The Transcendent Power of Partying

I've been a hardcore fan of Andrew WK since he released his first major label record in 2001. I'd never heard anything like it. Andrew's debut record, I Get Wet, is a wall-to-wall celebration of the major chord. It has three songs on it with the word party in the title and the rest of the songs are about partying and having a good time. Andrew's band has three guitarists for no other reason than three being more than two. And that sound! Andrew's sound is best described as volume. Not necessarily volume in terms of being loud. Oh, his band is loud, alright. I mean volume in terms of how much. Andrew WK's music is an assault on the senses meant to overwhelm the listener but not in a bad way. I've been overwhelmed by music before. Coil's Music To Listen To In The Dark, for instance, is an overwhelming experience, but it overwhelms with anxiety and dread. Andrew aims to overwhelm the listener with excess and an abundance of good vibes. It's shamanic, it's tantric, and if I'm being honest, I think Andrew WK intended his music to be that way in a deliberately mystical sense.

I've seen Andrew twice. The first time, I attended one of his spoken word shows. The second time, I attended one of his music shows. At the spoken word show, I'm standing in line for a meet and greet with Andrew when a friend of mine leans in and quietly suggests to me that Andrew is a magician.

I was aware that Andrew is a pretty weird guy. Before he was dressing head to toe in dirty whites and barking at frothing-mad audiences about partying, Andrew was a musician in a number of avant-garde musical projects around Michigan before settling into his party hardy persona. But this was a revelation to me. My buddy explained that Andrew would occasionally address people on Twitter with 93 93/93. It made sense, too. For a time, Andrew was playing bass in Current 93 while he was up to his eyeballs in some byzantine legal nonsense that sounds similar to the circumstances that led Prince to release records under his Artist Formerly Known As... sigil. If he wasn't aware of the occult before that, spending time with David Tibet for sure opened his eyes to a world of mystery and initiation. For instance, Andrew is seen reading from Liber al vel Legis in the incredibly weird video for his song I'm A Vagabond.

And then there's the matter of the taco guitar. Andrew, being the king of partying, lives to embody the party spirit in all that he does so, naturally, he had a pair of guitars made by ESP that convey his Will. The first was his pizza guitar. It looks like a slice of pizza and it also looks like it's a huge pain in the ass to play. The second was his taco guitar. You see, tacos and pizza are party food. The pizza guitar is your basic custom guitar but the taco guitar has some peculiar qualities to it.

There it is. Inlaid at the base of the neck are those sacred numbers. A little ways up the neck is the Unicursal Hexagram and it's a little hard to make out, but the inlay at the topmost fret is a representation of Baphomet.

I know. Occult symbols and heavy metal kind of go hand in hand but Andrew isn't your usual metalhead, throwing up horns and plastering his album covers with the sigil of Baphomet like, say, Slayer would. Andrew seems to have a pretty solid grasp of Aleister Crowley's words. There's a lot of Thelema in his music. For instance, in the triumphant refrain from his song Music Is Worth Living For:

Give me the Will to Love. So below and as above.

This is all surface-level stuff, I realize, but the point I'm trying to make here is that Andrew WK, a fairly mysterious musician, is doing a lot more with occult symbolism than his contemporaries. And where his contemporaries employ the occult for pure shock, Andrew seems to be directing his Will in the Crowleyan sense of the word.

Music is supposed to elicit an emotional response in the listener. If you listen to something that doesn't make you at least tap your toe or the steering wheel, the musician is doing it wrong and should feel bad. Andrew's music does this in spades. 90% of his songs make me want leap through a wall and leave a me-shaped hole in it like I'm some kind of cartoon. Either that or I simply leap into orbit with only my legs. But I'm getting away from my point. Music is art. Magic is art. Art shifts consciousness but not all musicians are capable of doing it. In spite of what New World Order obsessed Christians think, you're not going to feel that kind of gestalt at a Taylor Swift concert. You're going to be constantly reminded of how much you paid for a ticket to watch the most basic white girl in the world lip sync for an hour.

Andrew's shows feel like rituals. When I attended his concert, I couldn't help but notice the ceremonial and ritual aspects of it. Andrew is cagey about this quality of the music these days but before the band even took the stage, the house music, what seemed to be a single play-through of The Clones of Doctor Funkenstein, was quietly replaced with a seemingly tribal drum beat which repeated itself over and over in a hypnotic cycle, layering more and more beats until it stopped and Andrew's keyboard player, Erica, came out and pumped the crowd up with the lead track off of Andrew's latest record, You're Not Alone. Eventually the band hit the stage and the energy in the room, already at a pitched frenzy, took on a new life. The place went insane. I've been to a lot of shows in my lifetime. I, now in my 40's, was standing in one of the last Boston rock clubs that I had once stood in as a teenager for the first time since I was a teenager. I couldn't stop moving. I shouted the lyrics to every single song as loud as I could. I pumped my first with the beat.

