Party tip: Do what thou wilt
Andrew WK's God Is Partying as a transformative journey through the tarot
This is the latest in an ongoing series about musician, magician, and God of Partying Incarnate, Andrew WK. Be sure to read the others to come up to speed because man alive, things are stranger than ever with Andrew.
A new Andrew WK record is a joyous occasion, a clarion call to party, and another moment in my life when I get to crack my knuckles like a cartoon character and start sifting through the music and lyrics, looking for the gooey esoteric sweetness which lies at its heart. Andrew’s latest record, God Is Partying, is certainly packed with that goodness but something at its center is troubling and quite dark. Since the release of the lead-off single, Babalon, about which I wrote extensively, I have strongly suspected that God Is Partying was meant to be a magical working expressed through music and it took me a few listens through to find the first threads of that expression. The as-above-so-below relationship of Crowley’s Aeon of Horus is the notion that the dawning of the magical child is to be a reality-shattering transformation of society but also a radical paradigm shift of self. In this way, The Babalon Working ushers in what a lot of people see as a sort of Thelemic messiah, to put it in simple, vulgar terms, but the metaphorical qualities of the death of Osiris and Isis giving birth to Horus is something I’ve always interpreted as the rebirth of the phoenix. The Babalon Working, to me, is the shedding of the old self and the emergence of the new self. However you go about performing those rituals, you embody IAO through-and-through. You are Osiris, the person that you were before. You are Apophis killing Osiris. Apophis being the destructive process by which you clear the way for Isis. You are Isis in mourning, the creative process in the wake of destruction to rebuild the new individual and through her you emerge as the magical child. Andrew is clearly shedding the old self and emerging as something new on God Is Partying.
His process for doing this is outlined on the record and I think a clear road map for Andrew’s transformation can be seen in its parallels to the Fool’s journey in the tarot.
Stylistically, I was starting to feel like we were getting a much darker record from Andrew than anything before and upon hearing the whole thing I think that assumption rings true. You still get all the soaring, Wagnerian overtures that you’ve come expect from Andrew WK. Some of his refrains are fucking powerful in how they land, with brass sections underscoring the rock opera, occasionally punctuated by choirs. I may have mentioned it before but Andrew’s music, probably since the release of Close Calls With Brick Walls has reminded me of Jim Steinman’s compositions. Look him up and tell me I’m wrong by way of Bonnie Tyler, Fire Inc., and Celine Dion. Apart from being a powerful magical expression, God Is Partying is a fucking great record at a technical level.
Let’s dive into the Major Arcana, though.
The Fool, Everybody Sins
Of all the singles, this was my favorite one. It’s just a hell of a track. From Andrew WK you come to expect full-speed-ahead 4/4 stompers but this one has an entirely different vibe. I meant to write an entire article about it when the song dropped to go with my other analyses but with each single Andrew was giving me less and less to work with, symbolically. Babalon is stuffed with occult symbols, I’m In Heaven much less so, and Everybody Sins slides in at the end of the cycle as the Middle Pillar being a bit of both.
Lyrically, this song acts a kind of initiation. It presents the philosophy of Sethian Gnosticism with a healthy dash of Luciferian philosophy. Hey you! Listener! God is evil. Did you know this? Gigantic liar. Not even God. Rex Mundi is a pretender. The True Party is beyond the abyss with the True God but you have to figure out how to get there. Follow me.
Andrew has hinted on past albums at his interests in Thelema but this is the first time that capital-G Gnosis is presented as a Wagnerian rock opera meant to pry open your third eye with a crowbar. But it’s also a shedding of skin for Andrew following what sounds like a real bummer of a breakup.
The Magician/High Priestess, Babalon
Now we’re getting into it. I’ve already written at length about this song so I’ll cut it short and refer you to the link above that speculates heavily that the song is an invocation of Babalon. In the same way that you might use the Orphic Hymns to invoke spirits in a Greek Magical Papyrii sort of method, he’s using this song as a means to invoke Babalon and begin the process of breaking down his old self so that a new man may emerge that is perfectly in line with his Will.
He is The Magician now, unfocused Will but Will, nonetheless. Babalon is invoked as The High Priestess through whom this new man will begin to take shape. The Magician has the tools and the desire but the Priestess holds the holy code that forces the wild male energies to conform to a pattern which can more easily coalesce in the emanations to come.
