“Like You Mean It” by Watashi Wa ft. Freeto Boat, Friday, December 6, 2024

 

Pinkerton is a foundational album in the emo genre. Weezer’s second record was a commercial failure at the time of its release, especially following their massive debut record. Many successful bands look back at the album almost as a kind of bible of guitar tones and lyrical content. Pinkerton produced three singles, including “Pink Triangle,” a song in which the speaker, a boy in college, falls for a lesbian who doesn’t return his affection. The song explores the complexities surrounding sexual identity, which seems progressive for the time but a little cringy today. And it’s that cringe that seeps into Watashi Wa’s 2022 People Like People, an album I’ve talked about before, but today I wanted to look into why a self-identifying “ministry band” quoted Weezer to “say it ‘Like You Mean It.’”

SO HERE COMES THE SON TO REMIND YOU OF YOUR OWN BELIEFS. Watashi Wa started as a punk band when Seth Roberts and the original band were in middle school. Inspired heavily by early Tooth & Nail bands such as MxPx and Ghoti Hook in a time when Tooth & Nail Records started moving away from the fast drums and three-chorded fast songs, Watashi Wa signed to Bettie Rocket Records, where many former Tooth & Nail punk bands and former members of those bands formed new bands. Also on Bettie Rocket was another band, Freeto Boat, who is featured in today’s song, “Like You Mean It.” Freeto Boat was a Christian ska/punk band, starting as a ten-piece band with ahorn section, eventually moving into a hardcore direction. The band broke up in 2000 but started making music in 2019, around the time when Watashi Wa reformed. Like many of the features on People Like People, only avid fans of the often obscure bands would know the contributions made to the songs. 

YOUR MIND AND PRIDE. People Like People was my #2 best album of 2022, but it certainly wasn’t without issue—some of which I have talked about in the two other posts about it. Today’s song, “Like You Mean It,” takes a lighthearted look at polarization. Like a lot of the record, the lyrics are confusing. What exactly is Seth Roberts trying to say? What stance is he trying to take? The message Roberts comes back to is a lament about how unfortunate it is that people are divided on issues. He talks about how quickly love can turn to hate, possibly referencing cancel culture. In 2023, spending time in America gave me a generous view of Roberts’ views expressed in the album. But almost two years later, I feel like that even though there is more of an  openness to LGB rights—transgender rights are still abysmal—a causal reference to a Weezer song that casually references the demarcation of a group of people Hitler tried to eradicate feels trite when the world is looking more and more dystopian. Today’s song led me down a rabbit hole which led to me getting 1/3 of the way through Ken Setterington’s history, Branded by the Pink Triangle, which tells stories about gay men who were imprisoned, tortured, and killed for their sexual orientation. Setterington points out that lesbians were not systematically targeted as were gay men, and if they were imprisoned, they wore a black triangle to symbolize that they were socially deviant. The book doesn’t bring this up to belittle the suffering of one marginalized group but to show a history of how Berlin transformed from one of the most progressive cities to being part of one of the most oppressive regimes. How quickly liberal thought of the scientists, academics, and philosophers was silenced and then eliminated by the Nazi party, all in the name of making Germany great again. Fast forward to the 80s and 90s on college campuses, the triangle became a pride symbol in the Weezer song. Rivers Cuomo laments falling in love with a girl who cannot love him back because of her sexual orientation. “Pink Triangle” is maybe a little problematic because of the speaker reducing his love interest to a sexual orientation. But the speaker’s pain feels genuine. Watashi Wa’s “Like You Mean It” feels trite, like the person who announces loudly at a homogeneous social gathering: “I’m not homophobic. I listen to Weezer’s “‘Pink Triangle.’” It’s the same person who says that homosexuality is a recent human development or that the Holocaust could never happen again today because we read about it in history class once. I realize I’m on a bit of a rant, but I decided to take Watashi Wa’s advice and say it like I mean it. I’m getting really tired of conservative gaslighting. Hands up!

Read the lyrics on Jesus Freak Hideouts.