Andrew WK

I imagine this is also why Close Calls took an extra four years to get a U.S. release. I always thought that album was the beginning of a very strange new direction for AWK. The promo videos/cover art creep me out to this day. I do find it strange that he would continuously say things like "I'm not the same guy who made I Get Wet", like he's moved on, but then basically tour the whole album and do a big re-release thing shortly after

Also see the "Who Knows?" DVD. Really creepy in places.

Is that the one with the version of "I Get Wet" that starts on piano then cuts to a live recording? If so I really need that DVD

It is INSANE. Starts off with completely OTT montage of Andrew giving this bio and talking about how he realized the power blah blah while still photos from live tours pan, including on that just zooms in closer and closer onto his face making a silly guitar face until light starts poring out of his mouth. Then some really kickass live shows, all severely schizophrenically edited (noise band influence here) of him playing festivals in Japan, etc. Then all of a sudden it will slow down and he'll start narrating it again. Every time he narrates it sounds like someone they recorded talking high pitched and then slowed it down, or something. Super un-natural. Then every so often there will be a still camera shot of a room with a really bizarre drone playing in the soundtrack and AWK will be, like, crawling across the floor in slow motion and screaming or something. Really bizarre and spooky.

It's probably my favorite piece of the AWK myth. Bridges the gap between 'early' and 'later' AWK, if you think there is such a thing. I just think he's always been a weirdo, some kind of performance artist that tended to hold back in the beginning and then just went off the deep end w CCWBW. And now he's cashing in as a mainstream meme.

I want to hear the Bulb records again.

Sounds amazing. There's a bunch of really creepy AWK videos out there if you know where to look. I remember this one interview that I couldn't even watch; the interviewer spoke in this real monotone voice (I think she was reading submitted questions) and AWK's responses were hurried and he looked notably nervous, like someone was pointing a gun at his head off-camera, it was so weird. At one point he does this really weird nervous laugh that goes on for 15-some seconds. And all the while there was this really unnerving noise going on in the background. Lately his Facebook posts turned a lot darker, going from his standard life-affirming party messages to things like "I just rubbed habanero peppers in my eyes" along with pictures, soon he was posting photos of himself with Taco Bell where he looked in real rough shape, bruises and burns everywhere, like the look of someone who really needed to go to the hospital. But ultimately I think it was all photoshopped. He definitely seems to get a rise out of messing with his audience. I almost wonder if that bizarre "AWK Steev Mike conspiracy" website that sprung up a few years ago was actually his.

ok - can someone pls fill me in on the Close Calls album? Is it some kidn of experimental masterpiece? I don't think I ever heard anything past I Get Wet but I was always puzzled to see him regularly palling around with Current 93 and the like.

It's pretty badass. If you hold it up to some ambient music or krautrock or Japanese psych or whatever, it won't really seem that experimental, but it definitely is in a lot of way. Has some AMAZING tunes, some really cool bizarre experiments, some throw-aways that i really could live without, etc. It's basically a huge FEAST. Eat it up. It's a double album in the White Album tradition. Some quiet and eery studio noodling followed by pop song, etc.

I get "Don't Call Me Andy" stuck in my head all the time.

It's not wildly different from his other stuff but yeah, it's just a neat and experimental hard rock album. I think the lyrics make it seem more "out there" than it really is but it's a great listen. Lots of stuff about self-purification or the search for identity, and some that take IGW's themes to the extreme. Lines like "I'll push you off the roof if you are too afraid to jump". The Mother of Mankind rarities collection that comes with it is really great too. You get to hear him do reggae, there's a great tune that sounds like a IGW outtake, and some really bizarre stuff from early in his career. Also a few songs where it sounds like he's imitating Sparks, I kid you not. All very entertaining. In total there's about 40 songs there and a couple can probably be tossed aside but lots of it is very good.

It's cool IMO, got some good tracks, got some trying-to-be-weird tracks, got some succeeded-at-being-weird tracks. Hard to take in, yeah. It has a thread, too: Andrew WK, Close Calls With Brick Walls

I noticed a weird thing on the two live tracks at the end of The Wolf, where it sounds like his vocals are pulled from two different performances, just piled on top of each other. The live tracks on the IGW 10th anniversary remaster do the same thing, though at some points it sounds like everything is doubled, especially on "I Love NYC" which is really disorienting, in a cool way. But it sounds like there's two AWK's on stage the whole time.

maybe... there are?

LOL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_JhQVUklEI

The small golden eye dog.

