Cons: Inept singing, inept lyric-writing, inept song composition, inept arranging, inept playing. Hence only four stars.
The Bottom Line: Wesley Willis recorded thousands of songs. These 22 were hand-picked, after aura analysis from specially reincarnated Chinese monks, plus months of rigorous scientific testing, by some dude named Jello.
voxpoptart's Full Review: Greatest Hits by Wesley Willis
My song tonight, what I’m gonna do is
(1) I’m gonna rock my Casio pre-sets straight up your nostrils.
(2!) I’m gonna rock my Casio through your nose and all the way into your brain! And
(3!) I’m gonna fuuck your brain up like it won’t know from “meter” or “rhyme” ever again! And number
(4!) I’m gonna fuuck your brain up like a 300-pound man with a fuucking 50-pound carving knife!! And
(5!) All you need is love! Love is all you need.
Wesley Willis was a really excitable shouter! He could really belt it out. He was the greatest one of all.
Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis!
He kept on jangling on that guitar chord he knew. He kept grooving over that kickdrum you could barely hear. He kept trying to find those notes, and the white man kept hiding them. But which white man? Not Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley was a great rock and roller.
Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis! He was loud.
Wesley Willis played the Washington Street T stop in Chicago. About two dozen people watched his show. The fiasco was terrific; the fiasco was a jam. Some of the people had record contracts and let him have them. The shouter played on. The guitar chord was perfect. The trains were on time. The show was excellent.
Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis!
Sometimes he played the keyboard. He knew three notes on his keyboard! I think he even knew four. Maybe five! He liked three of them a lot.
Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis!
His yelling got him kicked out of MTV’s field of awareness. He freaked out a lot of customers; he also said “suck my dick” in front of a lot of people. Then he felt awful. So he sang some real notes in a funny hi-pitched voice like a country-western David Thomas. I mean the David Thomas who sang for Pere Ubu. Pere Ubu were a New Wave band! They made funny noises, and they rocked. David Thomas from Wendy’s sold meat that makes you fat.
Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis!
Wesley Willis made a lot of records. He made dozens and dozens of records. Jello Biafra collected 22 of his songs and called them Greatest Hits and put them on an hour-long cd. Three of the songs had a real band on them. They were loud metal or funk or funk-rock songs. They had fast drums. Those drums were perfect. Those drums were right on.
Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis!
Some people think Jello Biafra stole money from his acts. Some people think that’s a mean thing to say. Jello Biafra was a good punk rocker who could sing his asss off to the max.
Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis! Wesley Willis!
Rock over London, rock on, Chicago.
Lucky Strike cigarettes: Reach for a lucky, instead of a sweet.
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”When in 1964 Mario Savio implored the gathered crowd at Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, his language was direct but strikingly G-rated, as G-rated as the ‘Be Clean for Gene’ antiwar campaigners would be four years later in trying to stop the crushing autopropelled overdrive of the Pentagon’s bombs-for-peace plan for Vietnam. ‘There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!’: those were his actual words. Yet as they were transmuted by a malign game of haunted telephone, they were eventually quoted to America as ‘TEAR THE MOTHERFUUCKER DOWN!’: a fiction to rally the left, but destined as well to frighten and activate the political right’s clampdown, and to guarantee as well that Lenny Bruce would never be funny again.
“Savio’s error, if it was one, was in refusal to have an agenda. His Free Speech movement was precisely about the absence of manifesto: if it was his place to denounce the conformity and profit-driven aggression of the ruling order, it was equally everyone’s place, and all ideas on how to fix the issue were, in theory, welcome. That the point of Free Speech might be seen as the legalization – indeed, the mandatory attribution – of what George Carlin would later highlight as the ‘seven dirty words’ was a risk that was visible only in hindsight. There were historical precedents, however.
"When John Lilburne and Richard Overton came into conflict with the House of Lords in 1645, they sought representative government, toleration of religious differences, universal male suffrage, and the abolition of corruption within the judiciary. Yet by refusing to issue a manifesto of these or other specific demands, they ended up with a divided movement, betrayed military supporters, and a documented increase, over the next century-and-a-half, of the uses of the words ‘shiit’, ‘piiss’, and ‘cuunt’, frequently uttered in casual conversation, and penned in letters, even by the elite Virginian scribblers who signed the Declaration of Independence – which, in an ironic historical circularity, achieved Lilburne’s original demands.