And so did everyone else.

In a concert setting this isn't terribly uncommon but being a magician and a psychic, I'm tuned into frequencies that most folks are either going to miss or ignore and in that moment I felt a certain sync with the rest of the club. It was a potent oneness that mystics are always talking about and I can't possibly understate the power of this realization. This oneness had a transcendental quality to it. Andrew and the band led the club. Every song was a call and response party which turned the club into an ecstasy battery the likes of which I have only seen in archival footage of shamanic rituals.

Live music is a beautiful, powerful thing, but this was operating on another level, entirely. It was like wiring my emotional centers directly into a network of shared excitement and happiness. As the show drew to a close after an encore which began with Andrew leading the club in a shouted countdown from the number 93, Andrew and the band went from a harmonious unit of ecstasy and shifted to a sudden, jarring cacophony. The wall of noise became a tangible thing you could feel in the tactile sense and Andrew, who had been periodically twitching and contorting his face throughout the show suddenly went nuts. Well, more nuts, I guess. He thrashed around, seeming to dance. His body lurched in all directions, his face twisted into a haunting open-mouthed, eyes-rolled expression of horror until the drummer hit one last cymbal crash and the band thrust their fists into the air. And Andrew then seemed to return to his body and left with the rest of the band.

I was suddenly reminded in this moment of the Haitian Guede spirits. They experience the world of the living directly through possession of willing participants and when doing this they engage in sensory overload the likes of which you tend to find in hardcore shamanic ritual where the object is to drive the body to overload so the unconscious mind can fully take over and do the magical thing. In the case of the Guede, there's a sacred drum and dance ritual in which the to-be-possessed whip themselves into a frenzy until the spirit comes into them before doing something inexplicable like rubbing their bodies in the oils of super hot peppers or eating broken glass. The Guede don't do this to hurt the host, of course, even though it does. For the most part, they're positive spirits. But they spend their eternity suspended in limbo waiting to fulfill their spiritual duties and so when given the brief opportunity to taste the experiences of the living world, they tend to push it. Rubbing habanero peppers on their bodies seems to be the common trait.

And it should be noted that several years back, during a weird period adrift in the commercial world when Andrew was hosting game shows on Cartoon Network and pimping for Taco Bell, he inexplicably met the challenge of rubbing habanero peppers on his face for reasons that I'm not sure anyone really understood apart from Andrew just being Andrew.

There are two, probably more, Andrew WK's. And I don't mean this in the old contrived Steev Mike conspiracy theory sense. There's spoken-word Andrew who dispenses positive wisdom meant to encourage and empower his fans. He's the most powerful motivational speaker I've ever seen but in that mode, Andrew is awkward and nervous. He shifts a lot and spares no opportunity to remind the audience that even though he's Andrew WK that he's a depressed nervous wreck. He doesn't seem at home in his own body when addressing a crowd in this way. He does it because his wisdom is helpful and there's something reassuring in learning that Andrew and I have that much in common but he is visibly anxious in these moments. When he's Andrew WK and he's leading his band, however, he is an entirely different person. He's confident and animated. There is none of that awkwardness and he is in total command of the room. He is the high priest of his rock and roll ritual in these times. A character which clashes completely with the confident but soft spoken and cautious man on the spoken word stage.

Allow me some conjecture, if you would: Is it possible that the Andrew WK we know from live performances is an individual possessed by a spirit of partying; a spirit or godform which is capable of getting fans aligned on the same emotional power grid? At the same time, does this spirit demand a particular sensory experience in exchange? Andrew WK live is a genuine spectacle. Being at his shows is what those breakthrough moments must have been like for Albert Hoffman or John Dee. A HOLY SHIT occasion so potent that they spent he rest of their lives chasing it for another taste of the direct divine. That's what Andrew means when he talks about partying. It's so much bigger than keg stands or jumping off a roof into someone's pool. It's bigger, even, than abstract Hermetic notions of celebrating the ups and downs of life as Andrew sometimes likes to riff on. Andrew WK, through partying, becomes a conduit through which the divine speaks to us and rather than overwhelm and destroy us, it fills us with its light and makes us dance and sing as it ought to.