I'm really lucky to have the friends I've got because it means I have an ever-present source of music-related news to consume and (sometimes) slowly digest. As a result, I don't travel very deep into the realm of the blogo-music-sphere. In fact, it's not uncommon for me to miss shit by months or years. And unfortunately, I have lots of facepalm moments where I am introduced or stumble across a sick act that I then realize I had heard about and passed up just months earlier, or sometimes years earlier. So yeah, this post is about Andrew W.K.
Well, I guess it's not totally about him. It's about how his first album, I Get Wet scared me away with its drippiness and I only just last week started to regret it. I kind of started to get a clue that all was not as it (bloody) seemed when I went to see Ted Leo & Rx's karaoke night and a super down-to-earth and all around nice guy Andrew W.K. was emceeing the event. Then the awesome Disgrasian blog posted about an album of j-pop cover songs. I should go ahead and just quote the man from his website:
I had never really heard music like this… At first it was hard for me to believe that these were the biggest hit songs in Japan - they sound so different from hit songs in the western world. But as I learned the songs and translated the lyrics, I fell in love with them and understood their appeal.The album? It's effing awesome. Produced for the Japanese market, the thing unfortunately doesn't have distribution stateside. However, with some digging, you may be able to find it. And when you do, you'll find that j-pop standards translate super well into Andrew W.K.'s brand of party-metal. And once you've finished listening to the thing on repeat for a day or two, you may find like I did, that you have an itch to search out the source material. Which brings me to part 2 of this post: The Blue Hearts, who's track, Linda Linda, is included on AWK's cover album.
Debuting with their self-titled album in 1987, these guys apparently enjoyed some pretty mainstream success, with a couple of their songs even becoming classics (read: karaoke staples). Being a relative late-comer to the punk genre, I'll admit right here that I haven't got a very comprehensive understanding of punk history... but I can tell you that these guys are sick as hell. Lasting for 8 years and 7 albums has to count for something, right? There's also something to be said about having a movie written about a group of school girls learning to play covers of your punk songs. Anyway, on to the obligatory youtube embed:
Did you think I'd leave you without a tangible (audible?) sample of The Blue Hearts awesomeness? You were wrong.
Linda Linda - Andrew W.K.
Linda Linda - The Blue Hearts
