WEEZER – “Hash Pipe”
You want geeky? OK then. At one point in Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s The Ballad Of Halo Jones, the protagonist is exhausted. Her life is going nowhere, she’s fighting in a space war (this being, after all, a comic book), and her best friend’s just been killed. So she cuts her hair off, fast and badly, and when asked why she says “I felt like doing something stupid and ugly”. The line stuck with me, and now I’m reaching for it because I want to know why I’m listening to Weezer’s “Hash Pipe”, and the answer is that I feel like hearing something stupid and ugly.
“Hash Pipe” is an unevolved lump of a song – a riff and a hook and a harmony: one each, all textbook desultory and dumb. This isn’t magnificent Bangsian fuzz-primitivism, though, this is just the bare blocky minimum of effort, power-pop with all the wires cut. Listening to it is like kissing a housebrick. Stupid and ugly. I like it. This is as near, I think, as repressed English old me is going to come to the beer-chugging, bird-flipping release of frat rock, and with a thirteen-hour sleep debt I could do with a bit of release, thankyou.
I know very litle about the whole Weezer thing. I know their last album was meant to be emotional and brilliant, and this one is meant to be a stunted sell-out. Well, I heard some of those emotional songs, and they were OK you know but I just don’t have the energy to empathise any more: I’ve had enough of emotion for today, cheers. The granite comtempt of “Hash Pipe” asks for nothing and gives nothing back, and that’s how I like it. You’ve got your problems: I’ve got my web site.