Andrew W.K.

"she mostly listens to classical music."
hey what is her assessment of AWK's classical piano training?

"a waste"

haha! Burn!

I really just shouldn't have started that conversation

have you played for her his latest improv piano album?

i know his moms (no, NOT in the biblical sense) (she is a very nice, smart lady)

also, I too like to party.

def one of the 10 worst artists of this decade, ugh @ the fawning "genius" talk

You just don't know anything about him, that's all.

great posts in this thread

xpost

I hate Kathy Griffin so so much. Can't she take her smug altered face back to wherever it came from and never come out again?

she is awful. andrew wk is still a weird fucking phenomenon to me that I don't really get. Is it irony? Is it serious? also what was with the whole "he is just a created persona" thing that was going around?

Check out how long the responses are on this thing:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/andrew-wk,13766/

'what was with the whole "he is just a created persona" thing that was going around?'

This was a set of rumors that at least some of which were sanctioned/started by AWK inc. or the susan lawly foundation or whatever it was he called it. I think he/they were going for something grander than Dave Grohl = AWK.

no... steev mike was dave grohl.

Yeah i read that Onion piece back when I Get Wet just came out, and he had all this amazing inspirational stuff on his website. I was really excited about it, because I already liked his music, but reading this stuff was just icing on the cake.

The whole persona idea is interesting and if you've seen Who Knows? or listened to Close Calls With Brick Walls it feels like even if there aren't varying AWK actors then he definitely has some crazy schizophrenic themes running through his work. How does a song like "Pushing Drugs" (which is a AWESOME song in a completely different way than most of his stuff) fit in with this inspirational mindset? I love the line 'Mother nature does a favor, puts your body in a hearse, is what I'm doing really any worse?'

teh label made him change a lot of lyrics for I Get Wet... the tour he did before the release had totally diff lyrics IIRC (ie, "girl's own juice" -> "girl's own love")

oh man, i thought it was girls own love as in girls have ownership of love. "girls own juice" never made much sense, like they own a welches grape soda factory with profit-sharing or something.

or something ROFLMAOWOWOWOWOWLMAO!

401-K with matching funds?

LAWWWWWWWWWWLLLLLLLLLLLLL!

this is one hilarious grape juice factory.

i have never seen that kids show he presents

do you have scrolling capabilities (eg, up)? how about youtube search function? c'mon bro, you can do it!

Okay, I meant to say, I have never actually seen that show scheduled on television, but I watched a few clips of it on youtube and agree that it is essence the ideal kids show and reminds me a little of a show I used to love when I was young called Beakman's world that nobody but my sister and I ever remember.

I watched Beakman's World all the time.

How did we figure out Steev Mike was Dave Grohl? Any time I try & read about the whole thing it's a trip down the rabbit hole.

nounne-z

'Mother nature does a favor, puts your body in a hearse, is what I'm doing really any worse?'

Dude figured out lifes puzzle like quickness.

You probably know about his new album of classical piano solos that just came out. Possibly you know of his forthcoming tour with a string quartet. But have you heard about the Gundam Rock album due on 9/9/9?

Also, he is on Red Eye tonight but you probably knew that already.

you're assuming a lot

I'd hate to assume that I was the best informed person on Andrew WK matters on this board.

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c287/expatrica/tumblr_kpx62uqSep1qzvqipo1_400.jpg

WOW

A. Ant W.K.

Well, that took a long time. Close Calls With Brick Walls is finally getting a North American release. Double CD with a disc of unreleased and rare tracks. Feb 23 2010.

i own this: http://www.discogs.com/Andrew-WK-Close-Calls-With-Brick-Walls/release/1777968 version of it. The pressing is atrocious.

but obviously it looks amazing.

I was really into that record for a little bit and just recently listened to it again. Some songs are actually really atrocious. But there's some really amazing stuff on here as well. I think "Don't Call Me Andy" is my current favorite.

"Don't Call Me Andy" and "Pushing Drugs" are the best ones.

i believe the key is that wikipedia lists him as an "entertainer" before "rock musician."

Which is why this thread is on I Love Everything, rather than I Love Music.

xpost. Nah. Best tracks are "Hand on the Place, "Not Going To Bed", "One Brother" and "When I'm High". I don't know of any atrocious songs on this album. I mean, there's the three or four short filler numbers which are about 40 seconds long. Other than that it's solid as a rock. His best album by a mile.

Also "Into the Clear" is amazing.

I take that back. Not many atrocious songs. I don't like "Las Vegas, Nevada" or "The Background", and sometimes the production grates on me. But I'm glad he really just went crazy with this. It feels like every song is a weird experiment and sometimes it really works and if it doesn't then it just sounds really odd and it's a nice place anyways. My version also has "This Is My World" which I totally love.

