Even if you lived through it, it’s hard to fathom exactly why Weezer were disliked, even loathed, when they released their debut album in the spring of 1994. If you grew up in the years after the heyday of grunge, it may even seem absurd that the band were considered poseurs, hair metal refugees passing themselves off as alt-rock by adapting a few tricks from the Pixies and Nirvana songbooks and sold to MTV with stylish videos. Nevertheless, during alt-rock’s heyday of 1994, Weezer was second only to Stone Temple Pilots as an object of scorn, bashed by the rock critics and hipsters alike. Time has a way of healing, even erasing, all wounds, and time has been nothing but kind to Weezer’s eponymous debut album (which would later be dubbed The Blue Album, due to the blue background of the cover art). At the time of its release, the group’s influences were discussed endlessly — the dynamics of the Pixies, the polished production reminiscent of Nevermind, the willful outsider vibe borrowed from indie rock — but few noted how the group, under the direction of singer/songwriter Rivers Cuomo, synthesized alt-rock with a strong ’70s trash-rock predilection and an unwitting gift for power pop, resulting in something quite distinctive. Although the group wears its influences on its sleeve, Weezer pulls it together in a strikingly original fashion, thanks to Cuomo’s urgent melodicism, a fondness for heavy, heavy guitars, a sly sense of humor, and damaged vulnerability, all driven home at a maximum volume. While contemporaries like Pavement were willfully, even gleefully obscure, and skewed toward a more selective audience, Weezer’s insecurities were laid bare, and the band’s pop culture obsessions tended to be universal, not exclusive. Plus, Cuomo wrote killer hooks and had a band that rocked hard — albeit in an uptight, nerdy fashion — winding up with direct, immediate music that connects on more than one level. It’s both clever and vulnerable, but those sensibilities are hidden beneath the loud guitars and catchy hooks. That’s why the band had hits with this album — and not just hits, but era-defining singles like the deliberate dissonant crawl of “Undone – The Sweater Song,” the postironic love song of “Buddy Holly,” the surging “Say It Ain’t So” — but could still seem like a cult band to the dedicated fans; it sounded like the group was speaking to an in-crowd, not the mass audience it wound up with. If, as Howard Hawks said, a good movie consists of three great scenes and no bad ones, it could be extrapolated that a good record contains three great songs and no bad ones — in that case, Weezer is a record with at least six or seven great songs and no bad ones. That makes for a great record, but more than that, it’s a great record emblematic of its time, standing as one of the defining albums of the ’90s. – Stephen Thomas Erlewine