Andrew W.K. and the mystery of creation

0. The meaning of life

 If we’re going to discuss Andrew W.K., then obviously we need to start on 9/11.

On an individual level, the trauma of that day radiated outward like the concentric rings on a map of a nuclear blast. Near the center were those directly involved, killed or injured by the attacks. Further out were those who lost loved ones, or lived in the cities where they happened. Further out another ring or two were most people, those like me who got no closer than a TV screen but were still, understandably, shaken to the core. I lived in the center of a fairly major city at the time; it wasn’t implausible that we could be a target. We just didn’t know what might happen.

As with many catastrophic events, the attacks may have caused some people to doubt their entire worldview. For many more people, it served as confirmation. One of the things it did for me was re-affirm the poisonous role of religion in our civics. After all, the hijackers were Muslims who thought themselves engaged in a holy war. Language of the Crusades was invoked in America’s response. Religion was right at the center of all of it.

But what truly bugged me – what bugs me to this day, even though I’ve mellowed out quite a bit on the topic – were those people who credited divine intervention with their own near misses on September 11. For everyone whose train was late, or who overslept, or who changed their flight arrangements at the last minute, the survivor’s guilt must have been immense. And so a lot of people said that God must have saved them. God, in his infinite wisdom, decided that I must be spared on this day.

What does that say about God that he would choose to save you but let thousands of others perish in the most horrible of ways? How could you believe that about him? How could you possibly believe that about yourself? That you were worth saving, but not someone whose last moments on earth were spent in absolute pain and terror before their entire corporeal existence was annihilated?

So, no, I do not believe God was present on 9/11, nor do I believe he’s been present at any time before or since. In general I have no objection to other people believing otherwise. I’m certainly not going to argue the point. Why bother? Neither of us would change our minds.

I do want to clarify one thing, though. Lack of belief in a deity is not the same thing as belief in nothing, or, more accurately, it’s not the same as not seeking answers to some of the same questions that religion purports to address. Frankly I’m obsessed with these big questions, occasionally paralyzed by them. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Why am I here? Do my actions matter in any greater sense? I’m still wondering about all of these things. Sometimes, like a magic eye puzzle, the outlines of an answer might start to swim into view, and then they’re gone just as easily.

Questioning the nature of life, the universe, and everything springs from an assumption that, if flawed, could undermine the entire enterprise: that if an answer presented itself, we would recognize it for what it was. Maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe it would be completely inscrutable to us. Maybe the key to enlightenment is to change our definition of what the answer could be.

1. Getting wet

One of the reasons I think so many of us cling to our memories of September 11 is because our lives were otherwise so uneventful. I know mine was. Here’s proof: the next most significant thing I can remember about my junior year was learning about a new musical artist.

I got way into music in college. Indie rock, mostly, but music of all kinds. I was constantly going to shows, buying CDs on a whim, and of course downloading gigs and gigs of those sweet, sweet MP3s. Prior to college I had listened to a handful of favorite bands, all of whom were massively popular: Dave Matthews, Oasis, Radiohead, Metallica. But when I was introduced to a much wider world of largely independent music, I was addicted. I sought out everything I could, from stalwarts of the 1970s and 1980s to every up-and-comer the early 2000s had to offer. It was a fun time in my life.

With my newfound tastes, naturally I developed a little snobbiness as well. I probably argued that various things weren’t “real” music. I definitely kept pushing things onto my friends that they weren’t receptive to. Certainly the snobbiness was in effect the first time I saw, on my muted TV, a music video featuring a disheveled and intense-looking man headbanging in front of a giant sign that read PARTY HARD. I’m sure I snorted.

I had my TV tuned to MTV a lot in those days for some reason. I’d be on my computer listening to music of my choosing, and the TV would be muted and showing MTV. I’m not sure why. But they kept showing that weird video with the party hard guy. At some point I unmuted. And it was stupider than I could have imagined.

Lyrical nuggets like “When it’s time to party we will party hard” and “We do what we like and we like what we do.” A pounding guitar part that sounded like a jackhammer. What sounded like a single piano key being slammed over and over. A robotic voice that repeated “partyhardpartyhardpartyhardpartyhard.” I was into literate lyrics, unconventional time signatures, defiantly un-commercial stuff. I stood in line at midnight to buy Kid A on release date, for chrissake.

I found myself keeping an eye out for the video to come back on.

