avant-garde and performance art and, one the other, disaffected youth coming of age at a time of economic and political turmoil. Punk music was fast, loud, simple and often inaccessible – a mix of brash guitars, simple parts, and a focus on attitude. Although some bands, such as the Buzzcocks, remained apolitical, many strains of the punk movement were alternately nihilistic or politically vocal, espousing left-wing politics, and often maintaining an angry tone – both musically and culturally.

Out of this punk explosion of the latter half of the 1970’s emerged two somewhat distinct subgenres: new wave and hardcore. A more accessible offspring of punk, new wave maintained the simplicity of punk while largely taking on the form of pop music. Many of the artists of this genre began to experiment with synthesizers, which served as a contrast to new wave’s guitar-centric precursor. New wave music, as an accessible cousin to the punk scene, ultimately achieved a significant degree of commercial success in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s with hits by bands such as The Cars, who represented the more mainstream end of the genre, and Duran Duran, whose synthesizer-based pop and MTV presence earned them a moderate degree of commercial success. The flipside of new wave was hardcore music, which developed in the United States in the early 1980’s. Rather than appealing to pop sensibilities, hardcore music emphasized the aspects of punk that distinguished the genre: the music was “impossibly fast, the vocals were shouted, the riffs were simple, and the records looked (and sounded) like they were made in someone’s basement.” Whereas new wave music was embraced by commercial radio, hardcore music remained a localized phenomenon supported by cliques of disaffected young people.

Without the support of commercial interests, these hardcore bands established for themselves “a shadow record industry, complete with independent labels, recording studios, distribution networks, radio stations (mostly college), record stores, nightclubs, newspapers and magazines.” Artists in this context would not only establish a band, but they might also develop their own label on which to release their records. “The key principle of American indie rock,” according to music writer Michael Azerrad, “was the punk ethos of DIY, or do-it-yourself.” While bands often created record labels for the sole purpose of releasing their own records, occasionally bands developed labels to put out the records of other local or like-minded bands. Black Flag, for example, created the SST label, which released records by a series of acts now recognized as part of the American Underground canon: the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, Husker Du, and Dinosaur Jr. Such labels, independent of corporate influence, came to be known as “indies,” a key concept of the American Underground scene. Freelance music journalist Gina Arnold argues that without radio play or MTV support, these groups had no choice but to “do it themselves,” ultimately developing a network that “had its own stars, its own journalists and consumer outlets and nightclubs.”

The “indie” scene ultimately expanded well beyond the hardcore sound, which, however, remained central to the scene. By 1987, a time when the commercial record industry began paying greater attention to the underground scene, the indie scene was supporting a wide range of sounds: “underground blues, thrash metal, experimental country-rock, protest music and fusions of every description.” Reyne Cuccurro, a former editor for the New York-based Rockpool and currently an independent label executive, told the Boston Globe in 1989 that independent labels were driven by “aesthetic” rather than commercial concerns: “At indies, the thought of immediate profits or shareholder return is not an issue. It’s more a case of aesthetics. If you can find somebody who likes what you do, you can get it out on an indie label.” Similarly, the fortunes of college radio, unlike that of commericial stations, did not depend on advertising, and thus college stations could play a wide range of less accessible music. As such, the underground scene was able to support a variety of music while priding itself, in both the folk and highbrow traditions, on putting artistic concerns over commercial ones.

The flipside of this privileging of “artistic concerns,” however, was that indies were often strapped for cash and could only provide limited “distribution, promotion, and publicity” for their records. Consequently, the artists themselves often faced financial hardships, and towards the latter half of the 1980’s, as major labels became increasingly interested in the alternative scene, a few acts signed on with the majors, believing they could reach a larger audience. After majors expressed interest in the Athens and Minneapolis scenes, home to the Replacements and Husker Du, industry buzz focused in on the Seattle scene in early 1989. Interest in the Seattle branch of the alternative scene was jumpstarted by an article in the “trend-defining British magazine Melody Maker,” which hailed Seattle indie-label Sub Pop as a “lifeforce to the most vibrant, kicking music scene encompassed in one city for at least 10 years.” Following similar endorsements by a host of influential sources – John Peel’s BBC Radio One DJ program, New Musical Express, Spin and the Village Voice – Seattle became hailed as the “new Liverpool or the new Haight-Ashbury.” By this time, major labels were developing their own “‘alternative music’ divisions and negotiating licensing deals with the independent labels that often sign[ed]” the underground acts. In the subsequent months, a series of bands from Seattle were signed by major labels including Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam. The recession of 1990 hastened this process by leaving “several indie labels crumbling [and] underground bands . . . actively seeking the secure umbrella of major labels.”

