If you were forced to live on a desert island with only a record/CD player, what albums would you take with you? I've played this game a hundred times, both online and IRL. I think I have my list pretty well figured out at this point, but since we've got a whole year together on this here blog, I figure this will give me a little more space to explain my picks.
1. I Get Wet - Andrew W.K.
I'm not putting this first because it's my favorite album of all time. I'm doing it because I forget about it sometimes, and I refuse to do that this time, because I Get Wet is far and away the most fun album I've ever heard.
This is the first CD I bought that didn't include the words "Now" or "Radio Disney" in the title. I heard "Party Hard" on Madden 2003; after playing the game hundreds of hours and allowing AWK's pure adrenaline rush to bludgeon me for months, I finally made the leap: I asked my mom to take me to Target to buy it.
In the decade and a half since I Get Wet's release, Andrew W.K. has proven to be a far more eccentric and interesting fellow than the brain-dead self-wounding party animal that appears on his debut album's cover. But public persona aside, AWK's musical philosophy is much the same as his life philosophy: do what you want, live your life, and love pretty much everything.
He's a purer, goofier, less nuanced version of a stereotypical hippie, and his unrelenting positivity is all over I Get Wet. Even "Ready to Die," with its chorus of "You'd better get ready to die/You'd better get ready to kill/You'd better get ready to run/'Cause here we come," blazes ahead as if our untimely demise was just another part of the all-night rager - which, given that cover photo, it very well could be.
I have listened to this album countless times and am 99 percent certain that not a single minor chord is played at any point. Maybe that was a conscious decision, but if it was, it's the most subtle artistic decision made on I Get Wet. There isn't a whole lot of room for subtlety on an album with eleventy billion guitar tracks stacked to the heavens and an army of party gremlins shouting along to every chorus. From the rocket-fueled opener "It's Time to Party" all the way through the closing anthem "Don't Stop Living in the Red" (although to be fair, pretty much every song on I Get Wet is designed to be an anthem) each note is an adrenaline rush coated in sugar, dipped in a 5-Hour Energy, and finished with a splash of 4 Lokos.
Like any candy high, too much of I Get Wet and you might get a headache. But for a half hour at a time, nothing will change your mood for the better/wilder the way I Get Wet will. And if I'm going to be stuck on a desert island for an infinite length of time, that's something I'm certainly going to need.
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