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Weezer is a great band.

The music is good for sure; fun pop rock/punk that's really easy to like.

They've had more than their fair share of hit singles, which to their credit hold up well over time - not an easy trick to pull off, judging by how few artists are able to do it.

The possible exception to this is "Undone (The Sweater Song)" from the debut album (thogugh it's possible that I never cared for the song). The rest of that album is strong with "Holiday", "Buddy Holly", "The World Has Turned and Left Me", "In the Garage", ...

Every album since has included at least one instant classic:

Pinkerton - El Scorcho

The Green Album - too many to pick just one (

Don't Let Go, Photograph, Island in the Sun, Knock-Down Drag-Out, Simple Pages, Glorious Day, O Girlfriend, ...). Let's just say the whole album is good.

Maladroit - Keep Fishin'

By the way the best Weezer video on YouTube, in my opinion, might be the video for Keep Fishin', which is based on the idea of Weezer performing on the Muppet Show.

Apparently embedding for the Keep Fishin' video is disabled. That is a topic for a follow-up post.

Make Believe - Perfect Situation (I prefer this to "Beverly Hills" which seems to have won the race for preeminent geek-pop song on this album.)

The Red album - Pork and Beans

"Pork and Beans" is a catchy song and appropriate enough for the first single from an album released in 2008, which may be remembered as the height of what has been branded 'Web 2.0' phenomenon, i.e. the form over function, quick hitting, immature, only vaguely useful, current incarnation of what might loosely be described as 'web services', which are dominated by everything that could possibly be described as social networking.

Weezer's efforts related to the song and the Red Album is a good indication of just how well the band is negotiating the new world of music (which is heavily impacted if not dominated by the influence of the web and the internet more generally).

Increasingly, succeeding as a band is contingent on not disappointing online. Of course, ideally, but not always, this is on the back of putting out great music in the first place.

But this isn't a post about the music. Weezer has proven to be a great band and not just a band with great music. What's the difference? A great band is consistently creative and is willing to take advantage of new media rather than protest the fact that what worked well in the past is no longer relevant.

Case in point, Weezer on YouTube.

There may be other bands who have benefitted more from YouTube, OK Go comes to mind, and their are seemingly an endless number of people doing really imaginative things and posting the videos to youtube.com, but there is something pleasantly simple and genuine about Weezer's efforts. Their videos aren't overly clever, but they are exceptionally effective.

This post was motivated by Weezer's hootenanny video ( I realize it's a little old, I have a backlog of things I want to post about unfortunately :| ). I contend that there has never been something quite like this, and the ease of it underscores the power of the web to connect people in new and profound ways.

Weezer has taken the simplest and most obvious approach on YouTube, which as it turns out is also the most effective strategy.

This is the sort of thing that a strong case for the web as a uniquely valuable collaborative medium and not just yet another time suck. It makes me want to cancel cable service and spend more time on enjoying the web. MORE about this

This is the opposite of all of the Web 2.0 services out there which do little more than add layer after layer of fluffy redundant garbage on top of the web (Facebook comes to mind). The web is an application, and one that is well suited to creative, ad-hoc styles of collaboration. It's a natural asynchronous complement to the synchronous exchanges that are better suited to the real world of meetings, conferences, and other forms of people getting together in one place at the same time to work or socialize together. Weezer's Hootenanny project is a great demonstration of this relationship.

Kudos to Weezer.