This transformation from underground to mainstream was cemented on January 11, 1992, when Nirvana’s Nevermind album reached number one on the Billboard charts, replacing Michael Jackson’s Dangerous. Described by critics as a seminal moment in which “rock [had] entered a new era,” this chart placement stood as the first time that the “alternative scene” had produced the best-selling record in the country. With its unprecedented chart success, Nirvana came to be regarded as both a commercial and cultural force. Azerrad, who wrote a book on Nirvana, argues that the band came to epitomize a new commercial opportunity for record companies to connect with the “twentysomethings, also known as Generation X,” who actively sought out music and were now old enough to have disposable income with which to buy albums. Record companies agreed with such an assessment and rushed to fill this apparently significant market whose needs had not been filled by mainstream music in the tradition of baby-boomer rock. Labels became obsessed with finding the “next Nirvana” and began the chase to sign the next alternative rock superstar. By 1993, industry executives were attending sessions on “A&R (artist and repertoire) Post-Nirvana” and “Marketing Pre- and Post-Nirvana.” As Chicago Tribune critic Greg Kot put it, “Promising bands with the requisite sound (buzzing guitars, alienated lyrics) and slacker image were being hunted down and signed with brutal efficiency by major labels.

By the end of 1994, the underground sound of the 1980’s essentially had become the mainstream. Most of the still existent acts of the alternative scene were signed to major labels, and modern rock radio stations dedicated to playing alternative music had been established and drew significant listenership in many cities across the country. The success of these stations was tremendous; modern rock station listenership increased fourfold between 1991-1994. Ron Gonzales, a music critic for the Albuquerque Journal, argues that 1994 marked the “ending of a time when indie labels had presence and a trademark”; indeed, at the time Kot warned that the “indie network [was] in danger of disintegrating completely as major labels comb[ed] the ranks for the next big thing, often plucking promising bands at the first signs of success.”

The Alternative Revolution and the Music Press

This alternative rock revolution had a tremendous impact on the evaluation of music as art. Alternative rock, in its previous incarnation as the underground scene, had developed its own aesthetic code, its own conception of rock stardom, and its own ideals. By 1994, the ethos of the alternative music community had come into direct conflict with that of the mainstream rock world against which the underground scene had pitted itself. The music press, however, had been largely supportive of the alternative rock movement. Many critics – young ones in particular – hailed the alternative movement, which had embodied the notion of an autonomous art world wherein the creative impulses of the artist rather than commercial considerations drove the creative process.

The alternative scene also resurrected the notion that some music was indeed more authentic than others. Anthony DeCurtis, a senior writer for Rolling Stone, argues that by the mid-1980’s “To make a claim of authenticity for something was certainly unhip and also something that was regarded as unproveable, kind of raising up a non-relevant notion. The notion of authenticity had been so thoroughly disparaged that no one could legitimately claim it for anybody, it seemed.” However, the alternative scene appeared to inspire in some writers hope that some music was indeed more genuine than others. For example, Boston Globe critic Steve Morse argued in a 1987 piece on the underground rock scene that although the music may be “less sonically appealing due to budgetary constraints in the studio, . . . the musical inspiration tends to be more genuine.” Because of the scene’s opposition to commercialism and insistence that aesthetics dictate production, many writers felt the underground music reflected the genuine concerns and ideas of its artists.

