I spent Toussaint trapped inside my 425 € prison cell. To make the day go by a little quicker I decided to listen to Weezer’s Teal Album. The album is a collection of music covers by the band but there are two songs that stuck out to me. The first is their cover of No Scrubs which was originally made by a black girl group in 1999. The song is haunting, desperate even. That a self-consciously “nerdy” rock band whose members are all middle-aged white men is unnerving, why did they choose to cover this song? The keyboardist has set his instrument to be a harpsichord, his modern technology is emulating the eighteenth-century instrument, why? Is the listener Louis XV? This is a certain amount of microphone distortion that is detectable as the music ebbs, first softly but progressively becoming louder and more desperate. The lead singer, Rivers Cuomo, sounds hurt, is he being rejected? The song was written by black women declaring that they want men who are classier than the listener, – the scrub – a feeling I’m sure many women can understand. It feels as though the band is performing their own rejection, with a certain melancholy that simply does not exist in the original work. In the background there is a small group of chorded instruments strumming, it is haunting. The official upload for the song is also interesting, it is the album cover with the band’s figures rocking back and forth, but it is fuzzy, they chose to emulate the view of a VHS tape to emphasize the distance they have from the original song. Weezer is not a black girl group, why are they singing a song by one?
The group’s rendition of Africa makes this question more obvious. The irony of Toto (an all-white, American band) making one of the most memorable songs about Africa has been commented upon to death and Weezer seems aware of this. The cover is not musically different, but the music video draws attention to this fact. It opens in a similar matter to Toto’s video, but its differences end there, in place of Rivers Cuomo we see Weird Al Yankovic, but the voice is not his. As we continue to watch things feel wrong. The bassist is not playing correctly, Weird Al isn’t strumming the guitar correctly, and the keyboardist’s fingers aren’t moving. As the video progresses the unreality grows, the bassist takes his hands of his instrument, but it keeps playing, eventually, the keyboardist’s melody is replaced by Weird Al’s signature accordion, but the guitar keeps playing. In the end, hell breaks loose as the keyboardist actively shows the listener that he has not been playing and the drummer stands up mid-beat, the truth is made plain, this is all fake. But it is not all fake. The video was really shot in a single take and equally important it was shot on a blue screen, but it was never used. The audience is given a view behind the producer’s current, an honest view of the music’s complete disconnection from reality.
I think the members of Weezer are aware of the unbridgeable distance that covering a song creates. The meaning behind that song and our relationships with them can never be crossed. In Africa they take it a step further, the original band is describing from a distance, and that distance makes their song, in many ways, a lie, Weezer embraces that and presents their lies. In some ways that are how I feel in the tax haven, I am here but there is a distance that I cannot cross. I have spent the past four days in my cell, I have nowhere I can go. I am tired all the time but the days I look forward to the most are when I have class, I can try to bridge the divide and be closer to something other than white walls. At least a teal background is interesting.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 