Weezer "Weezer (Blue Album)" [1994]

Even though it's pretty clear 90s indie rock suffered greatly from a profound lack of talent and hideous audacity, it took Weezer to articulate that it's ultimately an insular, home-schooled, competition-devoid group of rich kids from American bi-coastal hippie parents who had the requisite moxie to force their embarrassingly amateuristic sub-par songwriting and performance on a music-listening audience of young people thirsting for something -- anything -- to save them from the Guns 'n Roses double album. Obviously, none of these chumps had it within them to deliver the goods, but what's so frustrating is it's just not that fucking hard to tune a goddamn guitar before you record your tracks in that multi-million-dollar studio. Are you checking if there's anyone besides Pavement and Jesus Lizard whose band is so horrendous they can set a two-inch tape on fire just by performing with extreme ineptitude? While Weezer is not as atonal as Dinosaur Jr nor as grating as anything that asshole Steve Albini ever did, they're still complicit with the slummy Gen-X aesthetic that ruined the youth of everyone who yearned for a viable alternative from TLC. Weezer even proves they do have at least some chops by singing harmonies, but they totally succumbed to what the cool kids have brow-beaten them into: shittiness = coolness, because quality = what Mom & Dad listen to. For God's sake, even boomer Ric Ocasek has drunk the koolaid, producing this worthless heap of Big Head Todd on a bottle of tequila. Only in the 90s could playing like shit equate selling out.