Ahhhh…. finally released from the shackles of The Number Ones. I’m freeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Oh, wait:
Upon closer inspection, it looks like I might have simply traded shackles rather than lost them.
While I’m no longer constrained by what Americans chose to be Number One at any given moment in American pop history, I’m instead newly constrained:
…By just the three options mt58 threw up in his survey.
And on top of that, the whimsical whims of the TNOCS.com functionaries, erm, I mean cast and crew, who get to collectively assign me the actual song to talk about.
Why must the universe torment me so?
Why must it always be other people deciding what I review?
Oh, right. It’s probably due to the fact that I will simply do absolutely nothing except watch TikTok and Family Ties reruns between meals if nobody gives me an assignment. Yeah, that’s probably it.
Spontaneous Flash Review:
This song kicks massive 90s alt-rock butt. It’s also a song of many faces: It’s hard and soft. It’s fun and whimsical. It’s novel yet repetitive. It’s punk-grunge gone pop. I fell for this song big time when it came out. The iconic video only added to the fun. This song never taps on the brakes, and it’s all the better for it.
STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART SCORE: 8/10!
Semi-Spontaneous Analytical Review:
Production: 9/10
Setting the amps to 11, Weezer busts out of the gate full blast with massive, meaty guitars almost at the level of a Nirvana refrain. Unlike a Nirvana song, it never lets up. It’s max-to-the-max distorted guitars straight through.
But, unlike Nirvana (and more like Spinal Tap), Weezer goes full melodic with the vocals as an almost-disorienting contrast with the music track. This effect peaks at the “woo hoo” segment of the pre-chorus. Most of Weezer’s other (amazing) hits were more in the quiet/loud alternations similar to Nirvana et al, but “Buddy Holly” did something different. And did it well.
Oh, and an extra bonus point for the squiggly/pitch-bend-y square wave synth after the first stanza of each verse! Why?
Because that’s iconic producer Ric Ocasek’s legacy Cars imprint on the track. Remember the riff from “Just What I Needed”?
Sure, he compressed it down to 1/100th of its original length, but it lives on!
And no review would be complete without an extra bonus point for that extra bonus naked mini-guitar solo at the end of the bridge.
So…many…wonderful…nuggets.
Songwriting/melody: 7/10
Sure, the “Oooo weee oooh” bit is melodic crack. But “Buddy Holly” goes well beyond the crack high. The entire song is chock full of melodic riffs, including a really serious pre-chorus and a smashing bridge. But there’s more:
For the eagle-ears out there, check out the crunchy chord beneath the lyric “just like Buddy Holly” in the chorus.
It’s almost like two chords being played atop each other. Wild stuff.
Vocals: 7/10
Weezer isn’t going to win any awards for vocal prowess, that’s for sure. But there’s an wink-and-a-nudge sly affect to their vocals that allowed them to stand out from the crowd of alt-rockers in the 90s. Further, it just sounds like there’s a decent amount of effort being put into this vocal track specifically.
Be it the emphatic “and I know your mine!” in the second pre-chorus, the octave harmonies in the bridge, the “oooo’ing” along with the first part of the guitar solo…
There’s just so much cool stuff they do that they simply didn’t have to do. But they did. Points.
Lyrics: 6/10
Yeah, the lyrics.
So, times have changed since the 90s. This song is apparently “based on a true story” where Rivers Cuomo of Weezer introduced his Asian girlfriend to his buddies and they were, uhh, not too graceful about it. His homies were dissing his girl! Why do they gotta front? What did River and his Asian girlfriend ever do to these guys to make them so viol-unt? I guess because her “tongue is twisted and eyes are slit (!!)”, she needs a guardian to protect her from… the guardian’s racist friends? Yikes.
As an aside, apparently people give this song huge shout-outs for mentioning Mary Tyler Moore, but I’m not.
She’s a treasure, and so was Buddy Holly, but this is pure disassociated nostalgia-bate and I’m not playing.
Holy crap, I’m torn on these lyrics. Points for being interesting (and rhyming “front” with “violent”), but 2023 called and it wants points deducted for tongue twists and eye slits.
Ear Worminess: 9/10
Super-duper strong earworms all throughout this song: the pre-chorus “Woo-hoo, but you know I’m yours/and I know you’re mine” and also the “ooh-wee-hoo” bit and the “I don’t care about that!” Heck, even the driving guitars themselves (and the mimicking organ solo) could qualify as an earworm. Impressive.
BLINDED BY SCIENCE SCORE:
7.6…squeaks its way up to an 8/10!
TL;DR:
“Buddy Holly” makes it all the way up to the mid-top tier of popular songs.
It stands out from the crowd. It stakes a claim to your eardrums and never lets go – we’re all on blast from the very first second to the very last stanza where the guitars blast a set of brand new chords, just for funzies. It’s got bizarro (but maybe-didn’t-age-too-well) lyrics. It’s got earworm hooks left, right, and center. It’s a blast of pop for the ages.