Man, "Hand on the Place" and "When I'm High" are really awesome too!

One of the experiments which doesn't really work is the Roxy/Sparks inspired number "Dance With Me". Maybe if it was done with more humour or elegance it would be okay but instead it's a bit of a mess. "Las Vegas Nevada" is a disappointingly poor relative to "Ace of Spades" lyrically speaking. The hedonism associated with gambling seems really manufactured and using Las Vegas rather than a winning card as the principle symbol weakens the whole thing. Cos you know, most people in Vegas are amateurs, there to lose a set amount then go home. For Lemmy it's literally win or die. This song almost sounds like a real ad for Las Vegas, which may well have been the goal. I know Andrew WK is pretty successful at licensing his songs, ringtones etc. To me, that's a turn-off if it's too obvious.

But nothwithstanding these details, it's one of the few albums from the last few years where I'll almost always listen to the whole thing from beginning to end. Yeah, there are two or three weaker songs like The Background and Las Vegas. But it's one of my favourite albums of the decade. Now set to be one of my favourite albums of the next decade too.

cool thing about AWK is that it's still impossible to say why exactly he's doing what he's doing the way he's doing it. he's inscrutable. he presents this super-earnest, half-crazed motivational speaker/kid's show host front - all positive, all the time - but then he carefully creates this absurdly elaborate backstory/mythology with creepy occult-psycho overtones. his music seems like pop, but also like a ghastly parody of pop, and the tension there never comfortably resolves. there's a big andy kaufman streak in what he does, down to the faux (or is it?) quasi-autism shtick. all of which inclines me to respect him. i like jokes that never quite give the punchline away. and close calls w brick walls is a hell of a lot better than i expected. everything OTM abt the wonders of "hand on the place", "one brother", etc. but "pushing drugs" is pretty great, too.

Yeah, good post. I've never really been able to make much sense out of the various sides of his personality/art. It's a baffling persona that raises questions every time I listen to him - even more than Kaufman (of course in Kaufman's case we have decades of hindsight to help us sort out the facts/motivations/intentions). Like you, I really like the unresolved nature of it. The joke without a punchline as you say.

I took a friend of mine who's in his sixties to see Andrew WK this summer and he was blown away because it reminded him of "proper" showmen that he'd seen in ye olde days like James Brown etc. Afterwards my friend went off totally inspired, read all the weird stuff and then later said to me that he takes it all at face value and was loving the ride because the whole point is about entertainment. I honestly do find him to be an amazingly inspiring figure. The show I saw this year was about a life-changing as anything is likely to be at my advanced age. Just him, a keyboard and an ipod.

Just him, a keyboard and an ipod.

which is weird, because this is the same format he chose in his early solo career around 2000-2001.

listening to this again, cuz i haven't thought of it in a while. i can't go so far as everything in loving EVERYTHING about it, but it's awful damn good, if somewhat bloated.

the songs that work best, imo, are those that wander a few steps from the aerobic motivational triumphalism that he's made his stock in trade. i get wet throwbacks like "not going to bed", "when i'm high" and "into the clear" get old fast, especially in comparison to the more varied & inventive material surrounding them. "i wanna see you go wild" & "you will remember tonight" are the best of that bunch: the latter's got cool & creepy messianic lyrics and the former just slays non-stop.

have the sense, though, that CCWBW would work better if there were just a little bit less of it to go around (which is probably the ultimate missing-the-point critique where AWK is concerned). the long set of mutated/inverted party jams that closes the album is a good example. they're all worth a listen, but collectively, they oversell the point. gems like "big party" and "we will boogie" struggle to stand out.

this seems to result from two things: 1) CCWBW is a concept album, and 1) most of lyrics are very simple and repetitive. so in order to make a point about the ghastly frozen emptiness of the scenario he's describing, WK needs an entire song like "we're not gunna get old". and it works, drives the point home w/ a sledgehammer - but it also drags the album down a bit. it's suitably grim & suffocating, but not very musically interesting. (i do like "las vegas nevada" though, which seems more cheerfully subversive than straight-up celebratory.)

and on that note, GOD this is a creepy fucking record. cryptic lyrics that read super-funtime-positive only on the surface, hopeless mirror-box solopsism, vaguely fascist calls to annihilation in the moment, not-so-vaguely homoerotic misogyny, digatally altered vagina-like WK mouths all over the insert art. it's more a subtle sort of psychological horror movie than the "party party" pep talk it pretends to be, and i guess i like that too. reminds me of BOC (touchstone for all music appreciation) and the flaming lips. creative, fearless and weird as hell. but you've probably gotta be something of a geek to really appreciate it.

point 1) and uh, point 1)...

It's a very good point.