PARTY HARD BY ANDREW W.K.
IT’S OCTOBER 2001. One month has passed since the 9/11 terror attacks on New York. Grief and fury mix like a Molotov cocktail on the streets of America. George W Bush’s war machine rolls into Afghanistan to extract Osama Bin Laden, while back home, popular culture is defanged to soothe a raw nation, with a list of nearly 160 ‘lyrically inappropriate songs’ allegedly delivered to US radio stations. The West will spend the next decade looking over its shoulder. The party is over.
Andrew W.K. just wasn’t made for those times. His breakthrough single, , was ostensibly everything that post-9/11 society could not tolerate, particularly if viewed in tandem with its music video. Dressed in grubby whites like some anti-Messiah, the singer inspects deep facial cuts in the mirror of a sinister, strip-lit bathroom. A robot voice gabbles: . Then begins an adrenalin seemed deeply out of place amid the debris and body bags.
