By: Kyle Anderson

The year was 1996. People were so busy making fun of Bob Dole that they weren’t noticing that their modern rock radios were spitting out a bizarre speak-sung story song that had a wide-ass hook you could drive a truck through and a nerd-core vibe that sounded suspiciously like Weezer. The song was Nada Surf’s “Popular.”

Most of what they have churned out—and Clarkson is the very, very special exception—has run the gamut from middling (Reuben Studdard) to boring (Clay Aiken) to invisible (Fantasia, where you at?) to fully awful (pick anybody who wasn’t Kelly from the first season).

The selections are all over the map: There was one tape that consisted of all those insane animated versions of Dr. Seuss stories (upon further review, The Lorax is seriously fucked up, isn’t it?); another cassette featured a bunch of old episodes of WWF Primetime Wrestling, from when I was way into pro-wrestling (as opposed to now, where I’m only moderately into pro-wrestling).

By: Kyle Anderson

But then Weezer’s cult blew up something huge and all of a sudden they became this sort of power-pop juggernaut, and people (especially journalists) began talking about Cuomo as though he invented the genre—as if all those Lemonheads and Matthew Sweet records never occurred a couple of years earlier. Sure, Pinkerton is a masterpiece, but Rivers Cuomo ain’t Alex Chilton.

By: Kyle Anderson