Weezer's new mix leaves a bad aftertaste

Raditude is one experiment gone wrong.

By Kelsey Whipple

Published Nov. 6, 2009

First, let's address the elephant in the room: Rivers Cuomo is a little bit of a crazy person. The sweater-wearing, horn-rim-sporting, loveably eccentric frontman has had six albums and countless stunts to prove himself, and Raditude is just driving his point home. Dude is Hannibal Lecter-crazy — but instead of eating people, he just wants them to make little Ws with their fingers. And for as long as the term "nerd rock" has been tied to their necks, we've been fine with that. Better musically insane than criminally, right?

Enter Raditude, an album so puzzling many are still trying to decide if it's a joke. But there's no punch line. If we were to attempt to diagnose the album, we might say it suffers from multiple personalities. The once happily screwball "Can't Stop Partying" has been turned on its side and given a techno backing track, like some mad rave in Rivers' mind to which the rest of us aren't really invited. Although Lil Wayne's rap does present a mildly clever (and supremely creepy) "Weezy-Weezer" connection, it's hard not to wonder if that almost-rhyme is the only reason he was even invited. And though they have made a powerful niche — and a living — from their playfulness in the past, the band's tongues are firmly out of their cheeks this time around.

And it's not the only song fighting for attention on Weezer's latest anti-triumph. It's hard not to wonder what "Love is the Answer" (Really? Love is the answer?), complete with Indian back-up vocals and an honest-to-goodness sitar, is doing so far away from the "Slumdog Millionaire" soundtrack. "Girl Got Hot"'s sing-along style is so cleverly catchy it might have been allowed to breathe on its own, were it not for ugly duckling lyrics about an awkward girl who, well, got hot. Songs that shone in other places in Weezer's back catalogue, such as "I Don't Want To Let You Go," have lost all their polish this time around, rubbed under what seem to be Weezer's three goals in music of late: excess, indulgence and power pop. And now, to demonstrate the fine line between laughing with you and laughing at you, it's Weezer.

The only way to understand Raditude would be to categorize it as a concept album, but then mid-life crisis isn't really a concept. If every Weezer fan had stayed in the same grade they were in when Pinkerton was released, these songs might actually make sense, but they've moved on to bigger and better things since they were 12 — such as the All-American Rejects. Or at least that's what Rivers seems to think. "Put Me Back Together," one of the album's surprisingly lovely pop anthems, was penned not by Humpty Dumpty, but by Rivers and the All-American Rejects' Tyson Ritter and Nick Wheeler. With lines such as, "And when I daydream/We're eating ice cream/It's such a nice scene," it's comforting to find sincerity — albeit of the flippant variety — in an otherwise bewildering chapter of Weezer's never-boring career.

Like it was for Spider-Man, it is important for Weezer to understand that with great power comes great responsibility. The same goes for great power pop. But then, if you're already a Weezer fan, you're probably in too deep to care. And Rivers knows that. The most staggering and simultaneously incredible aspect of this latest chapter of their nerdstory is that they are finally — or maybe just continually — doing whatever the hell they want. And that's great. It's a pity, then, that Raditude sounds a lot more like Baditude.