And though we are falling stars, we feel just fine: The Romanticism of Yoko and Pinkerton

I'm a bit of a romantic.

Not in that horrible sense meaning "lover of Sandra Bullock films and other examples of extreme sap-pery," but in the sense that I can't help but find myself attracted to stories of trial and failure.

My love of these types of stories is so great that sometimes the presence of them alone can compel me to do or learn about something that I otherwise would not have.

This happens a lot, probably the most often in fact, with music. Let's discuss.

---

One of my favorite albums is Yoko by the little-known band Beulah. Their biggest claim to commercial fame is their song "Popular Mechanics for Lovers" being featured in The O.C., a show I know way too much about for someone who hasn't even seen more than 25 minutes of it before. 

"Popular Mechanics" could be called representative of Beulah's larger body of work. It's sunny, breezy, and it sounds like something you'd hear on a boardwalk. The lyrics are clever, sometimes biting ("Don't believe a word he says/he wouldn't ever take his heart out for you"), and while they're not necessarily upbeat, the music definitely is.

But to call this the Poster Boy of Beulah's work as a whole would be an outright lie. Yoko is the story of what happens to a band when it's on the brink of destruction. Yoko is what a breakup sounds like. 

It's fitting that the title is the name of the woman often credited for breaking up the Beatles. Here, in a nutshell, is the history of Yoko's production, courtesy Wikipedia:

The period surrounding Yoko's conception and recording was one of great personal strife for the band - [Miles] Kurosky split with his long-term girlfriend and three of the six band members went through divorce while the record was being written, rehearsed and recorded. Amid all this, the foundations of the band appeared to be shaking; rumours of a break-up were rife and well-founded. The mood of the album was certainly much darker and the band phased back much of their instrumentation, preferring to create more of a live sound than layering multiple overdubs atop the mix. The album took a much rockier direction than their previous efforts; yet, upon its release in 2003, attracted a similar lauding that had greeted their previous two records.

So, obviously, heartbreak had a huge effect on the album. The album opens with "A Man Like Me," which is a plea to a lover on her way out to stay. "So try/try lifting all your weight/for a man/a man gone wrong," sings Kurosky, lead singer and one of the principal songwriters for the band. From "A Man Like Me," which is quiet with well-placed outbursts of energy in the chorus, we head into the unbelievably angry "Landslide Baby." Beulah was known for its clever and personal lyrics, and they're definitely there on "Baby;" this time, however, the lyrics (of which "I do believe that you hate yourself" is one) are now combined with a sound that better fits their mood as opposed to the sunny pop Beulah fans were used to. It's angry, it's loud, but it's still catchy and genuine pop. "Baby" stands out as the harshest and maddest song of the band's, and when it comes on right after the sentimental "A Man Like Me," you know that you're in for something quite different.

The band was also once reasonably religious (although it didn't have the greatest bearing on their music) but as their lives started to crumble around them and they fell into their states of (relative) despair, that belief was called into question. This was communicated in "Me and Jesus Don't Talk Anymore". The lyrics are slightly vague, but the devil is talked to "have a lease" and to be "riding with me again," along with "Maybe I'm losing sleep over nothing/maybe I'll be just fine/He tears me away from all those little things/that seemed so important when I knew you." The song ultimately is another lamentation of a relationship ended; this time, it seems more like it's a relationship with Jesus than with a woman, but it resonates all the same, even for those of us less-religious. (It's also really darn good, just in general.)

The sunny pop that the band was most well-known for did not belie any sunny or necessarily optimistic attitude. Even on The Coast is Never Clear, the album that came before Yoko and one that similarly had a troubled production, the recording process was tough and reflected in the lyrics: "Kurosky was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and took daily therapy sessions, which informed the lyrical mood of the record, which was often incredibly downbeat, very much at odds with the breezy, summery feel of the music." However, with Yoko, it was much more obvious that something had gone wrong, if not with the music, then with the band itself.

The band had been struggling to get by from the beginning, from company buyouts to poor sales, but it was never apparent to those who did buy their albums and see their shows that they were really going to call it quits until Yoko. In a way, Yoko the album was the "Yoko" that broke up the band; Kurosky and company flat-out said that Beulah would be no more if the album didn't reach gold status.

Guess what? It didn't. 

