Weezer-It's the Beach Boys

[Ian]

Clearly they are big fans....and are familiar with the 1965 Murry tapes....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsG37JcEQNw

[guitarfool2002]

Clearly they are big fans....and are familiar with the 1965 Murry tapes....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsG37JcEQNw

No doubt! They've worn it on their sleeves, specifically Rivers Cuomo, since their first success "Blue Album" where I heard the BW influences immediately when it was released (especially the single Buddy Holly of all things, it's full of BW-isms if you listen for them) and I became a fan with that debut album's release. That specific track "Beach Boys" was written to be the opposite musically of what a Beach Boys track would sound like, from the melody to the arrangement and groove. In that way it's pretty clever and avoided the obvious nods to the group except in the lyrical content and Murry references. If you want to hear the influences really come blasting out of the speakers, check out various tracks from their so-called "beach album", 2015's "White Album". They really wore it on their sleeves on that one. Of course there are quite a few Rivers tracks to hear this too. I met Rivers at a party at an apartment in Cambridge Mass in late 1997 when he was studying at Harvard, and the Pet Sounds Sessions had just come out. Yes he's definitely a big fan. Good times. 

[Ian]

Yeah--I downloaded that White Album and I am enjoying it a lot... By the Way, that kind of speaks to the age we live in....there is just such a bombardment of content being released that one cannot even keep track of it....I sort of followed Weezer for a while but as I got older I no longer pay close attention to every new album that comes out (used to buy Mojo religiously but have not since 2018 or so) and it must have passed me by completely when it came out. 

[coco1997]

Weezer has put out some of their best 21st material in the last 7-8 years. White, OK Human and their recent SZNZ EP collection are all excellent.

[Awesoman]

Yeah the "Beach Boys" song is pretty good and it's always nice when the band gets some love and street cred especially from a younger generation.  It's a bit unfortunate though that the song didn't become more of a hit.  Aside from the Teal Album with all the cover songs, has Weezer been commercially relevant at all with their more recent original material?  It seems like they're putting out new music all the time but very little of it gets any traction these days.

[Ian]

Well…I think they are a currently endangered species…the alternative rock band!! The airwaves are monopolized by mainstream pop and hip hop

[guitarfool2002]

In the past 5 years or so, the entire notion of music charts and the model itself has been completely demolished. There are so many moving parts working behind the scenes to where the process of "charting" a song or album is a joke. Songs which hit top 5 in the download and stream numbers don't even appear on the so-called "charts", whereas decades ago in the old model if a record sold over 100,000 copies and got x-amount of plays on radio, it would chart. Now the charts seem to ignore certain artists while promoting others, even though they're selling in similar numbers by the week or month. It makes no sense, other than some entities have a finger on the scale.

Is selling CD's or selling vinyl copies of an album still a valid measure of success? And is streaming seriously being tallied in such a way that it means something overall? When an album "charts" because it sells 4,000 or whatever vinyl copies, is that seriously a factor in commercial success?

Weezer has a strong fan base, and a lot of it is younger listeners. Look at how that Toto "Africa" cover came to be, it was sparked by a girl in her teens posting on their social media and it became a success. I think the mainstream pretty much decided that guitar-based alternative bands are out, and look at what the charts are featuring. I think a lot of the bands don't care, and many have cultivated a loyal fan base that pays the bills without being on the radar of the corporations and interests who feature the artists and genres they want to promote. Taylor Swift has 6 albums in the top 20 this week, the rest of that top 20 albums are mostly country and hip-hop. If a legit alternative rock band is doing their own thing, releasing songs and selling merch that the fans buy, and playing shows that make money, I think as of 2023 they don't care nor do they need to follow the chart models from 40 years ago in order to run a successful business as a band.

Weezer does perfectly fine doing what they're doing and have been doing, as the organic nature of that Africa single demonstrated. They have a solid base online that follows them and buys their products, and they're still playing shows. I think like Ian said, the notion of an alternative guitar-based rock band cracking these old chart models isn't a reality under the current system because the easy money isn't in cultivating and promoting those kinds of artists anymore.

