Welcome to Flashion Forward, a new UI feature in which we endeavor to explore the ever-expanding universe of sonic style. Each week, we’ll pluck a recently added interview from our warehouse of current clips and try to read between the artist’s sartorial lines.
Fashion and music often make strange bedfellows, and while we won’t dare attempt to penetrate the existential mystery that is heinous rock dude’s inexplicable ability to bed every model west of the Volga River, we will take our greasy paws and grapple with more prosaic perplexities–such as trying to figure out WTF it is that these zany musicians are strapping onto their carcasses these days and what it implies about their musical POA.
Take Andrew W.K.: Unshaven (a sexy, not shady effect), with long, slicked-back hair and an all-white ensemble comprised of what appears to be a blood-stained T-shirt (emblazoned with his name, always classy) and stovepipe whites jeans (a dangerous move, but he pulls it off). He looks–rather endearingly–like troubled metal head circa 1988 who sniffs too much glue, harmlessly flirts with Satan worship and is every popular high school girl’s secret object of desire, a fact he happily capitalizes on while their boyfriends are busy slapping each other’s butts at football practice.
Andrew’s oblique, fanciful references to homicide/suicide/general violent mayhem (the blood), purity (the white) and silliness (his name) go hand in hand with his musical and performance-style M.O. Andrew shows there’s substance behind his style, explaining that selling his soul excites him and even going so far as to vaguely hint that getting involved in infomercials that “dazzle” may be in his future.
For a man who puts out albums with titles like I Get Wet, tours with the Ozzfest, briefly hosted a show on MTV2, enjoys the unique joy of seeing one’s music appear on classic soundtracks like Girls Gone Wile Music Volume 1, was dubbed “truly cute” by Time Magazine, lectures at Yale and Carnegie Mellon and appears on NPR, Andrew is the apotheosis of high-low-brow coolness.
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