While other indie bands were recognized for their greatness and became cult figures post-breakup, even if they didn't necessarily have much fame when they were together, Beulah did not and does not have much of that. Yes, there are devoted fans who constantly lament the death of the band, but in the broadest sense, Beulah failed. They failed, and it stung. While Kurosky rose from the ashes to release a solo album, he and his former band still has not received the recognition they truly deserve. Beulah has faded away, for the most part, and it's a tragedy.

But what a way to go out.

Yoko is one of the band's most critically acclaimed releases, shining bright amongst its brothers. There are, indeed, shades of Coast and the tunes that made Beulah popular with the fans it did have, like "My Side of the City" (which was even featured in a Dance Dance Revolution game!) and "Your Mother Loves You Son." 

The most sensitive and beautiful stuff of their career is on the album, too, like "Don't Forget to Breathe" and my number one favorite, "Hovering." "Don't Forget to Breathe" is the penultimate track to not just the album but also to the band's career. It may be hard to imagine that one track less, less than four minutes long, could end an eight-yearlong journey so perfectly, but it did. When listening to it, the song doesn't really sound like anything special, and it definitely doesn't sound like anything on the other three previous albums (Coast, When Your Heartstrings Break, and Handsome Western States, in reverse chronological order), but that's why there are lyrics. The song sounds like a letter to the people who never cared, never took the time to listen: "Your last words will not be heard/there's too many of them that no one deserves/I don't need your love." This is driven home by the chorus, which rhetorically asks outright, "Is it worth me trying?" 

While their sales weren't strong and their fanbase still remains small, I'm going to answer emphatically "yes." While most people don't know of Beulah, to the people who do, they mean a lot. Their work took a dramatic and darker turn on Yoko, but honestly, it was for the best, and turned out to be the one album that I'll want to have with me always. Yoko might have broken up the band, but if they had to go, at least they left us with this as a parting gift.

---

The best example of this kind of behavior is my love for Weezer's Pinkerton, probably one of the greatest romantic(ist) stories in not-really-that-recent-anymore musical history.

Pinkerton's story is one that I have studied in-depth, but at the same time, it's complicated for me to explain. For the average listener, it can be summed up more easily. It was their sophomore album, following the much poppier and overall happy-go-lucky Blue Album that had sold exceedingly well. The thing was,  Pink was the complete antithesis to Blue, being dark and seen as the progenitor of that now mainstream, much-maligned "emo" genre. Here, as seen on Wikipedia:

Pinkerton is named after the character B.F. Pinkerton from Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, and the album is loosely based on the opera. Like the Puccini opera, the album includes other references to Japan, Japanese people, and Japanese culture from the perspective of an outsider who considers Japan fragile and sensual. The album's lyrical themes infuse the Japanese allusions with its first-person narrator's romantic disappointments and sexual frustration, the latter at times visceral and graphic. Due to the cohesion of the narrative themes, the album plays as a concept album about sexual longing and lost love, and because of its first-person voice, many consider Cuomo's songs autobiographical. Cuomo has stated that "the 10 songs are sequenced in the order in which I wrote them (with two minor exceptions). So as a whole, the album kind of tells the story of my struggle with my inner Pinkerton."

But then, you still don't know the real background. It started with a leg surgery.

Rivers Cuomo, our Byronic Hero, was born with one leg shorter than the other, a defect that prevented him from pursuing his childhood soccer dreams and required major surgery. If you have seen Cuomo recently, you would know that, obviously, the surgery was successful, but it was still insanely painful. Thus, he took to writing in the hospital as he recovered.

Also during this post-Blue time, Cuomo, disillusioned with the rock star life (a theme he would later address in album opener "Tired of Sex," as well as center the lost Weezer opus Songs from the Black Hole around), took some time off, enrolling at Harvard. Living in self-imposed near-isolation, this period of time was dark for the front man, inspiring directly some of the greatest songs on the album (my personal favorite and lead single, "El Scorcho," has some direct Harvard influence, as Cuomo once told the Crimson, "...one example is, in 'Pinkerton,' in 'El Scorcho,' two lines in the song are actually taken from someone else’s essay in my [Expository Writing] class. Because at one point, we had to do a little workshop thing, and we each got assigned to review someone else’s essay. So, I reviewed this one person’s essay, and I liked some of the lines in it, so I took them and used them in the song"). 