With a body shaped like a cat.

http://andrewwk.com/cms/andrewwk/news/i_330.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRkR-Km2gg

as far as the "st55v mike" stuff goes, i remember seeing some interviews circa close calls (don't remember where, sorry) where he talked about andrew w.k. as a collaborative performance piece, a collaboration between the artist and his audience. andrew's suggestion was that there was no fixed narrative to the story he was creating, and that he wasn't really in control of it himself. of course, this plays into the idea that he is or was a puppet, but it seemed to me that his primary point was that he was happy to go along with whatever story his fans wanted to project onto him - that this was the essential nature of celebrity, to be a story told by others. so maybe the st55v mike stuff was done by andrew himself, maybe it was done by his friends, and maybe it was done by fans. doesn't matter. it's equally real and "true" either way.

i found close calls with brick walls and especially the associated non-musical ephemera (art, videos, websites, theories, performances, interviews) extremely disturbing. it's lynch-like in that it suggests the presence of something awful, some terrible psychological disturbance or rupture, without ever really describing it directly. it has the sickening, trypophobic gravity of a good wingnut conspiracy theory, where everything starts to seem like an encoded clue after a while, but the solution remains forever out of reach.

I dunno it feels like the stakes are too low to be properly engaging. Basically the conspiracy is... to make a lot of money?

Well, granted I should allow that it should be at least as engaging as Scientology on those grounds.

Basically the conspiracy is... to make a lot of money?

by the time of ccwbw, he seemed to be on the outs with his label and management and wasn't yet making lazy money as a kids show host. it's hard to sort out any clear single thread, but the essence of the "conspiracy" seemed to revolve around questions of identity. the album and its "related ephemera" played on this in a number of ways, suggesting both a fragmented personality and literal duplicate identity, the idea that there might be more than one person "playing" andrew w.k. the fragmented personality stuff was very well developed, imo, and retains a disturbing edge even when you take it simply as art-play. self-actualization collapsing into literal solipsism, the idea that seeing is being, weird tangles of gibberish covering up mysterious gaps. helps to dig into the associated web stuff as you absorb the album, and much of it is still archived as far as i know.

there's also a fair bit of crowleyist philosophy in his motivational speaker schtick, which only adds another layer of creepiness to the whole enterprise.

xp exactly. scientology, too, is creepy as hell, and because it seems so serious, it's a bit less fun to examine as art. personally, i don't find art with apparent commercial intent any less interesting than that which seems to exist in a vacuum. and i think andrew managed to play some interesting or at least entertaining games with the idea of commercially commodified identity.

it's less interesting to me in that the motive behind everything just boils down to "how can we make money"
so anything disturbing about multiple identities gets submerged into "well, of course it's more lucrative to promote
AWK as a brand than can be played by multiple people than tying it to an individual" and it becomes no more sinister
than the fact that there are probably multiple ronald mcdonalds walking around.
I'm not super well-versed on crowley, but it seems like his motives were similar?

A few years ago on his message board, someone claiming to be from his high school posted a story about how they were asked in class by a teacher what they wanted to do when they got older. Most people said things like, "doctor" and "lawyer" and "policeman", but when it got around to Andrew, he said "I want to manufacture my own non-existence." Then everyone rolled their eyes at the 'typical Andrew' response.

very similar!

thing is, i don't know that there ever was any intent to promote AWK as a duplicable brand. maybe yes, maybe no. the thing about paranoid investigation is that the singular/coherent truth, to the extent that it ever existed in the first place, quickly gets lost in the embroidery of conspiracy. maybe the point of all the creepy psycho stuff was to poison the AWK brand. maybe it was an attempt to drum up viral interest in a flagging career. maybe it was all just a lark. maybe he was going through some shit, or fighting it out with the illuminati, or being indoctrinated into the golden dawn, etc. i like the indeterminacy, because it allows anything, incorporates anything, molds itself to whatever you want to make of it. this only makes it all the more scary, like a rorschach blot in which you can see whatever you want (or don't want). this is the sense in which AWK's play reminds me of david lynch. lynch is great at guiding the viewer's imagination towards whatever they might find disturbing.

that was xp PN

David Foster Wallace once wrote that 'Lynchian' describes a situation where the very disturbing and the very macabre is wrapped up in something that is on the surface very innocent and very innocuous. In this sense, AWK's entire performance art thing is extremely Lynchian.

you can find equal indeterminacy in tom cruise's marriage which you could also say is Lynchian. (also, see nicole kidman's role in AWKspiracy)

I feel like at least with tom cruise, there might be a genuinely deranged individual at work.

nicole kidman's role in AWKspiracy

what's this?

there was this whole thing about nicole kidman being tied to AWK and they tried to make it spooooky, but I think it just boils down to Andrew having a thing for redheads.

