I always suspected that Weezer's Rivers Cuomo was one of us: The glasses, the willingness to rhyme "front" with "violent," the arcane references to everything from Puccini to Kitty Pryde. But when I heard the song "Smart Girls" from Weezer's latest album, Hurley, I figured it was proof positive that Cuomo is a geek's geek.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNuvFkveGR0[/youtube]
Then I read a Q&A with Cuomo in Spin, and found out the origins of the song. Turns out Cuomo wrote it as "Hot Girls," and changed it after the fact.
Initially, I was put off by this: Who needs another song about hot girls, for cryin' out loud? But then I realized that Cuomo had come to the same conclusion, and had the *cojones *to be straight about the origins of the song in the interview. He tells Spin:
"The song was originally 'Hot Girls,' about how frustrating it is to have all these amazingly hot girls tweeting at me and it just felt so frustrating because I'm not in that life stage anymore where I can do anything about it...It ultimately ended up feeling -- I don't know, too macho or something? So we just changed it to 'Smart Girls' and every other lyric stayed the same, like a really cheesy song about girls. But just changing that one word makes it really different and interesting."
The lesson, he says in Spin: "If there's any little voice bothering you, like, something about this isn't cool, something about this isn't right, that means there's something yet to be discovered, so keep pushing."
Good advice for any endeavor, I think.
What do you think? Would you have liked the song in its original form?
