In the spring and summer of 1995, Rivers Cuomo was in a dark place. Sure, his debut album with Weezer had gone multi-platinum the year before, but his success felt hollow. Originally, he wanted to follow up ‘The Blue Album’ with a fully fledged rock opera tellingly titled ‘Songs From A Black Hole’ but that came to nothing. Between surgery, the following physical therapy and waiting to find out if he’d been accepted to Harvard to study music, Cuomo clung on to one of the things he loved the most to keep him going as the year went on: opera. Puccini’s ‘Madame Butterfly’ became his go-to, and as the twenty-five year old future nerd icon waited to see what was around the corner for him, the ninety year old stage masterpiece got played on repeat.

Let’s talk about ‘Madame Butterfly’ for a bit. Yes, I know this isn’t a retrospective for ‘Operatastic’, but bear with me. In the opera, the male lead, a US naval officer called Pinkerton, marries a much younger Japanese girl, then ghosts her. She’s hopelessly in love with him, and dreams he’ll come back. Just as she gives up and ends her life, he shows up again. So far, so ‘Romeo and Juliet’. According to his ‘Pinkerton Diaries’ published in 2011, what spoke to Cuomo was how this character felt to him like a touring rock star with a groupie in every town: always on the road, pretending to make a commitment to the ladies, and generally being a dick to those around him. More than that, the depth of emotion in this classic tragedy seemed to sum up what he was hoping to convey about the shallow and fleeting nature of his tour experiences.

Why mention this? Listening to the lyrics on ‘Pinkerton’ now feels slightly creepy until you realise it’s at least partially coming from this place of Orientalism and the characters which filled Cuomo’s head at this point ins career. The genesis of Weezer’s outsider viewpoint, ripe with longing, that comes into all of their later work starts with this disillusioned, nervous guy in a lot of pain who heard something in Puccini’s story that touched him. Was he the tragic mistaken hero, the treacherous male lead, or just a guy lost in unknown territory? These were the questions the vocalist hoped to answer for himself, and formed the basis of his second album.

Most of ‘Pinkerton’ was written very quickly during Cuomo’s first term at Harvard, and within a couple of seconds we can feel the change that his year wrought on his songwriting. Weezer’s debut record brought us ‘Buddy Holly’ and ‘Undone (The Sweater Song)’, but ‘Pinkerton’ opens with ‘Tired Of Sex’: a sweaty diatribe against the hookup culture conveyor belt. The whole band are so raw and so anguished, the pressures of their weariness bleeding through every bar they play. ‘Pinkerton’ was recorded without a producer, in bits and pieces over Cuomo’s university holidays, and the scattershot spontaneity is partly what makes this such a different Weezer record. While they always seem to take a teenage viewpoint in every song in their back catalogue, ‘Pinkerton’ feels like the real deal: a coming of age record that’s dealing authentically with the messiness of being a young adult. 

That includes, of course, the parts that are distasteful now. We’ve all been there, and anyone who got through university without a messy incident or two must be a saint. ‘Across The Sea’, based on Cuomo’s hopeless and largely imaginary crush on a teenage Japanese fan who sent him letters, has not aged well, and explains why ‘Madame Butterfly’ spoke to him so much. ‘Pink Triangle’,  his equally self-deprecating song about crushing on a girl who batted for the other team, is blunt and comes across as the kind of insensitive blurt-out which could really have happened. We’re not excusing songs from adults fantasising about teenagers – and even Cuomo later had to write an explanation to his fan club about why he was writing like this – but as he put it, he wanted to explore all of himself on this record, even the cringey and inappropriate bits. We see Weezer now as the sweet guys hoping for a trip to an ‘Island In The Sun’, but ‘Pinkerton’ is where the mask slipped and we got to see their unpleasant and all-too-relatable humanity. We might all hope to be the cool, respectful, instagram-able tourists if we go to Japan on holiday, but in reality, all of us are capable of being a Pinkerton. That’s what Cuomo wanted to share. 

It’s not a huge surprise that reviews at the time were mixed. Some people loved the desperate fuzz and more garage sound, and others wondered if ‘Pinkerton’ was sign of Weezer’s breakdown. In fact, it kind of was. The band took a five year hiatus from recording afterwards and returned in 2001 with a new bassist and ‘The Green Album’. Cuomo was reportedly very embarrassed by ‘Pinkerton’ for years. However, slowly but surely, the world started to appreciate ‘Pinkerton’. This is the same trajectory my Weezer journey took. My Dad bought spare tickets from a co-worker to their Brixton Academy show in circa 2002, and while Teenage Kate loved the cutesy pop numbers, half the ‘Pinkerton’ songs were a bit too much. It’s probably a blessing neither I nor my Dad could understand all the words, upon reflection. It was only after I’d been through the dumpster fire of early twenties unrequited crushes and existential despair that I finally got what Cuomo was going through. By 2010, pretty much the whole music world agreed that ‘Pinkerton’ was an important record of the era, and now regularly pops up in “Top Albums Of The Nineties” lists. Even Cuomo himself has now come to terms with whatever personal exorcism needed to happen in order to create it.

As it turned out, all Rivers Cuomo’s angst throughout the Pinkerton era resolved itself. Now, he’s happily married, touring occasionally and apparently running a Discord server. His quarter life crisis faded away, but left a legacy of a unique and edgy record that, much like he did in 1996, doesn’t fit in anywhere. It’s an awkward but rewarding chapter in Weezer’s history that’s also an unflinching dissection of Cuomo himself. It’s a stinging, uncomfortable listen, but sometimes that’s what a genius record does to you, three decades on. 

KATE ALLVEY