I'm glad someone brought up scientology - not that I think there's any direct connection but some of his songs on Close Calls seem to relate to those same principles. I do think the "Multiple AWK" thing is interesting and maybe part of the point of the live recordings with two vocal parts. He always seems to refer to "Andrew W.K." as though it was a corporation. Like you wouldn't hear Peter Gabriel referring to "Peter Gabriel music". Something like "I Sold My Soul" off his new EP seem to refer to this directly; "I sold my soul/and now I won't get hurt anymore/and now I won't be afraid anymore"

Pitchfork just ran an interview, and again he said something very cryptic/ominous:

When people do things to make your dream come true, you owe them in one way or another. Everyone understands that for every dream that comes true for you, there might not be a dream coming true for someone else. When we trade one wish for another, there's a price to pay. It works like that. When you make an agreement with yourself, or with a dream, or with a group of people, there really are consequences, and it's really hard to see that when you have no experience and you're young and you hope people don't take advantage of that.

The (I'm assuming) not-made-up stories about Andrew's troubled youth are frankly a lot more interesting than the Jane McGonigal/VICE-level viral marketing street team pranks.

i don't know that there ever was any intent to promote AWK as a duplicable brand

That latest video of "Time to Party" with literally dozens of people playing AWK. Also, the "Close Calls" reissue with that weird purple-tinted fake-AWK i posted earlier. Just bizarre. I really like the packaging for that a whole lot, including the weird photo for the "Mother of Mankind" CD that looks kind of like he's in a scene from a horror movie.

"When you make an agreement with yourself, or with a dream, or with a group of people, there really are consequences, and it's really hard to see that when you have no experience and you're young and you hope people don't take advantage of that."

what's cryptic about this (other than not naming names)?

When people do things to make your dream come true, you owe them in one way or another. Everyone understands that for every dream that comes true for you, there might not be a dream coming true for someone else. When we trade one wish for another, there's a price to pay. It works like that. When you make an agreement with yourself, or with a dream, or with a group of people, there really are consequences, and it's really hard to see that when you have no experience and you're young and you hope people don't take advantage of that.

this is the stuff i love best, the seemingly mundane blather that impinges ominously on any number of conspiracy theories without really saying anything. it's fun, and also just a little unnerving. it's like a good thriller or horror movie, and you don't have to take it as anything more than that. unless you want to...

nicole kidman's role in AWKspiracy

what's this?

― Poliopolice, Thursday, September 6, 2012 11:56 AM (10 minutes ago)

like PN said, there was at one point the suggestion that AWK was obsessed with and had perhaps even slept with nicole kidman. this was tied to the "seeing is being" solipsism i mentioned earlier, though, so "sleeping with nicole kidman" may have been nothing more than "seeing eyes wide shut". CCWBW lyrics touch on this indirectly.

That latest video of "Time to Party" with literally dozens of people playing AWK. Also, the "Close Calls" reissue with that weird purple-tinted fake-AWK i posted earlier. Just bizarre. I really like the packaging for that a whole lot, including the weird photo for the "Mother of Mankind" CD that looks kind of like he's in a scene from a horror movie.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, September 6, 2012 12:05 PM (5 minutes ago)

oh yeah, he definitely played up the "multiple andrews" thing. i just don't know that there was ever a sincere, real-world attempt to legally wrest the "andrew w.k." brand away from anyone.

The Andrew WK giving the talk at the Brony convention has a really thick midwestern accent, what is up with that?

Or, maybe it's a real thick "Da Bears!" accent

Great talk. When they declare him a brony, he stands still like a triumphant doll and rotates back and forth. About 20 mins in, he spontaneously leads the crowd in some drone chanting. He almost breaks into the theme from "Lawrence of Arabia".

I gives himself a hand for releasing the a 30th Anniversary Gundam tribute album. After he tells the crowd it's only out in Japan, he says "You can illegal download it!" AWK is an old-school nerd.

http://i.imgur.com/lV0zHoY.jpg

:)

The Andrew WK giving the talk at the Brony convention has a really thick midwestern accent, what is up with that?

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Monday, October 1, 2012 9:54 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark

he's from michigan