Ween - GodWeenSatan

  by Jeff Thiessen

published: 19 / 3 / 2009

intro

In the latest in our 'Soundtrack of Our Lives' column, in which our writers reflect on the personal impact of music on their lives, Jeff Thiessen writes about discovering Ween's anarchic 'GodWeenSatan' as a college student

My name is Jeff Thiessen. I write about rock n’ roll, and for as long as I can remember, I have wrote that Ween’s 'GodWeenSatan: The Oneness' album is the best rock n’ roll album ever released. It changed my life, and while it probably won’t change yours, at the very least, it will give you a swift, and efficient way to clear out a party, should that be something you desire to do. How did it do so you ask? Well might as well start from the beginning, as it affects you (since you are reading this). For as long as I can remember, I have been a writer, but not until fairly recently (two, three years ago) did I actively start writing about music. Both have always been a consuming love of mine, but for whatever reason, I always had kept the worlds separate. In fact, other then short blurbs, I wrote about everything OTHER then music. Movies, religion, pop-culture, sociological theory, politics, interpersonal relationships, drugs......all of these I covered extensively, but for whatever reason, I kept my music off the page. I don’t necessarily see this as a negative thing, despite being a audio junkie I am well aware there is a world out there besides music, and I think like anything, to effectively write about music you have to consider it within the confines of the world it resides in, anything less thaen that and you’ll find yourself being painted into a corner tremendously fast. The thing is though, while I had a lot to say on paper, it was sort of a vanity thing, as I always found it extremely simple to write effective pieces through cool/detached prose. Basically I relished the feeling of writing for my peers in a manner that I believed would instil some aura of coolness into the College-Jeff persona, the post-dated Beatnik, anti-hero of the university newspaper. I also thought it would get me laid a lot. So I pranced around campus, fancying myself, you guessed it, a writer! I’m not sure if this was on a conscious level or not, but I was creating an identity of a sort of drunken poet laureate, without the social inadequacies that generally accompany such a label. I had all the bases covered. I knew I was good then, I know I’m good now, but the difference these days is I do it because I do not know any other way, whereas back then it was a convenient way to get away with being an asshole at parties: Host of party: “Did Jeff just shit in my purse and then actually ask me for a piece of gum ?” Random party-goer: “Yeah, dick move, I know. But it’s ok. He’s an eccentric writer”. Ok, truth be told, I never did anything that bad, but the point is, it let me be an idiot in a lot of ways because I was operating under the guise of being this intellectual giant, totally unconcerned with the trivialities or manners of everyday life, while in reality, I just wrote some funny material in 'The Sheaf' (name of our paper) about boobs and shrooms. Unfortunately there was nothing about the level of my writing that should have allowed me to have a get-out-of-jail-free card, yet it didn’t stop me acting like a total jerk and (in)advertantly burning a lot of bridges. All of this is beside the point, which is, I was a douchbag. And who knows, maybe I would have continued down this path, if not for 'GodWeenSatan'. One day in the Uni’s newspaper office, we all decided to do something different for the next week’s edition. All of us writers would draw album names out of a hat, and whatever we drew; we had to do a feature review on it. As luck would have it, I drew 'GodWeenSatan'. For those of you who don’t know, GodWeenSatan is the 1990 debut of the band Ween, a twenty-nine song opus (for shorthand purposes, I will be referring to the superior, more current deluxe edition of the album). At the time I knew a bit about Ween. My drunken friends liked to play 'Piss Up a Rope' a lot, and one of my buddies had a Chocolate and Cheese shirt. That was about the extent of my knowledge regarding the band. Still, I was happy with my selection, considering one of my colleagues drew a Soul Asylum record, while another had the pleasure of examining Metallica’s 'Reload' in great detail. After taking it home and putting it in, I distinctly remember taking a drink of root beer as the notes from the first song blasted through my speakers, the eloquently titled 'You Fucked Up', and I literally spat out that tasty A & W beverage on the verge of travelling down my oesophagus. Not because I was so transfixed by the brilliance of the opening track, but because I couldn’t believe how ridiculously abrasive it was. It really didn’t get any easier from there, as my sissy ears had no idea what they were in for. The nadir was 'Mushroom Festival in Hell', which sounds oddly like, if you were on mushrooms, and were in hell. I finished listening to this uncultivated, brilliant mess of an album, sat down to write about it, then abruptly realized I had no idea how to write about something like this. After staring blankly at my computer screen for upwards of forty minutes, I decided to play the record again. Then a funny thing happened. As the record started with the immortal 'You Fucked Up' yet again, I casually reached over and turned up the volume. This wasn’t a conscious effort, and it wasn’t till about halfway through the record that I realized I had continually inched the volume up until it sat at max volume. At that moment, when I started to accept the looming reality that I just can’t play this record loud enough, something changed in me: All the coolness I had (or thought I had) drained out in a split second. I played 'GodWeenSatan' constantly that night, over and over, until my ears actually started to ring. I was so in awe of everything that record just gave me, writing about it was the last thing on my mind. After the ringing finally began to subside, I eventually drifted asleep, only to awaken in a true Jerry Maguire-sque moment in the middle of the night, jump out of bed, and immediately start the Ween piece. Nothing was safe, nothing was sacred, and most importantly, nothing was cool about it. I