Eye Land, My Son (3:30)

Manhattan is an island. It is in the sun. And it is a holiday. So what the hell?

Hip hip.

I am a big proponent of a simple plugged in guitar riff to open a song. All hail Chuck Berry; for who doesn’t love the way Johnny B. Goode starts? It’s invitational; the roots of music; one instrument starting with a melody as the other players pick up their own tools of the trade as if to say: “Alright. I can get with this. I can come along.” It has its own technique of drawing you in to an experience, a journey—-like a holiday.

I consider myself to be a minimalist and as much as I become awed by collaborative jam-bands in some cases, the purity of Rivers Cuomo’s opening five-note sweep sets the tone for a holiday-specific reverie. I once counted seventeen musicians on stage during a Broken Social Scene concert. It was a symphony more than a band and while it was spectacular in its own method, Weezer encapsulates the antithesis just as fantastically.

On an island in the sun. We’ll be playing and having fun. It makes me feel so fine I can’t control my brain.

At what point do we control our brains? Or is our brain always in control of us? It is often said, especially about love, that you can’t help what you feel. Perhaps the saddest example of this is when our brains stop serving us completely, like in age and disease. Maybe this is why we take so many pictures, or for the rest of us—-write.

When I’m on a golden sea, I don’t need a memory. I guess that what makes it a place all my own. Am I too exisistential? Does the refusal for the past make me miss something else that is a part of me?

Selective memory is a powerful thing. My sister is always reminding me of sad incidents in our childhood past that I seemed to have completely wiped clean from the slate. But I wonder what else I have forgotten? Years spent traveling without a camera is devastating to some people when I tell them: “Yep--been all over the world. Got no pictures.”

And just when you think you have settled into the calm drifting of Weezer's golden sea, the repeated melody of the song, it crescendos to signature 1990s ‘grunge.’ Introduced with once crash of the symbol, the feedback on the lead and rhythm guitars take you into a new dimension of the track, elevating the opening simplicity to a much more complex collision of sound. As the song ascends into the electric frenzy of 1990s nihilism, Cuomo reminds us that it doesn’t matter how good or bad it once was, but more importantly, we’ll never feel that anymore.

Hip hip.

It is difficult to know exactly what this song is about. It can be interpreted in dichotomous ways. Is Cuomo happy about the memories he has of himself and his heroine? One has to wonder if they are memories at all. The continuous spinning of verb tense intentionally confuses the listener. Is this a mystical place in the future or a metaphorical island once visited that he can never get back to? Or is he there now?

And yet he always returns to his island in the sun. His safe place. The sea of memory can offer the calm drifting his lyrics so poignantly describe, but it can also place you in the middle of a climactic (or is it climatic?) tempest just as the thrashing interludes suggest.

Ultimately, the song seems to be about the hope and serenity that only reclusion and companionship can offer. The first-person narrative longs for escape, and every time he thinks he is getting close, the musicians backing him thunder down their storm, spinning his vessel further away from his sought out utopian island in the sun.

The ending melody is Beach Boys in vocal harmonic style and there is the optimistic assertion that the two refugees “will never feel bad anymore.”

Hip hip.

What is there to feel bad about? The protagonist seems determined to reach his imaginative refuge without regret. Compiled with closure, memory, and joy in reminiscence, we find ourselves desiring to not join Cuomo on his island, but seek out our own tropical sanctuary.

Hip hip.

Slow down sailor. Take a breath. I think I see the shore.

Hip hip.