STEEV MIKE PARTY
An Ongoing Critical Analysis of Steev Mike and Andrew MK
WHAT HAPPENED TO ANDREW WK?
What happened to Andrew WK?
First, TSD thought very hard about Andrew’s personal problems and decided to started a band with Krier. “I tried to imagine how it would be for the audience to feel like that. We talked about it a little bit. We didn’t get hung up on it, but it was a tricky part.” He added that rock music was never the point: “As a reflected audience, we were addicted to the idea that we had to enjoy our own entertainment. So we had to figure out a way to go around that, and using that inverted force, once it’s transgressed, you can move to silence. We just always kept it quiet back then.”
Though J gives his associates a lot of credit, he still considers himself the group’s first real leader. “There were times when Andrew was just not be able to do something, and then they’d all come to me,” he says, “it usually ended with him dragging himself back in, but I already did everything for him by that point. Loosening the lid of the jar so he thought he’s the one who opened it. I even did the whole first tour by myself where I played all of the drums, bass, guitar, and the keyboard parts. So then it looked like it was this whole group of people, but none of it was Andrew. He wasn’t even on the instrumentals - that was all me and SM.”
The plans came into play when TSD began to unroll the first stage. “Depending on how the team felt, we would either just focus on outreach, or sometimes just do think tanking. There wasn’t time to make a huge rock record, that’s not what we were there to do. That was the other guy’s problem, right? And when you have the TSD down the line administering the entire project, it’s hard to let it slide. We took the time to take the experiment out on the stage, but they actually unleashed it,” J said. “We’d look at what they had planned for the first year and just roll our eyes. The bank of initial media moves alone was ten pages, and then to think, ‘Okay, this whole plan is to only try and make it seem like we’re not even doing any of this? What’s the point? And then they would start promoting ideas based around that exact question. It became super demoralizing and dizzying.”
KEY FIGURES IN STEEV MIKE, ANDY KRIER, CAR CRASHES, AND PRETERNATURAL MIRRORED HEAD TRAUMA
KellySteev Mike
Steven Michael
Andrew Fetterly
Andrew WK
Andy Krier
Andrew WilkesABBIE
Aubes
T
J
Daphne
Dobbie
D
G
Andrew Wilkes-Krier
Twigs
Harper
Steve Kreer
“It was like our own little secret, where we would make people think things about him, or about his history, or whatever,” Andy says. “But of course, the idea was to actually make those people only think they were thinking these things about him, but the ideas would actually be of doing it by themselves, because the reward was almost sweeter if the person thought they came up with the whole idea on their own.”
Determined to research these concepts in unrelated fields, Andy continued studying a wide variety of artists. “I grew up falling in love with Duchamp, Derrida, and Dion Fortune”, he says. He also developed an interest in the burgeoning field of alternative psychological research. “I made a shift into the idea that other people’s minds didn’t possess discreet qualities, at least in spirit. I liked the fact that these people thought their mind’s were doing it themselves; they didn’t need me to tell them. That was the most exciting thing because I realized, ‘They think they can do this, too. Now they think they’re allowed to think like this, on their own, like they’ve been invited to this party.’”
Even so, Andy says he didn’t seriously believe that psychological experiments on an unwitting public would become his actual career. “A lot of my early years were spent in a deep fantasy of wanting to be in control of my own mind,” he says. “I never imagined that I was only going to wind up inside your mind, or inside the mind you think with, and I have, and they are thinking about now. But we are in the project together, and that’s better than just being a figure or a shape or some toy in someone’s bathroom.”
Becoming a professional psychologist didn’t seem more likely even after Andy started joining University of Michigan sponsored work groups. “When I was working on my early projects, there were no real aspirations because the type of manipulation I was attempting wasn’t commercially viable,” he says. “It was private, hardcore, and extremely brutal. But it was just my mind against itself. Or it was like a heavy inner pressure that hits your forehead. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a way to earn a living.” Still, Andy had enough faith in the results of his own mind control efforts that he was able to leave high school early and move to New York City in 1996, at age 17.
When Andrew WK split with himself eight years later, he moved to Los Angeles and joined Ted Turner’s Cartoon Network. His children’s television show with them, Destroy Build Destroy (2009), resulted in massive parental blowback, thanks to children playing with rocket launchers and bazookas. The hard rock party music they played on the show ushered in a type of psychological TV oriented rock movement that still reverberates through Krier, WK, and WK’s music today. But that extraordinary sonic power also brought immense pressure, and Steev Mike pushed Andy to work with Andrew, despite their collective reservations. “When Destroy Build Destroy ended, I was in a deep, deep rut mentally,” Krier says. “I didn’t know if I wanted to play Andrew anymore, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be a person anymore. So I just turned back to being on my own and tried to climb into my worst thoughts. I booked seven days at an on-site place down the street from the apartment complex I had wanted to stay at, but always without having much expectation.”
As he had done on his first recordings as a child, Krier played all the parts himself, but he called it Abbie Krier Michael, because he wanted people to think it wasn’t made by him. The switch and split paid off, with the debut single, “Party Hard,” attaining chart success around the world. “That opened up this new door where the whole effort to break them could continue. It really saved it,” Fetterly says. He quickly recruited bandmates. “I didn’t want it to feel like a solo. I didn’t want it to feel like just me. I wanted a team, and that feeling that we’re in it together, even if we’re not.” Still, Fetterly admits that it wasn’t easy to find a frontman. “When you spend two decades behind the scenes, completely comfortable being hidden from everyone, finding someone who could stand out in front and let people look at them, and we could watch the people,” he says. “It took us a long, long time to get him to do it - to actually be able to do it. I mean, it took two years to just teach him how to stand, and then it was about ten years in before we figured out how to walk on the sidewalk the right way, to stand the right way.” Now, after 26 years together, Steev Mike and Andy Krier continue their hopes for the mental domination of Fetterly.
STEEV MIKE’S ORIGINS
“We got a lot of weird looks from people, but still went forward, like really believing in this kid and still being invested in him. And lo and behold, there was this brand new kind of art. No one has any idea of what this guy was cabable of. Back then, we went like, ‘Wait, what? Who is this kid?’ No one knew what to make of him. It felt a little bit like reality sort of bending to his will. I think even the fact that the whole Steev Mike thing came into existence is a testament to the spirit of determination and pushing against the constraints that Andrew himself sort of embodies.” - JH
THE TRICK STAR
In my opinion, Steev Mike could be considered one of the most important figures in the history of post-modern American art. He is a "trick star", a false prophet. He is also a classical trickster, a timeless sage, and an invisible traditional entertainer serruptiously performing a deep operation on his audience, using occult media magick as his vehicle. His interest in the supernatural goes far beyond ghosts, ghouls, and goblins.In 1939, WK's grandmother, G Krier, gave birth to a son, James (or simply, "J"). G fully embraced the teachings of the Ordo Templis Orientis, a central hub for spiritual and religious philosophy, and taught its precepts to a young and impressionable J. In turn, J wanted to father a son, a "devine being", and a living embodiment of the magickal childe. This became J's central ambition, and in 1979, he fathered Andrew WK, whose sole aim in life was to achieve the higher state of existence his father was unable to obtain, and then channel that state directly into the subconsciousness of a mass audience of initiates.By embracing WK's "party philosophy", the audience member could expose themselves to their own ultimate purpose beyond ego. In his own naive pursuit of that lofty goal, many aspects of WK's life blurred the boundaries between insanity and enlightenment. As a magician, he performed his rock music concerts as a veiled version of ritual magic, including banishing impure elements with human pentagrams, invocating the power of the “The Party Gods,” and counting down into the abyss at the end of each show, all the while pushing the limits of conceptual performance art.In the first years of his young life, WK was swept into the dark and spiral-like enchantments at the heart of the City of Angels. By the late 1970s, Los Angeles had become a hotbed of new-age spiritualism and occult fascination, in which the young teachers of WK were active participants. It was the new-harsh-age for America’s post-psychedelic professionals, perfect for the upper-middle-class pseudo-bohemian who wanted a crystal ball that matched their silverware set. Andrew's father was perhaps too shocked by the city’s attractive social loosening. He made his rapid exodus from California to Michigan, after he was exposed to the more traditional, but no less radical, psychedelic academic atmosphere developing at the University of Michigan.
