Andrew WK, I Get Wet

Sitting on a bus listening to Andrew WK. Who is Andrew WK? It doesn't matter, cannot matter because Andrew WK cannot exist out of the moment of sensual, tangible experience that is bloodstream wired and head-smashing concrete. It's a lot like the universe, that way, this Andrew WK. Which is frightening and exhilerating in ways words don't relate. When was the last time you believed? The first time you railed speed? The first time you heard Guns N' Roses. No, fuck that. Strip it of all guile, all direction, of all age. Primal like Misfits. Primal like laughing like Kundera said like the existance of life and the nonexistance of anything else kicking you in the face. The phoenix process for the ADD generation: death and rebirth simultaneously. Annihilating yourself while you declare the ubiquity of you with any and all movement and action. Don't let your ego die, revel in ripping it to shreads, the tate of its blood on your lips the only proof needed of your life, of you. Eros and Thanatos stuck in a blender, liquified into slurry, knocked back with a gasoline chaser. Ideology? You gotta be shitting me! Purity, real purity demands complete ignorance of anything other than the self of itself. Raging against appropriation, commercialization and corruption requires a knowledge of these things that purity cannot conceive of.

Huh. When I wrote that, over two years ago on the first day that I listened to I Get Wet, it didn't occur to me that it was going to end up being a controversial album. Not controversial in the usual Ice Cube/Marilyn Manson/Eminem/Elvis Presley sense of the word, but controversial along the lines of cleaving established music subcultures in two. The first time I saw Andrew W.K. live, the crowd was split down the middle between frat-boys who formed circles, threw their arms across each others shoulders and were screaming "I love New York City" hours before Andrew came on stage, and the snobbiest of indie kids who could probably show you, with graphs and overheads, the exact spatial-temporal point at which J. Mascis sold out. So who does Dub-Kay belong to? We don't know, and that's why he's a problem. He used to hang with the boys from Wolf Eyes, who sound like a lower-fi version of Suicide who can't be bothered to calm down enough to play a riff, and yet he wrote and performed a song for a Kit-Kat commercial called "Gimme A Break". You've got caffeine-induced rantings like the above paragraph, and then you've got roastings like this. I can see both sides (even if I'm firmly on the "has drunk the Kool-Aid" side of the fence), but when you're dealing with something as primal and astonishing as Andrew W.K., seeing both sides involves splitting your head down the middle and tossing each half on either side of a supernova, which is almost as exhilerating as the album itself.

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