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Originally Posted by pepper_green
being a Ween fan is a certain state of mind. otherwise they come off as dorky and disposable, but they aren't. it's very dark and enlightening. you just have to get there. of course it's funny but it's mocking and beyond. the opposite of someone making fun of your favorite band and getting mad about it. I mean "Don't Get Too Close to my Fantasy" is about child molestation. how sick is that? pretty fucking sick!!! and not in a good way but they got the songwriting craft down packed. so it's serious I guess which is even sicker, that's why they got fat and hooked on drugs. it's a Boognish thang.
er, I say Quebec is great to start off with. it has "The Argus" and "Captain". Mort u must at least listen to those songs. 12 Golden Country Hits is also fun.
Primus and They Might be Giants can go drown.
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Agreed all around. Don't forget "Zoloft", one of their most perfect moments, and a great tune for the uninitiated.
Yeah, totally sick. That's true. I picked up on the oft-referred to "scariness" of Ween long before I actually got into them. Someone told me they were basically the most disturbing, fucked up band ever, and I didn't need to be convinced. All I needed to do was look at the cover of the Pod, which despite being based on the 1975 Best of Leonard Cohen cover, with almost nothing added to it, still manages to give me the fucking chills for some reason.
Also song titles, the apparent NEED for obscenity, these were the things that stuck in my mind about Ween, the things that made me totally believe that their music was going to be fucked.
And yeah, a lot of it is. They are scary. One of my favorite songs of theirs, "Spinal Meningitis" (which coincidentally has a very proto-QOTSA chorus) is so goddamn fucked up man... the distorted voice of a "child" with a terrible illness whining "it really hurts mommy/ am I gonna die?" is no less disturbing for the gitty retarded Ren & Stimpy chimes that enfold the skeletal verse.... If the chorus didn't bring the rock I'd have a hard time listening to it.
But the truth is that they're also a benevolent force in music. They're not *truly* scary like Idaho backwoods KKK hardcore bands or Billy Joel. They're like the perfect model of art imitating life imitating art, and everything they did they did with the intention of challenging and expanding our ideas of what music should be. They were true experimentalists, like Sonic Youth, like Aphex Twin, like Zappa and Beefheart and Brian Eno and Lou Reed.
I hate having to explain why I like Ween, because to me it feels as natural as liking Sonic Youth or the Flaming Lips or any of the other artists I mentioned. I like them because I like fucked up music, and I like pop music, and I like it when the two meet and shake hands and do a little dance and then chop one another's heads off. I love experimentation and unexpected sounds and inimitable artists, and that's what Ween's about.
Duh.