Nothing lasts forever. Nothing. It’s a bit of a double edged sword, I think. On the one hand, we know that everything we know will surely one day perish. Every person, every place, every memory and movie and song. Every held hand, every kiss, every silent embrace. Everything we have ever loved will one day return to zero, be it by death, the trumpets sounding on Judgement Day, or the ultimate collapse of the universe and the end of everything. Nothing escapes. Everything dies. Sour, I think you can agree. But I like to look on the bright side; at least we know that at some point Cliff Richard will keel over and croak. That’s the sort of silver lining that gets me to sleep at night. You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, kids.

The end of everything as we know it is one thing. We can’t do anything about our ultimate fates. If the super volcano at Yellowstone erupts tomorrow and wipes out half the United States, blackens the sky with ash, and plunges the world into a nuclear winter, there’s nothing I can do about it. Not a jot. I’m cool with that. I’m happy knowing that should there be a cataclysmic event on Earth that could spell the extinction of our species, I have no responsibility to stop it. It’s not my job. No can do. I’m just going to plug in my headphones, listen to The Pixies, and start a sweepstakes on who turns into a mutant first.

Now, imagine you’re Superman. You have literally every cool super power in theworld, and your only weakness is some sort of crazy space rock that isn’t particularly commonplace on Earth; you can’t buy Kryptonite at Superdrug, for instance. It’s not a Mach 3. It’s as rare as rocking horse shit. He’s practically invincible. He’s still a super fucking weak comic book character, but that’s irrelevant to this point. We’ve established he is nigh on unstoppable.

Now, if Superman flies off to Jupiter for a holiday spending ten days at an all inclusive getting fat on lamb shanks and drinking his weight in San Miguel, and he comes back to Earth to discover it’s been hit by a comet, 99% of the population is dead, the planet is scorched and desolate, and Cliff Richard somehow survived, what does he say when he gets back to Metropolis?

“Oh, great job looking after the planet while I was away, Lois, you fucking douche”?

Fuck that. He’s the only person who could have stopped it (aside from Bruce Willis in Armageddon, but I think the jury is still out on the legitimacy of the science displayed in that movie). It’s his responsibility. He is our only hope. If you’re a bomb disposal expert, you don’t let a security guard take over dismantling the nuke while you go to the vending machine for a Tracker.

Those are the perils of responsibility. If you have responsibility, then you have an obligation to see it through. Those of us with no responsibility, we can go as we please. That’s why I’m not worried about not being in control of my ultimate fate. That’s why I’m not worried about super volcanoes, alien invasions, or zombie outbreaks. I can’t do shit. A plane could land on my head while I’m watching The Cube and there is nothing I can do about it. But there are plenty of things I can do something about. Everything dies, but not everything has to die when it does.

I’m walking down the street and I see a cat drowning in a river. It can’t swim and it only has two legs so when it tries to swim it just turns around slowly in the water. It’s fucked. Now I can stand and watch it struggling with a packet of pork scratchings, but I’m not going to do that, am I? I fucking hate pork scratchings. If I was going to have some sort of snack I’d probably go for some of those peanuts that have the crispy coating and the flavouring. What are they called… Nobby’s Nuts. Probably the barbecue ones, or the chili at a push. It’s weird because I don’t actually like barbecue but I do like the barbecue Nobby’s Nuts. Strange that. It’s like how I like banana flavoured things but I don’t actually like bananas. I think that might be down to the texture though. Who knows?

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the drowning cat. So this cat is drowning, and I could just stand back and watch, but I don’t. I pluck it out of the water, give it a tin of tuna, pat it on the head, and then give it to the RSPCA. The cat was heading to kitty heaven (or a local landfill, depending on which side of the faith fence you reside) but I helped it out and now it’s going to live out the rest of its days eating Whiskers and watching birds from an old womans kitchen window. It dies, eventually, but it had a better life thanks to my intervention. It dies, eventually, as everything does, but it lived out a good life, and didn’t die prematurely.

And so finally the point of this rant emerges. Not everything has to die when it does. Not everything has to fall apart without a helping hand. A lot of the time there’s something that somebody could have done. A lot of the time, it didn’t have to be this way, man. There’s so many things that didn’t need to go the way they did, and so many of those things sadden me.

Example; I didn’t need the fourth Indiana Jones movie. Somebody should have done something to stop it. The death of a screen icon. An all time great reduced to watching some cunt from Transformers swinging on vines. Playing second fiddle to aliens who were made from CGI that was so appalling that it looked like Spielberg had just drawn them onto the film with crayons.

Spielberg and Lucas had the responsibility. Indiana Jones didn’t have to be this way. But in the end, everything dies. What was once a wonderful franchise was turned into a rubber snake laden, CGI heavy, lead-lined fridge full of empty promises and the broken dreams of this teary eyed, downtrodden, twenty something adventure fan.

Damn you, Indy.

In the history of time though, I can’t think of many things that have died as prematurely, and fallen quite as hard as the band Weezer have. Depending on your age, you may not know this, but Weezer were actually once a good band. Yeah, I know. I’m not even fucking with you. God’s honest. They really were.

