There are many interpretations of what the lyrics of this song mean … some of them thoughtful, others not so much. I’m not sure what’s going on in this song, from the barely heard Robert Altman-esque dialogue in the background, to the lyrics which sound like someone having a mental breakdown, but I’m mainly focusing on the wall of noise that surges louder and louder as the song progresses to have the entire thing crash down into a million pieces at the end. This was the first Weezer song I remember hearing and when I found out Ric Ocasek from the Cars produced this, I thought “Of course.” Mainly because I thought Weezer (circa 1994) sounded like a more radio-friendly version of the Pixies in much the same way the Cars were a more radio-friendly (at least in America) version of Roxy Music. This is not meant a slam to either Weezer or the Pixies (or the Cars or Roxy Music), because that first Weezer album (the self-title “blue” album) takes everything that’s great about the Pixies and adds more hooks. It’s a classic pop album and it’s the one I most frequently return to, even though I love a lot of Weezer’s later albums. “Undone” is my favorite song off the “blue” album.
The closing song from Weezer’s now-classic 1996 album “Pinkerton.” This is the song that brings the entire album into perspective, because the title of the album comes from the name of the character in Giacomo Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” (BF Pinkerton) who seduces and abandons the tragic heroine of the famous opera. Weezer lead singer Rivers Cuomo felt the character in Puccini’s opera is an “a–hole American sailor similar to a touring rock star” and was “the perfect symbol for the part of myself that I am trying to come to terms with on this album.”
The song is a confession to a woman the song’s protagonist has seduced and abandoned. He tries to explain why he did what he did. The explanation may not be satisfactory, but it seems like an honest explanation by someone who is not sure of why he feels the need to follow a physical want without understanding the consequences such actions can bring. Granted, this is cold comfort to the woman who has been dumped. But sadly … the reasons why people do certain things don’t always have a satisfactory explanation, because those reasons are sometimes more complex than what can be put into words.
A frustrating but brilliant portrayal of a person who feels genuine sadness over his actions, even though he’s not quite sure of the reasons why.
Get your platform shoes and flares on. This is a nice latter-day approximation of crunchy, hooky, foot-stomping Gary Glitter / Sweet style 1970s glitter rock served up by Weezer. Would love to hear Joan Jett do a cover of this. From the 2009 album “Raditude.”
“El Scorcho” was the lead-off single for Weezer’s 1996 “Pinkerton” album, the follow-up to their very successful self-titled debut album from 1994.
The story behind “Pinkerton” is now legendary, but here’s the Cliff Notes version: lead singer Rivers Cuomo was having extremely mixed feelings about the success of his band, eschewing further band work to enroll as a Harvard undergrad in the interim. The songs he wrote for “Pinkerton” were intensely personal … oftentimes embarrassingly so … spelling out his ambivalent feelings for the fame and fortune his band received and revealing himself to be anything but the rock star people were thinking he was. The harsh sound and intensely personal lyrics of “Pinkerton” were off-putting for many folks. The album failed commercially and ended up getting bad to mixed reviews. Cuomo advised in 2001 in an “Entertainment Weekly” article: “It’s a hideous record… It was such a hugely painful mistake that happened in front of hundreds of thousands of people and continues to happen on a grander and grander scale and just won’t go away. It’s like getting really drunk at a party and spilling your guts in front of everyone and feeling incredibly great and cathartic about it, and then waking up the next morning and realizing what a complete fool you made of yourself.”
But … as these stories often go … the album took on a life of its own after it faded from the pop charts. The people that loved it … REALLY loved it … and praised the album in internet chat rooms. This fervent adoration for “Pinkerton” after its alleged critical and commercial failure wound up giving Weezer a new life, which caused them to subsequently reunite and achieve even greater and sustained commercial success in the new millennium. “Pinkerton” is considered by many to be Weezer’s best album and even Cuomo came around in 2008 admitting to Pitchfork: “Pinkerton‘s great. It’s super-deep, brave, and authentic. Listening to it, I can tell that I was really going for it when I wrote and recorded a lot of those songs.”
“El Scorcho” hardly seems like a radio hit on first glance. It’s off-kilter melodies and vocals almost derail the song, but the song keeps coming back to a chorus that increasingly becomes more rousing and anthem-like. The song is about having a crush on someone so intense that you don’t have the ability to communicate effectively around them. The goofiness of the vocals and musicianship is exactly what people do when they acknowledge that what they’re feeling is embarrassing and try to mask that embarrassment … poorly.
“El Scorcho” is in the best tradition of intense crush songs … the awkward, neurotic cousin of Jackie DeShannon’s “When You Walk in the Room.” It may seem off-putting and easy to dismiss at first, but seriously, you need to give it a few more listens. The song grows on you in the same way certain people do that you would at first write off. There’s always more than meets the eye and that’s what I see as the enduring appeal of not only this song and “Pinkerton” but of Weezer, in general. They can almost be forgiven for this album inspiring some of the most God-awful confessional “emo” music imaginable.
From their self-titled 2001 album (also known as “the Green Album”), “Photograph” is my favorite Weezer song of all time. This is a damn near perfect pop song, overlaid with lots of guitar noise, and says what it needs to say in 2 minutes 19 seconds. In other words, my wheelhouse.
Yes, the accompanying video seems a little too self-consciously geeky, but try to ignore the visuals and groove on the song.
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