‘Raditude’: How Weezer ruined their career
For Weezer fans worldwide, there seems to be a question about when the group started to become a joke. While a handful of music enthusiasts claim the band were always tongue-in-cheek, it wasn’t until the 2000s that the band started to look fallible in people’s minds after changing their tune to their emo-tinged sophomore effort, Pinkerton. Although some may point to Make Believe as the moment everything went wrong, Raditude tarnished any goodwill that Weezer ever had.
Granted, it’s not hard to see where the band wanted to go with their 2009 album. While the album Make Believe had divided their fanbase thanks to formulaic radio singles like ‘Beverly Hills’, their self-titled Red Album arrived to shake things up, featuring every band member contributing their original songs for the first time since the group began.
The experiment may have paid off by making the single ‘Pork and Beans’ a massive hit, but frontman Rivers Cuomo got an awful idea when crafting the follow-up record. Looking to become one of the biggest bands in the world, Cuomo decided that the future of Weezer would involve professional songwriters coming in to help mould the tracks into pop radio fodder.
While Weezer had never been far from the traditional radio-rock format, they overstepped their bounds more than a few times on the record. Though producer Butch Walker may have been a decent name to throw into the mix when working on the opener ‘If You’re Wondering If I Want You To’, the rest of the supposed song doctors didn’t necessarily endear themselves to the band’s signature sound.
Rather than the lovable dorks that were so easy to relate to on ‘In The Garage’, bringing in Jermaine Dupri to help write tracks like ‘Let It All Hang Out’ made for a toothpaste-with-orange-juice listening experience, as Cuomo had to stumble his way through sounding like a party animal behind his sleek Buddy Holly glasses.
The worst offender on the album has to be ‘Can’t Stop Partying’, featuring a guest verse from Lil Wayne that was most likely created just to make the lyrical pun “It’s Weezer and it’s Weezy.” Although Cuomo and the band would wash their hands of the project shortly after the touring wrapped up, the fans weren’t as kind, turning the record into the nadir of their catalogue.
While the band offered a course correction on the album Hurley, the damage had already been done, with the band getting dropped from Geffen Records and moving to independent label Epitaph. The band were even offered to break up at one point, with fans willing to pay them to call it a day. Considering all the shakeups with the band, it looked like the group would have imploded under their massive pop travesty, but they had other plans.
Returning after years out of the spotlight, Cuomo delivered the kind of Weezer record that fans had been wanting since the 1990s on Everything Will Be Alright in The End, featuring fantastic guitar solos and the occasional dorky lyric to endear the band back to their audience. Compared to the massive hooks of their previous work, hearing Cuomo singing the line “Sorry guys, I didn’t realise that I needed you so much” on ‘Back to the Shack’ feels like the perfect apology that every fan wanted.
Then again, the lessons of Raditude haven’t been fully corrected, either, with the band continuing to go down the pop-friendly rabbit hole almost immediately afterwards on albums like The Black Album. Weezer have struggled with an identity crisis throughout their time together, but no amount of dorky charm saved Raditude from becoming one of the biggest miscalculations in rock history.