“If Lilburne and Overton failed to see it coming, it was perhaps due to…”
[13-PAGE DISCUSSION OF THE ANABAPTISTS, THE EARLY CHRISTIANS, AND THE DISPUTE BETWEEN METRIC-SCALE AND ENGLISH-SCALE STEGOSAURS HAS BEEN DELETED FOR LACK OF SPACE]
“In this mythic mistranslation were written the outlines of a debate that would end the war in Vietnam, yet in the process foster the rage of an attack on Iraq as well-coiffed newscasters wrote bestsellers about peace activists entitled the Party of Death. It set the tone as well for a society where, on the one hand, a rotund black schizophrenic could threaten his listeners with violent rape for no particular reason, completely drop the subject, and start raving about exciting rock bands and the joy of the huge flying ‘chicken cow!’ before accusing Santa Claus of felony theft; and, on the other hand, the nation’s most popular right-wing pundit could threaten drug users with violent rape for no particular reason, completely drop the subject, and start raving about exiciting tax cuts and the joy of the huge flying ‘Strategic Defense Initiative!’ before accusing President Clinton of treason. Interestingly, of the two, it was the schizophrenic who was known to take _fewer_ drugs than were legally prescribed to him.
“It was 1988 when that schizophrenic – 25-year-old Wesley Willis – answered an ad on the window of a newly designated “clothes” boutique to please go somewhere else. With money he saved from asking people near the boutique if they had any spare money, he told the boutique “okay!” and started playing his acoustic guitar, leftover synthesizer, and plastic fork outside fast food restaurants. The name ‘Wesley’ set Willis apart even as it brought him into the fold: it carried fore-echoes of incompetent demon-hunting, perfect for his hallucinatory world, yet suggested a reserve of nobility in the heart behind his rapidly expanding belly (as the fast food restaurants were the recipient of most the change his performances earned).
“Wesley began almost every vocal in rich, deep, rolling syllables. They would usually line up together in flat Morse-rhythmed declarations, hurling themselves awkwardly up towards actual musical notes during whatever repeated phrase served, in each song, as a chorus. However, for impassioned moments, he would take on the charismatic rise-and-fall tumblings of a preacher, one insisting that God has graced him to be as unexpected, as unwanted, and as quick-moving as his cause deserved.
"This is probably also how he whupped Batman’s asss”.
--- Excerpt from Greil Marcus’s Inexpensive Train, as expanded from his “Made-Up Top Ten” column of September 31st, 2003
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Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2006 3:22 a.m.
Wesley Willis’s Greatest Hits is best understood as doing for cheap keyboards and strummed guitars what the Ramones’ early unreleased demos would have done for punk rock if anyone other than Ramotrader45 had heard them before I won the e-bay auction a week ago last Thursday. It combines the unadorned sonic drive of Suicide’s first album and the tense half-chirped vocal delivery David Byrne perfected on More Songs about Buildings and Food with the unabashed emotionalism of a dying-of-old-age Bono (not that we’ll let him get that far!!!!!!!) and the being-a-black-person of Afrika Bambataa. The guitar-oriented tracks suggest instrumentally the early reel-to-reel Mountain Goats, but with a country orientation as if he’d been listening to Uncle Tupelo, and with the unavoidable layer of synthetics draped over them after someone stole Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music’s clothes for the night.
However, he achieves his purest performances on entirely beat-driven tracks like “Larry Nevers/ Walter Budzyn”, where a political consciousness worthy of Rage Against the Machine is fused to sharp storytelling in the vein of Lou Reed when he was 12 and hadn’t yet sold out, all given the driving mechanical je ne sais quois of John Foxx-era Ultravox or a brevity-inclined Kraftwerk groove, translated into a major key that demonstrates joie de vivre and doesn’t sound at _all_ like a 5th-generation dub of a Wham! contribution to an NFL Highlights video so shut up.
“Rick Sims” displays the pate de fois gras of the pre-MTV-rotation Beastie Boys. Willis’s cadences are almost rap-like but have the cluelessness normally associated with white boys; samplers are used to produce sounds like in a video game where helicopters fire laser-driven pencils at Throbbing Gristle fans; his voice is distorted like Jhondale Uglo (whose pragmatically brutal warlord character in Big Mean Andromeda Aliens would later be simplified and popularized in the form of the much less interesting Darth Vader). Also Beastie-Boys-like is the kitsch tres bien maitre’d of its ironic honky-tonk chord structure.
