The lyrics are not particularly good, especially considering that their author was, at the time he wrote them, studying English at Harvard. Songs from the Black Hole can be described as both a concept album about fame and a sci-fi rock opera, both of which should raise red flags. This makes it even more endearing, somehow, since we now know that the young Rivers Cuomo earnestly squonking on the clarinet on the “Longtime Sunshine” solo will be writing slick pop songs for teenagers.
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As a whole, it “exists” as a series of sketchily realized demos, fuzzily recorded, instruments sometimes badly played, with one vocalist rather unconvincingly singing all male and female roles. A handful of songs were fully recorded for another record ( Pinkerton, 1996, whose 25 th anniversary is this September), and some emerged as B-sides. Of course, it’s true that this album cannot be as good as we believe it is. Frankly, we wouldn’t be as disappointed by Make Believe or Ratitude Hurley or if we didn’t know about Songs from the Black Hole, which is, for those of us who think rock music should be very loud, very sad, very sincere, and written and sung solely by 1994-era Rivers Cuomo, the ur-album. These are just some of the Weezer albums their fans tend to find disappointing there are too many to list. There’s no way for us to know whether we’d feel this way if Weezer hadn’t made albums like Make Believe (2005) or Raditude (2009) or Hurley (2010). Their music from that era is shot through with energy, passion, desire, anguish, and personality in ways that astonish upon every listen. Questions of objectivity and aesthetics and nostalgia aside, there is a small army of people who really do believe- whether it’s right or not, whether it’s fair or not-that the Weezer of roughly 1994 to 1999 is ineffably way, way, way better than any iteration of the band since.
Those of us who loved Weezer before the 21st-century – and Lord knows we are legion – find it distressingly difficult to stop caring about the band, even though they keep making records we mostly do not love. What we talk about when we talk about Weezer, usually, is why we are angry at Weezer for essentially all the music they have made since roughly 1999, with the possible exception of the guitar intro to “Perfect Situation”.
This is the central fact of most Weezer fans’ fandom. – YouTube user “Ziggy Startrucker,” May 2019, commenting on a bootleg version of Songs from the Black HoleĬhuck Klosterman wrote, in Eating the Dinosaur: “People are generally disappointed by Weezer albums.” It’s hard to put it more succinctly than that. !No! Weezer! NO!! Where has Rivers Cuomo gone? What has he done? What has happened to Weezer?! WHERE ARE THE REAL WEEZER?!!” – Spencer Owen’s review of the Weezer (the Green album) for Pitchfork,