JOHN'S GUIDE: ANDREW W.K.
WHEN IT'S TIME TO BLOG...
On September 10th, 2021, around 20 years removed from the release date of his landmark debut, I Get Wet, the singer, songwriter, musician, and party philosopher Andrew W.K. put out his sixth solo album, God Is Partying. In the days following, he quietly cancelled his forthcoming tour, took down his website, and deleted all social media. That same year, pages from the artist’s 1998 “vision journal” leaked onto the internet. In the journal, which may or may not have been retroactively engineered by W.K. himself, the playbook for the artist’s monumental creative run is revealed, from the granular (typographical choices, equipment selection) to the conceptual (fully developed ideas about identity and contextual play; references to David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick). The journal contains a detailed list of the various premeditated “eras” W.K. designed to define his career over a three-decade span; according to the timeline, we are currently in Era G. W.K. summarizes it as “DEFAULT-UNCANNY-MODE.”
Do young people care about Andrew W.K.? His body of work is singular enough that it doesn’t neatly fit into any of the retro containers currently available for Zoomers to process older music. It’s not “indie sleaze,” though W.K. did do a stint playing with Fischerspooner (Casey Spooner has postulated that W.K. got the idea for his signature monochromatic drip from an outfit he wore). It’s not noise music, though W.K. did come up in the same Michigan scene as members of Wolf Eyes. It’s not emo or screamo, though W.K. went on the Warped Tour and was adored by a lot of the kids with pierced lips and Diesel jeans. It’s not butt rock, but W.K. did hit the road with Hoobastank and put a song in the Jackass soundtrack.
What is Andrew W.K., then? He is the essential 2000s rock and roll cipher. At his commercial peak, W.K. dressed in stained white and played a slippery, maximal version of pop-metal with a manic, monomaniacal lyrical vision—songs include “Party Hard,” “Party Til You Puke,” and “It’s Time To Party”—that caused a fair amount of confusion as to the artist’s intention. At its time of release, the record got a 0.6 on Pitchfork, though a second review of the album’s 10th anniversary edition bumped that score up to an 8.6. As a purely musical document, I Get Wet remains a major achievement that, for me, is on par with the debuts of both Weezer and The Ramones in my personal cannon of guitar pop records.
Andrew W.K. used the success of I Get Wet as a springboard to subvert the tightly coiled parameters of his brand, making Andy Kaufman-ish moves that invited wild theories about the artist’s true identity and the forces behind his rapid ascent (if Andrew W.K. was indeed created by committee, I think that it was less a committee of music business professionals and more a committee of Michigan noise heads). We are not going to get into the weeds right now, and enough has been written about this, and this is John’s Music Blog, not John’s Conspiracy Theory Blog or John’s Philosophy Blog, but at the end of the day, I believe that Andrew W.K. is both an earnest rocker and an antisocial prankster; he expresses the multitudes that are contained within himself in part through a bifurcation of his identity: there is Andrew W.K., and then there is the unseen character of Steev Mike, a sort of evil double or “Lynchian shadow” that is always following the party dude around.
Andrew W.K. might be due for a comeback. Beyond the portentions enclosed in his likely fake vision journal and the fact that he rejoined Instagram, we once again have an American president talking about regime change in the Middle East. It doesn’t get more depressingly 2000s feeling than that. We need Andrew W.K. now more than ever. His best music transcends its surrounding mythology and acts as a pure blast of positivity, one at battle with both the darkness that exists in the world at large and the darkness lurking beneath the surface of his own persona.
“Party Hard” is Andrew W.K.’s most famous song, but it’s far from his best, even within the I Get Wet tracklisting. It’s hard for me to overstate just how good the album is. It sounds like Def Leppard made an oi! record. It’s somewhere between Sparks, death metal, and Max Martin’s turn-of-the-century productions for Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. Its life-affirming, major-key grandiosity hasn’t been surpassed. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the “Party Hard” video on MTV. I didn’t know what to think, but it stuck with me. It was, coincidentally, around the time I first heard Wolf Eyes.
“Wolf Eyes Rules (What Kinda Band?)”
A studied piano player and the son of a famous academic, W.K. grew up inside of a fertile ‘90 Ann Arbor experimental music scene. Before all of the magical reality engineering stuff came to define his narrative, the thing that really drew me into Andrew W.K. fandom was discovering his history within the deep underground. (For a hit of some of his early music, scope Terrestrial Optical Resonance Resistors by Ancient Art Of Boar.) “Wolf Eyes Rules (What Kinda Band?)” is an Andrew W.K. song taken from the Wolf Eyes Fortune Dove 12 inch on Bulb Records. The song is pretty much rap rock… W.K. is from Michigan, so it doesn’t not make sense. The verses are, let’s say, very influenced by the Hot Boys classic “We On Fire.”
Things happened pretty fast for W.K. after he made the move to New York City in the late 1990s. Here is footage from a very early show that sees W.K. on the keyboard playing embryonic instrumental versions of future hits. It’s his virtuosic piano skills, at once studied and naive, that shine through the murk. Culturally, we are still in noise territory. I think the West Coast noise legend Rubber (() Cement was also on this bill? Only a few shows later, W.K. would open for the Foo Fighters in San Francisco. The line from here to there is paved with a few Sweeney brothers and a lot of good luck. It wouldn’t be long until he signed a deal with The Island Def Jam Music Group.
