This is THE question about Weezer, and one that has been debated many, many times on these pages. My personal take isn’t that Weezer sucks (or has ever sucked) per se, but that Rivers’ love of the cheesier side of rock and bubblegum pop is what drives him musically, and ever since Matt Sharp left the band, there is no one there to reign in those cheesier impulses. Accordingly, we get songs like Beverly Hills and Pork and Beans. Catchy, but empty.

The lone exception is, of course, Pinkerton, which I believe most Weezer fans cite as their favorite Weezer album. That record is awkward and awesome. Its is heartbreaking, while at the same time hopeful. I’ve always believed the theory that Rivers’ wrote those songs when he was in a really dark place after the sudden, monsterous and probably, unexpected success of the Blue Album, and he holed himself up in that apartment off the 10 freeway writing those songs trying to make sense of it all.

Whatever the reason (happiness I guess (I hope)) he’s never going to go there again, and without another strong band member to pull him back from his Seacrestian-side, we are stuck with meme-mining songs from here on out.

http://www.merryswankster.com/archives/2009/06/retrohump_does.html

I’ll summarize – a lot of us think weezer started to suck after the first two albums, but did weezer really just suck all along and we didn’t know it? OR were they always the same band and only recently are we understanding this?

O RLY???