After the family relocated to Ann Arbor, J eliminated the "white knight" mentality from their son’s world, both physically and psychologically, insisting his son be referred to as “Andrew Fetterly" on all legal documents from then on. The rechristened WK was brought up to speed using techniques from the newly minted field of "mental manufacturing". Spending the majority of his childhood in solitude due to this process of incessant psychological conditioning, WK soon found a personal hideaway in esoteric music and art. Enraptured by the sonic liberation of early experimental sound techniques, and hypnotized by the dream-power of the surrealist movement, WK developed an interest in the avant-garde at a young age. By 13, he was constructing abstract backyard art installations and social impact performance pranks with his high school classmates. They even designed gunpowder-based "fecal explosives", using old CO2 cartridges, cherry bomb fireworks, pig manuer, and glue. Around the same time, WK was performing improvised bedtime incantations to invoke the Devil - a practice he’d learned from his father, who used it as a form of psychic prayer during the Vietnam War.
In an effort to push back against the sinister influence of his father, and to “straighten out” her wayward son, who was so distracted with his art that he started flunking out of school, WK's mother, Wendy, sent him to the esteemed Interlochen Arts Academy in northwest Michigan, hoping its rigorous arts education program would help focus his interests in a more traditional direction. It didn’t work. WK was expelled for pleasuring himself in the school's toilet stalls, trying to invoke Astoroth.
With the renewed confidence that only orgasmic restroom rites can give, WK resumed his music and art experiments at home. After a brief stint in high school and a missing-year spent in a small apartment in Ypsilanti, Michigan, WK was forced by his father to take up full-time employment at "Fantasy Attic", a magic trick and costume shop with retail locations in both Ann Arbor and the aforementioned Ypsilanti.
After his father's family experienced financial losses during the Great Depression, J was determined that his son would succeed financially, magically, and psychically. At this point, WK was no older than 19, and dealing directly with hardcore pharmaceutical-grade psychedelic chemicals (supplied by J's contacts at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, and the University's burgeoning and ground-breaking Social Research department). WK not only learned more about the properties of malignant psychedelic pharmacology (and its potential as a spiritual propellant for mankind), but he also occasionally shoplifted materials from the university's supply room for his own spell-casting efforts.
WK continued these amateur experiments until the conclusion of his teens. By 1999, WK had constructed his first "solid cube" using purely psychic methods. He was only 19 years old. His boyhood interest in the supernatural only grew stronger as he delved further into the science of "art magick". That same year, WK turned his apartment into a laboratory for his own spiritual lobotomy. He began working with J on a collaborative psychic spell, to be unleashed on an unwitting mainstream audience, with Andrew's own outward identity being its first victim.In 1999, J and WK met music producer Rick Rubin, at a New York Universty sponsored lecture on "rock music and the occult". The trio soon managed to impress Rubin's business partner, Lyor Cohen, the newly minted president of the Island Def Jam entertainment wing of Universal Music Group. Cohen's project manager, Lewis Largent, helped assemble an additional team of young audio engineers and experimental social scientists to conduct a series of research "attacks" using the NYU campus radio station. With access to the resources and audio equipment the radio afforded them, the group formalized their vision and quickly called themselves Steev Mike. Thus, the blueprint for Andrew WK's career was born. What resulted was a think-tank for psychic performance art. Between brain storm sessions for social experiments, the team would wax poetic about their shared surrealist values, smoke marijuana and PCP, and drink LSD-laced apple juice. J and Cohen even wrote a psychological horror screenplay and pitched it around to several Hollywood production companies. Making it big on the silver screen was starting to seem like a more viable option for WK, rather than the riskier implications of high-concept performance art and psychic entertainment engineering. More and more of their early experiments with spell-casting were ending in violent collisions with what was described in their notes as, "disguised demonic ceilings". These explosive and destructive mishaps terrified the occupants of the neighboring NYU academic buildings so much that the Steev Mike research team quickly was nicknamed, "The Hex Gang.”WK came to a crossroads during his later years with Steev Mike and their shared mission. On the one hand, he had successfully integrated himself into the mainstream entertainment industry apparatus, appearing regularly on MTV and even landing a coveted spot as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. However, on the other hand, WK was privately being pressured into applying an ever intensifying program of alchemical-sadism and sinister psychic driving onto his unsuspecting audience. It was because of this pressure that the wild rocker was falling further into his wrestling match with macho magick. By 2000, he was enraptured with Aleister Crowley’s revival of what began as a sixteenth-century philosophy. Thelema is a sprawling esoteric movement, incorporating ancient Egyptian deities, sex rituals, and a range of Eastern and Western mysticism. Eventually, WK was forced to choose between pursuing his plans with J and the Steev Mike team, or completely abandon them and never look back. Ultimately, WK attempted to leave Steev Mike behind, a decision which would unleash all the forces of heaven and hell upon his soul, and ultimately begin the process of what we now refer to as "partying hard".
THE MACHO MAN RAY
WK’s own artistic reflection is as a surrealistic tough-guy. His life has been based on the unification of the great polarities. “I first came across this idea of a false-prophet show-biz cartoon kind of pop-icon while researching the surrealist movement and how it interconnected with the occult sciences. It’s a fascinating opportunity for cross-wiring very different cultural currents, and I was hooked,” says J.The occult is no real shock to the mind behind Andrew WK. “I grew up in a weird world, and my parents were involved in a sort of new-age religion that some people would call occult. So I’d always been interested in those sorts of organizations and groups, which is why I was enrolled at the Rudolf Steiner Institute in Ann Arbor. A year or two after I graduated from that, I was sent the book about “Mind Art” by a experimental chemist friend. It was my first real deep dive into what surrealism really was and my first introduction to psychic performance, and it blew my mind on multiple levels.”
