I haven’t listened to the new Weezer album ‘Death to False Metal’, their first compilation of unreleased material released as part of the deluxe edition of Pinkerton, but I have seen the cover,… wow the cover… it is just very weird once again.
After the unexpected choice of Jorge Garcia from ‘Lost’ for ‘Hurley’, this new cover is extremely bizarre in its concept because it strikes me as something very close to an illustration from a Jehovah’s witness pamphlet. I am familiar with that kind of ‘literature’ for having stumbled on a few witnesses who were way too eager to give me their propaganda booklets. Their kitsch-looking illustrations always represent such idyllic scenery of mixed race people living in harmony with animals in a nature which looks like the garden of Eden, proliferating in fruits and other goods that the gods, excuse me God, has provided for the happy people who don’t even seem to use technology, but who have turned to Jehovah. There is even the bright light coming from heaven, I know, a few lions playing with the gazelles are missing but the Weezer’s cover looks exactly like a Watchtower creation!
It cannot be a coincidence. Has Cuomo become a Jehovah’s witness?? Come on, they already have Prince and (literally) Michael Jackson
Or is it plagiarism? In what goal? A sort of declaration of the type death to False Metal… death to false religion? If there is such thing that a true or a false religion.
But no, this is Rivers’ explanation for the title:
“I was very much into Slayer as a teenager, and Metallica, and what I would have thought of as the real metal. And that was an expression we used to kick around – “Death to false metal” – because it seemed like there were so many bands coming up that didn’t have that; the integrity of the bands that we loved, my brother and I and our friends.
And so I had just been talking to my brother a few months ago, and we were reminiscing about those times, and he reminded me of that expression – “Death to false metal.” And it just gave me such a warm feeling of a time in my life when I took musical style so seriously.’
But what about the cover? Curiously, as some fans have noticed, some Jehovah’s witnesses were already knocking at Rivers Cuomo’s door in the 2005 video of ‘We are all on drugs’, and the song ‘The Greatest Man that Ever Lived’ has the same title than one of the Jehovah witnesses’ books. Ok, this may be just a coincidence, but not this cover!
Pingback: Nicks Without Borders
I noticed this as soon as I looked at the album cover!