The Singular Vision Of Andrew W.K.
“God Is Partying” is the brand new album from Andrew W.K. set to release on September 10th, 2021. Like many bands who have an album on the way, Andrew has released a couple of singles to promote and drum up interest for the album. Like some bands, Andrew has also seemingly reinvented himself for this new album cycle. Unlike any other artist in the world, however, Andrew has done more than reinvent himself: he has turned the entire notion of his persona on its head in a fever dream of confusion and chaos.
The music video for the first single, Babalon, is dark, foreboding, and terrifying. It feels like the complete antithesis of everything Andrew has done before. Andrew, who is known for motivational speaking tours, writing advice columns, and who’s music is so uplifting and powerful he was once given an honorary award by a suicide prevention charity, is suddenly shrouded in darkness, singing about the occult, and invoking a thelemic deity.
What the fuck is going on?
The truth, as anyone who’s been following Andrew close enough for long enough will know, is that this isn’t actually as dramatic a shift in tone as it may seem, and is instead more akin to Andrew suddenly deciding to say the quiet part loud. Andrew W.K. has always been shrouded in mystery, it’s just that the mystery only existed below the surface, once you pushed past the “Party Hard” persona that most people know him for.
For a lengthy primer on all this, Michael Nelson’s incredible The Crying Of Lot 55 article does an admirable and exhaustive job (seriously, it is long) of laying down the “facts” and figuring out the bizarre mystery at the heart of Andrew W.K, at least as it stood toward the end of 2018. But here’s the major thing you need to know: for many years a long running theory has persisted that “Andrew W.K.” is not a real person but perhaps a persona performed by multiple people, and that someone called “Steev Mike” is either the real Andrew, or the creator of Andrew, or something else to that effect. It’s also most likely that this entire thing is an elaborate prank created by Andrew himself.
But since that article was published, the mystery has only gotten bigger and weirder.
In late 2020, a fervour spread among Andrew W.K’s fans when pictures were posted online which appeared to be a journal seemingly written by Andrew (among others) in 1998/1999. In the journal Andrew lays out his entire career: shopping lists for gear, mission statements for presentation, album cover sketches, there’s even a page where Andrew has written multitudes of different themes, circling the word PARTY. He breaks down his career into specific “eras,” even laying down the years they will span (we’re currently in “Era F” which will last into 2022). There are also occasionally notes provided by someone with the initials “SM” (Steev Mike, no doubt), and sections where the people involved figure out when fake Andrew’s should be deployed, and when the real Andrew should make appearances. Even moments where Andrew confesses to outwardly express occult imagery in order to distract people from what he’s actually doing secretly.
I don’t know what the general consensus is, but to me this journal is legit. Not legit in that it was written in the late 90’s/early 00’s, but legit in that it was definitely written by Andrew, most likely while he was bored out his mind during the pandemic and wanted to further fuck with us, as is his want. There’s just enough deep-cut nods and tips-of-the-hat to the wider Andrew W.K. mythos that if this thing wasn’t made by Andrew it was made by one of us, and honestly if that turned out to be the case I wouldn’t even be mad I would be impressed.
At one point, my favourite section in the whole damn thing, Andrew lays out a nine album plan. He (or someone) mentions that he should release the first two “back-to-back” and then space the others out, and not to clutter up his catalog with “tons and tons” of releases (which is probably a tongue-in-cheek nod to the two Japan cover albums and a handful of other things Andrew released that don’t seem to be counted as part of the plan). He details each record in turn, giving them working titles (some of which were actual working titles for each record, like his second album “The Wolf” being titled “Blow Your Bone,” which was the title that record was actually marketed as for a short time), and paints each one as a single part of a larger mythos, though not a story in the sense of say Coheed And Cambria’s The Amory Wars, but more of a sonic and dare I say “spiritual” journey.
Andrew explains each album abstractly, and he talks about Album #5 (2018’s You’re Not Alone) as being where a shift is suggested but not truly conveyed, the album instead employing wordplay to suggest positivity and negativity simultaneously (Andrew often remarked in interviews around this time that the title “You’re Not Alone” could be read as optimistic on its face but in specific contexts, such as walking down a dark alley, or sitting in a room by yourself, suddenly hearing the phrase “you’re not alone” could be terrifying). The beginning of what would show up more recently is even apparent in the track The Devil’s On Your Side, which paved the way from something like Babalon thematically, but is kind of a deep cut on that album so it’s not surprising that it slipped by more casual Andrew W.K. listeners. (Interestingly, The Devil’s On Your Side is also the title for Album #5 in the journal).
(One small aside that adds a small air of legitimacy to the journal: Album #6, which is God Is Partying, set for release later this year, is listed in the journal under the name The Party Gods. The similarly named The Party God is the closing track on Mother Of Mankind, a rarities compilation released by Andrew in 2010 . When Babalon, the first single for God Is Partying, was released on 7" vinyl back in February 2021, what song would appear as it’s B-Side? An instrumental version of The Party God titled… The Party Gods.)
From there, Andrew paints Album #6 (God Is Partying) as a further descent, “a feeling of upheaval and fear;” Album #7 as the lowest point, using “the most intense and dark minor key song ideas;” and Album #8 as a “phoenix rising from the ashes” and a “total and wide reaching synthesis […] from all albums over the entire odyssey.” And then, most ominously, Album #9 has no title or description, just a giant X over the entire page.
Obviously there’s no way Andrew planned his entire career from the off-set (though it wouldn’t surprise me if Andrew had a much looser idea in his head of where all this was going), but the things that are happening now with Andrew are all laid out in there, which also makes sense if Andrew did write this in 2020 as he would have been neck-deep in getting this new album ready for mass consumption.
Part of me wants to imagine that may have been Andrew’s actual raison d’etre for writing and “leaking” the journal: to give the die-hards a heads up that shit was about to get weird. It’s also possible that Andrew wanted to paint a trajectory. After all, him laying out his entire career before it had started is absolutely outrageous, but the journal goes beyond 2021. The “eras” end in 2032. “God Is Partying” is Andrew’s sixth album (technically) but there’s that nine album plan. While it’s doubtful Andrew had all this planned from the beginning, the journal, if it’s real, is attempting to do something similar. Laying out the eras, laying out the album plan, Andrew is instead setting himself a finish line. Perhaps not even just for himself but for us, the die-hard fans, too.
Now, there’s a goal. A destination.
Whenever artists release a record it’s a journey in and of itself. Typically when bands do multi-part album cycles they’re up front about it (as with Coheed And Cambria’s The Amory Wars or a handful of other examples), or it’s only when a band has wrapped up their discography that a trajectory could be mapped out post-mortem, even if it’s something that’s unique in the mind of each listener.
Now, Andrew W.K. has done both. He’s being up front about the fact that this is a set journey (or as up front about anything as Andrew could ever be, which is of course, by presenting it completely shrouded in doubt and mystery), but also retroactively assigning his previous five albums into the fold of this specific journey.
So while it may seem like Andrew has shifted focus away from his superhero “Party God” persona, the truth is that this has always been Andrew. Andrew has always had a Jungian shadow archetype waiting in the wings, in the man known as Steev Mike (another aside for those who may never have noticed: Steev Mike is listed as an Executive Producer on every single one of Andrew’s records). If these hypothetical nine records are a journey, then the journey is very clear; Andrew is going to have to confront his shadow self, in the form of Steev Mike. “God Is Partying” may feel like a shift, or a left-hand turn, but this has always been the road we were travelling on with Andrew W.K. whether we knew it or not.
“God Is Partying” is set for release on September 10th, 2021.
