Youth Culture Deflowered Me

I just haven’t been feeling settled since I found out that Beck was a Scientologist. And the new Weezer single, “Beverly Hills,” doesn’t help things much.

Now, don’t misunderstand me—I love the song. Whenever I hear the lurching guitar progression and the aw-shucks lyrics (“Preppy girls never looked at me / Why should they? / I ain’t nobody, got nothing in my pocket,” etc.), I beam with old-school geek pride and want to get drunk off one beer and run across the Yard.

But every damn time I finish listening to the song, I experience the same horrifying prophecy. I see it becoming the opening-credits music for some Disney Channel Original Movie about a skinny (but surprisingly buxom) white 12-year-old and her meaningless problems at Palo Alto Junior High. “Sweet lord,” I think to myself, “this…this isn’t ‘original!’ This isn’t ‘challenging!’ It’s glossy! It’s mass-marketable! Maybe I just like it because it has subliminal messages! Isn’t there some Nigerian noisetronica group I should be listening to?”

But my fears aren’t just about the song, in and of itself. They get personal. In a panic, I wonder, “Has Weezer frontman Rivers G. Cuomo (kind of) ’98 totally lost the juice he had on the ‘Blue Album’ and ‘Pinkerton’? Should I give up hope? Has he—gasp—sold out?” Behold the eternal problem for us music listeners. Do we have a right to feel betrayed if our favorite musicians start making big money on easy-to-digest musical nuggets? Do we declare that they’ve “sold out” because they aren’t “pushing” the “envelope” anymore? Or are such thoughts juvenile and elitist? I feel as though I can only answer these questions effectively by talking about my own struggle with Beck’s recent life decisions.

Virtually everybody who cares about music had some kind of “gateway drug”—an artist or band that was just “mainstream” enough to be visible to our young and impressionable eyes, but ballsy enough to put out music that reformatted our synapses and led us to a treasure trove of lesser-known acts. For me, that drug was the living embodiment of the 1990s, Beck Hansen.

God, it’s embarrassing to talk about, but I used to fantasize about marrying him. Not in a sexual way (although, at the time that I discovered Beck in seventh grade, I was known for wearing flared jeans, starring in school musicals, and dating a girl who ended up becoming a lesbian). But more in a “this person has moved me in a way that no one else ever has, and has altered the course of my life—therefore, I can never leave him” sort of way. Which, now that I think about it, isn’t a whole lot less creepy.

Anyway, he just recently got married, had a baby, announced that he was a member of the Church of Scientology, and put out a new album that’s both enormously successful and surprisingly bland. Like any devoted wife who thinks that her husband has been sleeping around, slacking off, or joining trendy religions, my first response was to feel angry and betrayed.

This song will make a number of similarly committed Weezer fans writhe in agony. But I’m starting to have a musical version of that begrudging epiphany you have when you realize that Marty Feldstein is right. Ladies and gentlemen, writing Beck and Rivers off as Judases is all too easy.

So what if Beck becomes a Scientologist? Yeah, hearing him sing about the hypocrisy of corporate America was cool in a junior high sort of way, and now he’s a part of the Cruise/Travolta club, but who am I to deprive him of his happiness? He did what he did because he wanted to find peace and joy, and if he’s making money, isn’t it a bit moronic to whine about how much cooler it (or I) was when I was the only one on the block who knew about him?

And most importantly, hipsters—don’t cry about the music. It’s not like someone’s gonna go around erasing those great old CDs from our teenage years (besides the inexorable process of entropy). And so what if the new stuff isn’t revolutionary? If it’s as thrillingly fun as “Beverly Hills,” you’ve got nothing to complain about, guero. And if it’s as dull as the new Beck outing, you can always challenge yourself by listening to that Nigerian stuff for a while. But whenever you want to hear your hero’s voice, just secretly pop in his new material for a quickie. I mean, it’s not like you’re married or anything.