just felt I had so much to say about this ridiculous berserker of a record that I didn’t know if I could ever step away from the computer. And to some extent, I didn’t, I wrote about 'GodWeenSatan' until early hours of morning, printed it off (all fourteen thousand words of it), and ran off to school to give it to my unsuspecting editor. On this particular day, self-awareness had dropped to nil, and even though I should have been well aware this particular piece wasn’t going to fly very well within the hip, rigid confines of 'The Sheaf', but suffice to say, I wasn’t thinking things through too carefully that day. The exchange went something like this: Me : “Hey here’s my piece on Ween! I think it’s really good!” Editor : “This is pretty long.....let me go read it” (Eighteen minutes pass) Editor : “No way we can print this, or any version of this. This is a piece of shit, Jeff” Me : “Ok, see ya!” It wasn’t like my pride or anything like that was hurt, it was nothing related to my ego at all actually. Honestly, my stinky dishevelled ass couldn’t have cared less what the paper did with it actually. I was just happy one person read it, and walking out of the office I knew there was something inside of me that had awoken, and it had nothing to do with finding something I was good at, and passionate about. Instead it had everything to do with the epiphany that left me basically in awe, of what one single album could drive me to do, and since then it has led me on a perpetual search to discover everything I felt on that one fateful day, and even when I don’t find it, the search can be more rewarding then the destination itself. In large part, it made such an impact on me because it sounded like, this is something I could have made. Of course I couldn’t have. Ween are two of the most prodigious musicians to ever crack mainstream music, but they never flaunt this, and as a result it really FEELS like this was something we all could make given the time and resources. At first glance this looks like a putdown, and to some elitistsit probably is, but even though the dynamics and sonic textures of every single nuance on the album are astronomically advanced and flawlessly crafted, it sounds like this journey through feedback, distortion, and Prince homages could probably have been made by you, or at least by someone you know. The Clash did the same thing. Nevermind they could out play absolutely anyone around at that time (save for the Stooges), and were some of the most talented players in the world, but their music sounded so simple and straight-forward that people started to believe they were just kind of messing around. This in turn, brought the fans closer to the band, believing that they weren’t uber-talented musicians light years ahead of everyone around them, instead choosing to label the band as ‘one of them’. See, I don’t think for a second that I could have created 'GodWeenSatan'. I’m not that delusional, but throughout the entirety of the album, the bridge between listener and artist isn’t just destroyed. It’s burnt to the core, leaving no remainder or for the matter, reminder it even existed in the first place. This despite the fact that the two band members have more of a musical IQ then any other collective band in the entire world. I’m a huge Ween fan, loving their whole catalogue, but nothing will ever top the sheer iron will of 'GodWeenSatan'. I mean it just refuses to fold into anything resembling a structure, and most importantly, it never feels intentional. Make no mistake, this whole album is a natural, fluid progression in excess, no idea seems misguided, and constructs a tremendous rock n’ roll record by deconstructing the institution to its core. This is something Sonic Youth never understood. I’m not interested in music stripped down and reshaped just because you have the right to do it, your prerogative or whatever. 'GodWeenSatan' tears down the sacred institution of rock n’ roll just by refusing to play by its unwritten rules, or to compromise even one of their creative impulses. In fact, when you consider that absolutely everything on the record is such an exercise in free-thinking on an epic scale, this might be akin to some of the best jazz releases we have had the privilege of listening to, and I would expand on that, if I didn’t feel that Squarepusher’s 'Music is One Rotted Note' is a more accurate representation of that description, but, in all honesty, I think 'GodWeenSatan' is much more punk then jazz, and the fact I’m even slightly on the fence with that assessment tells you just how brilliant an album we’re talking about here. If elitism must perish in rock n’ roll for it to truly take over the world (it never will, but bear with me for the sake of argument), then that means there must be no more wall between the listener and musician, instead with the music serving only as a catalyst to bring out the most pure representation of both parties, with the listener’s dedication and subsequent assimilation of the music into the path of their own life, proving to be just as relevant as the music itself This is why it’s easy for me to be fanatical about rock music/writing about it, after all these years, and not care about being broke, and feeling no guilt for spending $80 on import albums I listen to once then never again....it’s a no-lose situation, at least through my eyes. I never wrote again for the paper, instead preferring solo-drunken jaunts, blathering on about the many faces of Led Zeppelin, or the understated genius that is the lunacy of Mudhoney, all within the confines of my room and nobody reading it except for me. Ididn’t care, and the fact that nobody saw these things was beside the point, or precisely the point of it all. Jim Carroll once stated that the difference between a person who likes drugs, and a junkie, is when a normal person will try a drug and say “Wow, that was pretty amazing”, while a junkie will be pissed off and say “Ok, why haven’t I been doing this my entire life?” That’s sort of the best way I can describe how that one little ferociously inventive Ween record singlehandedly gave me the power and liberation to be content with hanging out in a very uncool, solitary room my whole life. It’s a room that stretches a thousand years wide.

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