There emerged a sense that the alternative music scene was an authentic cultural expression of a generation in the same way that artists of the late 1960’s had been understood to represent the voice of the Baby Boomers. Azerrad explains this Generation X as being “ignored by the media, force-fed a diet of retro-culture” by the “mighty Baby Boom generation.” Azerrad, at the height of the alternative revolution in 1992, trumpeted the notion that the alternative music scene represented Generation X’s project during the 1980’s to “build their own cultural sandbox in the Baby Boomers’ backyard; unable to find rock ‘n’ roll to call their own, they invented it.”

In addition to reviving a traditional notion of authenticity, the underground movement rejected the traditional understandings of rock stardom. By the late 1980’s mainstream rock deified the rock star and the rock star lifestyle; part of the experience of rock music had explicitly become the image of the rock star. In the 1970’s “arena rock” developed as a branch of guitar-centered rock music whose artists achieved a level of popularity that allowed them play concerts in arena-sized venues. Throughout the 1980’s the caricature of the arena rock star –

who partied hard, engaged in conspicuous consumption, and flaunted his popularity – grew even more extreme with the development of “hair metal,” a scene which borrowed the “pop heavy metal” derived from arena rock and matched the sound with “flashy clothing, heavy makeup, and large, teased hair.” However, the alternative movement’s conception of the artist was directly at odds with this image of the rock star. Azerrad argues that this paradox of being an impoverished yet celebrated musician fundamentally shaped the ethos of the underground scene:

The breakthrough realization that you didn’t have to be a blow-dried guitar god to be a valid rock musician ran deep; it was liberating on many levels, especially from what many perceived as the selfishness, greed and arrogance of Reagan’s America. The indie underground made a modest way of life not just attractive but a downright moral imperative.

Rock stardom, in the conventional sense, was vilified as being part of the commercial world that the indie defined itself against. As such, with the ideal of the alternative rocker and mainstream rockstar clashing, one of the central norms of the rock genre – the glorified rock god – came under direct fire.

Of course, as alternative music caught on and supplanted mainstream rock as the most popular form of rock music, these former underground musicians found themselves to be rock stars. This contradiction between the values inherent to the alternative movement and the reality of alternative rock stardom often led artists to use irony, a staple of the college scene, to resolve this paradox. For example, Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana who ultimately sold 10 million records, posed for the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a hand-made shirt, in the DIY tradition, reading “corporate magazines still suck.” Kot has noted that by 1994 the alternative scene was composed of a “new generation of rock stars trying its best not to be rock stars”; while ultimately the contradiction between rock stardom and Cobain’s own values contributed to the turmoil culminating in his April 1994 suicide, Kot found that others such as Beck, who had a hit with his song “Loser,” “laughed out loud” at the oxymoronic “alternative rockstar.”

In addition, the success of alternative music increased the audience for alternative publications. Thus, when alternative music broke into the mainstream, there was parallel coverage by these specialty or subculture magazines. The mainstream press (e.g. daily newspaper writers) had formerly been discouraged from extensively writing about alternative acts, due to a perceived lack of reader interest. Tom Moon, music critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that prior to the alternative rock revolution, mainstream publications covered the underground scene only insomuch as “an early warning device” about what was coming next in rock. Joe Harrington, a writer for a number of papers including the Boston Phoenix and the New York Press and the author of a history of rock titled Sonic Cool, adds that excitement over the triumph of underground music led some young people to take up music writing as a profession, resulting in a cohort of writers inspired by the alternative sound.

The Norms of the Music Press after the “Alternative Revolution”

To develop a better understanding of the current state of the music press, I conducted a survey of 150 music writers writing for daily newspapers and weekly entertainment papers throughout the United States. The writers in the survey represented a number of different positions in the music press. Fourteen percent of respondents were pop music critics, 17 percent were freelance music writers (who might write music articles for a variety of publications), 11 percent were music editors, 8 percent were pop music writers, 12 percent were arts editors, 19 percent were entertainment or features writers, 14 percent were staff writers and 4 percent held other titles, such as editorial assistant or classical/jazz critic. 80 percent of respondents were male, and of those whose jobs specifically entailed music criticism, 90 percent were male. Survey participants were asked a series of questions about how they understand the function of their job and what make the attributes of prototypically good rock music.

