Pushkin

Most people know rivers Cuomo as weasers brilliant, horky, bleedsy.

But one thing you may not know is that several years ago, a bizarre conspiracy theory started to make its way around the web that rivers was actually Kurt Cobain.

As in, Kurt staged his suicide in 1994 and carried on living his life as rivers Cuomo.

While Nirvana and Weezer are at seemingly opposite ends of the 90s music spectrum, a closer look reveals they're actually a lot more similar than you might think.

In anticipation of Weezer's ambitious and incredibly catchy new album, Ok Human, rivers explain to Rick Rubin why the band ditched their classic guitar-based style for an orchestral sound.

They also talk about the specific substances that rivers took to write the hit song, Hashtag.

And rivers entertains the Kurt Cobain conspiracy and plays along with Rick as if it were all true.

This is Broken Record, Linernotes for the Digital Age. I'm Justin Richmond.

Here are old friends Rick Rubin and Rivers Cuomo talking over Zoom.

Have you seen the website, the conspiracy website that says that Kurt Cobain did not kill himself and that it's actually you are Kurt Cobain? Have you seen that?

Yeah, I've heard of that. I hadn't seen the website before and then just yesterday somebody afforded it to me.

Is that suddenly going around for some reason? I know that conspiracy has been around for a long time.

I don't know, I just thought the other day and thought interesting. I thought it might even be interesting if I would ask you questions as if it were true.

Because that could be fun for both of us.

Yeah. So if you were Kurt, tell me how you imagine you would have transformed yourself into rivers.

Well, first of all, I'd have to stage my death, but it seems easy enough. And then yeah, the blue album came out a month later after he died.

You could have been working on that like for years.

Yeah, and I know he was he seemed to be very interested in very innocent naive music.

Like they covered the raincoats, which is not that different from weezer, I guess.

You know, major key. And we kind of picked up that ball and ran with it.

So yeah, I think kind of running the opposite direction from grunge and, you know, where the button down shirts and cut your hair short and and sing with a very pure voice rather than rock voice.

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