Ongoing History of New Music looks at things from the alt-rock universe to hip hop, from artist profiles to various thematic explorations. It is Canada’s most w...
Rivers Cuomo and Weezer - Alt-Rock's Nerd Heroes Part 2
The way I see it, there are three types of bands that stretch across a spectrum…first, there’s the extreme sort, a group that will do almost anything to attract attention…you’re probably thinking of some names right now.
Next to them are the traditional sort, and they comprise the vast majority of bands out there…these are groups that go out there, do their thing earnestly and honestly, and hope that this will be enough for music lovers…they occupy a huge part of this spectrum.
And then we have the third type: the quirky, eccentric, and weird…these groups come in all sorts of flavours, from mildly bent to the gloriously stupid and the confoundingly weird…these bands go a long way into making music fun and unpredictable.
Not all land with audiences—they’re too strange, not enough people get the joke, or maybe they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But there can be a balance between being quirky and fun and having songs that have widespread appeal…they have just enough of the nerd factor to set themselves apart while not being so nerdy that they’ll turn too many people off.
This is really hard to do…it takes songwriting skills, careful management of your image, and plenty of creativity and imagination, especially if you want to main things over more than just a couple of albums and touring cycles.
Among the very, very, very best of this class of band is Weezer…they’ve perfected a formula that includes musical talent, wit, self-deprecation, left-of-centre thinking, a desire to have fun, a willingness to experiment, some clever marketing, and above all, to let their fans in on everything…it’s an approach that has worked very, very well for decades.
This is part two of “Rivers Cuomo and Weezer: alt-rock’s nerd heroes”.
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42:36
Rivers Cuomo and Weezer - Alt-Rock's Nerd Heroes Part 1
If Rivers Cuomo of Weezer were to walk past you on the street, you probably wouldn’t notice him…if you did, you might think that this stranger kinda looked like Louis Tully, the nebbish accountant played by Rick Moranis in a couple of “Ghostbusters” movie.
Chances are he’d be wearing skinny jeans, a t-shirt, a hoody, maybe a baseball cap, indistinguishable from a hundred other short, slight, guys with glasses that you encountered that day…and that’s just the way he likes it.
But Rivers Cuomo is an unlikely sort of rock star and is extremely committed to being a rock star—or at least doing the things that he hopes will keep him at that level.
He’s highly educated, deeply introspective, very private, and always looking to learn something new, be studying the mysteries of writing the perfect song to computer programming to intense forms of meditation to careful study of the music industry… and one day, he wants to make a weezer movie—not a tour film, but some kind of actual movie.
Weezer has been together for more than 30 years…there have been no break-ups and reunions…there haven’t even been any official hiatuses.
But Rivers has also taken up pickleball with a vengeance…he’s a very good chess player, too…he’s fascinated with Japanese culture.
What else?...PETA once voted him “the sexiest celebrity vegetarian,” although he confesses to hating carrots…he doesn’t have a middle name because his parents wanted him to choose one when he got old enough—but he never got around to it.
Fox filmed a pilot for a tv show based on the years rivers went to harvard…and he once had a pet squirrel named “Mr. Peanutbutter.
That’s just a start…think we can fill up an entire program with fascinating facts about Rivers Cuomo and Weezer …I bet we can.
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36:56
Dreampop - A History
We’re about to get all dreamy and floaty and all blissed out by taking a look at another specific genre…a post-punk genre called “dream pop”…it’s a thing unto itself but it’s also related to other genres where atmosphere, sonic textures, and (in some cases) sheer volume reign supreme…and from its origins in the early 80s, dream pop has had a profound effect on music that is felt even today.
It touches on and overlaps with other alt-rock subgenres including shoegaze and anything resembling modern psychedelic material…it has a volume continuum that ranges from barely-there softness to somewhere beyond a jet engine…but at the same time, it never loses touch with melody.
So, complicated stuff—and i haven’t even mentioned vocal styles, guitar effects, production methods, and all the other goodness that goes into making something dreamy—or in extreme cases, nightmarish.
Here…let me show you.
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34:35
The Most Explosive Band Bust-ups and Breakups
This is an episode all about bust-ups and break-ups, those times when tensions within a band get so high that things get weird and violent and—well, let’s just say “regrettable”.
Some of these incidents resulted in nothing more than an airing of the grievances…steam was let off, people calmed down, and it was back to business as usual…other times, though, the damage of was irreparable and it marked the end of the group forever—or at least something close to it…
You want stories?... You want drama?... You want weird…stand by…i got the stories ---and they are not pretty.
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37:21
Stories Behind Songs - 5
We’ve all sat listening to music and though to ourselves “what does this song mean?...what’s the singer (or the band) trying to say?”.
Sometimes it’s nothing…it’s just a bunch of words strung together in a way that sounds fun…other times, lyrics to a song may be just some kind of stream of consciousness thing that somehow made sense to the singer or the lyricist at the time…or maybe it didn’t…lots of songs are written in altered states.
A song could be an oblique and opaque form of poetry that’s supposed to resolve itself in the brains of each individual listener…there have been many times when I’ve asked a singer “what does this song mean?”… and their answer is “well, what does it mean to you?...whatever you say is the right answer”.
Okay, i get it…it’s art…art is supposed to be open to personal interpretation…when you hear something beautiful or provocative or inspiring, who cares what the initial intent was—if there even was one…all that matters is that the song somehow hits you on some kind of emotional level that’s difficult or impossible to quantify or describe.
Then again, some songs have a very specific point…they tell a story…or they’re inspired by something that happened in real life and the composer is trying to capture what he or she felt and saw.
And then there are the stories of the creation of the songs themselves…something happened for that song to be born…what was it?...and what were the circumstances, the serendipity, the accidents, the crazy coincidences that needed to manifest for a great song to come to life?.
Let’s explore that…this is another episode of stories behind songs.
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Ongoing History of New Music looks at things from the alt-rock universe to hip hop, from artist profiles to various thematic explorations. It is Canada’s most well known music documentary hosted by the legendary Alan Cross. Whatever the episode, you’re definitely going to learn something that you might not find anywhere else. Trust us on this.
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