Snuggie Inside

Thanks to my mate Thomas I got to go to the Halloweezer gig last week at the Hammerstein ballroom.

This was highly awesome - the crowd was all in costume and some people were invited up on stage to help the band out of their costumes: a liminal space if ever I saw one - costumes allow for more fluid identities and roll reversals, hence the audience becomes the performer and that.

One of the bits I particularly enjoyed would probably have not had the same effect for anyone else there.

Allow me to explain.

The last time I saw Weezer play was in 1994 -

[Oh Lord can it really have been 15 years? Wowzer. Weezer are like an old band now.

{Kottke pointed out a while ago that listening to, say, Nirvana's Nevermind album today is the same as someone listening to Terry Jack's Seasons In The Sun (1974) in the year 1991}]

- they had just released their first album

[now known as the Blue album and still worth listening to if you don't have it].

When I saw them play Rivers Cuomo was in crutches because he had just undergone surgery to lengthen one of his legs.

[It was whilst recuperating from this apparently very painful surgery that he wrote the much darker [and always difficult] second album Pinkerton, which bombed when released but has steadily gained admiration and sales ever since.] 

So it gave me a particular kind of joy to see a trampoline on stage, which Rivers would use to to leap up onto the drum kit and back again.

The video infomercial above promoting the new album shows the band pimping the Snuggie - and you can get Weezer branded Snuggies when you buy the new album, which is awesome.

It has more than 5000 comments on youtube - I suspect, in part, because, you guessed it, it is culturally recombinent.