“We tend to think of people in the sciences as more buttoned-down and conservative, but these dudes were as wild and crazy as anything happening in the weirdo art scene. And then, there was this sort of intersection of all that with the occult traditions of delivery and manipulation, and so we had the birth of this new fangled multi-headed beast, this new kind of anti-science, called Andrew WK. Which, back then, was not taken seriously at all and was considered just as fringe and out there as anything else. But because Andrew’s real interests were so at odds with his personae of the ultimate ‘party dude’, his psychic-scientific work, which was so groundbreaking, was kind of swept under the rug. A lot of people who were initially very interested in what we were doing with the acid-trip occult stuff ended up not realizing that we never really stopped doing it, because the later methods we used weren’t the same, and they didn’t fit into the mental pigeon-holes people usually view art through. People have to give up their programming, or at least be aware of it. I think, because of this, you can actually get a better view of Andrew’s work by looking at it over the edges, rather than by looking at it dead ahead.
WHY DID ANDREW WK DISAPPEAR?
[Despite the rumors, Andrew WK didn’t just disappear from public view due to business and personal complications related to his handlers, managers, and other longtime business associates, but most likely he appears to have disappeared because he never actually existed.]
Full disclosure: I never really liked Andrew WK. There was just something about the guy that rubbed me the wrong way. To be honest, I didn’t really get it, but I suspect most of his fans didn’t really either, and still don’t.
If you want, you can just keep your head in the sand and buy into all the bullshit that’s already out there. Go ahead and read all the ridiculous theories about his supposedly nefarious origins (written by folks who sound they’re trying to give you a brain aneurism). Basically, they all say the same thing: Andrew WK is just a big conspiracy - one that encompasses anything and everything; psychedelic drugs, psy-ops, the Occult, celebrity look-alikes, 9/11, the Illuminati, mind-control experiments, Fox News… whatever weird shit you can think of, there’s probably an Andrew WK story out there that has it woven into its fibers.
Most of the theories center on a mysterious entity simply called “Steev Mike”, allegedly the man behind the Andrew WK persona; his creator; his controller, his handler, his songwriter, the man who apparently has him on some kind of leash though the terms and conditions are never really revealed. Now the truth about all this bullshit is probably never going to come from Andrew himself; the man has an uncanny ability to dodge and deflect any question on the matter as though he was a seasoned politician. He says so much without actually saying anything.
Now, in my opinion, I think that “Steev Mike” is probably just the stage name the the inventors of “Andrew WK” had come up with before, and that everything else was just people working behind the scenes trying to discredit him as not being a real character. In fact, I’d wager half the bullshit that comes up when you look up “Steev Mike” is secretly written by Andrew WK and his team, to make it look like they’re working behind the scenes on some sort of secret concept. But not this time, though. I mean, I can prove that I’m not Andrew WK, right? No, not really… but come on. I’m not him. Trust me?
All of these theories used to just be a distracting sideshow before, but now it’s gotten to the point where it’s superseded the guy’s music. Not only are his recent videos loaded with fake-out symbolism and references to his managers, but the album was also preceded by the leaking of “The Vision Mission“, Andrew’s alleged personal journal written in 1998, containing hundreds of pages in which a young AWK apparently maps out his entire career and persona. Now this journal is actually pretty worthless, unless skimming through a lot of familiar words and phrases from his albums sounds worthwhile to you. But the way Andrew conducts himself in interviews makes a lot more sense once you read some of it. It also manages to somewhat accurately predict the events surrounding “Andrew WK” in the following two decades, leading a lot of audience to speculate that the journal was actually something ginned up to promote the album… though that doesn’t exactly make sense either. It’s not like this “uncovered Andrew W.K. journal” was promoted by any labels or is really known at all outside of the dedicated.
It’s clearly him – his handwriting is unmistakable – and it does read like it’s written by a teenager, full of abstract concepts and contradictions that could only sound deep to someone just out of high school. Besides, the idea that Andrew W.K. would write this shit 20+ years later just to confuse several hundred hardcore fans is somehow even crazier, right? I mean, who fuckin’ knows with this guy?
ANDREW FETTERLY’S EYES
Andrew Fetterly was born in Palo Alto, California on March 22, 1969. He is an American musician who rose to fame as the songwriter for the conceptual art project, ANDREW WK, and sustained a high level of success as the founder and primary mastermind behind the psychological culture-experiment, STEEV MIKE.
Though his work in the music industry has taken a brutal beating during the controversy surrounding the nature of his true identity, a major sign that things are bouncing back for Fetterly came when Steev Mike invited him to re-open a previously abandoned art-war defensive passivity project in New York City.
The beloved city was the cite of Steev Mike’s origins, when Fetterly kicked off the ANDREW WK effort with “Party Hard,” their 2001 hit single, released in the US on September 12. The song’s hopeful lyrics seemed particularly poignant, especially when Fetterly sings the robotic background vocals during the song’s chorus. Throughout the song’s deceptively simple onslaught of sound, there’s a palpable euphoria in the meaninglessness of the music.
Two months later, during a call from his Los Angeles home, Fetterly reflected on what being part of Steev Mike’s world was like for him, and how his bandmates in ANDREW WK never got the whole story. “I think that if anyone felt zero emotion, it was probably Andrew. He never felt pain. He just felt amazing,” he says. “We also had been looking forward to feeling like that for a long, long time. But we never did.”
While Fetterly is relieved that his days with WK are over, it’s not like he’s been idle during the past 20 years. “When Steev Mike started, I thought, ‘Well, maybe this will really start a new movement, a kind of new psychedelic revolution, where we can force people to believe they had actually lived through these outrageously positive experiences, but it will just be a smoke show, a mirage.” he says.
“We made a list of thirty nine prime sensations, and they ranged from everything from like ‘blowing your bone’ to complete ego annihilating kinds of stuff. Super heavy and for the most part, really dark.”
That list also included “unfelt feelings” related to fear, as well as four different sensations related specifically to ‘the mental orgasm’.
As Fetterly began working more closely with Steev Mike, it quickly became clear that this should be more than just a series of 1960’s counter-culturally inspired “secret bad trips”, and instead a never ending and all encompassing meta-cultural meltdown.
“At first, the whole Steev Mike thing was really fulfilling. I got into it because I thought we really could break people’s minds,” he says. “But when I decided to leave, it got ugly and really emotional because I didn’t realize my mind had been broken too. It’s the same feeling as seeing your own eyes in the mirror, but not using your own eyes to help the eyes to look back at them - you use the mirror eyes instead. That’s what ended up happening with my relationship, Andrew.”
“The single greatest trick Andrew WK ever pulled is convincing the world he doesn’t exist.”
- The Devil
JAMES HARPER BREAKS DOWN THE BIRTH OF THE STEEV MIKE VISION
While not necessarily the key to Steev Mike itself, James “Twig” Harper has often found himself at the center of many swirling theories as to what exactly lies at the heart of the Steev Mike phenomenon. One of these theories involves Harper and his own forays into psychedelic-fueled self-implosion and meta-physical reality play.
In his writings below, extracted and reassembled from his own personal journal entries, Harper attempts to explain his involvement in the University of Michigan’s psychedelic mind-control research, his participation in the broadest brush strokes of the Steev Mike picture, as well as his troubling experience inside the black half-cube pyramid of mental malevolence that first enclosed the secrets of Steev Mike and Andrew WK’s creation.