[Ian]

It’s a crazy world these days. I’ve tried to get my daughters into classic rock but like a lot of the current generation if it happened before 2010 they don’t want to know about it. To them *NSYNC is a classic rock band! I feel like the ability to just listen to only what you want these days is harming culture because no one is forced anymore to listen to something different. When I was a kid, we listened to whatever our folks played and developed an appreciation for older music. Now the kids all have their own cell phones and air buds and tune it out.

[rab2591]

It’s a crazy world these days. I’ve tried to get my daughters into classic rock but like a lot of the current generation if it happened before 2010 they don’t want to know about it. To them *NSYNC is a classic rock band! I feel like the ability to just listen to only what you want these days is harming culture because no one is forced anymore to listen to something different. When I was a kid, we listened to whatever our folks played and developed an appreciation for older music. Now the kids all have their own cell phones and air buds and tune it out.

Yeah I am really wondering how my kid is going to wade the ocean of music that is at everyone's fingertips now. I want her to have her own tastes of course, but I also want her to understand the beauty of harmony and quality music (music that goes beyond the usual generic 4 chord structure seems pervasive in modern music).

At a very young age my parents gave me a walkman, and a few years later I graduated to the discman. I was able to purchase my own CDs at Sam Goody or Plan 9 (or Circuit City), and I definitely had my own taste in music. However in my late-teens early 20s I gravitated toward classic rock (Zeppelin, Beatles, Beach Boys) and other music I would've found "uncool" when I was in middle/high school.

I think kids listen to what their peers are listening to, not because it's good, but because it's cool. And later in life they come to appreciate the various genres/bands throughout history. It is why classical is still a big industry. People eventually walk away from current-culture and gravitate to what speaks to their soul...whatever that may be.

[guitarfool2002]

It's certainly a crazy scene to navigate, especially for kids under 16 these days! I think the music finds the right people at the right time, or I hope that's the case. I took some heat from my peers in middle school when I was a Beatles and Monkees fanatic who also loved the Beach Boys, 50's Sun Records rockabilly, big band jazz like Glenn Miller, etc. And everyone else was listening to whatever was on the charts. But so was I, I loved top-40 of the day when top-40 radio had probably it's last gasp of breath as the way it was in the 60's. It was a good time to grow up and experience music, and eventually I just didn't give a damn what people around me thought, and the music I needed to hear found me as much as the vice versa was true.

Only problem was it wasn't as easy to find the music in terms of albums and 45's, and I think that's where part of my love for scouring yard sales and flea markets to find "classic" albums and 45's was born. I still get a charge out of seeing a Capitol "swirl" label or a red and white Colgems label hiding in a stack of 45's, even though I really don't need any more. And I remember the letdown of seeing a swirl label and finding that it's an Al Martino record and not a Beatles or BB's.

I think the fans today are spoiled by almost instant access to finding a song, but that's not a bad thing either. The fun of the search and the knowledge isn't the same, but if someone is looking for a song, they can immediately do a search online and find a wealth of information about both the song and the artist and do so while listening to the song stream. That's pretty cool.

I remember one specific time I was looking for a Beatles song I had heard somewhere and loved instantly. I didn't know what it was, only that it sounded like an older Beatles tune. The record stores didn't help, so I started to spend my hard-earned paltry savings on buying up Beatles 45's on trips to a local flea market every few weeks. I didn't have the reference books, there was no internet obviously, the record stores had vinyl and cassettes before the Beatles CD reissues around '87, so I'd buy up at least one 45 on those trips when I found one with a song I didn't know and hoped it was my mystery tune. Beatles albums even back then were a little too expensive unless you got really lucky. Then I finally found it: "I Should Have Known Better"...the B-side to "A Hard Days Night". I was young and didn't have access to all the reference books or anything else, but when I found that 45 I was ecstatic, as scratchy as that 45 was it was the song I was looking for.

That's how silly it was! But I got to discover some great tunes I didn't know before, got some neat 45's to put in my rack and play on the parents' console stereo, and that was very early on in my Beatles obsession. Now all of that info that took me so long to find a 45 of a mystery B-side is literally seconds away online.