MTV played the “Party Hard” video a lot. Perhaps it was a Buzz Clip. Either way, at some point I abandoned the pretense of enjoying the song as a guilty pleasure. When my tax refund showed up that spring, I strolled into Newbury Comics with a couple hundred bucks to blow on CDs. This was 20 years ago and I can’t remember most of what I bought. I think Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was in the stack, and certainly characteristic of the rest. But in there, too, was I Get Wet by Andrew W.K.

Like Marty DiBergi said of Spinal Tap, I was first struck by the album’s unusual loudness. The opening track, “It’s Time to Party,” starts with a single, chugging guitar part that sounds filtered and distant, like you’re hearing it across a poor phone connection. You may be inclined to lean closer to the speaker. This is a feint. It’s a ju-jitsu move by Andrew W.K. to trick you into turning up the volume before the song explodes in a barrage of overdubbed guitars and sledgehammer-like percussion. It’s time to get loud. It’s time to party.

And when it’s time to party, what do we do? We segue directly into track two, “Party Hard.” The album doesn’t let up from there. A lot of the song titles and lyrics read as imperative statements. Take it off. Get ready to die. Party ‘til you puke. And despite a couple of detours into slightly gentler fare (“She Is Beautiful” being a standout here) for the most part every song follows the same formula.

Once, I was skipping through each track on the album for a reason I can no longer remember. At some point I started chuckling because almost every song started exactly the same way. Usually a keyboard part that was just a single loud, insistent note plinked over and over, like Schroeder’s sarcastic rendition of “Jingle Bells” fed through the Doof Warrior’s Marshall stacks. This was followed by that same explosion of guitars and a driving kick drum that matched the tempo of the keyboard part. Most songs develop into a maelstrom of overdubbed guitars and vocals. As I said, it’s very loud.

It’s also, thematically, all about partying. Sort of. Hosting a party or attending a party are a little too specific for what AWK is getting at. Now, for me at age 20, partying meant nothing more and nothing less than getting drunk and failing to get laid. And I don’t think any of that would be excluded from his definition of partying. After all, in an otherwise undistinguished academic career, partying until I puked was where I was a Viking. Yet Andrew W.K.’s definition of partying seems to be more expansive. It’s more than a lifestyle, it’s a state of being.

This leads to some weird places, lyrically. The song “Ready to Die” demands that “you better get ready to die,” which makes sense as a call to carpe diem. But it’s followed by the words “you better get ready to kill,” which, charitably, we could interpret to mean that you gotta sink your teeth into whatever endeavor you’re attempting, but honestly it reads as more literal than that. Consider that earlier that W.K. has pledged “This is your time to pay / This is your judgment day / We made a sacrifice / And now we get to take your life.” Definitely sounds like it’s about murder.

Then there’s the title track, “I Get Wet,” which is incomprehensible. With a female singer you’d think it could be about sexual arousal. The only other interpretation that I can think of is a reference to “wet work,” aka professional murder, which fits a little better with the rest of the lyrics. “I get wet whenever you’re crying / I get wet I know that you’re dying.”

My recommendation is not to listen too closely to the lyrics.

At any rate, 20 years on I think I could make a case that I Get Wet is my favorite album of the 2000s. It certainly has stuck with me far more than music that was more acclaimed at the time. (I couldn’t tell you the last time I gave Yankee Hotel Foxtrot a spin.) It’s exuberant, propulsive, and so much fun to listen to. But the quality of the music isn’t the only reason. It’s also because of the man himself.

Andrew W.K., against all odds, has stuck around. Although only sporadically releasing music, he’s emerged as some kind of guru, a zen master for the 21st century. He’s hosted TV shows, penned advice columns, maintained an enigmatic Twitter presence. He’s famous and even ubiquitous, but not in the usual manner of today’s TMI celebrities. He seems to stand not outside the mainstream but athwart it.

He’s still partying.

2. In the flesh

Have you met Andrew W.K.? If you have, I bet you remember it well. He makes an impression.

I met him in the fall of 2003. He was playing a show at the Roxy, which was on Tremont Street right next to campus. I attended the show and retain three clear memories of it:

1. Getting punched in the face, knocking my glasses off

2. Having a full beer dumped over my head, which was actually refreshing given the temperature in the room

3. So many people going onstage for the encore of “Party Hard” that the equipment got knocked over and they had to stop playing

Great show.

Hanging out back on the dorm’s front stoop afterward – god, I hope I showered – a fellow AWK fan came out the door, breathless. “Andrew W.K. is at the Little Building!” he exclaimed. We headed right over.