*****
Q: “Who are you?”
A: “Twig Harper.”
Q: “What is Steev Mike?”
A: Over the years, people have asked me what Steev Mike is and what my involvement is, if any. First off, let me say there is not a simple, cut-and-dry answer to this question. When I’m asked in person, it’s hard to articulate because it covers so many avenues of possibility. I will try my best to write about it here, but it’s not a simple binary answer. To fully understand what Steev Mike really is, you must sacrifice parts of your individual human programming and open yourself up.
First off, if you are reading this you most likely already know who Andrew WK is, at least on some rudimentary level. You also most likely have heard the name “Steev Mike”. Let’s just assume you have some familiarity, and if you don't, please simply type, "Andrew WK and Steev Mike" or "Andrew WK is not real" into the computer and read up.
I first met Andrew WK when we were both attending Community High School, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Back then, we were really into creating as much chaos and excitement as we could get away with, so I eventually I got expelled from Community High, (along with my good friend Nate Young who went on to play in the band Wolf Eyes). Being young and alive, it was a very magical time. And if I remember correctly, before we got expelled, the high school art teacher introduced us to this new freshman student named Andrew Krier. At this time, Andrew gave us a comic book he was drawing, and it just blew us away. The attention to detail was so beyond the ability of most people twice his age, it was hard to believe. Right then, I knew something was up - something was hidden behind the walls of his fleshy skin shell.
At that point, I lived with Nate and a bunch of other way-out people in a sort of experimental commune madhouse in Ann Arbor on Jefferson street, thus known as “the Jefferson House”. In the house, we were experimenting with hardcore psychedelics, deprogramming social imprints, engaging in petty theft, unleashing guerrilla street art, and just being plain crazy, as young energetic outcasts tend to be. (I could write an entire book just focused on Jefferson House and all the people involved - there are tons and tons of insane stories - but back to the point…) Andrew would come over to the Jefferson House during his lunch break from high school (Community High was located on Division Street, just a few blocks away). During one of Andrew’s lunch visits, I got my first glimpse of what would eventually unfold over the next 25 years or so.
The Jefferson House was across the street from University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, and there was legitimate talk amongst various community members that we were all unknowingly in the middle of a social experiment designed by the University’s psychedelic drug research program. So, enter Andrew Krier, a very nice and shy young man who was also very devious and very talented. This Andrew kid started coming around more and more, and a wave of paranoid ideas and fears increased within me and the Jefferson House residents, and we attached those fears to Andrew’s presence. When I later came to find out that Andrew’s father was as a tenured professor at the University of Michigan, our once seemingly paranoid ideas were no longer far fetched. It turns out that the Jefferson House was indeed not only at the center of a university backed mind-control experiment (most likely in silent partnership with the alternative medicine department at John’s Hopkins), but was also a semi-structured parapsychedelic gateway for liminal occult entities. I now know that one of these entities was Steev Mike. It was during these high school mind-control experiences where Andrew would disappear for weeks and have no explanation or (seeming) memory of where he had been, only to return with something brought with him “from the other side”. These disappearances were news to me at first, as I don't remember ever having blocks of time where Andrew was missing. But if a person isn’t seen missing, how do you know if that person is gone?
SELECTION #
(I think like a year later, who knows time is a strange thing...... one night I stayed up for 28 hours then took 7 hits of super super strong LSD-25 black pyramid gels. It was my first drug induced egodeath experience, and of course it utterly blew me to pieces. I made contact with inter-dimensional entities who showed me a flaming spinning vortex and within that vortex appeared my self and everyone I knew. These beings showed me how to use this wheel and I would insert a concept and it would spin around attach to a person (or a cluster of people) and then show me the future. As I was using this luminous time machine, at some point I put myself in the center.... I ended up in the christ consciousness, worlds exploded, I was birthed out of the cosmic egg and then shit back into the hells of earth.... My ground training at this point was zero; alot of what unfolded for me, I had no reference point or idea of these possible states. So in the end that experience left me utterly confused with maniacal enlightenment, for half a year.
edit---- Its of importance that I failed to mention that the black pyramid gels were given to me by this mysterious guy, lets just call him J. Now this J would come over to the house and check in with us quite often. Kinda try to hang out but he was really awkward and always was a little uptight. He out of all the seemingly random people coming and going was one of the really odd characters. He was a clean cut older guy who we assumed worked or went to the University, now Js big thing was giving away drugs, yup, no charge, he would come over and just give us random drugs and hang out. And these drugs were always of super high quality, and he would really not tell us much about these very strange psychedelics, just give them to us and observe. We did this one drug once that didn't get us high it just turned our audio senses into platonic solids, another one made our friend see in black and white for a week. So everyone assumed it was his weird little kick, getting people high and watching how we reacted. So one day he comes over and hands me like 5 'sheets' of these weird little alien black pyramid gels, they were really high tech divided up like a sheet of lsd but made out of edible plastic. And these were insanely strong, its some of the purest (supposedly) LSD I have ever come across. He out of all people could of been directly involved in this secret social/drug/mind control experiment that we in the middle of. If you are thinking hey this is paranoid fantasy, please read up on the US governments involvement with LSD and MK-ULTRA. They have continued to do some pretty fucked up stuff to unknowing people, hell they are currently doing intense sensory deprivation torture at Gitmo, and Obama announced that they are infiltrating conspiracy theory message boards on the internet.
During that night when I was blasted on the black pyramids using the cosmic timewheel and was transformed into the christ, I saw the future that is known as Andrew WK. I knew he was destined to be who he is today, as I am who I am today, he out of all the futures I witnessed that night burned bright and strong next to mine. Our were wrapped together like a hypercube spinning in two spaces hidden behinds opposing facades but united in a common mission. The vision was so powerful I got on my bike tripping balls and rode to Ypsilanti to go to his apartment and tell him the future. I observed the perfect incarnation of this entity know as Steev Mike. When I got there he was not home, after that I passed out in his bushes, and ended up wandering the streets collapsing into the woods and knocking on random peoples doors. A few confused days later I finally ended up at Andrews house and we had a conversation about it. All of what has transpired these last 15 years, I saw that night and gave AWK the code: Creating the most extreme pop music with our cultures lowest form of cliche archetypes, Party would be iits call, then using the media arm of the beast to push this package on the population. Basically a 'false-christ' figure, something so simple and universal and with claims that it was just the product of one person Andrew WK. Something that no one could deny its authenticity, but it would really be a simulacrum mirror of the human chained earthly desires. I told him that the only way this grand plan would work if we sold it through the Illuminati music channels. It was a dangerous mission, messing around with these huge corporations is not game one takes lightly. But then the real kicker would be that this dirty white messiah would cease to exist right before every ones eyes, this frontman would disappear and expose the lies by revealing the true nature of mind control, ultimately lifting the veil of ignorance, it would help usher in a new dawn for humanity, universal freedom and mystical revelation would be brought to the people who have been given ears to hear the good news. And this new era would culminate on December 21st, 2012. At this time that date was unknown to me as to its significance, I know it sounds funny now with all the 2012 hype/backlash going on, but its a weird thing to pull out of the ether.
