This month on Twitter, @sotachetan hosts #BrandedInSongs – which is a head-on collision of my personal world of music and my professional world of branding and advertising. The challenge is to simply pick a song with a brand name in its lyrics or title. I added one more criteria to my picks, which is this: the songs themselves must be as iconic as the brands they mention. No filler here.
The broad range of sound from Weezer never really occurred to me until the day I finally saw them live in 2018, a double billing with the Pixies. That was the night I saw how they turned to more pop sensibilities in recent years with songs like “Feels Like Summer”, which I never realized was a Weezer song. It was also the night I got to revel in the older, rock stuff, like “Say It Ain’t So”, “Undone – The Sweater Song”, “My Name Is Jonas” and “Hash Pipe”.
This song feels so old to me that I thought it came out in the nineties. The harsh, guitar-driven sound certainly feels like it was a product of that decade. Released as a single just five months before 9/11, “Hash Pipe” is a reminder that Weezer rocks it hard. It comes at us full force like Godzilla – standing in stark contrast to the other big track from the same album, “Island In The Sun”. River Phoenix’s falsetto reach on lead vocals is unforgettable. But it’s that crunchy, monster guitar riff makes it the phenomenal rock song that it is.
“I can't love my business If I can't get a trick
Down on Santa Monica where tricks are for kids.”