Live at the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame 2002
Flashing forward a few years, W.K. and his band, which was at the time comprised mostly of Florida death metal legends, laid non-stop waste to gigs across North America and beyond, inviting crowd members to bum rush the stage, earning it in a way not seen since the heyday of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. That’s not to mention the marathon autograph signing sessions W.K. would undertake. My friend once got kicked out of a show for crowd surfing and received a handwritten apology note from the artist himself. It’s some of the best live rock and roll I’ve ever witnessed; maybe that’s not saying much, maybe that says all you need to know about the diminishing returns of guitar music in the 21st century, but my memories of W.K. shows in the early 2000s are really good ones.
“Give Me A Break (Kit Kat Jingle)”
I’ve seen Andrew W.K. live a total of six times over the course of around two decades. At one show, I think in the spring of 2004, he played the jingle that he was commissioned to write for Kit Kat not once, not twice, but three times in a row. I remember the concert being somewhat poorly attended. It was sparse enough that my friends and I ran laps around the club as he played “Give Me A Break,” which deploys the classic W.K. sound palette—faux-orchestral keys, four-on-the-floor drums, wall-of-sound guitars—in tribute to the chocolate-covered wafer bar that everyone loves.
More than the high-energy rock that remains his most beloved music, Andrew W.K.’s second album is filled with plodding, fist-pumping balladry. Many have compared The Wolf to Meat Loaf. The record is good, and one single, “Never Let Down,” is up there with any of his best songs. It was around the end of the LP2 tour cycle that the rumors started: the Steev Mike stuff, the Andrew W.K. impersonators showing up at gigs, and the barrage of cryptic, primitive conspiracy theory websites. Whether this timing was coincidental or not, we might never know. It was the beginning of the end for W.K.’s true superstar potential. But what did Semisonic say?
It took a long-ass time for W.K.’s third record, Close Calls with Brick Walls, to come out. First, it was only released in Japan. After that, the legendary Providence label Load gave it a vinyl press. It took until 2010 until it dropped worldwide. The record doubles down on some of the Sparks influences latent on his first two records but abandons the density and crunch that makes I Get Wet such an unforgettable sonic experience. W.K. shrouded the album’s delays in mystery and conjecture, though others have postulated that the record simply got shelved because the label lost faith. It’s a good record, and an interesting record, but, honestly, going through his discography only makes me want to listen to I Get Wet over and over again. It’s the sound of one young person losing their mind in New York City.
Released before Close Calls with Brick Walls was available around the world, W.K.’s fourth LP is a hard swerve and a completely logical next step: A solo, improvisational piano record released on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label. The piano playing here, though abstracted, is clearly in conversation with the musical language W.K. built and defined on his first three records. The LP’s final track, simply titled “Cadillac,” starts by using the chord progression from the W.K. classic “We Want Fun” and then, following an album that features over 30 minutes of sparse piano music punctuated by the occasional field recording, brings the song and the record to a close with a brief-but-impactful full-band finale and some inspired throat (?) singing. It’s one of my favorite musical moments in all of his catalog.
On Late Night With Conan O’ Brien 2007
During his downtime between records, Andrew W.K. worked on a wide variety of projects. He made records with Lee “Scratch” Perry and the noise band Sightings. He opened a club in Manhattan. He wrote advice columns. Maybe his most high-profile non-musical endeavor was his parallel career as a motivational speaker. Using his party-focused lyrical vocabulary as a jumping-off point for philosophical exploration, W.K. was able to strike a conversational tone as—excuse me here—liminal as his musical output. W.K.’s extramusical endeavors only made the mystique swirling around him heavier; at one speaking engagement, he told the audience, "I'm not the same guy that you may have seen from the I Get Wet album.”
With his long-awaited fifth album, W.K. delivered something like a return to form, a synthesis of his first three records, and a showcase of his improved vocal capabilities. The lyrics extrapolate on his motivational speaker phase, but the lingering, unsettling confusion around his persona doesn’t quite wash away. When I played with him around this era, his live presence was aloof, and not unlike stories I had heard about the directions that his set could veer into. There’s the time he did a solo piano performance at the small Los Angeles gallery Dem Passwords and basically trolled a group of his hardcore fans for a few hours.
“Babalon” is taken from W.K.’s final record before his disappearance. It sounds like some form of contemporary European metal that I don’t have the exact reference points to describe. What I can describe, though, is the music video for the song, which is littered with fairly overt occult symbolism. It’s an attempt at further deepening the artist’s lore in a way that at this juncture almost seems like fan service. Even still, I believe that the Andrew W.K. project is very much in motion. I believe that there are more chapters to be unrolled. I believe that there will be an amazing multi-part documentary or art show or something that will, in the end, reveal nothing and make the legend of Andrew W.K. even more confusing.
Great post. Hadn't put it together until now how much The Armed's narrative confusion shtick resembles the WK playbook, and they're both from Michigan too.
♡♡♡!!! i was so excited to see this in my inbox. i had tickets to his 2021 tour, would have been my first time seeing his magic in the flash. heartbroken i never got the chance.