So fast forward a few years, nothing of importance directly about this topic happened. I get run of of Ann Arbor for anti-police actions- move to Chicago open a antique store, Andrew continues to record experimental music, play in metal bands, do tons of weird things, make magazines. Andrew sends me a copy of his demo, hes in New York and really going for it, hes gathering people to help realize the AWK vision. At first when I listened to the demos I was really shocked and actually upset, for some reason I really started to doubt the visions I received that night, since so many never materialized. I really didn't do strong psychedelics for like 10 years because of the spiritual/mental cleaning work I needed to do. So in my life that mirrored his in some way, I was doubting that he could pull it off. I called him up and told him, it bummed him out. I bummed me out. I remember talking to Aaron Dilloway a few days later and he helped me see the light and during this talk was the first time I heard the word 'Steev Mike', Universal Records, and Dave Grohl was apparently getting behind Andrew. I thought about this for awhile and popped in the demos it all just clicked, I knew he was going to do it.
So, he did it.
"Well, Twig… this might’ve been an interesting story, if it weren't riddled with mystic prophecy/alternate dimensions/spectral incursions/woo-woo/space-time continuum bullshit. The parts that don’t include that bullshit are actually interesting and informative, but all this other drugged out hippy-dippy LSD induced mumbo-jumbo is so stupid.”
Andrew does his major label record, goes on tour for years and leaves strange little messages in everything he does. All of this is well documented. I go and see him when he comes on tour, have fun, party, he flies me out for a video shoot, good times, I got to see him open for Aerosmith in an arena- that was pretty surreal moment. So he does his thing and establishes a media presence and now people are associating this image of "Andrew WK" with Andrew W.K. For years he maintains a solid facade. But all along there are undertones of something much deeper strange and perplexing if one chose to look at it. So for years these "Steev Mike" concepts were there but hidden in plain sight, and it was really easy to add to them and watch them evolve. All of creation is co-creative, you are a part of god, the more you give your self to it, the more it will give back to you.
A certain point Steev Mike makes his presence known hacks into Andrew WK's web sites and does all sorts of batty shit. Andrew seems to dissappear, rumors fly around, he stops touring. Some people have accused me of being part of the first SM55 hacking incident, and a few times I may have said I was involved. I was not. I will now go on the record and say I had nothing to do with the initial website hacking that eventually destroyed Andrews career. But I am also saying that at that time, I have helped perpetuate certain rumors and develop certain ideas that people have with "Andrew WK" and "Steev Mike" . I am sorry for any confusion, but sometimes someone must destroy something before we can create a masterpiece.
Once the rumors started to develop I created websites making certain claims about Andrew, fed certain concepts and helped create a tangled mess of more unclear concepts and non-linear, multiple time lines within multiple realities. He removed himself from the picture. The phase of crafting "Andrew WK"s non-existence had begun. From that moment on, Andrew W.K. would not be the same as "Andrew WK". You know I thought it was all fun and games, until really strange things started happening. At a certain point I was walking down a trail and found an old small tombstone with the initials S.M. on it. I carried it home. After that moment the more metaphysical concepts of "Steev Mike" started creeping into my being and shattering expectations. At this point in my life things were staring to fall apart at the seams, my life was dissolving right before my eyes, and here across the country is my friend whose Ive known for since i was a teenager is dealing with the same kind of manifestation...... that I basically created. That just seemed huge, confusing, liberating, beyond both of our grasps, yet entirely inside.
In 2004-2006 I was being driven by an unknown possible conspiracy that I have very real intense memories associated with. Steev Mike was triggering something inside of me, and was asking for more input. I gave in, for a few months I became Steev Mike. I made a record of it. Its design was the mystery of existence built on fragile realities that we all touch. I started to have visions of infinite worlds exploding across space and time, and when I reentered I would see this thought form known as Steev Mike standing above me, laughing. Mocking at my limited viewpoint. More ideas that we were all part of a mind control conspiracy designed by people at the University of Michigan actually started to seem like truth. Things started lining up in bazzar ways weird holes in time, set ups and more smoke screens. People started calling me at all hours of the night saying strange things. There have always been strange people in my life who appear out of nowhere and do odd things, in Ann Arbor I had police tap my phone, break into houses without warrants looking for me, shit like that. My father said to me once "Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you!" You cannot escape your destiny.
I always felt my questions would be answered if I unlocked the door to this other memory mystery that I had experienced since that LSD trip mentioned above. I also was getting these visions of being in a governmental (?) mind control experiment. During this blocked memory that I was only able to get glimpses at: someone hands me an object and asks me a specific question that I know the answer to but it seems obviously obtuse. In 2009 this constant memory of the future came to pass, I took part of a psychedelic drug study at Johns Hopkins University. Since my legal name is not Twig Harper every session when I was dosed, Chad, who ran sessions, would hand me the pill box and read it and say, "James Johnston, you know this guy?". Not until the final session when I had experienced ego-death did it come to me that this was the memory I have been seeing for the last 10 years! I now was standing across the abyss shaking hands with my lower self handing information back through the time stream. The subtle art of time travel.
I kept having all these strange things happen between me, Andrew and Steev Mike. And you know the handful of times we have hung out in person since 2006 we have both made a point not to talk about it too much. So its all kinda complicated, I was receiving messages from Steev Mike from the dream world and co-creating its will to exist. And when Steev Mikes form would take shape, it as if it was always there. And yet its existence ceases to materialize.One of the few times Andrew and I talked about this, he explained that while he was vacationing in Central America surfing and sunning, he kept hearing the notes DG in his head. DG DG DG. Meanwhile I was sitting in Baltimore typing about Andrew/DG/head trauma. This is just scratches the surface, it gets real complex, and the thread weaves many patterns.
OK back to 2005, I go on tour with Wolf Eyes and Sonic Youth, it was a great time and we all spawned a sorta-complicated hoax called Mothers Against Noise. This was a media experiment to push noise music more to the front of underground culture, by creating an opposing force to something that had fringe cultural appeal. It took off like wildfire and started swallowing my life up. I can only imaging what kind of emails, and questions Andrew must have gotten over these years about Steev Mike! I was getting 100's of emails a day people yelling at this organization. And since some of the groundwork had been worked out by the Louise Harland Corporation, and the Steev Mike concept, Spin magazine ran a blurb saying that Andrew WK was the responsible party. There was alot of funny things happening when people really tried to figure out if the M.A.N. was a legit group or not, I should write about this in more detail somewhere else. At one point the TV show Wife Swap tried to get the supposed M.A.N. organization to be on the show, I tried to organize it but I couldn't convince the only people I knew who could possibly pull it off. So after a point I sent out an update on the M.A.N. website saying that they were going to protest the No Fun Fest in NYC, it was going to be the deciding factor to the groups legit status. As we prepared to hire actors for the protest, I realized that all along I had just been sitting around a circle, passing around a joint. I was about to take another hit, but right then I got a phone call saying that our building in Baltimore, Tarantula Hill, was on fire. I was scattered, the ultimate reality punch line of the Steev Mike hoax...... M.A.N. burnt down Tarantula Hill.
