Alright, this is bullshit. I've had it. Is this what we've been reduced to? Michigan metalheads copping ESPN Jock Jams*, capitalizing on the shameful worst of the 1980s and bellowing incessantly about the wondrous virtues of the all-nighter? Rock critics who dissed this entire genre in its heyday now glorifying its second coming as somehow superior? If this is what the future of music has in store for us, why no apocalypse on New Year's Eve '99? Doesn't God care? Shit, maybe Y2K really* was Armageddon, launching us headfirst into a great black xFC-metal abyss, and maybe Andrew W.K. is just the first of four pending horsemen.

And that, boys and girls, was about all I could muster on March 20th, just as the stormclouds began to crash together for what would soon spin into a torrential whirlwind of one-sheets and NMEs-- maybe one of the scariest hypes this planet's ever seen. I was overwhelmed!

But now it's July, and almost as quickly as he arrived, Andrew Wilkes-Krier has been rudely ushered off the Apollo soundstage and scribbled as a footnote into history's textbook of rock novelties. Been months since I last heard "Party Hard" on the radio or saw WK thrashing about on M2 like a hyperactive retarded kid whose parents failed to give him a disciplinary shaking. If it hadn't been for this meddling CD-R I was sent by Island Records' promotions team, I might already have forgotten the guy. Ahh, but yes, in due time. I take immense comfort in the realization that, at some distant point in the future, I won't be able to recall any of I Get Wet, and whether that'll be due to its legitimate forgetability or a future struggle with Alzheimer's I don't much care, so long as I never again have to envision his mangy "RAW is WAR" hairswath (wash it!), or listen to these unshakable cro-magnon shoutathons. And so, this is where I get to say that, as evidenced in italics above, I almost told you so.

A few weeks prior to my first attempt at taking down this sorry sack, my old pal Brent DiCrescenzo, who as a culture addict spends a fair bit of his spare time scouring the British music rags, had swung by to write up the Promise Ring's Wood/Water. He'd read about I Get Wet in Mojo or something, and saw it amongst the promo stacks on my windowsill. "Have you heard this?"

Now, Brent and I like to hook up and get cynical from time to time-- we'll even bash the bands we're into just for shits-- so I was patiently waiting for D to reel one off so I could start in, casting to the wind that fact that I, in fact, hadn't yet heard it. "It's pretty funny, it's basically these huge guitar riffs, sort of soccer anthems." He quickly unloaded Von Bohlen from the disc-changer (well into Wood/Water's second half, any excuse would have sufficed) and tossed in the CD-R. Instantly, blaring multitracked guitars and shooting-range stadium drums came accosting. I tried to yell something, but my exclamation was swallowed by the immense wind-tunnel attack of the clenched-fist maelstrom.

"WHAT?"

It was hopeless. Nothing could penetrate a sound that dense. I was overcome. I tried to remember the last time anyone dared to push rock so poppily over the top, and figured it must have been some time around Hysteria. I sat rapt by the simple barbarity of that sound, Andrew barking adamantly over the exploding plastic fury. The gall! WK demanded respect, whether he deserved it or not. His conviction was startling, and the sound so scrutinously polished it lapped itself back into rawness. Indeed, it was time to party.

The party, as it just so happened, lasted all of three minutes-- appropriately, about the same lifespan as a pinch of Big League Chew. For this was bubblegum in its purest, stickiest form, designed for the sole purpose of imminent pop. To be packaged, marketed, and shipped by a grand corporation, and to be enjoyed by the consumer for a few moments before being spit or swallowed. I spat, and with the poisonous substance expelled from my system, I saw it for what it is:

I Get Wet is an insidious beast, planting itself into the deepest instinctual recesses of your brainstem, where it instantly detonates in a visceral adrenal charge. There is suddenly no respect for proper behavior, just the urge to turn acrobatic flips and smash everything within a fifty-foot radius. You're Genghis Khan in the San Dimas Sportmart somersaulting over Nike racks to the Slippery When Wet synth-metal of Beethoven's Schmidt Music foray into Bachman-Turner Overdrive. And then you wake up the next morning, hazy-headed and groggy, humiliated by the preceding night's incidents. Don't blame yourself. This music is evil in its purest form, wafting through air, waiting to possess every decent person in the entire room until they're flat on their backs in bed, wrists tied to the headboard, with drunken priests standing holy at their sides to exorcise the demon.

