Rock Is Rollin'

The world has turned and left me here," sang Rivers Cuomo on Weezer's self-titled debut album. In the years since that double-platinum 1994 CD, that's exactly what happened, not only to Weezer but to an entire generation of rock bands that emerged in the early to mid-'90s. In that era, grunge, punk and "alternative" bands--Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots--ruled the hearts and wallets of young listeners. Then, almost without exception, they dropped from the top of the charts, replaced by rap acts and, later, boy bands and girl divas. Some lingered but grew less relevant (Nine Inch Nails' 1999 The Fragile was a critical smash but a sales disappointment) or less edgy (a Foo Fighters song became the theme music for the NBC romantic comedy-drama Ed, for cripes' sake).

Weezer released the ruinously unpopular Pinkerton in 1996, then vanished long enough for lead singer Cuomo to enroll at Harvard and nearly complete a bachelor's degree. So before the release of the band's new (and also self-titled) record, Cuomo flatly predicted, "I think it's going to fail in every sense of the word."

If rock is good at one thing, it's dying, as it did, cyclically, with the rise of disco and new wave. But if rock is good at two things, it's dying and coming back to life. And so last month Weezer found itself making its debut at No. 4 on the Billboard charts, its video for Hash Pipe--an eccentric, grinding single about a transvestite hooker--breaking onto MTV's Total Request Live. Last week Break the Cycle (Flip Records/Elektra), an angsty slab of dysfunction-metal from Staind, entered the charts at No. 1, selling a surprising 716,000 copies in one week. Right behind it was Lateralus (Tool Dissectional/Volcano), from arty gloom rockers Tool, which came out at No. 1 a week before, displacing red-hot girl group Destiny's Child. (Weezer hangs in at No. 9.) Overnight--Hello, Cleveland!--kids were ready to rock again.

Well, not overnight. Rock never really died--after the alternative-rock craze bottomed out in the late '90s, rap-rock hybrids like Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock as well as more straightforward rock bands like Creed have clicked with audiences and gone multiplatinum. And record-company executives, like anxious analysts anticipating a tech bubble burst, have been anticipating a correction in teeny-pop's long boom. They have devoted more resources in the past year to signing and developing rock acts, believing the tweens who flocked to pop would soon be ready for a different sound. "They want [their music] to evolve into something else as they grow older and mature," says John Davis, vice president of Loud Records, a division of Columbia.

Teen pop isn't dead either, but even there, a shift is under way. The Backstreet Boys' latest, Black and Blue, sold a healthy 5 million, according to SoundScan, but that didn't touch the 11.8 million for their 1999 Millennium or the 10.5 million for 'N Sync's 2000 No Strings Attached. And few expect 'N Sync's July follow-up, Celebrity, to approach those heights either. More significant, long-reigning teen acts are, in attitude if not music, waxing more grownup, more rock 'n' roll. It may not be far-fetched to see the cultural roots of a rock revival in the moment Britney Spears ripped off her clothes at the MTV Video Music Awards last fall--Daddy, I'm not a little girl anymore!--or in the snarly, goateed look 'N Sync has adopted in its latest video. Bubblegum's fans are being led down a rockier road--and nothing rocks like rock.

But each of the rock successes of the past weeks were the product of years of touring and building grassroots followings. Tool first broke out on the Lollapalooza tour in 1993, and Lateralus, its first album in five years, was hotly awaited, though its sales were still surprising. Staind was godfathered by Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst, who brought the band on the Family Values Tour in 1999, helped get it signed to Elektra (its first album, Dysfunction, sold slightly more than a million copies) and sang on its ballad Outside from the Family Values Tour 1999 CD. But even with a famous sugar daddy, success came after 18 months building cred on tour.

It's tempting to liken this budding revival to the coming-out of grunge 10 years ago, when the President was named Bush, the economy was contracting and anxious Gen-Xers with guitars rode self-deprecation and power chords to the top of the charts. But Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam et al.--could be said at least loosely to have a common sound, a common fan base and a common thrift-shop fashion sense. This season's rock monarchs share good timing--"There's a collective exhaustion now like there was [in 1991]," says Jonathan Poneman, co-founder of Sub Pop Records, which served as grunge's midwife. But the bands have little else in common.

Thus Staind's Break the Cycle is the sensitive mosher's album, heavy on commercial-metal power ballads a la Creed and emotive if inarticulate lyrics laced with therapy-speak (hence the title) that play like an R-rated episode of Oprah. ("Did Daddy not love you? Or did he love you just too much?... Well, f___ them, and f___ her and f___ him, And f___ you...") Tool, for its part, specializes in punishing, proficient metal with complicated progressive-rock time signatures: Metallica by way of King Crimson. It's also firmly in the progressive-rock tradition of noodly instrumentals, bloated song lengths and bombast; the band's florid lyrics ("Saturn ascends, the one, the ten. Ignorant to the damage done") and Latinate album titles like [A]Enima and Lateralus seem more than a little [a]effected. Weezer's stripped-down, raging and sardonic beach pop is Tool's pure antithesis (you could fit their blissful but brief new CD 2 1/2 times over onto Tool's nearly 80-minute monster).