Back in the 90s, Weezer released their self-titled debut album (which has been lovingly referred to as The Blue Album by fans since) and it included probably their best known song, Buddy Holly. This album is, for me, an all time great. It’s just back to back tunes. It’s geeky in just the right way (Weezer made being nerds cool before being a nerd was cool) and strikes just the right balance between sing-along pop melodies and intelligent, honest lyrics. It takes the best bits of pop punk and the best bits of indie, blends them together, and turns them into something wonderful.

Obviously, people were excited about a follow up to the album, and Weezer came out with Pinkerton. At the time, Pinkerton wasn’t greeted with such great reviews as the first album, but over the years it has garnered somewhat legendary status. Rather than being a carbon copy of The Blue Album, it featured more desperate, introspective lyrics, a little more lo-fi sound, and the kind of brutal honesty rarely seen in a record of its ilk. Personally, I preferred The Blue Album (I know, sue me) but Pinkerton was an album almost its equal. No small achievement.

Pinkerton met modest commercial success. The first album had Buddy Holly, a bona fide rock anthem, and guaranteed album seller. While Pinkerton was great, it didn’t have that sort of commercial appeal. It was more of a grower. Ipso facto, all the clown shoes that bought it expecting eleven doses of Buddy Holly repackaged in slightly different ways were disappointed. Those who wanted something real to sink their teeth into were not.

Rivers Cuomo, the frontman of Weezer, didn’t take the commercial failure of Pinkerton well, and disappeared into himself for a few years. Many wondered if Weezer would ever be heard from again. Eventually, they released their super anticipated follow up to Pinkerton, another self-titled album this time referred to as The Green Album.

Now, The Green Album is not a terrible album. Not by any stretch. It’s not Blink 182, or Fallout Boy, or whatever. But what it is, is massively inferior to what came before. Almost everything that made Weezer special in their first two records was condensed and watered down into easily digestible, radio sized chunks of disappointing pop-punk. And no subsequent album since then has ever managed to get it back. Some albums had glimmers of hope, like The Red Album with “Pork and Beans” and “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived”. Some, like Make Believe, were just flat out awful. I think it was by the time they released Raditude where I had to question whether the first two Weezer albums were actually genuinely good, or whether they’d been subversively mocking us the whole time.

Why did Weezer have to fall apart so early into their career? Why did they have to start recording songs with Lil Wayne? Why did they turn into a parody of themselves? Why did it all have to end when it did? Was it the money and lifestyle that they thought appalling, sub-OPM bilge like “Beverly Hills” would bring them? Was it the self-doubt after the relative failure of the second album? Whatever the reasons, they crumbled. They are the archetypal “When good bands go bad”. It’s sad. It’s upsetting. But it’s not uncommon.

So many great bands have fallen in similar ways. And it’s not even just the great ones. Some alright ones just got shit. Some pretty bad ones just got horrendous. I mean, look at Metallica. I was never a huge Metallica fan, anyway, but the first three albums range from pretty good to a bit special. Then it’s like as soon as Cliff Burton got crushed by a bus they started a downward spiral into second rate dad rock and sad attempts at recapturing their former glory days, all of which culminated with the absolutely abhorrent St. Anger; an album so atrocious in almost every conceivable way that all other bad albums are now judged against it in sentences like, “It’s nearly as bad as St. Anger” or “It’s no St. Anger, but I’d still rather snap the CD and cut my wrists with the shards than ever hear it again”.

You’d think that would be enough for Metallica, having well and truly dragged their legacy through a field strewn with shit laid by cows of colours disappointment and despair, but then they actually managed to do the unthinkable and after a half decent follow up (Death Magnetic) collaborated with Lou Reed and constructed one of the most heinous aural abominations ever committed to compact disc; Lulu.

How you manage to top St. Anger I will never, ever know. If I didn’t know better I’d think they were doing it to spite us, or at least trying to make people stop downloading their albums for free by releasing the sort of fucking dross that even music pirates would feel ripped off by. Take that, Napster, indeed. In many ways I actually respect the achievement. Not many bands who actually did something (and let’s not forget, Metallica were a seriously important influence on metal) have managed to notch up two albums that I would happily include in a top ten list of the worst of all time.

Lou Reed doesn’t come out of this one unscathed either. This is the guy responsible for The Velvet Underground & Nico. An all time classic, classic album. The sort of album that earns you a legacy that it would take a superhuman effort to undo. He’s not unscathed, but he’s still got that legacy. Metallica don’t have that luxury.

Across all genres of music, and in all walks of life, invariably, good things tend to go bad. There’s nothing we can do about it. We have no responsibility. We are the security guard and Rivers Cuomo is the bomb disposal expert. We are Lois Lane and James Hetfield is Superman. And I suppose using this analogy Lars Ulrich is Lex Luthor, and Kryponite is being a pair a fucking shitehawks.

Things either suck or die in the end. All we can do is sit back, put our headphones in, listen to The Pixies, and wait for a plane to land on Cliff Richard’s head.