Andrew WK

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