The survey results reveal that authenticity, originality and accessibility remain the most important attributes to music critics. Regardless of particular job title, respondents agreed that “authenticity/sincerity” is most important to good rock music, followed closely by “originality/deviating from norm.” Both of these characteristics were labeled, on average, as being between “important” and “very important” to good rock music. Exactly how authenticity/sincerity is understood by writers may vary – for example some argue that a band merely must sound authentic even if it does not actually mean what it is saying; but ultimately respondents do seem to have some expectation that music sound as if it is expressing some truth in the Romantic tradition. Originality also seems to be a rather widely held expectation among critics, with 90 percent of writers responding that originality is at least somewhat important to good rock music. For both authenticity and originality, however, music critics’ responses are, on average, less extreme than the average music writer’s.

Music writers’ conceptions of their jobs seem to differ slightly by title. Both music critics and entertainment writers/editors see entertaining the reader as their top responsibility and discovering new talent as a secondary responsibility. However, entertainment writers seem to view their reviews, on average, as being more of a buying guide for the readers. Music critics, on the other hand, place more of an emphasis on placing acts in a historical context – a pattern of response which corroborates the idea that canon creation and the maintenance of genre narratives are central components of music criticism.

This difference over the role of contextualizing the music is the most pronounced in the survey with “somewhat unimportant” being the most popular response among entertainment writers and “very important” being the most common response among music critics.

Beyond differences in occupation, there are differences in ideology, as well, based upon the type of journal for which an individual writes. Many writers write primarily for one publication, which employs them full-time, and then write freelance for other publications on the side. Two-thirds of survey respondents write for mainstream publications, such as daily newspapers, which aim for a general audience that may be not particularly informed about music. However, these writers often freelance for general interest music publications like Rolling Stone which assume that their readers are at least marginally more knowledgeable about music than the average individual. In addition, approximately a third of respondents write for specialty publications that focus on the underground local music scene. These alternative weeklies tend to reflect, to a greater degree, the underground culture outlined in the following section. The main statistical difference in responses between writers who write primarily for alt-weeklies versus mainstream publications is that the former rates discovering new talent as being a more significant part of their job; over two thirds of alternative weekly writer respondents rated this function as being either “very important” or “crucial” to their job in contrast to mainstream writers, of whom less than half responded with such evaluations.

Fragmentation and The Canon

Thus by the mid-1990’s several conflicting ideologies had staked claims within mainstream rock music: the idealist strain of the late 1960’s, the mainstream rock of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and the alternative scene of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Rolling Stone Reviews Editor Nathan Bracket argues that “one of the bigger stories in pop music is that it has become more and more fragmented.” Indeed, by the late 1970’s, the romantic notion that rock ‘n’ roll was going to change the world according to counter-cultural principles had been largely abandoned. The ostensibly meaningful rock of the 1960’s blossomed commercially throughout the 1970’s as styles within rock further diverged from the aesthetic diversity which the late 1960’s’ grand narrative had, in a sense, papered over. Bracket contends that “in the late 1960’s there was a point where there was a rock music narrative – where all the important artists were being played on FM radio and there was a thread you could follow,” but that over the past thirty years that singular narrative has fragmented. Indeed, as early as the mid-1970’s, hard rock, characterized by a “loud, aggressive guitar” sound; pop/rock, a subgenre which emphasized the importance of melody; progressive/art rock, which evolved partly out of the psychedelic sound of the latter half of the 1960’s, and the “amelodic” and experimental music of the Velvet Underground, MC5 and the Stooges – what later came to be known as “proto-punk” – had all emerged as distinct sounds.

This splintering of rock into subgenres, then, led to the construction of a number of taxonomies of music, articulating the various aesthetic codes and histories of subgenres branching out from rock’s phylogenetic tree. This fragmentation then complicated the type of canon construction that lay at the heart of rock criticism. Mark Fenster argues that the establishment of a canon of essential albums represents one of rock criticism’s central accomplishments: “it is hard to imagine the faithful reader of Spin and the music pages of the Village Voice (and similar local alternative weeklies) who has not heard any Velvet Underground or Talking Heads . . . . Or the Rolling Stone reader who has not heard of REM or U2.” Fenster, here, stresses that canons pertain to particular audiences – that the notable artists for a Village Voice reader may differ from those for a Rolling Stone reader – but that within that particular audience exists widespread recognition of the canon. Brackett concurs that fragmentation of rock has resulted in a series of narratives:

Canon is more specific to different genres. There’s a canon of heavy metal records, and a canon of classic rock records and there’s a canon of punk records . . . . If you’re gonna call yourself a serious emo fan, you’re gonna have to listen to bands like Fugazi or the Rites of Spring or the Promise Ring. If you’re a heavy metal fan, you have to listen to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. If you’re into industrial music, you have to listen to Ministry.

