El Scorcho: Difference between revisions

'''"El Scorcho"''' is the first single and seventh track from ''[[Pinkerton]]''.  The song was not a successful single; several radio stations refused to play the song, and the video stiffed on MTV. This is considered to be one of the causes for the initial commercial failure of the album.  On WeezerJonas, the official online street team for Weezer, "El Scorcho" was ranked the 3rd best song on Pinkerton, losing to "[[The Good Life]]" and "[[Tired of Sex]]."  Although "El Scorcho" had little success as a single, the song itself has become somewhat of a cult classic.  It is only now that it is seeing large strides in mainstream popularity (in large part from being on the video game ''Rock Band'').

The premise of "El Scorcho" is the struggle between confessing your feelings, waiting for the girl to, or simply doing nothing about it.  The opening lines explain the frustration of finding out if someone likes you, and finding out everything you can about the person through their friends ("The redhead said you shred the cello").  The girl in "El Scorcho" appears later in the song "[[Falling for You]]" when she leaves her "cello in the basement" of Rivers' place.  Many fans have related the chorus to that of a ''Pet Sounds'' chorus because of it's simple nature, yet incredibly effective wording:

"I'm a lot like you, so please, hello, I'm here, I'm waiting."

"El Scorcho" is a prequel of sorts to the song "[[Falling for You]]".  Both songs mention the playing of a cello, feature the expletive "God damn!" prominently, and this song's lyrics contain the phrase 'falling for you'.  It has been said that originally, "Falling for You" was to follow "El Scorcho" on the album, until "[[Pink Triangle]]" was written, and placed between the two.

The line "listening to Cio-Cio San" is in reference to Puccini's opera, ''[[Madame Butterfly]]'', The main characters of which are an American sailor - Pinkerton - and a Japanese girl named Cio-Cio San. The actress who played Cio-Cio San in the premiere cast of 1904 was named Rosina Storchio though the alternate spelling points to this being an unintentional reference. The reference may additionally be to the David Henry Hwang play M. Butterfly, which, at least to a degree, deals with themes of gender, sexuality and the confusion many people experience. This, in conjunction with the song "Pink Triangle", and the continued reference to the opera and/or play, gives the album an over-arching theme. Additionally, the line "I'm the epitome/of public enemy" is a direct quote from Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype."

The song also mentions the band Green Day in the lyric "I asked you to go to the Green Day concert/You said you never heard of them." In 2005 while on the Foozer tour, Weezer often changed the lyric to "I asked you go to the Foo Fighters concert" and changed it to "the Weezer concert" in late '05. During their stop in Chicago for Lollapalooza, this was again changed to "I asked you to go to the Pixies concert", who were playing just before Weezer on a nearby stage. The song also goes onto mention 1990's professional wrestling company ECW in the lyric "Watching Grunge leg drop New Jack through a press table."

Cuomo felt very strongly about keeping his videos gimmick-free during the promotion for Pinkerton. His reaction to the huge success of the [[Buddy Holly#Music video|Buddy Holly music video]] was one of fear that people loved the geeky gimmicks of the video, and weren't appreciating his songwriting. He wanted El Scorcho to be very straight-forward. During the editing of the video for El Scorcho, Cuomo and the director, [[Mark Romanek]], got into a disagreement about the way the video was to be made, which led to Romanek removing his name from the directing credit. Two verisions came out of this dispute, a "Director's Cut" edition (Romanek's version) and a second which probably had Cuomo as its main director. The "Director's Cut" version is shown below.