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Andrew W.K.: I Get Wet

Let me get it out of the way and welcome everyone who clicked here with the sole hope of witnessing Pitchfork's biggest statistical mea culpa ever. Ten years is a long time for sour grapes to ferment, and I hope they're delicious. Perhaps you've heard that we were not particularly kind to Andrew W.K. the first time around. I obviously disagree with Ryan Schreiber's initial assessment, but even if it weren't poor form to publicly air out your boss for opinions he held a decade prior, I'm in no position to judge. I, too, am trying to live down an equally regrettable (if far more obscure) review of I Get Wet for a student newspaper that went in the completely opposite direction, praising it not so much for its musical value as its ability to combine with Adderall and Keystone Ice to form an outgoing college senior's Holy Trinity of nihilistic intoxication. It was and is a record that inspires extreme reactions. And a lot of us seemingly did I Get Wet a great disservice trying to intellectualize it from both sides. Now here we are 10 years later and nothing has changed about the record except our relationship to it. Even though critics of Andrew W.K. were often branded as the fun police and his fans considered fools or incurable ironists, I Get Wet is a singular record, and your opinion of it can't possibly make a larger point about anything else. It just is.

It was one of the last great bizarre major label experiments. Coming at a time when the New Rock Revolution was meant to depose nu-metal, it was staunchly anti-intellectual, undeniably a commercial flop, and yet, you've heard it nearly everywhere. A full decade later, Andrew W.K. maintains enough pop culture juice to end up on TV with striking frequency. Musically, I Get Wet started no trends and influenced no one. It's often scoffed at as one of the dumbest records ever made, but I've heard equally compelling and cogent arguments comparing it to Daft Punk's Discovery in how its treats euphoria as an actual musical genre.

It is not a work of fascinating contradictions, deceptive layers, or idiot savant genius. But do you want to turn a record whose first song is called "e;It's Time to Party"e; into an academic work? Many, including Andrew W.K. himself, have tried to frame "e;party"e; as a metaphorical device or a Zen philosophy, but come the fuck on: It does nothing new in any technical sense if you've been in a basketball arena at any point in your life. And still, the only response to hearing the initial detonation of guitars, kick drums, and fake orchestra hits from "e;It's Time to Party"e; is, "e;What the fuck is this?"e; Or to backflip into a kegstand, after which the next 90 seconds should not be spent around any breakable or flammable home furnishings. "e;Party Hard"e; is the next song and upon first exposure, the two may seem like the five greatest minutes of music you've ever heard. 

Whether you consider these songs to be brilliant, brilliantly dumb, or just dumb, I Get Wet is necessarily simple. Though placed in the lineage of hair metal, there's almost no technical flash, no power ballads, not even a single minor chord. The trickiest modulation happens on the chorus to "e;Girls Own Love"e;, which may or not just be a Hysteria deep cut played at twice the speed. The vocal harmonies of "e;Party Hard"e; are stacked so thick that the melody barely moves, making it the easiest and best karaoke song ever. Even if "e;Party Hard"e; had lyrics about anything else, it would still be a keg-rock legend based on its riffs alone-- they're the four best on I Get Wet, which makes them the four best of that year. But unlike those from, say, White Blood Cells, they just sound wrong banged out on one guitar. The impossible number of vocal and guitar overdubs on "e;Take It Off"e; pushes it beyond even shoegaze incomprehensibility. You simply can't divorce the sensational effect of I Get Wet from its emotional one, and the music truly is the message: "e;It's Time to Party"e; immediately triggers I Get Wet's enduring effect, the same pit-in-the-stomach feeling of boarding a roller coaster, asking someone out, or looking at your bank account after a particularly brutal weekend. It's thrilling, it's nauseating, there's no going back.

But while I Get Wet is the perfect Andrew W.K. album, it's in no way a perfect album. For one thing, there are the songs that actually try to make some sort of coherent statement and could potentially take on some sort of post-9/11 relevance ("e;I Love NYC"e;, "e;Ready to Die"e;). But they thrash about as blissfully unaware as "e;Party Hard"e; because they make absolutely no sense. Many hear I Get Wet as a record of unintentional comedy, but "e;I Love NYC"e; falls into the realm of intentional comedy because I don't even think it's about New York City. Or any city. "e;She Is Beautiful"e; and "e;Girls Own Love"e; are both hilariously bereft of any kind of eroticism, women viewed as mere vessels for expressions of male lust and yet beyond all comprehension. They're songs Barbie and Ken might fuck to. Point being that, for an album that supposedly steamrolls any talk of nuance, it has some pretty mundane issues. And the second half is much weaker than the first. If you don't believe me, ask anyone who's shown up to the I Get Wet 10-year anniversary shows 20 minutes late. (Dude loves to party but he's remarkably punctual.)

Part of that is inevitable since any record that starts with "e;It's Time to Party"e; and "e;Party Hard"e; doesn't leave much room to build on an upward trajectory. But while "e;Party Til You Puke"e; is the culmination of I Get Wet's "e;Party"e; trilogy, it's also the tipping point where the thought of past, present, or future partying becomes unbearably oppressive. The sheer velocity of its call and response vocals renders it a monolithic yell of "e;CHUG,"e; and immediately afterwards, "e;Fun Night"e; is that guy handing you a rally beer at the toilet when all you can say is "e;not now, bro."e; "e;Got to Do It"e; is "e;Girls Own Love"e; seen through the eye of a tiger, and though I've owned this record for nearly a decade, to this day I still can't remember what the title track sounds like. To its credit, "e;Don't Stop Livin' in the Red"e; is pretty much the only way this record could end, and it's nice to see it get him some Target ad money even though it's almost impossible to imagine its, um, suggestive cover appearing in the superstore's sales racks. So I suppose there's irony somewhere in all this.

As far as the reissue goes, it's worth exploring whether or not you're amongst Andrew's white-denimed minions. There's a batch of live tracks that are curiously and intentionally recorded in a way that Andrew W.K. once described to me as what he hears when he's on stage. I'd say the demos and alternate takes are far more intriguing since the idea of I Get Wet ever existing as demos is hilarious-- just imagine Andrew W.K. hunched over an acoustic guitar trying to finish "e;We do what we like…"e; with the right lyric. 

If you're 20 years old and haven't heard I Get Wet yet, go ahead and enjoy it while you can. But I won't convince you that it matters in a larger sense even though the ostensible goal of any reissue, particularly in the case where the original isn't out of print, is to edify or reassess. That's unnecessary with I Get Wet. Not much Andrew W.K. did or could do after the record would redeem, justify, or vindicate your original opinion of it. About a year and a half after it failed to set the charts ablaze, The Wolf happened, and while it's a perfectly fine record, its value is entirely manifested in its utility for expert-level trolling; surely on a message board somewhere, someone is taking great satisfaction in his opinion that it's better than I Get Wet.

Andrew W.K. did go on to make other records on a much smaller and cultishly followed scale, which was likely meant to happen from day one. In spite of the utter lack of separation between Andrew Wilkes-Krier and his living, breathing party persona, neither appears to have aged a day in the past decade, which perhaps confirms the record's totemic, unyielding nature. Because really, while my life has changed significantly since my first exposure to I Get Wet and I maybe spin this record once a year, I still don't think there's ever been an album that does a better job, while it's actually playing, of convincing me it's the only music I'll ever need for the rest of my life.