With each canon emphasizing particular traits of the subgenre, the aesthetic code of rock has also been fragmented. As a result, the music press, who write about rock music from a variety of subgenres, must familiarize themselves with each of the applicable canons and be able to understand how an artist places itself within a particular history. Consequently, Bracket argues, “It is important to find out what a band’s influences are or what genre a band places itself it” in order to properly evaluate a record.

While some critics warn about the dangers of using genre-placement to evaluate a band, this has become a central activity within rock criticism. Fenster argues that these canons “serve to guide assessments of works released within the genre.” Thus a relatively inaccessible 1980’s underground record would be evaluated using a different vocabulary than a 1970’s arena rock act. The canons then function, says Fenster, “as a familiar trope of criticism, enabling the conclusion that any particular record succeeds or fails because it is like or unlike other, similar records.” In this way, writers for general interest publications are able to evaluate works within their own ostensibly consistent frameworks, i.e., does this album work in the context of what alternative music is supposed to be about. In addition, comparing records to the well-known canon provides the writer with the ability to describe an intangible, non-verbal medium to the reader. As such, comparison constitutes a “necessity” of the craft – a means to overcome the essential difficulty of writing about sound.

Not only has the grand narrative of rock fragmented, but real generational differences have emerged within the rock community as well. By the mid-1990s the near-universal acclaim for the popularization of alternative music had dissolved into disagreement among writers about ideals of what rock should be. Though several critics I spoke with argued strongly against establishing a singular set of norms by which to gauge music, several tropes did emerge in the 1990’s about what rock should aim for. Tensions ultimately developed between the mainstream and an alternative rock scene that questioned traditional notions in rock (such as the traditional interpretation of the rock star cult-of-personality) and championed a different canon, composed of underground punk records, than that accepted by the mainstream. Consequently, a fissure emerged between writers who sympathized with the alternative rock ethos and those who merely found the ideology to be bratty.

Thus by the mid-1990’s, a real tension had developed within rock writing between the mainstream and alternative conceptions of rock. With mainstream publications now covering alternative rock on a regular basis, conflicts between the traditions came to the fore. Often along generational lines, writers disagreed with what constituted authenticity in the music, what image artists should aim for, and to what degree “indie cred” mattered. Writers faced an increasingly fractured canon and, as such, understanding how an artist presented himself became important to understanding how the act fit into a particular rock tradition.





Chapter 4:

PRESS EVALUATIONS OF WEEZER 1994-1997

In this chapter, I briefly recount Weezer’s career between 1992 and 1997 and then provide an account of popular evaluations of the band during this period. Using the historical context outlined in the previous chapter, I lay out three tropes popular among writers during the period 1994-1995 to describe Weezer: Weezer as novelty act, Weezer as bubblegum alternative, and Weezer as an ironic alternative/hipster band. While these three labels are not mutually exclusive, they represent ideal types around which representations of Weezer were clustered. Specifically, I evaluate the role of irony/humor, commercial appeal, musical heritage, audience demographics, and various historical contingencies on evaluations of Weezer during this era. I then elaborate on how these visions of Weezer influenced the reception of their second record, Pinkerton, in 1996 and readings of Weezer’s performances through mid-1997.

