Weezer :: "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived"
From Weezer ("The Red Album") (Geffen Records; 2008)

Weezer used to be the best band ever. “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived” is enough to re-instigate…well, if not the love affair, then at least the interest. Like Oreos without the milk (which, I mean, some people actually like Oreos without milk!) or “Southland Tales” without beer, loving Weezer is a process devoid of enough pleasure to make the large pain it affords almost bold and unreal: choirs, ambulances, sex. This is not the classic Weezer sound, but every second of this song sounds like some fucked-up message-boarder’s take on what Weezer—good Weezer—could sound like in 2008. Part of me doesn’t want to believe Rivers Cuomo wrote this song—the part that still laughs at “Mo’ Beats”; the part that, all things considered, would have just about died if this freak cut through the 2005 hype machine and delivered us all from the delusion of “Beverly Hills.”

Because crazy Rivers is a concept, and so as a concept it exists (in my mind) as an ideal state. It kind of pains me to see it messed with in this way, even lovingly so. How I would’ve loved Cuomo to throw down the axe and deck Elton John and frickin’ throw his cardigan-wrapped shit at his fans, who’ve been eating it up since approximately 2002. That’s what Make Believe should have been, and it’s what “The Greatest Man” finally attempts, the beaut being that this time the mental masturbation is absolute and Cuomo’s got spores tonguing out every bar so the track, which starts almost innocent with its pianos and quaint loafers on the prowl, takes to just fucking explode, just gush at all these importunate and slightly awkward moments. There are like five pace changes in this song—at least one that will make everybody laugh out loud—and none of it, not even when the Shaq bomb drops and Rivers starts channelling a fratboy Prince via Korn, takes away from the song’s central tenet, this band’s one undimmed lifeforce: the (choke) riff.

Because, yes, it’s that riff again: the one you heard on “Holiday,” and the one you’re going to hear all over again in various keys and guises on what I guess we’re now calling Red but let’s just say Weezer because, fuck, I love that riff. I love what they did with the production here, and I just love this band (despite its existence). This is a song on Weezer, by Weezer, probably even for Weezer; no amount of gooning Scott Shriner will sully that. One hears this and imagines a truck exploding. One gets to hear, finally, a band destroy itself.

And it has to be a funny feeling that sets a power-pop group on auto-destruct, right? In listening to “The Greatest Man,” in trying to parse its ambition, its futility, its one goddamned melody that contains, pretty much, every tail vocal and vim tonic this dude’s had in him since summer school, one realizes that this is truly the sound of a band on its way out. This is absolutely the closest the Weez have come to their cheap melodic high, and the bit (way before Rivdawg quaffs helium) where things cut out and we’re briefly left with the dude and his acoustic? It could have been pulled straight outta the ’90s: if Weezer took these twenty seconds and farted out, like, an Album Five Demos’ worth of rubrixed permutations, then we might have something approximating a genuine critical resurgence and reappraisal. We might get a ton of people suddenly and correctly thinking Green is kind of amazing, and that Green-era Brian Bell does look a lot like George Harrison. But this is Rivers, or more specifically this is Rivers with one leg in Blue, a whole foot in mouth, and one hand neatly pulling on his dick. Which says, “hi,” by the way.

If indulgence is the joke, then I get it: dude’s an asshole and assholes don’t have a lot going for them besides. Analyzing the song in this light is maybe what the band wants us to do—it’s not like Weezer haven’t ransacked the ghost of their past before, but “The Greatest Man” does it exceptionally. It may be more disturbing to think, though, that this song casts a new light on that hallowed period that justifies the existence of the band in the first place. Because if “The Greatest Man” completely succeeds as a Weezer song in 2008, it’s only to the detriment of what Weezer was, or at least what it was in my head. Meaning that this suddenly makes me realize how ridiculous even this band’s great material is—how even the sloven-melt pop of Pinkerton reveals itself to be a fucking exercise in ridicule and how the idea of this gimp singing an unironic falsetto over cockswinging riffs is not just plain absurd, or ballsy limp satire, but a whole other kind of rotten spunk. “The Greatest Man” proves that Rivers Cuomo has no soul. In pulling out of his own band’s golden era, and slavishing it with post-Vispassana cum-chi, he’s done that final, fatal carwreck move: he’s granted autonomy to his own band’s sound, leaving us what has to be his take on what he should be doing right now, which, broadly, since these are his impressions: fuck art, fuck (Japanese) women, and fuck fucking Matt Sharpe! With a Steely Dan! If these are the things Cuomo thinks make him cool or thinks we think should make him cool or whatever permutation of he said/we said then this is a six minute anti-song about “being yourself,” or acting in what used to be your place. Point being, I don’t know what I really think anymore. It may be a wank, but believe me: hand anatomy is hard, and this song did, briefly, make me forget about those frickin’ lumbricals.

So…yeah. I love it.

Alan Baban :: 12 May 2008 |