Rivers Cuomo has taken your shit for over two decades and he’s had it up to here. Midway through Weezer’s ninth studio LP, he airs his grievances on a song called, not coincidentally, “I’ve Had It Up to Here”—the most valid of which is that people think he’s somehow insincere. You could describe Weezer’s 21st century output in many derogatory ways and most of it would be warranted, but “dishonest” isn’t one of them. Pick anything he’s done over the past 15 years and ask yourself, “What label exec concerned with the bottom line would possibly cosign this?” Rivers Cuomo is making the exact kind of music he wants to make—it just so happens that it sounds like music for the masses and has no currency whatsoever. Yet, in his finest mock-operatic metal voice, Cuomo brings “I’ve Had It Up to Here” to a head with, “If you think I need approval from the faceless throng/ Well, that's where you’re wrong.” The important word here is “faceless.” Cuomo does seek approval, but on Everything Will Be Alright in the End, he realizes that he needs it from a familiar source that he knows quite well: people who may have once been Weezer fans.
That said, you’ll have to give the overt apology “Back to the Shack” a second chance, and I realize that’s a tall order—if recent Weezer has ever driven you to punch a total stranger, this one leads with the chin. There's Cuomo’s tendency to treat The Blue Album’s goodwill as a renewable resource, the lyrics peppered with meta references about Weezer’s past—namely, his lightning bolt guitar strap and that one time he let drummer Patrick Wilson sing lead. You might roll your eyes when he rhymes “rockin’ out like it’s ‘94” with “more hardcore,” and they will bug out when revisiting 1994 somehow means doing fourth-wall rhyme-bustin’ that was perfected on “El Scorcho” and responsible for “Beverly Hills”. And then there are the wincing, “What year is this?” jokes that will certainly be criticized for “lolz rockism”: taking himself to task because “I forgot that disco sucks,” thinking that the radio and “those stupid singing shows” are even in competition anymore, or that they had any effect on Weezer.
But something about this song sticks, and it’s not just the hook, though that’s a big part of it—even those who despise Weezer can admit Cuomo has an inexhaustible, infuriating ability to write melodies that lodge themselves in your brain after one listen, whether you want it there or not. During the second verse, Cuomo drops the yuks and sings, “I finally settled down with my girl and I made up with my dad.” He could not be more direct about what “Back to the Shack” truly means beyond its reprise of “Pork and Beans”'s message about being true to one’s self: those represent the twin engines that powered The Blue Album and Pinkerton’s emotional train wrecks, and there's the possibility that “Back to the Shack” might be a sly, sarcastic rebuke against armchair producers and YouTube commenters, a la Danny Brown’s Old: you don’t want the old Rivers Cuomo, so do you want him to rock out like it’s ‘94 or do you just want him to sing about it and make a record of his (broken) heart?