Category Archives: video

Weezer’s Beverly Hills Music Video

This is trademark Weezer, so distinctive it’s almost unbelievable. There are soooo many identical bands doing what Weezer do, yet they just whip these little bands kicking and screaming out of the water and straight into the dirt. All this and it’s not even a great bonafide classic Weezer song. This is the kind of song that does really well commercially but the fans find other beauties in the back catalogue to worship, as do I but you just can’t beat Pinkerton, just pick any song its amazing. But you can’t have it all, and as this ‘commercial’ gem shows Rivers has not lost any song writing skills whilst studying down at Harvard. How can you fault a super uber geek who records music videos inthe playboy mansion? Good stuff from Rivers & co. always ones to play on their success with a stunning vid. This is a simple song (as most compositions of Weezer’s are) basic yet undeniably strong to the ear, picking most lyrics up on first listen and defiantly a tune to drive to.

Pork and Beans Music Video

Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” video brought together most of the elements of my childhood. The chunky guitars echoed seventies rock from bands like the Raspberries. Weezer embraced their inner geek by casting themselves within a homage to the sitcom, “Happy Days.” For a kid who grew up on Richie, Potsie and The Fonz, it was the ultimate trip, a delicious embrace of disposable pop culture. It put director Spike Jonze on the map, winning MTV’s 1995 Breakthrough Video award. “Buddy Holly” made music videos a respectable, cut-and-paste art form.

With their new video for “Pork and Beans,” Weezer has buried the MTV era and embraced the network that matters most, YouTube. The first single on their red album is classic power pop: short, sweet, and anthemic. But the “Pork and Beans” video takes the song to another level by embracing the absurdity of instant Internet celebrities. It is a massive, viral video test. The humor will be completely lost upon those who ignore those forward emails with links to strange outtakes. But for people who can’t get enough stupid human tricks, Weezer creates a wondrous chance to play name that meme.

For those who can’t name the meme (because they don’t know what a meme is!), Richard Dawkins coined the word thirty years ago in his book, THE SELFISH GENE. A meme is a thought, catch-phrase, or in the Internet era, a link, that is passed from one person to another in rapid fashion. Whenever we choose to forward a joke, a video, an article, we are engaging in a form of natural selection. Some may argue with Dawkins’ theories, but he offered a viable explanation for why the funniest, craziest and most memorable videos rise to the top on YouTube. And Weezer put all of YouTube’s most useless bits into one slamming stew of “Pork and Beans.”