Songfacts®:

• This song is an homage to all the young ladies who were hitting up Weezer's married frontman Rivers Cuomo on Twitter. He explained to Spin magazine: "'Smart Girls' - the song was originally 'Hot Girls,' about how frustrating it is to have all these amazingly hot girls tweeting at me and it just felt so frustrating because I'm not in that life stage anymore where I can do anything about it. So I wrote this song 'Hot Girls.' It ultimately ended up feeling - I don't know, too macho or something? So we just changed it to "Smart Girls" and every other lyric stayed the same, like a really cheesy song about girls. But just changing that one word makes it really different and interesting.
  
  It actually reminds me of that song 'Back in the USSR' by the Beatles, because everything about that song is like a really cheesy, early Beach Boys type of song, except they changed the setting. And it becomes cool.
  
  So that's the lesson, I think, is just to keep revising, keep working until you're satisfied that it's totally cool. If there's any little voice bothering you, like, something about this isn't cool, something about this isn't right, that means there's something yet to be discovered, so keep pushing."