Rivers Cuomo: My life is a sea of sadness.

Butterfly

IN Madama Butterfly, Pinkerton travels across the sea and finds himself a beautiful creature. He captures her, and immediately loses interest — he’s drinking a toast to finding ‘a real American wife’ before he’s even left Japan. He sails back to America and forgets Cio-Cio-San, and she is left staring out to sea, clinging to the promise he made that he would return ‘when the robin makes his nest again’.1 The opera ends when Cio-Cio-San, having remained faithful to Pinkerton throughout, learns that he has an American wife. Having no hope left in the world, she takes her own life.

One of the greatest challenges Puccini had faced in bringing Madama Butterfly to the stage was the percieved lop-sidedness of the story’s plot. Puccini’s collaborator Illica complained that Pinkerton virtually disappeared for most of the story, ‘and his is the drama!’ he wrote to Puccini, exasperated.2Weezer’s second album would, in a curious way, make amends for this. Here, the drama is all Pinkerton — tellingly, his name has replaced hers on the marquee. There is still the unfathomable distance of the Atlantic Ocean between the young American and his Japanese love. But we never see her — while his emotional crises form the entire plot of the album. Butterfly writes adoring letters on cute stationery to her young man, he sits alone in his room and rationalises their relationship out of existence before it’s begun — all the while wishing for it to come true. But it’s on the album’s last song, ‘Butterfly’, that Cuomo’s feeling for Puccini’s opera becomes clearest. The singer tells us he keeps going out to catch butterflies — and they keep dying on him. ‘Every time I pin down what I think I want it slips away,’3 he sings. It seems as though there’s something wrong with him, as though his wants and his needs are fundamentally opposed. He wants something, he chases it and often catches it. But the object of his desire melts away as he grasps it. Understandably, he’s starting to wonder if there’s any point doing anything at all.

The prevailing mood of Pinkerton is not so much of despair as of resignation. ‘Tired of Sex’ is a nightmare reversal of the usual rock star brag about all the girls the singer slept with in all the different towns he played. This is not the Don Juan of the Spanish legend or the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s opera, but the Don Juan of Byron, who looks back over his many conquests with an air of melancholy detachment. The joke in Byron’s Don Juan is that the great seducer is always the seduced — he doesn’t really have to try. This is the scenario of ‘Tired of Sex’, where the singer sounds mostly perplexed about his many one-night stands, and finally, disgusted. He feels he has been taken advantage of but, like Byron, his pose of static detachment prevents him from running away. ‘Thursday night I’m naked again,’ sings the tired-sounding rock star.4 What’s the point? In ‘Why Bother?’ the singer reveals that he’s just as tired of love as he is of sex. He could ask that girl out, he could pick up the phone, he could lean in for a kiss. But he has already been disappointed so many times that he can’t quite bring himself to try, he has already spent enough time chasing happiness to know that it will always elude him. So he gives up. He ignores his urges — which in any case are no match for his inertia — and resigns himself to solitude.

Schopenhauer would say that the singer is right — love is not worth the trouble. The problem with love, according to Schopenhauer, is that it’s inseparable from the sexual drive, and the sexual drive is part of the great, destructive tide of birth, struggle and death that pushes life along its purposeless course. The sex drive is will manifested in the individual, and since will for Schopenhauer is always negative, allowing oneself to be driven by instinct can only lead to no good.

In the world of rock and roll, this amounts to heresy. Rock ballads — with their we gotta and I wanna — place a lot of faith in instinct. ‘We gotta get out while we’re young’, ‘we gotta hold on to what we got’, ‘I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day’ — belief in the power of instinct is the legacy of fifty years of rock music. No wonder Cuomo sounds so confused when he sings in ‘Butterfly’, ‘I did what my body told me to’. In chasing his Butterfly, he merely followed the advice of a thousand radio hits — do what you feel, listen to your body, go for it — and the result was tragedy. ‘Tired of Sex’ and ‘Why Bother?’ present variations on the same theme. He acted naturally, according to instinct, and all he got was…more unhappiness.

Schopenhauer would say that a moment like this is a step on the path to true wisdom. We must accept that the butterfly will always get away, that our goals will always melt into the air when we reach them — like Robert Smith’s girl in ‘A Forest’. In Pinkerton the singer has come to realise that happiness can only be found in a state of non-willing, which his new attitude of resignation and renunciation (‘Why Bother?’) will allow. This, as Schopenhauer himself knew, is easier said than done. The so-called ‘Buddha of Frankfurt’ had a surprising number of affairs and one-night stands, presumably because — like Cuomo — his inertia made him an easy target.

Wagner gave Schopenhauer a number of reasons to dismiss his Tristan poem. Even if Schopenhauer had managed to overlook the problems of style and the fact that Wagner wrote grand operas (which Schopenhauer mostly hated), there would still be the hurdle of the composer’s insistence on love as a form of salvation from suffering. For Schopenhauer, love is the reason we suffer, and it ensures that we continue to suffer. In this, Schopenhauer is not, like Andy Gill from The Gang of Four, trying to say that love is a superstition which is perpetuated by love songs and grand operas, and can be unlearned. Schopenhauer accepts that our desire for love, like all our other urges and emotions, is real enough. But the fact that we are created with the desire for happiness and dumped into a world of flux and chaos in which that happiness must always remain out of reach is, for him, yet more proof that life is hell, and that it would have been better if the human race had never been born. Human life, Schopenhauer writes in his essay, ‘On The Emptiness of Existence’, ‘is basically a mistake’ — and the proof of this lies in the simple fact that no matter how hard you try, you can’t get no satisfaction.5