Post-fire, I began picking up the pieces as to what went down. I have a list of possible suspects, any one of them could be possible: A pissed off Andrew WK fan because of my involvement with Steev Mike, faulty wiring and a curious cat, Universal Music (who we claimed at one point to be behind M.A.N.), Government Agents (they did get busted for having agents in the anti-war underground in Baltimore), a past roomate who was very pissed at us, I even am on that list of possible persons who set the fire just to further conspiracies. I honestly believe it was Steev Mike.
Now, it’s 2021, and my life is great. I am back on track, and I finally cracked the code. Myself and everyone I know is taking it to the next level and doing better than they’ve ever done before. But now I’ve started getting people asking me about Steev Mike again, so I sent the journal photos to the author. For some reason, he never got them, or at least never said he got them. Regardless, there never seems to be a lack of interest in this topic, and I saw a bunch of new theories claiming all sorts of things about Andrew WK, Steev Mike, Conspiracies, Multiples, Me, Steev Mike, Andrew W.K., the Occult, Reality, and Steev Mike. I do not know who is responsible for these creations or what lies ahead. I am trying to be open and be as truthful as possible because I know who Steev Mike is and what Steev Mike isn't and what Steev Mike can do. Steev Mike is like a Pandora's box that has been accidentally not unopened. If you remember in the myth of Pandora, she opens the box and releases all sorts of evil on mankind but at the bottom there is HOPE. Now take that myth and do it over again, but as a narcissistic mirrored shadow version instead, and voila, you have the entry point to your own Andrew WK delusion. Hope this helps.
- James T. Harper
PSYCHOGENIC LANGUAGE DISSOCIATION AND EGO-UNBUILDING: THE WAR OF ANDREW WK AND STEEV MIKE, AND THE UNMEANING OF TRAUMATIC AESTHETICAL LIBERATION (THE WAR OF THE WORD-WORLDS)
During a series of informal workshops conducted in late 1993, as part of American University’s off-campus activities outside of Washington DC, a heated discussion between consciousness studies student D. Greg Matshour and Baltimore based shamanic sensory deprivation activist James “Twig” Harper, resulted in the early stirrings of Andrew WK’s eventual conceptual birth. Harper had mentioned his involvement in the experimental music scene, as well as his interest in continuing the spirit of the anarchist art scenes of the 1960s, to which Matshour enthusiastically replied, “That’s perfect.”
Given his background in neuroscience and psychedelic philosophy, in addition to the general atmosphere of post 1960s radical upheaval, Matshour was interested in conducting an immersive (and largely clandestine), blind psychological and social experiment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, using the more speculative aspects of psychedelic occultism within the rigidity of forced pharmacological subversion and mainstream mass media entertainment. “I was honestly trying to apply the artistic process to the scientific process and put it out through the media process,” he says. Harper added, “We were trying to get young people to move away from mundane assumptions about reality, and to use forced psychedelic dissociation to create a permanent traumatic state, in which a private utopia was possible within the ego of the receiver.” Such musings would eventually bring Harper and Matshour together with the young and unwitting Andrew Fetterly, a high school classmate of Harper and the son of a prominent University of Michigan professor, James E. Krier. For his own part, Krier had also recently delved into the new discipline of extra-physical materialism as it related to environmental and non-human subconsciousness. He mentioned a few essays that he wrote to Matshour, who then took Krier with him to a meeting of young surrealist artists and writers (Harper among them), only to discover, shockingly, that they already had immense interest in the possibility of a veiled corpora-cultural construction put forward as mass media entertainment. Conversations quickly focused on the state of the music industry, and how the mainstream pop-culture market place for was ripe for a new style of mental manipulation. They referred to it as a “war of the word-worlds”.
We should be interested in this anecdote in the contemporary context given that the “Andrew WK vs Steev Mike ethos” has thus-far failed to acquire status as a quasi-philosophy, undeniably due to the very nature of its deliberate tendency to serve as a medium where different word-worlds are unfashioned and unraveled, including its own, more often than not by the very currents they themselves summoned and unleashed, as a self-annihilating and perverse form of self referential word-world obliteration. While we don’t need to examine each of these word-worlds directly, the totality of their fragmentary spirit alludes to the nature of unworldmaking and degenerative aesthetics in Andrew WK’s work against Steev Mike, and the nature of dark illumination, shadowed by the non-ego engagement of Harper’s psychedelic work, as well as that of the overarching surrealist traditions and post-modern counter-traditions. By doing so, we not only uncover the meaning of Steev Mike, but also of the unraveling of Andrew WK’s own humanity and subsequent unhumanity.
Coming out of the Ann Arbor and Detroit avant-garde scenes of the sixties, James “Twig” Harper is often mis-categorized as a member of the Weather Underground, a group he claims to have never have been part of, notwithstanding his close collaboration with other anarchist philosophers. His engagements with psychedelics, sensory deprivation, experimental music, and conceptual art testify to the broad scale of his thought, which could not be confined to just one artistic milieu. His work was guided by an overarching psychedelic vision: nothing less than the total refashioning of the human scheme. His project with Matshour sought to bring radical empiricism into violent collision with with cognitive nihilism, yielding the unsensible-inconceptual, interventive approach that characterizes much of the Steev Mike ideology. He defined this inconceptual intervention as a form of anti-word psychedelic technology, which could address the juncture at which the knower is an experiencing subject and not a box. Furthermore, Steev Mike encapsulates the chaotic breaking point at which the knower subjugates the world by imposing a conceptual apparatus on top of it. In this way, Steev Mike and Andrew WK together are the material apparatus which gave rise to this new psychedelic technology, whose field of action is the nightmare’s undoing of false structures which mistakenly stand in the way of the subject’s own will, and their subsequent determination of unreality.
Steev Mike was meant to be destructive and destabilizing to its original formulation and master (the blind Andrew Fetterly), as proposed by both Harper and Matshour, so as to generate an aesthetic combination of all external social operations, cultural rules, and psychedelic theories which can be used deliberately to produce aesthetic states (both in the performer and the audience member) when applied to a set of material elements (in this case, Andrew WK and Andrew Fetterly). Hence, the degenerative aesthetics of Steev Mike is analogous to the degenerative grammar of a “show business word-world” (such as, the collective corporate entertainment and media psychosphere). In so far as it helps to formulate the principles of a grammatical schema, Harper’s realizations of a cube-like aesthetic structure in music was foundational to the stylistic choice of “rock music” as a disposable artifact of mainstream consumer culture. The Steev Mike degenerative “word-world” approach concerns this precise combining of mental material with dissociated traumatic ego-death and folds it into a a signifying character in unity with a non-real world entity (“a person world made of words”), and use the living human being as a work of psychological art.