This can’t – and won’t – always be the case.
But it’s nice that, with “Buddy Holly” at least, my heart and mind are aligned.
Imagine a world where our hearts and minds were always aligned? What an interesting place that would be.
Cheers!
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Hard to believe, I know, but I didn’t know this song (which is why I voted for it, unlike say, Run-Around, which I know all too well). Your meticulous review will give me lots to listen for as I queue it up in just a minute. Glad to have you with us, buddy … oops… friend!
Same here! It is pleasant power-pop. Perhaps a little too distorted sounding for me, but I can dig it. But that video! Very entertaining. Thanks for the review, Jon!
🙂 Thanks!
Welcome JD!
Pardon my old rockist self coming out but: “Ahhh, how nice to read a review of an inventive, infectiously melodic track with interesting instrumentation, recorded by a group of musicians who learned to play together as an ongoing unit (a.k.a, a “band”).
There’s plenty of more recent pop I like, and some that I love, but damn do I miss the days when tracks like this were more common.
Weezer was huge for me. I got turned onto alternative rock as early as age 12, and especially loved Pearl Jam, but Weezer’s geekiness and sugary rush made them the first band I could actually kind of relate to.
The opening “homies” lyric is interesting for a connected reason. That year, I had gone from a sheltered private Christian school to our local public middle school, which at the time was full of extremely unruly students with a lot of aggression. My brother and I were targeted by various bullies over the course of that year, being as we were shy preppy nerdy kids, and so “what did we ever do to these guys that made so violent?” really struck a chord. And no matter the race of the dudes doing it, they all adhered to hip hop “street”
style and affectations, so the homies reference was appropriate as well.
To hear that the initial inspiration for the song were jeers coming from Rivers’ friends is disappointing. And certainly the lyrics about his girlfriend’s race are awkward. I still kind of take it as him relaying the slurs that were laid upon by the brutish “homies,” but whatever the interpretation, the execution was clumsy. Not as bad as Siouxsie Sioux’s defense of asian people in “Hong Kong Garden,” but that was written in the late 70s.
Anyway, great write-up of a great song. We welcome more entries!
Oh I 100% agree that he was using those words to relay how his homies were viewing things.
For the record, I’m not that easily offended, but I’d be blind to not see that our culture has decreasing levels of tolerance for insensitive language. So, more just pointing it out as an interesting cultural FYI than something I feel reflects badly on Weezer.
Reality bites (same year as BH right?), back in my customary timezone and no more magical days. Though on the bright side that means plenty of time to keep up with daily tnocs goings on.
And what better way to get back into the swing of things than Buddy Holly?
It was a #12 hit in the UK though surprisingly not their biggest hit, that was Beverley Hills which reached #9 in 2005. I’m sure BH is the one everyone knows them for.
I bought the single, loved it and thought I knew it pretty well but your write up gave it an extra layer and I’ve just played it listening out for all the little elements you mention. The questionable lyric content seems to have completely passed me by, if I noticed the references to her eyes being slit I’ve forgotten. Nevermind 2023, I didn’t think that was still passable in the mid 90s.
In blissful ignorance to that I’d have scored it a 9 but just like Al’s fish, that’s not so great so 8 it is.
Look forward to more Jon if we can drag you away from Family Ties.
Ha! Yes, more is the current plan. I hope to keep doing this on the (semi) regular over here!
Jon! Welcome to the party.
I’m going to have to give “Buddy Holly” another listen because I never picked up on its racial content. I guess I was too busy enjoying the guitars, but an 8/10 sounds about right. Well done!
Tbh, I also never knew about the weird lyrics until I dove into them for this review – and read a bit of the backstory during prep.
At least fifteen years passed before I saw the lyrics online. (I didn’t buy “The Blue Album”. Does it have lyrics?) “Buddy Holly” is so insanely catchy, for me anyway, my initial cringe dissolved into a shrug. Cuomo could have written: “Your eyes are epicanthal folds,” but it doesn’t scan.
“Across the Sea”, however, is a different story. I simultaneously love and loathe it. I hate myself for playing it. The New Yorker staff writer Sasha Frere-Jones writes about having mixed emotions about “Brown Sugar”.
I like how unhinged “Across the Sea” is. It reminds me of the first Violent Femmes album. Or “Never Tell” from Hallowed Ground. Rivers writes: “You are eighteen-year-old girl from small city in Japan.” The fan could be eighteen, or she could be eighteen. Under the context of Japan’s pornography laws pre-2014: “I wonder how you touch yourself,” comes across as a little creepy. Whenever I listen to the song, I imagine the girl’s mother in the next room, and I want to tell her: “Call the police.”
But I digress.
Back to “Buddy Holly”. When Erin Moran passed away, Scott Baio, unlike every normal human being, mourned her death as a tragedy. I wonder if he held a grudge against Moran because he wasn’t included in the music video.