The Empress/Emperor, No One To Know
This might be my favorite song on the record if I’m being honest and I’m not really sure why. It has all the signature AWK touches but it’s also very sparse by comparison to other songs by this guy. It’s also melancholy in a way that I just can’t seem to put a finger on. In this song, Andrew has emerged from the first stages of manifestation and he’s beginning to rise above the illusion. The song is profoundly lonely and it seems to realize that some part of him has irretrievably died in the process. He is fully in control of his self and is the master of his own world but he’s also alone in that world.
He’s like the guy that breaks the chains in Plato’s Cave. He emerges from The Cave to realize that everything he thought he knew is a lie and that which lies beyond is his to take but no matter what he says if he goes back to the cave to tell the others, no one is listening so he has to make this journey alone. There’s an optimism to it but also an underlying current of sadness that he can never go back to the cave.
Whole buncha cards, Stay True To Your Heart
With the transformation complete, and only 11 songs to express himself, Andrew yadda yaddas basically every card from The Hierophant to The Hermit in a single song. In a lot of ways, Stay True To Your Heart is Andrew’s riff on Do What Thou Wilt. Lyrically, it’s all about finding your own way and stopping at nothing to do the thing you’re born to do. And what occurred to me as I thought about it is that even before his time in Current 93, when David Tibet likely initiated Andrew into the mysteries, Andrew’s PARTY PARTY PARTY message always had a thread running through it that perfectly aligns with the Thelemic concept of Will. In simpler times, Andrew was singing and speaking about how important it is to be the person that you truly are in spite of how this collides with the judgements of others. You hear the words on this album a lot and in this song, in particular. They’ll do this. They make you do that. Whoever this mysterious they is, Andrew admonishes the listener to give the editorial they the finger and find happiness and love in the person you are and whatever your mission happens to be. He’s the Hierophant now, addressing the listener because between those two cards is a lot of symbolism of self-actualization: The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength. The Hermit is the culmination of those symbols as you’re now on your own again, like in No One To Know but it’s not the sad occasion that No One To Know is. Now you’ve got the tools and the talent to make your enlightened existence meaningful.
Whole bunch more cards, Goddess Partying/I’m In Heaven
Goddess Partying is a strange instrumental interlude that now, more than ever, has me wanting to hear an entire orchestral composition by Andrew. Thematically, it seems to be a turning point in the story. I first thought that it may have been a symbolic break between what Side A and Side B should be but it falls very early in track list. Still, it seems to be the turning of the Wheel of Fortune and the adjustments of Justice. These are now the trials of the New Andrew as he faces the world with a new perspective. He’s a new man but he still has growing and maturing to do. He’s working out the bugs in this new model and still has to put himself on the cross, as The Hanged Man does, and sacrifice in order to shake off the loose ends and parts of his old self that just will not let go. But he does and lets it die as the Death card necessitates on I’m In Heaven.
The nature of this song when it was released as a single was lost on me without the larger context of the record and that’s probably why I didn’t much care for it when it landed. There are several tracks on God Is Partying that are more or less vehicles for Andrew to repeat one or two phrases over and over and this is one of them but in the context of the narrative, this is Andrew struggling on the cross to let go of the world. I’m In Heaven, he keeps saying. Isn’t this the kingdom? Over and over, he says it until he finally lets it go in the last refrain and announces that he’s in hell. For a lot of us in the gnostic current, we view this world as hell. This is our tribulation and we have to rise above the labyrinth in order to make a cosmic prison break if we’re going to enter the true kingdom. We have to let go of the physical world to make that jump.
Temperance/The Devil, Remember Your Oath
This is where the album takes a real dark turn. It’s pretty clear that Andrew’s breakup with Cherie Lily was a devastating emotional loss and parts of the song reflect the introspective qualities of Temperance. Temperance is watery as all get-out but it’s not as deep as The Moon. That’s still to come. Temperance is about taking apart and putting back together. It’s why the card is referred to as The Art in Crowley’s Thoth deck. This is the scientific analysis part of alchemy. You break the matter down to its components and toss out what you can’t use and combine the parts that you can use with newer parts to make something better and stronger. This is Andrew looking at the wreckage that was left in the wake of the breakup and trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Obviously we’ll never know those details. This is an extremely personal song for him and real vulnerable moment for him.
