Ween is an alternative rock duo that started putting out albums in the early ’90s and, much to my delight, is still together and touring. They have not, however, released any new material since 2007 and La Cucaracha, the band’s ninth full-length LP, and I haven’t heard any talk of any writing or recording taking place by the pair, at that.
And it’s certainly easy to make this into a discussion of economic incentive, obviously, as musicians’ material is basically bastardized in streaming, made available for next to nothing for just about anyone, with just one click.
Ween is also a very special case for several other reasons. As regards me in particular, I happened to hate them, pretty much, when I first heard them. I mean, they were basically making fun of a kid who had spinal meningitis. And they had this other song in which the only lyrics were “AIDS!” and “HIV!” It seemed they definitely had a lot of growing up to do and I’ve never really been the type to indulge in the deliberately puerile sectors of our music industry (see Adam Sandler, Afroman, Tenacious D, roughly).
Under what ended up being a kind of steady mounting of force by continual positive, raving reviews of them I’d get from various friends, publications and whatnot, I eventually decided to burn the Quebec (2003) CD from the library and give it a shot. I sat back and let it rip, becoming much pleasantly surprised as “It’s Gonna Be a Long Night” took a punk rock form. This was back in my heavy Nirvana/Primus days so the opener on Quebec marked sort of a revelation for me.
Track two, “Zoloft,” did anything, then, but simplify my relationship with this band. This is basically a song which actively chastises the enterprises of taking SSRI’s, or anti-depressants, and, crazily enough, Zoloft is the exact drug I was being prescribed when I heard this song. “Zoloft” is further compounded as a really funny experience for me because I’ve never even found it to be a good song — I don’t think it’s on a single one of the 560 Spotify playlists I’ve made. But it always stuck with me. There was no other band doing sh** like this — that’s for sure — with the double narrative of a de facto drug advertisement with the superego-laden protagonist counterpoint issuing cautioning statements against the drug like “Don’t suck the mind / Don’t drain the source / The path of life’s not so / Easy to course buddy”. To make matters even more bizarre, the band saw fit to cloak the moral reasoning hemishpere of this binary in this singularly weird vocal effect that made the prevailing sentiment to be delivered in this high, chirpy and undeniably weird vocal. And it hurt me, to be honest, that the band were apparently so adept at obliterating the value of the drug I was on, and which was helping me out, mentally, to be honest. But I have to admit — I was listening. No other band was doing sh** like this and the result was cerebral and thought-provoking, employing the kind of discursive complexity and integrity which are certainly dying breeds in rock lyrics today. More than likely, Ween just don’t feel like they fit in within today’s landscape, which is so dominated by reductive, uniform themes of romance and conquest.
And, sure — to an increased extent, when I listen to Ween, it just seems like a matter of a set of artists who just GAVE MORE into their work than the average. Quebec, to be sure, is not an album you’ll ever forget, once you hear it. It toggles from a hardcore punk ditty about beating someone up and cutting them all night, to that kooky public service announcement about anti-depressants, to the relatively approachable classic rock of “Transdermal Celebration” to “Among His Tribe”; which is probably the trippiest song in history not called “Captain” and not by Pink Floyd. For all the apparent schizophrenia in the band’s m.o. of juxtaposing a hard, fast punk song with all this ridiculously noodle-y and ephemeral psychedelia, the project is still anchored by “Happy Colored Marbles” and “Chocolate Town”; two classic alt-rock songs in the vein of, say, Marcy Playground and Supergrass, clumsily. They employ not only a multiplicity of genres, on Quebec, but also a plurality of dispositions, from comedic, to concerned, to metaphoric and back again, and, continually, it just seems like a task so daunting and memorable that no other band even sees fit to try to mimic it. Attempting to emulate Ween, that is, would exemplify an exercise in futility and would garner the most claims of contrivance, since their strategy in putting together an album conceptual and stylistically unchained. For this, they should be recognized as deserving of compensation for their art.
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