The Little Building is a dorm on campus, the biggest at the time. When we arrived, AWK was holding court in an atrium area on the second floor with about a dozen students. Bear in mind that this was after midnight and he had played a show shortly before. How did Andrew W.K. come to be standing there, still wearing his dirty white t-shirt and jeans? I have no idea.

What I remember most about him was that he took his time to meet every person there individually. He could have issued a general greeting, signed some autographs, and taken off. God knows nobody expected more from him. But that’s not what he did. He went one by one, giving each person his full attention, asking our names and making actual conversation. And he didn’t just sign an autograph. He sat down and wrote you a goddamn letter.

I’m not kidding. In my haste to find something he could sign, I had grabbed a copy of a personal essay I’d recently had workshopped in class. The reviewer had written on it, in all caps, “YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE!”

This will require a bit of an explanation.

As a writing major with no real life experience and an eye toward commercial success, I was cultivating a certain softboy persona at the time: self-deprecating, wry, a lovable loser. I wrote a lot about my romantic failures. For the most part it worked, as much as undergrad writing can be said to work, and most of the time my personal essays were warmly received by my professors and my classmates – with this notable exception.

In the absolutely true story, I had written about the time I woke up a girl I was wooing by tossing coins at her window in the middle of the night. In my mind it was a romantic gesture. Lloyd Dobler-esque. It met with mixed success on the battlefield but it made for a winning anecdote in personal essay class, for most of my readers anyway.

This one girl was incensed at the story. “You’re throwing money at her? Is she a stripper?” she demanded to know. I didn’t have a good answer except that it was non-fiction and therefore no symbolism was intended.

With the passage of time I think that this classmate probably had me dead to rights much more than I was willing to acknowledge at the time, alone among the class in perceiving that the version of myself I presented in my essays was, if not necessarily false, highly calculated. While I wasn’t nearly ambitious enough to define it in such terms, I think that I was undertaking a project to create a literary version of myself that could be marketed alongside other schlubby men of letters like Chuck Klosterman.

All that being said, it’s bad form in a writing workshop to call another writer an asshole.

So when my turn came to get some facetime with the man himself, I showed him the essay with the incendiary notes scribbled all over it. He seemed stunned. “Why would somebody do this?” he asked.

He took the essay and sat down at a table with a Sharpie. (I recall that it was his own.) He proceeded to handwrite a full-page letter on the back sheet in all capital letters. I’m not sure if I still have this somewhere, but as I recall it was full of exhortations to stay positive and not let the negativity get me down. The phrase I think I remember verbatim is that Andrew W.K. pledged that he and I would do “GOOD FUN STUFF AND NOT THE OPPOSITE!”

I treasured this letter. I showed it to everyone I could. For days afterward, I was glowing from the encounter. To think that this rock star, who I now realize is barely older than me, would take such time and give such attention to a random fan who shoved something in his face to autograph. He didn’t have to do that, but he did.

That was when I realized this guy wasn’t just some musician.

3. Never let down

Right on schedule, Andrew W.K.’s sophomore album dropped in 2003. I picked up The Wolf upon release in September 2003. A lot had changed in my life. I had graduated in May with $60,000 in debt, and gone straight into a customer service job making $8.25 an hour.

I can’t tell you how miserable I was that summer. Not in a fun, quirky, marketable way either. I was just depressed. I drank a lot and smoked too many cigarettes. I went for long walks in the middle of the night. The problem wasn’t just that I was broke as dirt and working a shitty job. I’d been broke before, and I’d worked plenty of shitty jobs.

The problem, as I saw it, was the vast future yawning before me, formless and terrible. My entire life to that point had been prescribed and I had not deviated. Even my acts of rebellion were safe and predictable – the first and only time I’ve ever dyed my hair was the week before my freshman year.  The next step was always laid out before me, and I had only to lift my foot to take it.

Post-collegiate life was not like that. I was, at long last, responsible for myself.  I had to decide what I would do next. I wasn’t ready. I considered grad school and I even considered the military. Any action seemed like too much for me to handle. I was barely hanging on.

By September, things were turning around a bit. I had a burgeoning relationship with a young woman I liked a whole heck of a lot, who would later become my wife. Plus I had lucked into a far better job, now working on the website of a weekly newspaper. This job paid a cool $11.25 an hour. Enough to buy a new CD!

Andrew W.K.’s The Wolf was not what I expected. It wasn’t I Get Wet Part 2. A lot of his signature elements were still there, particularly massive overdubs, and yeah, there was a song about partying. But it was, if not less heavy than its predecessor, then less harsh. It was smoothed out more, with a greater variety of instrumentation and climaxes that swelled rather than pummel you into submission.

