If you're wondering if Rivers Cuomo wants you to take him
seriously ... he wants you to.
"The thing that pisses me off is when critics say that it's all a big
joke," confesses Weezer's leader over a speakerphone from an L.A.
recording studio.
"When they say I'm intentionally making fun of
certain kinds of music, or I'm making fun of my fans, or I hate my
fans, or I hate music. I hear these kinds of things all the time, and
it's so frustrating for me because I put so much work into the
records. No one would put that much effort into a joke! It's
obviously something I care so much about. I love the music, I love
the records, I love our fans, and I don't know how to communicate
that to the world in a way they can understand."
Clearly not. If anything, Cuomo and the rest of Weezer — guitarist
Brian Bell, drummer Patrick Wilson and bassist Scott Shriner — have
developed a reputation over the years as a band of smirking power-pop
satirists. Their videos — from the Happy Days homage of Buddy Holly
to the viral-video tribute of Pork and Beans — often find them
cheekily sending up pop-culture trends and touchstones. Recent live
shows have reportedly found them covering Lady GaGa's Poker Face,
Coldplay's Viva la Vida and The Killers' Human. Their recently
released album Raditude — which was christened by Office star Rainn
Wilson — finds Cuomo and co. venturing into the hip-hop realm with
the aid of unlikely allies like Lil Wayne and Jermaine Dupri. Heck,
even their winged-W logo is a clear knockoff of Van Halen.
Then there are the Snuggies.
To promote Raditude, Cuomo concocted a
truly bizarre marketing campaign: The band is selling Weezer snuggies
for $30 — and giving away the CD with purchase. They recently
performed on Late Night With David Letterman clad in the sleeved
blankets, and have even filmed a TV informercial. And he wonders why
people don't take him seriously.
But dig below the surface and you'll find a sincere songwriter, he
insists.
"I don't think I use satire and irony nearly as much as other people
think I do. In a number of cases, I've done lyrics 100% sincerely and
those lyrics have been interpreted as being satirical. The entire
song Beverly Hills, for example, is completely sincere, exploring my
craving for celebrity. But many listeners think I'm satirizing
celebrity."
The soft-spoken, thoughtful 39-year-old wasn't satirizing anybody or
anything when he spoke to us during a break from assembling a deluxe
reissue of the band's underappreciated 1996 sophomore album Pinkerton.
The most obvious difference between this album and your others is
you're collaborating with other songwriters now. How did that come
about? Until now, you've been a self-contained unit.
Last year we put out the Red Album, and to support it we did what we
called The Hootenanny Tour, where we invited fans to bring their
instruments to Weezer shows and play with us onstage. So each day we
were faced with the challenge of making music with these people. And
each day I got to hear hundreds of new instruments, and I was
interacting with people I had never met before.
And it was very
invigorating. So it was natural for me to start calling up other
musicians when I started writing songs for Raditude at the beginning
of this year.
Some of them aren't people anyone would expect you to know, let alone
work with — people like Jermaine Dupri and Lil Wayne, for example.
How did that happen?
I've always been a huge fan of Jermaine Dupri's songwriting and Lil
Wayne's rapping. Yeah, they're from a totally different world,
musically speaking. But that made it all the more fun and challenging
for me. To figure out how to integrate their ideas with my ideas and
with Weezer's sensibility and chord progressions and melodies.
And how did you fuse those things together?
Well, it just takes a lot of work. You just have to keep trying
different things and problem-solving until everything clicks. The
song Can't Stop Partying is a perfect example. The idea Jermaine was
bringing to the table was a pure club-party song. And while I thought
something about that energy was great, it wasn't the whole story for
me.
And I struggled for a long time with the lyrics, trying to revise
them to make it feel more authentic to me. But everything I tried
just made it worse.
So eventually I struck on the idea of radically
changing the music underneath the lyrics — changing it to a minor key
and making it into a sad, beautiful musical landscape under those
lyrics. And it really changed the music of the lyrics. Now I'm
singing about partying but the music is sad.
You're selling Snuggies and giving away your CD with every purchase.
What kind of statement are you making about the music industry?
(Laughs) Yeah, it's a bit of a joke. People say that CDs really
aren't worth that much anymore. So we're basically giving it away for
free with a Snuggie. But I don't know that we're making a serious
statement there.
How are they selling?
I haven't got any figures yet. But from what I hear, they're selling
quite well. Snuggies in general have just been phenomenal sellers —
14 million or something like that.
Please tell me that Brian's not rubbing your feet in your fake
informercial.
Those are not my feet.
You're going to be 40 soon. You're married and have a two-year-old
daughter. How do you integrate that life with the arrested
adolescence of being in Weezer?
I think the core human emotions are pretty universal. So as long as I
boil my feelings down to their core essence, people of any age can
relate to them. Whether they're people 20 years younger than me or
people 20 years older than me. That's what I've strived for as an
artist with Weezer's first album — trying to make timeless, universal
songs that will appeal to people of any age.
Speaking of timeless, universal songs, Raditude's first single If
You're Wondering if I Want You To (I Want You To) seems to borrow a
bit of its groove from You Can't Hurry Love. Yet the lyrics are about
a guy urging a lover to hurry up and make a move. Is that an
intentional juxtaposition on your part, a happy accident, or am I
just overthinking the whole thing?
Gosh, I loved that song so much as a kid. I can't say I was
intentionally modelling it — though I do remember, as I was writing
the song, saying 'Hey! This kind of has the same feel of You Can't
Hurry Love.' But no, it wasn't closely modelled on that song.
You recently wrote a song with Katy Perry. Tell me about that.
Well, there's not much to tell. We just got together and wrote a
song. I don't know what the fate will be of the song we wrote. It
could end up on her record or my record or anybody's record.
Do you have a wish list of other artists you'd like to collaborate with?
Yes, I actually literally have a list. Let me pull it up on my
computer. Some of the names you might know are Fred Durst, Lady GaGa,
The Killers, Karen O, Brian Wilson ...
Are they on the list simply because you appreciate their music? Or
are there other factors involved?
It's important to me that I'm really excited to work with somebody
and a big fan of their music. But I also like to talk to my friends
and see who they think it would be cool for me to work with.
Sometimes, somebody else has a different perspective that might
produce a result that I never would have thought of on my own.
