It's Gonna Be Chaos." As he wrote about his experiences at St. Pete's Hospital, where people were vomiting blood and "lying dead" on the floor, the song "Gonna Be Chaos" was inspired: > I would stand up in the middle of a roomful of people lying unconscious on gurneys—I knew what I was seeing was real. The sound in the room would sound like a big wind was blowing through it—this stuff was so shocking and unexpected. We took it in, kept shooting, because there was no way we could edit out what was really going on. We started calling it "Gonna Be Chaos." On March 18, 2009, the "Gonna Be Chaos" video premiered on MTV News. > Our goal was to create an animated short that was just for the people who had been watching us throughout the seven years that this band has been around. It's a visual essay—I think we wanted to put together something that represents a day in the life of [the record] in a visual way. That's the only real goal. I don't think we really think about our audience. We're so focused on the music, we think about them [the songs] so much, we can't help but write about our lives, but really, what we do is about us. The video was an instant viral hit. Its video views soon skyrocketed to more than 6 million. "Gonna Be Chaos" ended up becoming the third most watched video of all time on MTV, and they ended up with a gold record for the song. On April 4, 2009, the album's final track, "Mission Bell," made its worldwide premiere on MTV on the new program, _Awkward,_ called "An Evening with Panic!" On the show, the band played their song "Mission Bell" for host Jemima Kirke and two hundred high school kids from New York's Stuyvesant High School. The band members were outfitted in formal dinner suits as they sat in the middle of the stage, holding mics, and playing their song. For about eight minutes, a single song brought a generation of kids back to a time when they were young and learning about the world around them, the things that they thought mattered, and their friends and all that got them through those crucial teenage years. "We were hoping for someone to be like, 'Oh my God, I forgot what the '60s were like,'" Vig said of the show. "We just wanted someone to have an open mind and to hear something from us that we wrote in a different time." Within a week of the "Mission Bell" video, _Awkward_ viewers were posting the song's lyrics to their Myspace pages, so the band members put up the song's lyrics to _Weezer_ 's entire catalog for free on their website, www.Weezer.net. As of March 31, the lyrics had already been downloaded more than 100,000 times. The only thing left was for the band members themselves to go on Twitter. "Weezer has tweeted," they wrote on April 2. It was exactly the post they needed to do. Two days later, they were trending. "Wow," read the first tweet, written by a Twitter user named Sleeter Dunkel, a journalist who covered Weezer for the _Guardian_ newspaper. Dunkel's tweet led to a string of tweets from other fans, and Weezer's message was spreading across the Internet. The band's Myspace page was now receiving a million hits per day, and in addition to the song lyrics, members were answering fans' questions about the lyrics, adding to their "Ask Weezer" section. This went on for a few days, and then Weezer's Twitter account sent out a message: "OK, it's officially a hit. Just wanted to tell you. Thanks, everyone." Before that, _The Black Swan,_ a movie written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Weezer's song "Alone" played in the opening credits, and it made an impression on people. Vig knew nothing about the film; in fact, he only found out about the movie's release from one of his fans, who sent him a copy of the film. He was immediately struck by its imagery, as the movie seemed to echo the song's lyric "dreams, I cannot control." He immediately posted a quote from the movie on Twitter and on the band's website: > _In a life-threatening moment, it is not about who you are or how you got there. It's about who's there for you. There are two options: Either you are alone, or you have to let someone in._ It went from there. Panic! was signed to the record label Hollywood Records, but Aronofsky, impressed by the song, reached out to the band. The _Black Swan_ movie, it turns out, featured an "Alone" scene in it. It became the band's most popular video—more than any other video they had released—soon rising to Number 3 on the MTV Top Ten, and soon they were asked to sing "Alone" at _Saturday Night Live,_ with host Jimmy Fallon. It also brought people to realize that Weezer still had some great songs left. When the band's album _The Red Album_ came out a year later, it went back to their first days of getting together to make records; they'd always been fans of classic power pop bands like the Police, Squeeze, and David Bowie, and they wanted to make a record that sounded like that. "We all like pop stuff, but there's kind of a darker undercurrent that we all relate to," they told _Billboard._ The album would soon be released through their record label, which came as a surprise to most fans, as Weezer had always been indie. "The big machine was very surprised," they told _Billboard_. "There was this big fight for it not to happen, but it did. . . . In the end it was a good move. We get to keep making the music we want, in a traditional label setting." Weezer was back to making regular, consistent records, with all original songs that had something to say. ## ## Bands That Had More Than One Album, One Song, or More Than One Track JAY Z (JAY Z & KANYE WEST) We don't always need the hit. **—** Jay Z in _New York,_ December 31, 2007 HINDSIGHT IS 20/20 BLACK HISTORY THE GOLDEN AGE OF POP When people think of Jay Z they often think of his songs. He is arguably the most powerful rapper of all time, and for more than a decade he was a figure that many other rappers patterned themselves after. He had an original sound that changed the sound of rap. His voice had a quality that was unique, and his lyrics touched people's hearts. They were his songs; they were the best songs he ever made, and he's made a number of really good songs that are in the pantheon of rap music. But there's more to Jay than his songs. He's always been known for his fashion, for his business interests, for his success in sports and on Wall Street. He's someone who was able to overcome an upbringing in public housing, and his story is one for the ages. Jay's love for music started at a very young age. By the time he was six, he was making beats with a plastic box and a towel and was telling his older cousin that his name was "Jay-Z." "People would call him Jay-Z because he was that bad," his mother, Gloria Carter, says. Jay Z's mother didn't understand what he was into when he was young, but he found joy in the music he loved. The first album that would come to change his life was Michael Jackson's _Off the Wall._ Jay Z loved how his favorite songs touched his feelings, and it really made him want to become a rapper. "My mom would be coming home from work and I'd be crying my eyes out," Jay Z told _Details_ magazine. "She'd ask what was wrong and I would say: 'Man, I'm crying because I need this' or 'I need that.' Then she'd know I had to see my father." When Jay Z was a young man, he became a star in the rapper community in the New York City borough of Queens, where he still lives. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he became interested in a different form of music—namely, hip-hop. As his mother told _Vibe_ magazine, "His first love was always music, and he was always looking for musical answers. But hip-hop wasn't really for him. He wasn't looking to get in a gang." That changed in the early 1990s when the rap movement exploded in the East Village of New York City. Jay Z's first album was called _Reasonable Doubt,_ and it became a hit in New York and all over the world. Before that, he had become friends with a producer, Just Blaze, whose own rap career was just getting started. When he and Jay Z first met, he was hanging out on Forty-