Weezer: “El Scorcho”

One of the most lasting criticisms I’ve heard of Weezer goes something like: “Their current output is so bad as to actively discolor my fond memories of their first two records,” which is pithy enough to be an effective jab, but is probably only true if you weren’t a walking rock tumbler of horomones when Pinkerton came out. I was in seventh grade when I bought the first Weezer album and was neck-deep in girl trouble by the time the second arrived, which means that Weezer’s inversion from “major-key songs about hanging out” to “minor-key songs about girl problems” synced up exactly with my pastimes as they themselves shifted to accomodate all the awkward sidepipe I was suddenly pushing. To wit:

The first time I heard this song was during a late-night drama club rehearsal in middle school; somebody had come to school with a first-day copy of Pinkerton and was passing a Discman around for everybody who wasn’t blocking scenes to hear. Finally it came to me, and when I put the headphones on, two extremely important things happened. The first of those things was “Tired of Sex,” which might have the best bratty keyboard part on the planet — better than “Just What I Needed;” better than Brainiac’s “Nothing Ever Changes” — and whose title was actually shocking to me, probably in the way BrokenCYDE is shocking to 30 year-olds now: You can get tired of sex? You — no you can’t! And at that moment, as in some sort of karmic call-and-response, the second thing that happened to me was the bare foot suddenly curling up my leg, courtesy of the person sitting across from me. I looked up, horny to the point of terror, and sure enough — a ridiculously pretty girl I’d been awkwardly flirting at for months was sitting there, giving me the sort of weapons-grade coquettish glance you don’t even know exists until you’re fifteen.

I am sure that I tried to play it off cool, which must have been like watching a dog try to rap. It’s hard to reciprocate something as ungainly as a leg rub, especially when you’re wearing sneakers and don’t want to jam an eyelet into somebody’s thigh meat, but it’s even harder when your second-period English teacher is scanning the room for insolence, and then doubly so when said leg is attached to somebody whose eyeballs are somehow handing the word “blowjob” directly to your cerebral cortex. Finally — probably something like ninety seconds later — my choices were split between “ejaculate immediately” versus “take this party somewhere else,” which is when I stood up, oh-so-carefully held my book bag in front of my waist, and asked the girl if she’d like to accompany me to my locker. And she accepted.

There are scores of anecdotes that start like this and end with the phrase “up against a locker,” and if I were a different person this would certainly be one of them. But instead, somewhere between the lunchroom and my earth science textbook, I completely and totally chickened out. I’m sure it was a combination of things — a fear of getting caught by a custodian with my paws up somebody’s shirt; the improbable chance that I had somehow misread her signals — it’s also entirely likely that I was dating somebody else at the time and good sense hadn’t been able to scream louder than my balls until I’d walked off the footsie a little. Whatever the case, when we got to my locker, I kept my head down, opened it, pretended to look for something, and then, unable to look her in the eye, walked her back to drama club. And there, putting the Discman back on, feeling like an oily, hamfisted ape, simultaneously wishing for sex and death — that’s when I hit “El Scorcho.”

This is what “El Scorcho” and Pinkerton at large get right, moreso than any songs which have followed in their footsteps: They’re laments, and they’re a little whiny, but they’re also a little funny. Being a human being is a ridiculous proposition, and even when we want to lie down in traffic, we’re usually also laughing at ourselves a little. Excepting real tragedy, nothing is so bad when you’re fifteen that you can’t turn around and clown your friend a minute later, and having a narrative voice which acknowledges how bad it is not to kiss who you want to kiss as well as the patent humor of being alive and tender is far more useful than one which just amplifies the two poles of “horrible” and “wonderful.” That’s what’s so valuable and so lasting about this song, and this record, and this band; that when you get back from making a colossal ass of yourself, something is there to say, “Jesus christ — that was ridiculous!”