Weezer – A Brief History: 1992-1997

Among the bands signed in the early-1990’s rush to gobble up the next “alternative star” was Weezer, an alternative rock outfit from Los Angeles. Signed by Geffen, a major label, on June 25, 1993, Weezer was a relative newcomer to the alternative scene, having played the LA club circuit for about a year and a half. Unlike other alternative rock groups of the era, none of Weezer’s members – singer/songwriter/guitarist Rivers Cuomo, bassist Matt Sharp, drummer Pat Wilson, or guitarist Brian Bell – had been part of the 1980’s underground scene. Cuomo had played in a heavy metal band Avant Garde in his native Connecticut before moving to Los Angeles with his group to seek hair metal stardom; Sharp, too, participated in the heavy metal scene of his native Virginia. Despite these metal roots, the Weezer sound was markedly alternative. Having been turned onto college rock while working in a record store in Los Angeles, Cuomo began penning songs fusing the sound of the underground scene, such as the Pixies, and traditional pop/rock, like the Beach Boys.

Produced by Ric Ocasek, frontman of the new wave group the Cars, Weezer’s self-titled debut, which came to be known as “the Blue Album” for its cover featuring a lineup of the band against a bright blue background, was released on May 5, 1994. Upon its release, the album garnered little press attention as Weezer embarked on a series of club shows up and down the West Coast. The initial marketing strategy, offers Weezer A&R person Todd Sullivan, was to let the album take hold in the college scene. Coming from the Los Angeles hipster scene, the transition to the college radio market seemed like the natural first step. However, in June of 1994, a commercial alternative radio station in Seattle, KNDD, began playing the first single from the album, “Undone (The Sweater Song),” and noting Weezer’s success in Seattle, the Geffen promotions department began to push the song nationwide. Within a few weeks, “Undone” had become a staple of alterative radio nationwide. Convinced that “Undone” could be a “‘smash’ if it had a video,” Geffen set up a video shoot for Weezer, and soon the video was showing in regular rotation on MTV as a “Buzz Clip.” Young alternative music fans showed tremendous enthusiasm for “Undone,” which peaked at number six on the Billboard music chart.

However this commercial success invited a backlash amongst those who pinned Weezer as a novelty act with a jokey song about sweaters. Weezer’s follow-up single, “Buddy Holly,” did little to quell suggestion that Weezer was a novelty act. Although “Buddy Holly”‘s success ensured Weezer would not be a one-hit wonder, the catchy two-and-a-half minute pop tune with its pop cultural references to Buddy Holly and Mary Tyler Moore and its ironic use of jive (“What’s with these homies dissing my girl? Why do they gotta front?”) bolstered the claims of those identifying Weezer as a joke act. The video that accompanied the song used computer effects to place Weezer in a Happy Days episode, as they seemingly performed for the Fonz and company in Al’s Diner. Both the single and the video were tremendous successes, propelling the Blue Album up the charts, where it peaked in the sixteenth position in late January 1995. While its music streamed into cars and homes nationwide with heavy play on radio and MTV, Weezer toured intensely in support of their record, visiting some cities over four times within the year. After taking opening spots on tours with alternative acts Lush and Live throughout 1994 and touring in Europe in early 1995, Weezer returned Stateside to headline a tour throughout March and early April.

By this time, however, negative sentiment towards Weezer was peaking among the music press and detractors in the population at large; indicative of this backlash is a Village Voice piece run in April 1995 suggesting the United States counter Chinese indifference to CD piracy by “blast[ing] defective Weezer albums – eternally stuck on that irritating ‘sweater’ line – at the Chinese embassy.” Despite these negative sentiments, Weezer continued to have success on radio and MTV with the release of the third single from their debut album, “Say It Ain’t So.” Indeed, the growing audience led promoters to book Weezer several amphitheatre shows for the summer of 1995. However, slow sales ultimately led these shows to be switched to smaller venues – a move which vindicated those who regarded Weezer as a flavor-of-the-week.

In September 1995, Weezer went on hiatus as frontman Rivers Cuomo headed off to attend Harvard University, and bassist Matt Sharp released an album with his band The Rentals. While Sharp scored a radio hit of his own with the new wave-inspired “Friends of P,” Cuomo began writing songs for the next record. Despite Weezer’s having won accolades from some music writers, Cuomo became concerned that Weezer was being written off as a “one-dimensional, silly pop band,” and as such used the winter of 1996 to begin penning a series of more personal lyrics describing failed romantic encounters. The result was an album in the tragic Romantic tradition, depicting Cuomo as Captain Pinkerton, the villain of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly who has an affair with a “15-year-old Japanese girl, gets her pregnant and then abandons her.” Recorded in June 1996, the album, featuring noisy guitars and amplifier feedback, was noticeably rougher sounding than their first record, which was marked by clean production and was recorded to a metronome click to ensure rhythmic consistency.

