God Is Partying

About

When Andrew W.K. burst onto the cultural landscape with his 2001 debut <i>I Get Wet</i>, the perpetually white-clad musician proclaimed his love of partying loudly and proudly on relentlessly upbeat synth-rock tracks like “It’s Time to Party,” “Party Hard,” and “Party Til You Puke.” Two decades later, he’s projected his proclivities upon the heavenly realm. “There’s a through line of optimistic negation in these tracks,” he tells Apple Music. “It’s a pessimistic kind of hopefulness that declares that life is not absurd—despite what we’ve heard—and urges the development of a personal, positive paranoia about the nauseating number of potential parties you could never hope to attend, or even know about. In this way, the album is about having fun, hanging out, and partying harder than ever.” Below, he gives a philosophical interpretation of each track. <b>“Everybody Sins”</b> “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.” <b>“Babalon”</b> “Something can be both flawed and good, and like nearly everything else in life, it’s overly simplistic to say ‘Babalon’ is an either/or sort of song. Most of the Andrew W.K. songs contain both good and bad parts in them, much to my chagrin.” <b>“No One to Know”</b> “The average person seems to have an unquenchable thirst for exploring the shadowy side of the human spirit. This might explain why people watch TV shows about serial killers more than shows about soup kitchens. But some of the people who make these TV shows vastly overestimate the importance of the shadowy aspects of life. At the same time, some of those same people would be horrified to see what’s actually happening inside the feelings of [the people in] the show they’re putting on. It’s really the opposite of emptiness.” <b>“Stay True to Your Heart”</b> “I'm having a party, and I'm inviting the whole world. The invitation is bright and fun and beautiful and positive, and once you come inside you can see that the whole world is in there with you, and all beauty and joy and ugliness and suffering and light and shadow is in there, too. And it’s harsh. And it’s orgasmic. And this is the world. And this is the mission. And we will stay true to it.” <b>“Goddess Partying”</b> “In order for this work to convey the feelings it’s ultimately meant to conjure, it had to make my own life feel that way. You can't make that feeling for your audience unless you yourself have become that feeling. I must have made direct contact with it back in my start, and then allowed it to invade me, penetrate me, and impregnate me. I guess I really turned myself over to it. It wasn’t easy to do, nor pleasant to do, which is why I guess most people don't do it. That’s why I never did it, either.” <b>“I'm in Heaven”</b> “I’m in hell. In case you couldn’t tell.” <b>“Remember Your Oath”</b> “How a magic trick is done is almost never as interesting as wondering how the trick is done. It's even less interesting to be spoon-fed the secret behind the illusion versus working it out for oneself. Explaining everything essentially kills the effect—it becomes a dead experience. If things are allowed to remain unresolved, a powerful and unnerving level of tension and potential energy can build up in the audience's psyche. It's this vital, vibrating uneasiness that holds within it the experience of a deeper truth—a feeling that’s stronger and more profound than any intellectual explanation could generate.” <b>“My Tower”</b> “It's about having the highest amount of fun at the lowest level possible.” <b>“And Then We Blew Apart”</b> “It’s easy to view many of life’s issues as false dichotomies. If the world generally appears to offer only a choice between A or B, can we choose the rest of the alphabet? When someone says there’s only a choice between us or them, can we choose humanity? When someone says there’s only a choice between high or low, can we choose subversive transcendence? And when someone says there’s only a choice between life and death, can we choose love? Who knows?” <b>“I Made It”</b> “I was shown a vision at a relatively young age. It's been my life's work to realize that vision and show it to as many people as can see it. I've been as loyal to this vision as possible, even at the expense of loyalty to other people—and even myself.” <b>“Not Anymore”</b> “This is actually an older song that used to be called ‘I Sold My Soul,’ but now they had us reconfigure it for this bonus track. My mind was quite twisted in a lot of the recording situations from this era. I was ingesting a lot of mephedrone at that time. I did ‘M&M’ a lot—that’s mephedrone and mushrooms. It was intense.”

via Apple Music