As I watched what currently passes for "Weezer" perform a song from their new album on last night's Late Show with Stephen Colbert, my heart sank.
It wasn't that the song was bad, though it sure wasn't great, but that Rivers looked, for all intents and purposes, like a man forced to play a role that had long ago been stripped of any meaning for him.
That Cuomo would fall victim to the same trap that forces the latest cobbled-together version of Ratt or Great White to don Halloween-quality wigs and wedge their AARP-sized arses into stretchy faux-leather pants each night for fear an audience hoping to relive their youth might refuse to accept the fact that their heroes aren't ageless wonders still comes as something of a shock.
Dressed ironically in a button-up cardigan and trademark black rim glasses, Cuomo no longer resembles the 20-something slacker who rode the Blue Album to unlikely platinum success, but, rather, an alt.rock Mister Rogers trying just a little too hard to be cool.
It is that same misguided desire to keep Weezer relevant (i.e., commercially successful) that leads Cuomo to continuously, and quite ridiculously, team up with co-writers of songs by Beyonce, John Legend, Britney Spears, and Rihanna in hopes of creating product that, in his eyes, adheres to a musical template that he, himself, can no longer follow.
Thing is, those of us who found the band's self-titled debut album so refreshing all those years ago did so because we'd seen hair metal fall victim to the power ballad and alternative music become nothing more than an avenue for endless self pity.
When Kurt Cobain sang "Rape Me", he opened the door for Weezer to poke light-hearted fun at what he and the rest of the top-tier alternative scene had become: a sad cartoon unaware of its own descent into self-parody.
Maybe The Blue Album wasn't ever meant to be that successful, but Cuomo's knack for writing great pop songs that defied all commercial pop formulas of the day couldn't help but find a mass audience because, like him, we too saw what hair metal and alternative had become.
In Weezer, we saw a band that would never fall victim to those same trappings because, like us, they'd seen it happen to others and knew the obstacles to avoid.
What might Weezer's second album have sounded like if the first one hadn't been so wildly successful, we're left to wonder? Pinkerton, for all of its revivalist greatness, was not an honest progression, but a flipping of the Monopoly board by someone already tired of the restrictive coffin that mega-success had forced him into.
It's not like other bands hadn't been in that same position, yet Def Leppard were capable of progressing both artistically and commercially after the mad success of Pyromania rather than recoiling from it. AC/DC, already dealing with the death of their singer, didn't run from the success of Highway To Hell, they built on it with Back In Black.
Upon releasing Pinkerton and seeing Weezer's commercial stature shrink considerably, Cuomo suddenly realized that he'd made a horrible mistake and immediately set out to recreate the Blue Album right down to mimicking the album's cover art and bringing back the Blue Album's producer, Ric Ocasek.
In doing so, Cuomo returned the band to global prominence, but at what cost?
From that moment on, whenever Cuomo feels the band's commercial fortunes slipping, he releases a Red Album, or a White Album in hopes that those of us who got the joke the first time still find it funny, or endearing, or listenable.
Upon seeing Rivers and what passes for Weezer these days perform a song last night that seemed to exist only to please radio programmers who can't accept Weezer for anything other than what they were in 1994, I found myself feeling sorry for a man whose every dream had come true, but whose dream had since turned into a nightmare from which none of us can escape.