Starting on track 5, “Never Let Down,” there was also what I can only characterize as a shift in focus. Gone were the bizarre and sometimes violent lyrics. In their place were soaring tributes to trying your best and connecting with others. AWK’s role as the singer changed too, from the party ringmaster (or maybe just the mascot) to almost a messianic figure. In “Never Let Down,” he declares: “I’m a friend by your side / You’re never gonna be alone.” (A sentiment that he’s repeated often, such as in the title of his 2018 album You’re Not Alone.)

Not all of it works. But some of it works better than it has any right to. On the ironically named “Totally Stupid” AWK reaches honest-to-god profundity. The song builds and builds until an absolutely cathartic climax that I have to quote in depth:

 When we look into the future
To the place we haven't gone
See what we haven't done
We have known it all along

If we wait until tomorrow
Will tomorrow ever come?
This is where we're coming from
And we're not the only ones

When we find ourselves in trouble
We can find ourselves a way
You can find a place to stay
And the place is always safe

 If you have a heart that's in pain
Don't be afraid, you're not to blame
There's a better world inside of us
Where we always thought it was

You don't need to hide
You can open up your eyes
And you'll discover
That there is another world

A bit of self-help mumbo-jumbo? I wouldn’t dispute that. But I don’t read it that way either. “If we wait until tomorrow, will tomorrow ever come?” reads like a koan to me. And those final lines hint at a form of transcendence. We’re not exactly partying until we puke anymore.

Partying was still on the docket, though, and when we threw my 22nd birthday party at my apartment, you bet The Wolf was on the playlist. At last, the future looked bright.

4. The lost years

The stage was set for tons of new Andrew W.K. music in the years to come. But one year passed, and then another, and then another, with no new releases. At one point he dropped an album called Close Calls with Brick Walls in Japan only. I downloaded it using nefarious means, and it was all right. Looking at the track list now, only a couple songs really stuck with me. “You Will Remember Tonight” was a banger and “I Want to See You Go Wild” recaptured some of the old magic. But overall it struck me as kind of a meandering piece that lacked the power of his previous two albums, and for a long time afterward it seemed like his musical output had evaporated.

It would be wrong to say that Andrew W.K. went away, though. On the contrary, he was everywhere. He hosted TV shows – Destroy Build Destroy and Your Friend, Andrew W.K., neither of which I’ve watched – and appeared occasionally in random places, doing a weather report in one place or going viral for a bizarre late-night spot on Fox News.

For quite a while, he wrote an advice column for the Village Voice. At times his columns could be breathtaking. When a letter writer asked for help in coping with the death of a friend, he wrote movingly about grief:

Also remember that you are your friend. The thoughts and ideas you had and still have about him are your creations and concepts as much as they were his. You are made of each other. The times you spent together helped shape your days and make you the person you are right now. Your friend is bound up in all of you, as much a part of you as your blood and bones.

Lastly, remember that all of our experiences in the world ultimately occur in our mind and soul. When your friend was alive, you looked at him with your eyes and heard him with your ears, and those senses formed impressions and thoughts in your mind. Now that your friend is dead, you are still using your mind to think about him and perceive him, just as you did when he was standing right in front of you. He really is still here.

I recommend reading the whole thing. It’s quite something. Gone are the shock-jock slogans of partying ‘til you puke and the self-help mantras of doing all right and doing ok. This is genuinely profound. It’s metaphysical. And it requires no suspension of disbelief, no forbearing of one’s critical faculties. I’m getting misty-eyed just reading it again.

I don’t see this as a departure from his earlier work as much as an evolution. He still is recommending a full embrace of existence with your eyes wide open. Feel it all, the good and the bad.  Even grieving can be partying.

Naturally, because nothing good can be allowed to exist, during this time rumors began to swirl. Was Andrew W.K. even a real person? Or was he a corporate creation, a fictional character inhabited by a paid actor or even multiple actors? Did he write his own music? Did he even write the words that came out of his own mouth?

For his part, AWK – or his social media team – seemed to enjoy stoking the fires. Every time another article gets published or another podcast gets posted, AWK makes sure to share it while loudly denying the claims in a case of protesting way, way too much. What’s the simpler explanation: that the claims are true and whoever is running the con short-circuits when someone gets too close, or that they’re false and AWK gets a kick out of playing along? I know which side my money’s on.