I enjoyed this review a lot JonDeutsch. Rivers Cuomo’s Japanese fetish doesn’t stop me from enjoying “Buddy Holly” or the entire Weezer discography. I can’t tell the difference between good and bad Weezer albums like other people. Dude managed to stay on a major label for close-to-thirty years playing an unpopular genre. He must be doing something right.
Nice to see ya here Jon! Great review as always.
I was hoping for “Run-Around” myself, but I’m cool with Weezer. To me this song was always background music for the very cool video. I grew up watching the Fonz and the Cunningham family, so the video was nostalgia for nostalgia (the latter existed for my parents, not for me).
There’s something about Weezer that always kind of rubbed me wrong. Not the racist lyrics, which I was unaware of until today. They seemed a little too desperate to be relevant. A little too knowing in what they were doing. Calculated maybe. Calculation may work well for some forms of music, but it’s an ill fit for fuzzy post-grungey mainstream alternative. Not distant and ironic enough to be cool like Pavement. Not hard and sincere enough to be like Fugazi. Their sound falls in the mushy middle. At least they’re not the Goo Goo Dolls or Soul Asylum, both of which were so boring they were practical adult contempo. I like Weezer’s guitar crunch, but I wish it took me somewhere interesting.
Maybe this isn’t true (I don’t follow Weezer) but they come off like the rich kids at the party. Like they didn’t have to work particularly hard to get there, they just had to show up and look like they’re trying.
FWIW I can absolutely appreciate this POV. It makes sense.
My POV on them just comes from a different angle: the angle of the less-popular kids in school who figured out that they, too, could play with the big boys when it came to modern rock, and went over-the-top as kind of a lark… and shockingly made it work.
Yes. They’re a sort of Revenge Of The Nerds story.
I think I view Vampire Weekend in the same way that you view Weezer.
I agree with JonDeutsch that I got more “out of step with the cool kids” vibes than rich wannabies from Cuomo et al. Certainly their indie elements seem less important and formative for their sound than their more mainstream ones.
Anyway, if you’ve never heard the Blue album in full, I really recommend it. Even if you did hear it way back, you might be surprised how well it’s held up as rip-roarin melodic pop that’s perfect for driving down the highway on a spring or summer day.
“At least they’re not the Goo Goo Dolls or Soul Asylum.”
Oh, my. That’s some faint praise. But you’re right, they’re not. I’ve got Weezer grouped with Semisonic and Fastball. You were a college rock deejay. Do you remember Trip Shakespeare? Here is some High Fidelity fan fiction.
Dick: Did you check out the new Semisonic?
Barry: What a bunch of sellouts. Dan Wilson peaked with “The Slacks”.
Dick: “Closing Time” is really good. Have you even listened to Feeling Strangely Fine?
Barry: No. That’s not the point.
Rob: What’s the point, Barry. Enlighten us.
Barry: They signed to a major. They suck, on principle alone.
Dick: But at least they’re not the Goo Goo Dolls or Soul Asylum.
(Barry nods his head.)
Rob: You know, I read they found some of those kids in the “Runaway Train” video.
Pitch perfect! Especially the Rob semi-sequitur at the end. Nailed it Cap!
My work here is done. *smug smile*
Well done! Welcome!
Might someone consider posting a link over at TNOs for Jon’s excellent piece?
Hooray, Jon’s come over to join the fun on tnocs.com!!!! (‘Bout time, dude, lol)
I likey, Semi-Arbitrary Review’s on a song of our choosing. “Buddy Holly” is easily one of those songs that I personally don’t care for, but totally acknowledge it’s mark on pop music history as being a unique, transformative composition. This is the rare song where probably over 75% of players will guess correctly on the first second in Heardle.
Spike Jonze is one of those music video directors that totally got the medium, and consistently cranked out fascinating and fun clips. I’ve often wondered how popular Buddy Holly would’ve been without the video….
Better l8t than n3vr, right g8r?
You mean, the late Heardle.
Holy crap, I had no idea. Way to screw up a perfectly good idea, Spotify.
What would we do, baby, without Jon?
(Sha la la la…)
This SAR gets a 10/10.
Great write-up, Jon!!
It’s hard for me to detach “Buddy Holly” from it’s amazing video, but the song stands well on its own. I never really paid too much attention to the lyrics before (kinda racist!), but Ocasek’s production really helps levitate the band’s sound. Probably my favorite Weezer song.
The video was so inseparable from this song that at first blush my intro to the review was going to be: “So this is what you get when you mash-up 50s nostalgia with 90s grunge?”
Upon further audible inspection, there’s literally nothing about the Happy Days vibe in the actual song. So that line was summarily cut. A bit of a shame, because I liked the line.
As if I was raised by wolves. Welcome, JonDeutsch.
Good to have you join us here, Jon! Love your analyses on The Number Ones and glad you’ve exported the feature to here. And glad that my choice was the first one you reviewed as well! Can’t wait to see more coming from you!
Belated welcome Jon! Excellent review, heart and mind aligned indeed, and you gave us even more reasons to love this song.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.