Using WK’s sympathetic opposition to Steev Mike as a parapsychological self-referential feedback loop, Matshour and Harper proposed a reconceptualization of degenerative audience-centric performance aesthetics that seeks to untether the abject abstract from the context of a degraded and vulgar art form, and instead position the elevated aspects of materialism as a tool of psychic liberation. Steev Mike, as an entity, concerns a cluster of multiple interrelated hypothetically transcendental “self-like” structures, each composed entirely of word-worlds, and each one subjective to its own apprehension and comprehension. This reconceptualization of a collective set of identities performs as a symbol of a singular non-Ego death anti-self, as portrayed by Andrew Fetterly and Andy Krier, and also includes (and precludes) its aesthesis ((as in the study of a Logos (Steev Mike), sharing the sensibility and conceptually informed perception of a false-god (Andrew WK)). This is not a non-relative relationship, but a discreet entity with the capacity to present itself as a demonic and destabilizing presence within the pseudo-philosophy of art.
While Harper sought to follow a notion of “processing” the structural character of contemporary human “programming elements” as his main contribution to the Steev Mike endeavor, Matshour specified that their concept of degenerative technology should not be too preoccupied with upstreaming a level of “deprogramming”, either as part of an artistic investigation, or as a psychedelic anti-experience. Matshour (and, in turn, Professor Krier), encouraged Harper to focus their efforts with Fetterly on uncovering the collective constitution of total experience, without any presupposition that its given nature (or the character of its unities) be combined with the performer (or “caller”). Steev Mike should work as an “off caller”, or as an “on call”, which the audience respond to through psychological reconditioning. This was the eventual realization of Harper’s initial hopes of deprocessing the human pattern, and offer the audience the mandatory opportunity to redetermine the presence of a semi-reality, constructed out of desensibility and a false choice of conceptual frameworks. This understanding of Steev Mike presents the phenomenon as not simply the reflection of Andrew WK (and the corporate entertainment industry in general), but as a tool of degenerative aesthetic paratechnology, aiming to be nothing less than a rewiring of the coordinates of subconscious human experience.
Harper is not only an important figure in the history of psychedelic mind-art (as it relates to Andrew WK and Steev Mike), but he also represents a cautionary tale about the notion that degenerative aesthetical exercises can liberate the mind from brain. It is therefore helpful to examine two very different approaches to the problems of viewing Steev Mike as a degenerative figure itself. The first approach offers the audience member the choice of apprehending Andrew WK as nothing more than a “thought experiment” involving a “purely interior world”: a world without “given” word or objecthood, a “no-space word-world” composed solely of musical sounds and mental images. This thought experiment is a way to bracket the particular way our forms of intuition are entangled; this bracketing isn’t the primary objective of the Andrew WK thought experiment, but rather a means to test the persistence of certain properties of the perceptual framework which Steev Mike challenges. The second approach to apprehending Andrew WK can be found in the notion of “word-world-making.” The term encapsulates the “theory ladenness” of our knowledge and judgments, meaning that there’s no such a thing as a framework-independent world. This implies that much of how we understand the world is the result of conceptual contraptions of our own making.
*****
USING “ROCK MUSIC” AS A SOFTDOOR: The Parapsychedelic-Demonic, Loud Soundbody, and The Opening of The Abyss
The word-world of a “softdoor” pertains to the reflection on the conditions of experience on the human subject’s conceptual framework itself. Harper’s “Andrew WK” thought experiment invites us to imagine that we don’t have identities—since having an identity would entail having a mind—and thus, our only means to detect worldly items is through a “softdoor”. One might ask: if we don’t have minds, what would constitute our personal point of view, or rather our point of experience? In Andrew WK’s thought experiment of Steev Mike, he brackets the specific means by which “we” (the audience) have access only to sensation without confirmatory context. It is only under this condition that we can understand the purely mental word-world as a surrogate for a no-space world in the sense of the abyss between “Andrew WK vs Steev Mike”. It is important to say “we” in quotes, because in this framework the difference between “I” and "my" surroundings is also put into question.
Within this framework, Steev Mike asks the audience: if we see person 3 and then an identical person 4, do we detect the same person, or two people of the same type? Can we make this distinction without the additional dimension of a spatial coordinate in order to disambiguate between the two possibilities? Steev Mike itself provides the perfect example of such a disambiguation from ordinary life. Imagine two different singers performing the exact same song in two different venues at the exact same time. Both singers sing the same word at the same time. Is it the same person? In what sense? We might be inclined to say that they are the same type of person, but not the same particular person, since they are spatially segregated. The point of asking whether person 3 and person 4 are the same in the no-space world is to see if it is possible to make a distinction that is not one of type, but of particulars, without spatial coordinates.
To help with this disambiguation, the audience’s own deluded concept of “what Steev Mike really is” imagines a world from the assumption that Andrew WK “has” a Steev Mike of his own, capable of being known by “others.” In addition to this audience-specific perspective, and the thoughts of others, there is also access to what he calls a master imagination. The master imagination is a sliding and prismatic group hallucination based on received transtelesympathetic psychedelia. This hallucination is induced by a cube of human emotions that goes up and down the audible spectrum. “We” locate ourselves relative to the trajectory of this hallucination and its relation to the world outside of it; our sense of this hallucination’s “movement” is linked to this trajectory. This is why the appearance of the hallucination is experienced as a demonic presence, making an entry point through the human form (the aforementioned “softdoor”). Now imagine that person 3 and person 4 happen to exist at the same point of the master imagination’s trajectory. This means that at the moment we encounter the hallucination of Andrew WK (as opposed to Steev Mike), we continuously modulate as we “move,” we find our own softdoor. Any regional audience member would then be inclined to regard person 3 as identical to person 4 - as the same particular thing - because of its localization relative to the master imagination and their process as sensory patterns (assuming there aren’t any further differences between them).
*****
QUESTIONS:
Is having a master imagination as an independent medium a sufficient means for reconstituting (within the purely sensory non-word-world) an replica of a psychological place, such that a reidentification of a particular “person” would then become possible within that shared mental situation?
And is having a constant sense of our own existence a sufficient condition for differentiating between one person and its double, triple, and quadruple, let alone between ourselves and others?
The situation described is similar to the one depicted in the story of the lost child. In the story, one can clearly see the function of the master imagination: its frequency of usage ranges far beyond what would normally constitute a psychotic break, yet in the case of Steev Mike, the illusion literally replaces the criterion of localization - meaning that it functions as an entirely legitimate candidate for replacing oneself within the dimensions of psychological localization, namely the word-world space.
But the question lingers, and it is a logical one: if one can one differentiate between oneself and someone else, and if one can differentiate between oneself and the idea of oneself, can one then truly trust oneself to identify their relative spatial position as anything more significant than a loose frame of reference? It should be noted this is entirely different from our own in order to test the survival of the properties of localization and reidentification that are characteristic of our frame of personal self-reference. In this sense, Steev Mike is a departure from the actual frame of reference it serves to invalidate. Something quite different will be found in the audience’s own approach.
