It seems like “Saints” was just doomed from the start, more or less. On one hand, it’s almost impossible to imagine the ruling male radio industry gentry allowing a girl band to skyrocket into the stratosphere of pop stardom the way Nirvana and the Pumpkins did. “Saints” is a good enough song to get that done, in tandem with the killer one-two punch from mainstream debut from Last Splash of “Cannonball” and “Divine Hammer.”
By fluke or happenstance, anyway, “Saints” was the third single released from Last Splash, and, as it followed two singles from summer and fall of ’93, respectively, took flight in 1994, the year when, in early April, Kurt Cobain killed himself. Now, anybody who’s heard “Saints” knows it’s pretty much the best “summer” anthem in history, or at least up in the celestial territory of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” and Beck’s “Girl.” Now, by basic math, collegiate summer break starts about a month after April 5, Cobain’s carbon date. What kind of music, then, shall we seek to tailor to this emotional and sociological landscape?
I was only 10 at the time, so my memory of this summer is fairly limited. I remember the Counting Crows being very popular — a relatively mournful and thematically grounded sort of act, by general alternative rock standards. Another song I remember being big this summer is “the 12-m song,” or “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies, if you want to be official about it. And yes, this is also one of the most depressing songs of all time. Green Day sang of giving themselves the creeps, Beck sang of being a loser. It just wasn’t an epoch in which you were allowed to feel good. Let’s put it that way. (The Kerrigan attack and the OJ murder probably didn’t help, as it were.)
What is “Saints” about, at its core? I think it’s just supposed to be dumb and fun, actually, like “Steal My Sunshine.” It’s funny to think about, anyway, Kim Deal in the chorus declaring that “Summer is ready when you are”; given the irony shed by the sort of “delayed summer” rendered by the Cobain incident. When is the time for “Saints”? Could it be 2025? Or 2026? Well, that depends if Weezer tackles it, I guess.
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Brief Addendum: The ‘Saints’ Music Video
Another reason why “Saints” might have been sluggish in exploding into hit single territory would be the unparalleled awfulness of the music video. Actually, something I think I see going on here, and ironically, given the great spots for “Cannonball” and “Divine Hammer”; is an overt, express hatred for the music industry on the part of singer Kim Deal, who might have partially blamed said institution for the death of one of her favorite singers and friends [1]. Deal is singing the song in really bizarre dialects and inflections, like somebody making fun of somebody else’s song, and the figure of the dude smoking through a ski mask at the beginning even summons up thoughts of homicide and extreme malevolence in the viewer. Like most of such petty rants, I don’t think it accomplished much, at the end of the day, but maybe Deal at least took pleasure in knowing her label sure as He** weren’t going to make any money off of this pile of hogwash.
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[1] Kurt Cobain was a nondiscreet fan of The Breeders, often citing their debut Pod as a musical influence and congenially befriending Deal (which of course he inconspicuously refused to do with Axl Rose).
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