Vegeterrorists

Vegeterrorists
Background information
Years active	1990
Former Members
Rivers Cuomo Roger Marinelli

Vegeterrorists (or Veggiterrorists) was a moniker briefly used by Rivers Cuomo in the early 90s for an unreleased rap project. The name was listed in the Weezer Recording History alongside a song title called "Black Fur in the Hour of Chaos". Former Weezer guitarist Jason Cropper recalled the project in a 2019 Rolling Stone article:

Cuomo decided he would write 50 songs in a row before allowing himself to form another band or play live again. He moved to Santa Monica, started attending college there, and recorded demo after demo on an eight-track cassette recorder. He wrote only 30 or so songs, but among them were “Undone – The Sweater Song” and other eventual Weezer tracks. Cropper says that around this time, Cuomo also made an entire, never-released rap album under the name Vegeterrorists – songs about his lifelong vegetarianism in styles akin to Public Enemy and Run-DMC. “Rivers can drop mad beats and spit mad rhymes with the best,” says Cropper. “And if I stayed in the band, we would’ve done records like that years ago.” (The only released evidence of this period is a striking demo of Cuomo covering Ice Cube’s “The Bomb” like a one-man Rage Against the Machine.)

In a Facebook Q&A held for members of the Weezer Fan Club on August 2, 2020, Karl Koch briefly discussed Veggiterrorists, explaining that "Black Fur in the Hour of Chaos" was Cuomo's attempt at a vegetarian-themed rap song in the style of Public Enemy (the title being a riff on the Public Enemy song "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos"). Said Koch:

"[Rivers had] grown up vegetarian. One of my earliest memories of him was: he had this VHS tape called Diet for a New America[...] It was a big deal at the time[...]If you were thinking about vegetarianism it definitely converted you at the time[...] He was super into that, he'd watch that tape all the time, and he decided he'd make a band called the Veggiterrorists, and it would be a rap band, and their song would be 'Black Fur and the Hour of Chaos.'" - Karl Koch, Weezer Fan Club Vault Dive

In 2020, as part of an assignment for a web programming course, Cuomo created a wiki titled Riverpedia, which included an entry for a person named Roger Marinelli (one of Cuomo's roommates at Poinsettia Place in Los Angeles), who Cuomo described as "his partner in the Vegeterrorists" and, as Cuomo added, "Generally thought to be the better rapper of the two."

See also

• Rivers Cuomo
• "The Bomb"