Rivers Cuomo Breaks My Heart.

I was sort of dreading the release of the new Weezer album. Let me explain.

I’ve put many hours and days and years into my Weezer love. I was an early fanatic. I had to defend myself when Weezer was called “math rock” or “only for real geeks” or whatever. And I stood by Rivers Cuomo through his reclusive Harvard phase where he didn’t want to be bothered. I dismissed his self-loathing and his simultaneous ego as the mark of a true genius.

But now Rivers has sort of broken my heart, as I knew it would happen with the release of the green album. It’s not so much the interviews, or the video on MTV (can you believe they can’t even say “Hash Pipe” on MTV, so the title of the song is dubbed out?), or the fact that it’s just about impossible to get tickets for a Weezer show these days… I knew that the green album would cause Weezer to be a bit of a sell-out band, since Rivers wasn’t producing the album and the studio/production company threw out most of the new songs from the band and chopped it down to less than thirty minutes of music. These things I can excuse as growing pains of becoming a big band. I can allow a certain amount of idiot moves as you become more and more famous.

But Rivers said that Pinkerton was a shitty album. A mistake. He said he wished he never made it. He hates it. He wishes it would go away. In this Spin interview he says that he wishes he never made the album and he knows that only the fans like it and he won’t play it for the fans anymore and he doesn’t care if he loses fans over it.

I can’t even tell you how many people I turned into Weezer fans just by playing “The Good Life.” I can’t tell you how many memories and good times are tied into the songs on Pinkerton. So many good times. The songs are so good. They’re about pain and happiness and it’s got the whole Madame Butterfly theme going and it’s just so good. And for Rivers to be all, “Yeah, we’ve mostly got this crazy cult following because our fans liked Pinkerton when nobody else did, but fuck ’em, we’ve got a new album out now”– it makes me very sad.

I like to think he didn’t say it at all. That’s what I’m going to think. He didn’t say that at all.

I don’t really have much else to say about this. It just makes me sad. I hate when my rock idols get all stupid and assholian. Pearl Jam, I’m still staring in your direction with a stink-eye.

I’ve been so excited about the new Destiny’s Child album and then the new Weezer album. After “Bootylicious,” the Destiny’s Child album bombs in a big, fiery, over-produced, under-written, crap-fest. And I never thought that I’d say things would ever go downhill on anything after the word “Bootylicious.”

And now Weezer makes an album shorter than an episode of Friends and I have to use it to defend my insane love for them over the past seven years when nobody else would care?

I swear to God if that Radiohead album next week turns out to be crap, I’ll cry forever. What am I saying? Radiohead can do no wrong. Ever.

Buffalo Bill updated again.