The resulting album, entitled Pinkerton, was released on September 24, 1996, amid a flurry television ads sponsored by Geffen. However, unlike Weezer, the new record stalled commercially. A series of factors undermined the album’s success on the charts. For one, the first single from the album, “El Scorcho,” failed to achieve significant airplay on many alternative stations, possibly due to its un-radio-friendly sound or to a shift in alternative programming away from “grunge” sounding music. Second, Cuomo refused to do any interviews with the press in the first months following the release, which angered some in the press and limited the number of stories about the album. Third, Pinkerton Security Company filed an injunction against Geffen days before the album’s release which, though ultimately lifted, limited the amount of promotion the record company engaged in during the crucial few days before and after the record’s release. Fourth, Cuomo refused to make the type of clever videos that had propelled the first album up the charts, and the straightforward videos the band did make for the first two singles never caught on. Finally, due to Cuomo’s scholastic obligations, Weezer was able to tour only throughout the fall of 1996 until the end of January 1997, when spring semester commenced. These factors, combined with the relative inaccessibility of Pinkerton, resulted in limited commercial success for the album. After debuting at a disappointing nineteenth on the Billboard 200, the album slipped further down the chart each week, falling off the charts completely by February 1997, despite the release of a second single from the record, “The Good Life.”

When Cuomo’s semester ended in May 1997, Weezer resumed touring, opening for ska-rock band No Doubt. Increasingly popular at the time, No Doubt was able to play 7000-person venues in stark comparison to the club shows that Weezer had been playing during the first leg of its tour. The band hoped that the tour and the label’s current release of a third single from Pinkerton, “Pink Triangle,” might jumpstart support for the record. However, with Pinkerton still languishing at the bottom of the charts and “Pink Triangle” not making a dent on the modern rock chart, Geffen ultimately decided not to invest in a video for the new single. Then, tragically, Weezer fan club founders Mykel and Cari Allan died in a car accident in mid-August while following Weezer from Denver to Salt Lake City during the band’s short tour of the western United States. Devastated by this turn of events, Weezer cancelled a tour date to attend the funeral, and a month later, after having completed a 10-day tour of East Asia, performed a tribute show for the Allan sisters on August 15, 1997. This show would be the last Weezer concert for almost three years as the band again went on hiatus and Sharp left the group to work on The Rentals full-time.

Images of Weezer

When Weezer first emerged in 1994-1995, writers had difficulty assessing the band. Weezer’s music seemed to represent a number of different traditions. On the one hand, the music maintained the knowing attitude of the alternative scene and utilized the same brand of crunchy, distorted guitar tones as other hallmark alternative bands, like the Pixies and Nirvana. On the other hand, the music had a melodic sensibility particular to pop music, with Beatles-esque chord progressions and catchy melodies. Cuomo had studied Beach Boys records, picking apart the harmonies employed by group, and he employed them throughout Weezer’s songs. Further complicating matters was Weezer’s alternating use of irony and straightforward sincerity, leaving the listener unsure of what was plaintive and what was comical. As one writer from March of 1995 noted: “Putting a label on Weezer is a daunting task. – they’re too cynical to be pop, too peppy to be grunge, too melodic to be metal.” Moon argues that “you could ascribe many things to Weezer and try to triangulate them,” but that ultimately such efforts to pin the band down as a specific combination of genres “left something missing.”

