Are They Serious?

Over the last decade, I've felt an increasing difficulty in categorizing art in terms of any one genre, style, or even medium. There could be many books written about this difficulty, so I won't delve deeply into the problem here. However, along with the complication of categorization has come a seemingly increased difficulty in acertaining the intentions of the writer. Art has become almost purposefully enigmatic in a way that differs from art produced during the heyday of New Criticism. Many new pieces of popular art have no seeming message, yet offer experiences just bizarre enough and just far enough out of the range of expectation that we can't assume that they are merely poor art. From obvious postmodern poster-children such as Pulp Fiction to lesser known (and often maligned) films such as Dana Carvey's The Master of Disguise, I often find myself wondering: are they serious?

Are these films what they portray themselves to be? Is there some sort of genre-parodying going on? Or is there a certain heralding of the unexplainable as deconstructionist and postmodern theories of art slowly seep into mainstream consciousness?

This brings me to the song I heard today. I came upon the new Weezer/Lil Wayne collaboration, Can't Stop Partying. The song, penned by Weezer's Rivers Cuomo with a verse by Wayne, sounds at first glance like a cheap rap-rock collaboration, a typical celebration of women, booze, and well...partying, as the title suggests. In the mid-1990's, Cuomo made a (huge) name for his band by releasing bitterly honest and painfully introspective pop-rock tunes that vaulted him to the status of legend in the indie rock community. And yet, since the commercial failure of Weezer's sophomore release, Pinkerton, an album that was composed while Cuomo was studying at Harvard and was written as a retelling of a Puccini opera, Weezer has released seemingly derivative, bland pop-punk. What happened?

I go into depth about Weezer's history as a musical force because it seems that there is some connection between the enigmas described above and Weezer's new glam-rap anthem. Since the release of Pinkerton, it seems that Cuomo has been dedicated to producing generic music that is obviously below his capability as a writer. Moreover, these songs are often laden with subtle nods to the fact that even their author thinks of them as garbage: intentional garbage. This is a man intentionally making music with no clear substance, and yet he still manages to produce albums with hints and flashes of depth. Again, the question arises, is there anything more here than music for the masses?

Like the violence and fart-joke laden works of Eminem that, while they appear shallow in content, are crafted with a great deal of formal skill and intelligence, Weezer's newest song de-stabilizes our expectations for songs. What are we to make of a track with the line, "I gotta have the cars, I gotta have the jewels" that comes from a guy who cited Nietzsche and Stendhal as major influences? If we make the assumption, and I think we can, that Cuomo is not being serious when talks of bottles of Patron and rollin' up to the VIP, we are still left with the enigma of a decade's worth of goofy pop-punk.

But this goes beyond Weezer. Each day there seems to be a new song that can't be made sense of, that fits no traditional genre expectations and has sly lyrical content that seems purposefully impossible to make sense of or even understand whether or not the author is remotely serious. Like Jerry Seinfeld, favorite comedian of the postmodern crowd, might put it, what's the deal with ambiguously ironic songs?



image via HipHopWired