I have been a Weezer fan since The Blue Album came out back when I was in high school, and let me tell you, it’s not been easy. Their recent work has been uneven, and Rivers Cuomo, the genius behind the band, tends to take an almost scientifically superstitious approach to song writing that seems to have been counterproductive. He keeps this crazy binder in which he breaks down Kurt Cobain and Green Day songs in this really analytical way to try to figure out the formula behind their genius, and thereby, find what I can only describe as the unified field theory for pop music. It eluded Einstien, so I don’t know how he intends to crack it, but whatever. Therefore, when he writes music, he winds up with several different versions of all of his songs.

Relax. This is not a huge rant about Weezer. I’m going somewhere with this, I promise.

What I want to talk about is a song called Perfect Situation. I just love this song. I got Make Believe when it came out, and while much of the album is a little shaky, that one song is brilliant. It moved immediately to my iPod, and has lived there ever since.  When I recently signed up for a subscription music service, (a brilliant idea that I can’t believe I didn’t do sooner), Perfect Situation was one of the first songs I sought out.

So imagine my surprise when I played it, and found it totally changed.  The melody in the chorus had changed. There were backing vocals that hadn’t been there before. All the changes had been, in my opinion, poor ones. It was so hard to hear . What the hell was going on? I looked all over, but couldn’t find “my” version.

The reason? It had been replaced. To be clear, the older version had been completely removed from iTunes, and the streaming services, and the new, weaker version was substituted. An explination, vie Weezerpedia:

When Make Believe was first released, the version of “Perfect Situation” on the album featured one of two different melodies Cuomo originally wrote for the chorus. During the summer 2005 tour, when the band prompted the crowd to sing along, the fans, oddly enough, invariably sang the other original melody Cuomo had written. Cuomo stated in an interview during the band’s 2005 performance at the AOL Sessions, “Well, if these ten thousand people think it should go this way, maybe we should go back and re-record it.”

The remix includes re-recorded chorus vocals with the other melody, a synth track added to the first chorus (the original version only has it on the second chorus), and added backup vocals of “perfect situation” over the outro. The radio edit of this remix, served to radio and featured in the video, is eight seconds shorter than the album version, due to a shortening of the intro guitar solo.

Right.  So the other, older version, the one that had become among my favorite songs, had been deleted from existance because Weezer fans can’t sing it correctly.

I find this a little disturbing. Perhaps is the pre-internet fuddy-duddy¹ in me, but I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with the public informing art in this way. A world where paintings get repainted due to feedback on facebook.

Then again, movies have been doing this for years. Final cuts get put before Focus groups, and the results become reflected in the film that gets shown on opening weekend. There is a lifelessness in this approach. But Devo, another of my favorite bands, released an album this year, Fresh, in which all manner of aspects were decided via focus groups and song studies. And the album was excellent.

This could be a fundamental change in the way art is produced. Or, perhaps Rivers Cuomo should just stop over thinking his songwriting. But remember, Greedo shot first, and despite what crimes George Lucas chooses to perpetrate on his movies, there are people who will never forget that fact. And the rest of the planet could care less.

¹ That’s Right Gang, fuddy-duddy.

This week marks the relaunch of brainpanonline.com. Brain Pan has been around in some limping form or another since 2004. I have always been a writer, without any real place to write anything, and Brain Pan was an attempt to solve that problem. Over time, it also became a way for me to work on my Web Development skills, a pursuit that eventually evolved into how I make my living. It also was part of the beginning of Fat Robot Radio, and everything that came of that. Even though this site as been up till now a sorry and pathetic mess, it was part of reason why my world looks the way it does today. It is embarrassing to think back to how bad the site was back when I started. And I assumed that what with the fliud and ever changing nature of the internet, these old sins would have been long wiped away.

But I forgot: But the internet is forever.

Thanks to the Way Back Machine, I was able to uncover that first site. Before I bought the domain brainpanonline.com, I ran the site for almost a year using free web hosting. I assumed that sites like this went back through and deleted old, inactive accounts, but this one apparently does not. No, readers, it is out there, just as I left it over 5 years ago.

This is fascinating to me. Our culture is leaving behind unintentional traces of itself in the dead parts of the web. Old profiles on dead social media sites, comments in long dead blogs, images uploaded to god knows where and left abandoned; all these things are still out there. They exist as weird little snapshots of where we were at a given time. And they will be out there, of interest to no one, telling the world about who we used to be.