Weezer’s being at the intersection of so many traditions resulted in pieces tending to use one trait or another to caricature the band in a particular light. Consequently, a series of tropes appeared with which to depict Weezer: Weezer-as-novelty act, Weezer-as-alterna-pop, and Weezer-as-clever-hipsters. The first of these characterizations, the novelty act, portrayed Weezer as either a corporate alternative rip-off or a college rock band that aimed to achieve notoriety through a shtick rather than through the works’ merit as pop/rock music; this was the most negative of the three characterizations and the one of the most common throughout the first year of Weezer’s national exposure. The second characterization, Weezer as lightweight pop, recognized Weezer as a band capable of producing catchy, radio-friendly music but derided it as an act that lacked substance; pieces utilizing this approach to Weezer emphasized the band’s fun and upbeat sound and colored the band as a “guilty pleasure.” The third general category was Weezer as an alternative/hipster act. This characterization played up the band’s use of ironic pop culture allusions, the band’s appeal to the college crowd, and the alternative music-style surface of the band’s music. These three conceptions, though, were not mutually exclusive. In a single article Weezer might be considered a hipster band ironically employing the retro-pop sensibilities of 1960’s, resulting in catchy songs.

Weezer as Novelty Act

Weezer emerged onto the national radar screen at a precarious time: a year when alternative music had become the mainstream. With a flurry of alternative rock acts being signed and with alternative now firmly mainstream, deciding what bands truly represented the underground became a central task; as critic Gina Arnold argued in 1995, “indie credibility” became equated with the “idea that a band is creating a valid artistic statement rather than merely selling a contrived, commercial musical commodity.” As such, the impressions of a band’s artistic merit, at least among writers who sympathized with the alternative rock notion of authenticity, depended in part upon whether the band was deemed truly alternative or one of the supposedly corporate-copycats flooding the market by 1994.

Emerging as a new alternative band with the class of ‘94 – the era when “tastemakers making decisions on ‘cred’ really came to a head” – Weezer’s indie credibility immediately came into question. By August of 1994, Weezer, a band with no traceable roots in the alternative rock community, had achieved, with “Undone (The Sweater Song),” widespread recognition based upon radio and MTV exposure. The single was almost universally pegged as being particularly jokey in character; the song seemed to borrow a hipster’s ironic and detached outlook in humorously comparing a failing relationship to an unraveling sweater. Weezer’s follow-up single, alluding to pop icons Buddy Holly and Mary Tyler Moore, seemingly adopted the same strategy as “Undone.” Both singles succeeded upon the significant radio and MTV support, and both used the humor of college radio bands such as Pavement. As such, Weezer became particularly susceptible to the charge of being a “cookie-cutter corporate-alternative act” that that had “adopted the Pavement sound for greater financial rewards.” Sonic Cool author Joe Harrington contends that this combination of humor and opportunism “is the essence of novelty – it’s just a pose – it’s a mass marketed thing.”

Reponses to the critic poll I conducted corroborate this conception of the band as an overplayed and annoying flavor-of-the-week. One critic recalls that in 1994, he found Weezer to be “obnoxious, whiny and not particularly original.” Recounts another respondent: “lots of hype. . . made me wary of their music at first. [I] just considered them a buzz bin band before I sat down and really listened.” Another respondent recollects that despite being “hooked” by Weezer’s debut, he was “suspicious of the band’s meteoric rise while so many of their indie contemporaries and precursors languished.” Another offers that he felt Weezer was particularly “gimmicky” and “put more into their videos than their songs.”

Weezer as “Bubblegrunge”

While some used Weezer’s sense of humor to dismiss the band as a novelty act, a larger portion of the press found Weezer to be, in the words of one survey respondent, a “pleasingly accessible alternative to what had become a deluge of humorless grunge.” Grunge music’s extreme seriousness, which had dominated the alternative rock airwaves for three years, came to head in April 1994 with the suicide of grunge icon Kurt Cobain. Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis recalls that “that kind of moment of alternative triumph turned out to be so brief; no one would ever admit this, but I think it scared people, and it sent a chill up people’s spines.” In contrast to Nirvana’s dark irony, Weezer presented an ostensibly lighter take on the alternative sound. Whereas the lyrics of early 90’s grunge seemed weighed down with meaning, Weezer songs were described as “eliciting snickers instead of tears.”

Pieces describing Weezer in this light accentuated the importance of the pop “hook” to the band’s music. In January 1995, Spin Magazine proclaimed Weezer to be “