Some other inspired moments from the album include "No Other One," in which Cuomo tells us that, despite all of the things he doesn't like about the girl he's with, "She's all I got/and I don't wanna be alone." "No Other One" has some of the best instrumentation on the album, but it's Rivers Cuomo's sincere and sensitive vocals that really do it for me. "The Good Life" references Rivers persevering disillusionment again; while some called it out for its occasionally less than stellar lyrics ("shaking booty/making sweet love all the night," anyone?), it was a pretty honest expression of the desire to return to the less lonely life, the same one he dreaded in "Tired of Sex."

["The Good Life"] chronicles the rebirth of Cuomo after an identity crisis as an Ivy League loner. Cuomo, who had been isolated while at Harvard, wrote it after "becoming frustrated with that hermit's life I was leading, the ascetic life. And I think I was starting to become frustrated with my whole dream about purifying myself and trying to live like a monk or an intellectual and going to school and holding out for this perfect, ideal woman. And so I wrote the song. And I started to turn around and come back the other way."

Pinkerton is a chronological album, presented in the order it was written. Rivers Cuomo starts off as a rock star getting tired of the lifestyle ("Tired of Sex"), lamenting about it ("Why Bother?") until he decides to lead a life in isolation, as a "hermit" in a completely new place (Harvard). The single most-discussed song on the album, "Across the Sea," recounts the absolute lowest point in Cuomo's romanticist journey to find himself. It's the heartbreaking story of his receiving a fan letter from someone all the way "across the sea," and, even knowing he'll never see her, ever, falls in love with her, largely because he's so lonely. Fans bring it up so often because it's such a specific tale, as opposed to the slightly more general but still extremely personal "No Other One" and "Getchoo", and you can feel the pain that he's feeling. The exceptional songwriting that is heard throughout the album stands out the most here.

So the album stemmed from pain to begin with. Despite that, it was quite brilliant. The problem? Few people initially felt the same. Fans felt alienated, critics called the lyrics childish, overwrought, and insincere, and the band faded into the exact thing that Cuomo had wanted to get out of so badly, obscurity, and even more so, isolation. The album crashed and burned; being a very dark and wintry album released in mid-September, the teenagers that made up the majority of Weezer's fanbase either were disinterested in it when they had it or did not feel compelled to buy it. The sales were awful, and it seemed that what the critics of Blue had thought was true: the band was just a novelty act, a two-hit wonder. (You can read an interesting and informative thesis by a Harvard grad on the subject here.)

As everyone familiar with the phrase "Beverly Hills, that's where I want to be" knows, Weezer isn't exactly suffering anymore; at least, not commercially. But it is critically and artistically that they have let their game down. Cuomo thought that the failure of Pinkerton was everything that made it so appealing to the people who embraced it, albeit a little too late; he thought it was too personal, too romantic. He famously compared it to "being really drunk at a party and having everyone watch you." But if Pinkerton is what Rivers Cuomo produces when he's "drunk," then I hope that he sips some of that alcohol again soon. 

(Note: while Weezer's absolute worst album, Make Believe, sold a ton, the two similarly awful albums to follow it were not nearly as successful, and the band, last I heard, has now found themselves without a record label. While they're sure to end up somewhere else soon, it's a sign that maybe today's listeners would be more receptive, even encouraging, of a new Pinkerton-style Weezer album. Rivers Cuomo, though, being the Byronic figure he is, is probably too arrogant to ever admit that he was wrong about thinking that Pink was dreck, and we'll probably see him in even stranger facial hair and outfits to come.)

---

What does it say about our society that it's the tragedies that stay with us the most? Better yet, what does it say about us that we let these musical tragedies occur? 

You may think that the story of Weezer isn't tragic, and as I said before, commercially, no, it isn't. But artistically, the death of Pinkerton and the band's integrity is a loss for lovers of good music.

Beulah's story is most sympathetic, especially when you consider that they never really achieved the success that they wanted to or deserved. But I do believe that the band appreciated the fans it did have. Why would they give us four excellent albums if they didn't? 

The romanticism of music is the most compelling to me, but in other media it is of interest and importance, too. Maybe we'll get to that someday.

Download: "Don't Forget to Breathe" and "Landslide Baby" by Beulah; "El Scorcho" and "Across the Sea" by Weezer; *BONUS* "Hovering" by Beulah 

I'd recommend that you buy Yoko here. 

And I'd also suggest that you purchase Pinkerton here. (A deluxe edition is on Pre-Order here if you're interested.)

P.S. Weird teenager-y Rivers pic found here.  
P.P.S. Sorry this post has a stupid URL. I pressed publish too early. Hence the wrong "posted by" time. I actually posted it about three and a half hours later, heh. But you probably don't care!