I think a lot of younger fans today go on searches after hearing a song on a soundtrack or a video game, and it's still the same process. I work with younger musicians and from what I've seen their musical tastes embrace a lot of eras and genres, which is good. Maybe the musically-minded kids are the exception to the rule and don't really care about peer opinions on something as personal as music tastes, I really don't know.

But what blows my mind, to this very second, is to realize that when I was searching for those Beatles/Monkees/Beach Boys records, they were roughly 20 years old at the time, give or take. Music that is 20 years old now is from the early 2000's...I seriously cannot think of an artist, or an album, from that 2000's era that generates the same kind of emotions among kids today as all those classic 60's records did for me and others when they were 20 year old releases.

Maybe it did all change after 9/11/2001

[guitarfool2002]

https://www.billboard.com/charts/billboard-200/

And now I want to pose a question about the validity of the current chart system and get opinions to hopefully talk me down, as I'm a bit baffled by this. The link above is the current week's Billboard top albums chart. I'm looking mostly at the top 20 entries, but if you widen it out to include the top 100, it gets even more interesting.

So my question is this: Taylor Swift has 6 albums in the top 20. Some of those albums are from the previous decade, some are several years old. I understand the popularity and huge fan base, but my question is are there truly that many "new" Taylor fans buying an album from 5 or even 7 years ago for the first time in enough numbers to place that album on the top-20 chart? And not just one, but multiple older Taylor albums are currently charting. And ironically, one of them is set to be released in a new "Taylor's Version" remix in October, which will probably debut at #1. For those that don't know, the "Taylor's Version" series is a response to Scooter Braun buying her catalog and Taylor getting control of the music again by doing her own versions of the albums so Braun doesn't make money off her songs...supported 1000% by her fan base who immediately turned on Braun after the deal many thought was a rip-off.

So I'm asking is it realistic for that many back-catalog albums to be in the top 20? Of all the Taylor Swift fans out there, most would already have these albums I'd think...or maybe that many "new" fans are getting these titles, but seriously in these numbers enough to warrant constant top-20 placement on the charts?

I need help understanding how that can be, considering most people only buy an album once (minus deluxe editions, remixes, etc). Or are there really that many new Taylor Swift fans driving up the sales numbers on a weekly basis?

I'm also a skeptic, full disclosure, based on info about algorithm manipulation and artificial followers and subscription numbers being used to boost online stats and increase "value" of certain individuals, groups, artists, etc from even more proof that this was done on very popular platforms like Twitter/X, YouTube, and others. A lot of the follower-subscriber-engagement numbers were artificially boosted and driven by manipulating the algorithm to place content or bury it, and artificially create tens of thousands of "followers" that didn't exist as actual humans. Could this be the case with music as well? I wouldn't be surprised.

And it goes back to the issue of alternative rock bands placing albums on these charts...looking at this one, do you think they stand a chance as of this week based on that chart above?

[Michael Edwards Love]

The short answer has got to be streaming. It explains all the catalog greatest hits placements too. Your point about algorithms is important regarding streaming. A lot of people aren't choosing what they are hearing when they stream. So, Taylor Swift becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The algorithm puts it in front of people and then the algorithm notes that they listened to it and puts it in front of them again as well as in front of other people. I think the alternative bands have a shot if they can get a single song to connect with enough folks. What I find interesting about the chart is that 2000-2010 is barely represented. A lot of music released during that time (the downloading era) has fallen into a historical black hole.

[Alex]

Well…I think they are a currently endangered species…the alternative rock band!! The airwaves are monopolized by mainstream pop and hip hop

The "airwaves" aren't really that important anymore. I still see decent crowds at the alt/indie rock shows I go to. Granted, they're usually at smaller venues, but rock is still a pretty sizable niche. I honestly don't mind that it's become the domain of NPR and PBS rather than MTV, because that means there aren't really a lot of meatheads and rednecks at shows, and the bad stuff from the genre doesn't get overplayed to death as much in public anymore.