But let’s temporarily accept the premise and let it play out. Let’s say that Andrew W.K. is a character and not a real person, in so far as that can be defined. (Some days I don’t feel like a real person.) Does that make his message untrue? When you’re jumping up and down to “Party Hard” and feeling absolutely free, is that feeling a lie? If his words help you grieve the loss of a friend, does it matter if they were written by one man or by a committee?

To be clear, I don’t think any of that is true. I think Andrew W.K. is a musician and a provocateur, and I think to the extent that he is playing a role it’s not all that different from the way most people present a different side of themselves depending on their surroundings. The version of yourself at work and the version of yourself at home are not exactly the same. It stands to reason that the public-facing persona of a messianic rock god would not be exactly the same as the part of him that makes deals and signs contracts. We are all prismatic.

5. The second coming

The rock star Andrew W.K. came back a few years ago. He announced a full-band tour, his first in many years. I went to see him at the Brighton Music Hall. I drank too much and left early. (I’m not as young as I used to be.) But there was the same old Andrew W.K., bringing 110% energy to a less-than-capacity crowd at a small venue in a dodgier neighborhood in Boston. He played a solo on a pizza-shaped guitar.

Next came an album. A pretty good one! You’re Not Alone contained a couple of certified bangers, revisiting themes of partying and not giving up. The party seemed less visceral now and more spiritual. There are a couple of spoken-word tracks that feel like they may have been adapted from that advice column. Harkening back to a sentiment that had appeared on The Wolf, AWK says in “The Feeling of Being Alive”:

Life is very intense
But that doesn’t mean it’s bad
Understanding this
Is what partying’s all about

Now we’ve got a brand-new album. Its title, God Is Partying, can be taken in two ways. The simpler interpretation is as an answer to the question “What is God doing?” The interpretation that I prefer has “partying” as a noun. Partying is a state of being, and God = partying. Not a personal God, not a creator of all things, what we call God might be best understood as a very human state of transcendence that Andrew W.K. prefers to call partying.

God Is Partying is a heavy album. Not heavy in the jackhammer way of I Get Wet, or in the operatic way of The Wolf, but in a slow, confident way. The chunky riffs of “Everybody Sins” and “Babalon” carry more than a whiff of stoner metal. Not one, not two, but three songs exceed six minutes in length, which is highly unusual in his oeuvre. Only his album of piano improvisations, 2009’s ’55 Cadillac, had any other tracks that long. No songs on I Get Wet even make it to four minutes.

So yes, there are some curveballs. Chief among them the slow, crooning “Stay True to Your Heart.” Lyrically, it’s right in AWK’s wheelhouse:

They'll try to break you down
They'll make you mess with your mind
They'll leave your heart spellbound
You'll leave yourself behind
Whoa

But what’s interesting about “Stay True to Your Heart” from a musical perspective is how much it relies on anticipation. AWK songs of the past threw everything at you that they could, like a flurry of strikes from Bruce Lee. Here we find an Andrew W.K. who’s willing to withhold a bit and lure the listener along. It really works.

Other songs revisit that weird darkness that was lurking in his very earliest work. I’ve been using www.genius.com to look up lyrics for this post, and in seeking a choice excerpt from “Everybody Sins” to explain this point I was distracted by an explanation from the man himself about the meaning of the song. It’s kind of mindblowing.

Sin could be considered the world’s first cliché, and forgiveness from sin could be the world’s first platitude. Sometimes, dealing with these clichés and platitudes is like sucking on ice cubes—there’s something essential in there, but it’s sort of frozen. Nevertheless, if you take the time to roll those icy words around in your mouth and warm them up with your tongue, their essence can thaw, trickle down into your soul, and quench all those who suck on it.

This guy is brilliant.

So much of what happens on God Is Partying is about melting down these frozen concepts. There’s a coherent worldview in there, one grappling honestly and fully with the big questions of our existence. Individually the concepts are simple and easily grasped; together they construct an edifice that is most easily perceptible by the negative space around it. If were smarter I would explicate it. Instead I can only behold it, and beckon others to do the same.

If it’s not clear, I’m not suggesting here that Andrew W.K. is a deity, not even a demigod. But if my tone is hard to read, let me emphasize that I am earnestly suggesting that he is providing a spiritual pathway that is worth exploring. Human meaning is found in human experience. Embracing and allowing ourselves full contact with those experiences, those we would call positive and those we would call negative, is how we can begin to understand ourselves, our relationships to one another, even our place in the cosmos.

We might be alone in the universe. There might not be an afterlife (or a beforelife). Life may lack a definite meaning which we can divine from an outside source. But while we are here we can party, and everyone is invited. Maybe God did create Andrew W.K. in his own image. Because God is partying.