Alternative Tentacles definitely deserves credit for recognizing Willis’s subversive appropriations of what had, in corporate hands, been corrupt mass art forms. Listen to the echoing drums, peppy fanfare, and six-chord structure of “Vampire Bat”: the overproduction of such curses upon our land as Bon Jovi is rendered tinny and imperfect, although suspiciously easy to dance to.
The Wolfmonster-like bass riffs and stilted early-Black-Flag barked vocals of “Jesus is the Answer”, one of the three full-band recordings, move and accelerate with the chaotic funkiness of early Red Hot Chili Peppers, causing the listener to imagine that “Give It Away” video if all those shirtless wonders had been fat pigs like Crocus Behemoth after eating Lydia Lunch. “He’s Doing Time in Jail”, another full-band song, combines the ghetto consciousness of N.W.A., the underground-rap moral forthrightness of Atmosphere (“I told him to shut his face”), and the fierce metallic distortion of the Velvet Underground if they had used fierce metallic distortion, hadn’t had a viola, used different sorts of chord progressions, and had a cowbell player. The final band song, “I’m Sorry That I Got Fat”, has a fretless bass-driven flexibility halfway between Primus and Morphine, jazz snare drums like one of the 1970s Miles Davis records that you haven’t gotten around to buying, and an arrangement sparseness suggestive of the Arcade Fire if they didn’t play a bunch of instruments or sound so gloomy or tuneful or Canadian.
Also, like Morphine’s frontman Mark Sandman, Wesley Willis is now dead, having been diagnosed with leukemia in 2002; he expired mere months later. Wesley Willis has not, in the last three years, even begun to match his earlier output, suggesting that the temptations of indie-label money were enough to corrupt his unique vision.
Also, I had sex with your girlfriend before she sold out and became willing to sleep with just any random schmo.
Well, okay, but I talked with her by a concession table and got her to sign a napkin. And as soon I do have sex, I’ll have witnesses that my penis is much larger than yours. Especially if you’re a chick. In which case Wesley Willis’s Greatest Hits foregrounds passionate vocals that cross Polly Harvey’s feral howls with Liz Phair’s inability to sing on pitch, with the native excitement brought by Billie Holiday in her prime, when the Jim Crow laws still kept black people from access to recording equipment. Only, you know, male.
So. Um. Hi. Are you free tonight? If not, are you an expensive import available only through cdjapan.com with applicable coupon?
(Joined: 30 Dec 2002
Posts: 1,462
Location: NJ)
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This review played at the I’ll-Show-You-Mine-If-You-Show-Me-Yours Writeoff. It was attended by 3,000 people, and it kicked asss! Its host is MattA75, and he opens people’s minds. He pairs up writers, and I got paired with HaplessChild. I had to make her listen to music that's not her type, and she did the same to me.
Hapless Child! Hapless Child!
Her e-mail gave me three choices. One was an instrumental band, because I like voices. One was something called Current 93, because they are in league with the devil. I have one of their albums on order too.
I’m sorry that my mind closed. I’ll try to keep it open.
But she said Wesley Willis would be my “’Hapless is on crack for asking me to listen to this’ choice”. And that had to be good. That would have to rock. Usually I listen to bands that can sing and play, but today I know better.
I’m sorry that my mind closed. I’ll try to keep it open.
Wesley Willis was a great person. He used the same ideas over and over. He always had fun with them. He made them fun. He talked about anything he felt like. I talk about things I feel like talking about too. He “sang” about calories and Dracula and making a jerk of himself and feeling bad. Then he would make a fool of himself instead and feel good. I thought fools were bad.
I’m sorry that my mind closed. I’ll try to keep it open.
Wesley Willis used a lot of ad lines. He wasn’t paid by Mitsubishi or Folgers or Sam Goody. They don’t want to be The Voice Of A Schizophrenic Generation. They think they are too good for that. Well, they can stuff that up their asss. Wesley Willis can be the heartbeat of America forever if he wants.
I’m sorry that my mind closed. But you? If you quote ad taglines all the time, I’ll still think you’re a jerk.
Hapless Child! Hapless Child!
I already knew Hapless Child was on crack. She always writes about serial killers. She wonders why they kill people. You know why they kill people? Because they are criminals! Because they are ASSS holes. Serial killers will put you in the grave.
Hapless Child! Hapless Child!
Eggs over Portland, roll on, Columbia.
Diet Pepsi? Nuh-uh!
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