“Buddy Holly” was a cornerstone video during my brief dalliance with significant MTV exposure back in 1994, and was also my first exposure to the power-pop conundrum that is Weezer.

I had some friends over a couple of days ago, and the “Buddy Holly” video came on. This led into a discussion about Weezer’s frightening inconsistency from record to record. Sometimes Rivers Cuomo is right on point. Sometimes he tries too hard, and sometimes he goes over my head. “Buddy Holly” is an instance in which the king of nerd-rock hits the spot right on the nose.

“Buddy Holly” is timeless. You can’t immediately date-stamp it as a ‘90s tune unless you were there. It’s also a song whose title references a ’50s rock on, name-checks a ’70s television legend in the chorus, and has a video famously incorporating the band into the ’70s hit show “Happy Days”, which was set in the ’50s and ’60s. See? Timeless.