And the demon is a tricky sonofabitch, spinning you in circles of confusion and chanting its life-affirming message to brainwash you into truly believing, right to the core of your soul, that what it speaks is the Good Truth. Read any interview with WK (they're all the same-- just like the songs!) in which he spews naïve positivity like dad's warbly old self-help cassettes. There is no irony about Andrew. He is, in fact, so earnest it sends any straight-thinking individual into epileptic fits of shivers and winces. For christ's sake, the man opens the second paragraph of his self-writ bio with "I will work every day to feel O.K." before finally getting around to calling the music "perfect" because "all it wants is for people to be happy." LIES!

This here is about as empty as rock music gets, right down to the tinny, digitally processed tonebank noise that passes for 'guitars.' You think otherwise? Then let's have a moment to look at the obvious points of reference-- the songs and bands to which I Get Wet rightfully owes a sizable chunk of its royalties:

Def Leppard: "Pour Some Sugar on Me"

Oooooh, in the name of love! This one boomed from your older sister's boyfriend's Thunderbird all 1987 long. You'd look out on the driveway with envy from your bedroom window. Dude is BAD!, you'd mouth, examining just exactly the angle and velocity at which he'd bang that head, his bleached-blonde mane tossing about in a fire-eyed, glorious salute to Rick Allen's one-armed colossus. But that one time he drove you to your girlfriend's house and you excitedly rummaged through his tapes, you saw truth in his glove compartment: this guy only listened to Def Leppard! And you turned to him wondering, "Hey, don't you have any real rock in here?" And that's when he stomped the brake and charlie-horsed your bicep with the force of ten silverbacks.

Gary Glitter: "Rock & Roll, Part Two"

You know this one, even if you don't know it by name. Bah-badahhhhhh-- HAY! Bah-badah. And repeat. That's all there is to this one, kiddies. You hear it at soccer games. Maybe football half-times, too, or anywhere there's a bunch of boneheaded fools spraying each other with keg nozzles in fits of homoerotic glory. "HAY!," the song's sacred battle cry, really drives home the victory, even when the hometeam gets their ass handed to 'em by Kansas City. You only need to hear one bar of this song to know it forward and back for the rest of your days. It also screams "beer" louder than any Anheiser-Busch logo or beef-eating Steelers fan un-pantsing himself to reveal a secret team-praising message on his pimpled asscheeks.

Baha Men: "Who Let the Dogs Out?"

A song whose chorus roused Arsenio crowds and 6-year-olds with the life-bending lyric, "OOF! OOF! OOF OOF!" Like an inescapable, overlong Geico commercial booming from Jeeps, Escalades and Honda Civics across this nation's every city, "Who Let the Dogs Out?" was at once your worst nightmare and the everyman's personal nirvana. If this song had a verse, it was added as an afterthought to give this asinine catchphrase the illusion of being an actual song. And it's not over yet: I'm thinking three months tops before we see it pushing Beggin' Strips between 'boot camp' segments on Maury.

Hmm, incriminating. Not the kind of legacy one works toward securing, and certainly not the kind of music you'd find in the collection of any self-respecting rock elitist. In fact, if I knew a rock elitist with this record, I'd smack them up 'long side the head, 'cause who the fuck are you to tell me I can't own the Sophie B. Hawkins "Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover" CD5 when just last week you subjected the entire fucking interstate to "Fun Night"? I'll cripple ya!

And yet, some of these 'punk' and 'indie' kids are still willing to back WK up with a number of ridiculous excuses that they deep-down know are inherently flawed. "It's catchy" is no kind of argument. Every pop song you've ever truly hated is catchy. "It's ironic" is wack, too, since there's exactly zero irony to be had on any of I Get Wet or in WK's motivational interviews. "It's fun" is about the only legitimate excuse a guy could come up with-- and that's the one thing I'll give it to warrant the .6 in the rating-- but this world of music which history has graced us with is loaded with fun music. Even fun music with substance, fun music that doesn't talk to you like you're some kinda total dipshit that wouldn't know Boredoms from buzzworthy. And you don't even have to look that hard! So then, what is the excuse for a typically elitist music nerd to bow to Andrew WK's blistering tard-rock? That's right, folks: there isn't one.