Lyrically, the song is packed with references to making a deal and it’s not clear if Andrew is singing to himself as You or someone else, though I strongly suspect that it’s the latter because the song that comes next. Hoo boy! It’s… something.
These qualities of Remember Your Oath refer to the temptations that The Devil offers. It’ll happen again like it happened before, he says. This is something that keeps happening and like Crowley’s own writing, these lyrics likely refer to several things with a single sentence. You never remember your oath likely refers to some sort of emotional caution that Andrew likely lets down when he lets someone into his emotional space but given the hints in the songs on this record and the peculiar way he’s been presenting himself on social media (PDA with Kat, butt-nekkid muscle-man selfies), this breakup had to do more with her than him since he seems to be firmly in post-breakup revenge mode.
The Tower and The Star, My Tower
He makes it crystal clear. They will never see each other again.
The Moon, And Then We Blew Apart
Can I just take a moment to reveal my inner twelve year-old and laugh at the lyrics “We blew our load/We came together”?
With that out of the way, And Then We Blew Apart is your typical dark night of the soul. My Tower just gets it out of the way. Andrew is angry. The betrayal cut real fucking deep and hurt like hell. And even though he celebrates being single in the way that a lot of divorcees on the rebound do, there’s something in that celebration that rings hollow.
In order to complete the transition you have to look inward and process the trauma in a way that’s more healthy than WE’LL NEVER SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN over and over. We’ve all been there and it fucking sucks. Even in these times when your life is a smoldering ruin on the business end of some personal tragedy you have to acknowledge that it wasn’t all bad and that whatever you had resulted in at least some positive things. And on the tail of My Tower, And Then We Blew Apart is a more measured release of the patent badness of a breakup. He lets it all go in a song and it drifts away and sinks into the sea.
The Sun/Judgement, I Made It
Holy shit, did the sun rise on Andrew or what? This is a celebration of what’s left when you let the bad vibes go. It’s a celebration of what he’s accomplished on his own by way of his own Will. It’s about how he focused himself in a way that allowed him to make his dream come true and that not only was it everything he wanted, it was everything he dreamed it would be, to the letter. It’s also the first time in a while that the record has made deliberately mystical references. There’s a reference to Crowley’s The Vision and The Voice, aka Liber 418, his documentation of working through John Dee’s Aethyrs.
Musically, the song is Andrew WK to a tee. It’s full speed ahead and joyous and you’d better believe that it’ll be a regular on touring set lists. But I’d also like to point out that The Vision and The Voice plays a large role here in the form of the number 418. I noted before that 418 is the gematria for Abrahadabra and three songs on this record clock in with play times of 4:18.
His mission is to be Andrew WK as we, the listener, understand him to be. God of Partying. All-around positive dude. There’s a remark in the lyrics about getting into his head, which is dark. This is the calling that the trumpet sounds on Judgement and this is him rising out of the grave to answer the call. The trumpet is the call to get out of that negative headspace and get back to being the Andrew WK that he thought he lost. In a way, this cycle has been a way of reuniting with a version of himself that he likely feels like he lost at some point. You’re Not Alone was his first big release in America in some time and in a lot of ways it was a do-over of I Get Wet and The Wolf. Right down to the videos being very similar to the ones from those first couple of records. Now, emerging from this cocoon, he’s ready to try again to recapture that guy.
The World, Not Anymore
Free of the shackles, Andrew is once again facing the mysterious editorial they. Those sinister, nefarious forces of judgement that try to bring him down. But guess what? He doesn’t care. He is fully himself now. He’s been through process and is the fully realize man of True Will.
The record ends with Everybody Sins as an overture. This is the cut that we all heard when the single dropped but this is the 4:18 version of the song which has got to be a pain in the ass to arrange when you’re trying to time an entire song to hit a particular length of time. But this coda has a couple underlying meanings.
The World is never the end. It’s the end of this cycle but it’s just the end of this orbit and whatever comes next. Expect to run through this cycle again.
Abrahadabra, the closing power word that cements this magical working in reality. This is the punctuation mark that sets the work in motion. By ending the album at the beginning with abrahadabra, the intended outcome will come to manifest.
With this rock and roll shedding of skin finally in our hands and what is clearly bad vibes out of Andrew’s head, I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Thank you for doing this. I've really enjoyed the series.
Excellent analysis once again!