Across the Sea

In very brief summary, Pinkerton was an album of unmitigated genius that the world simply didn’t want to hear in 1996. It was all at once too personal, too complex, too nuanced and brilliant for a market that then wanted little more than simple melodies and big arena refrains from their rock songs (all thanks be to the Gallagher Brothers). Rivers Cuomo has said that much himself; prior to the release of the album, he thought he had hit upon a new sound that would be a breath of fresh air for audiences still living in the nuclear winter of grunge’s 1994 fallout. But as he later noted on the Rivers Correspondence Board in early 2001, he realized that he had fallen out of step with the times soon after the record’s release. That realization hit him the first time they tried to play “Across the Sea” at a festival.

But hindsight is a magnifying glass, and it’s pretty clear now that “Across the Sea” is one of the very best songs on one of the very best records of the ’90s — quite possibly the finest song Cuomo has ever penned. Beginning with a fragile piano line and the semi-confident playing of a dusty recorder (a rare blessing on a Weezer song; who wants to start the petition to bring back the recorder for album #7?), an electric guitar chord hits with fist-pumping conviction, leading us into the verse.

At once, the band is in top form, Matt Sharp’s bass rumbling and tumbling like someone dragging himself out of bed, a scrappy but precise beat being laid down by Pat Wilson, and Cuomo’s winding vocal melody reciting almost verbatim a piece of fanmail that an 18-year-old girl from Japan sent him in the wake of The Blue Album’s success, poor grammar left candidly intact. As we are soon to find out, this letter resonated with Cuomo as he first read it, probably alone and miserable for his first semester at Harvard, his recently-operated leg in a brace and his hand firmly planted on a supportive cane. Rumors abound that for her indirect contribution to the lyrics, Cuomo actually registered her as a co-author of the song, and she receives royalties on it to this day. (Does anyone know the veracity of this claim?)

The word “epic” was thrown around a lot to hype up this year’s The Red Album, but really, this is about as epic as Weezer gets. A huge, towering chorus of loneliness, verses filled with confused and schizophrenic vocal countermelody, and one of the greatest breakdown/buildup/payoffs in rock history. The very structure of the song seems to capture and reflect Cuomo’s ambivalence: on the chorus he abstains, singing, “I could never touch you / I think it would be wrong.” And yet elsewhere, he fantasizes about everything from the girl’s taste in interior decoration to the way she masturbates, and briefly considers moving to Japan so that he can score “the juice” (talk about personal!). Finally, triumphantly, as the grand swell of the song reaches its zenith, he shouts, “As if I could live on words and dreams and a million screams / Oh, how I need a hand in mine to feel!”

It’s a cathartic moment and, interestingly, we, The Listener, find ourselves strangely able to relate. Surely none of us have ever had the experience of being lonely and depressed enough to sincerely consider moving to Japan to meet an 18-year-old fan of our rock band, and yet somehow the emotion feels so genuine and honest that we can make it an anthem of our own. That moment, wherein Cuomo accepts the hopelessness of “words and dreams” and promises that can’t possibly be fulfilled, could just as easily be applied to the very common pain of a long distance relationship. “Why are you so far away from me?” Perhaps, for the listener, the sea is metaphorical; perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it’s not even a girl at all, but simply that painful feeling,of waiting for something that will never come.

Perhaps it’s when Cuomo, in the midst of that dark moment of clarity in the middle of the song, takes a moment to psychoanalyze himself and decides to blame all his romantic failings on the way his mother brought him up. But these are little details that don’t really matter; what matters in the end is that somehow, there’s something in this intensely personal, intensely specific song that is so undeniably universal and human, that it can become yours, no matter who you are, if you care enough to crack its shell. It’s a bit of a struggle, and apparently one few fans of The Blue Album wanted to attempt in 1996, but, like the album it represents, “Across the Sea” is one of the greatest investments a listener can make — and that is why it has endured.

Funnily, since the ’90s, Rivers has more or less resigned himself to a career of musical mediocrity, pandering to the lowest common denominator, trying to find a song topic as broad and generalized enough as to appeal to the entire world. But it doesn’t matter how many times a man in his late 30s attempts to take advantage of traditional song cliches. He can flip the bird to authority (”Troublemaker”), capture the desire for celebrity (”Beverly Hills”) or write as many faceless, formulaic love songs as he wants, but the great irony of Weezer is that they will never again be as relatable and universal as they were on Pinkerton — the most unique, sincere, and individual work of their lives.

p/s: gobshite, sekali lagik mengerepak~