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 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 debut single, Party Hard, was ostensibly everything that post-9/11 society could not tolerate, particularly if viewed in tandem with its video: dressed in grubby whites like some anti-Messiah, in the mirror of a sinister, strip-lit bathroom the singer inspects deep facial cuts; a robot voice gabbles: “When-it’s-time-to-party-we-will-party-hard”. Then begins an adrenalin shot of pop-metal whose chant of ‘Let’s get a party going!’ seemed deeply out of place amid the debris and body bags.