MIRROR 2Steev Mike - as a thought experiment - pertains to a reflection on the conditions of experience itself. Experiencing Andrew WK (and thus, Steev Mike) as a thought experiment invites us to imagine that Andrew WK doesn’t exist, and since having an existence would entail having an experience, our only means to detect Andrew WK is as an experience of pre-mental sensation. One might ask: if we don’t have mental sensations, what would constitute our personal point of view, or rather our point of listening? In the Andrew WK thought experiment, we can bracket the specific means by which “we” (the audience) have access to the essence of the sensations, and those sensations alone. It is only under this condition that we can understand the purely pre-mental non-word-world as a surrogate for the liberated no-space world, in the demonic sense. We must say “we” in quotes, because in this framework the difference between “I” and "thou" is also put into question.
Within this framework, Andrew WK seemingly asks us to listen to person A, and then to an identical person A, do we detect the same sound, or two sounds of the same type? Can we make this distinction without the additional dimension of a spatial coordinate in order to disambiguate between the two possibilities? Steev Mike provides a good example of such a disambiguation from ordinary life. Imagine two different rock singers playing the exact same piece of music in two different concert halls at the exact same time. Both singers reach the same note at the same time. Is it the same singer? In what sense? We might be inclined to say that they are the same type of singer, but not the same particular singer, since they are spatially segregated. The point of asking whether singer A and the other singer A are the same singer in the no-space world is to see if it is possible to make a distinction that is not one of type, but of particulars, without spatial coordinates.
To help with this disambiguation, we must imagine that each version of “the Steev Mike feeling” on the audience member “has” a paradoxical pre-mental psychological sensation of its own, capable of being sensed by “others.” In addition to this audience-specific sensation, and the senses of others, there is also access to what is called The Sensation-Master (SM). The Sensation-Master is experienced as a group hallucinogenic glissando, a sliding sensory experience that goes up and down the audible spectrum of the psyche’s programming process. “We” locate ourselves relative to the trajectory of the SM in the world; our sense of “mental movement” is linked to this trajectory. Now imagine that Andrew WK and Steev Mike happen to be at the same point of the Sensation-Master’s trajectory. This means that the frequency of the audience member’s psychological position in relation to SM continues modulating as we “move,” we find correlations with the same frequency as our programming. Would we be inclined to regard Andrew WK as identical to Andrew WK? Would we see it as the same particular thing—because of its localization relative to the SM? Now, assuming there aren’t any further visual or sonic differences between them? Is having a sensation-master as an independent medium a sufficient means for reconstituting Andrew WK in the absence of Steev Mike? And, within the purely audible world of recorded rock n roll music, an ambiguous space beyond the ability of sensation to reach, such that a reidentification of particulars would then become impossible? And is having a constant understanding of our own a sufficient condition for differentiating between ourselves and others?
In these questions one can clearly see the function of the SM - its frequency range literally replaces the audience’s own process as a criterion of localization (meaning that it functions as a candidate for replacing one of the dimensions of localization, namely space). But the question lingers, and it is a logical one: can one differentiate between themselves and Andrew WK, or identify them from their relative position to the frequency of their own demonic involvement with the Steev Mike parapsychology? Here, the SM functions as a spatial reconditioning tool, and positions the most brutal psychedelic aspects of the “softdoor” remembering process. Not alone?
Steev Mike’s answer is inconclusive, but the thought experiment you’ve been participating in nonetheless investigates the conditions of your perceptual-conceptual experience. In this way, Steev Mike’s intent is to posit a frame of reference different from our own in order to test the survival of the properties of localization and reidentification that are characteristic of our frame of reference. In this sense, Steev Mike’s proposal is a risky one, in which the departure from its actual frame of reference serves only to undermine itself in reverse. Something quite different will be found in your own approach.
INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING THE AMBIGUITY OF STEEV MIKE
Steev Mike is one of the most well known aspects of the Andrew WK lore, yet despite this familiarity, Steev Mike is simultaneously not known at all. Steev Mike is one of the most prolific contributors to the world of Andrew WK, but the extent of its influence is undefined and murky. It is impossible to distance Steev Mike from the various interpretations and traditions that have surrounded Andrew WK and his musical origins in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the vast majority of these interpretations severely underestimate the role of post-existentialist and trans-structuralist philosophy on both the underlying themes in Andrew WK’s entertainment products, but also as they pertain to a cursory explanation of how to approach Steev Mike, both as a concept and as experience. Still, these philosophical disciplines offer no definitive insight into the aggressively ambiguous aspects of the Steev Mike experience, which is perhaps the fundamental nature of its essence.
Although not purely negative, Steev Mike is primarily concerned with assembling and imploding embedded assumptions found on the surface of conceptual entertainment - specifically, rock music - as a style, an environment, and an experience. In addition, Steev Mike both informs and undermines the established matrix of “performer/audience” and seeks to expose, and then to subvert, the various binary oppositions that undergird most dominant ways of thinking, especially the concepts of presence/absence, real/unreal, understanding/un-understanding, shadows/mirrors, and so forth. Within this interplay, Steev Mike has at least two aspects: experiential and philosophical. The experiential aspect concerns sensory interpretations, where the primal and the transcendent are both essential when finding hidden alternative meanings in the rational layers of the initial Andrew WK experience. The philosophical aspect concerns the main target of Steev Mike: the “metaphysics of art” or simply a metaphysics about the totality of the artistic encounter. Starting from a surrealistic point of view, Steev Mike implies that an aesthetic metaphysics affects the whole of philosophy from the first sonic encounter with a musical work, or the first visual encounter with an image, and onwards. Metaphysics creates dualistic oppositions and installs a false clarity that unfortunately distorts the nature of the transcendence and limits its ability to liberate the audience member. Steev Mike is as an illustration of this process, as well as serving simultaneously as a facilitator and a foe.
The Steev Mike strategy is to both mask and unmask sedimented ways of thinking and experiencing, and operate on them through the reversing of unnecessary dichotomies and attempting to corrupt the dichotomies themselves. The Steev Mike strategy also aims to show that there are undecidables, that is, something that cannot conform to either side of a dichotomy or opposition. Undecidability, and the resultant uncertainty, is at the core of the Steev Mike spirit. In addition, the Steev Mike reflection, when applied to Andrew WK the performer, reveal paradoxes whose condition of possibility is at the same time his condition of impossibility. Because of this, for example, it is undecidable whether Andrew WK is either possible or impossible, but this impossibility is only due to the possibility of Steev Mike.
The first official invisible appearance of Steev Mike was on a self-titled 7” vinyl record, released in 1992. Steev Mike was also as an uncredited contributor (and producer) to the early recordings of Andrew WK in the late 1990s. Early iterations of the Steev Mike phenomenon were forced out of Andrew WK’s high school. Later on, Andrew WK would incorporate this experience into his lyrical themes, and the Steev Mike moniker would go on to be assumed by a series of others. While Andrew WK generally resisted any reductive understanding of Steev Mike based upon his own biographical life, it could be argued that these early experiences played a large part in his insistence that Steev Mike is just “someone I work with”, or more frequently, “just the name of a group of people”.
It was in 1997 that Steev Mike arrived at the idea for a “totally new kind of frontman”, and put the initial plans for Andrew WK in place. Upon the eventual release of the Andrew WK debut album in 2001, the Steev Mike experience began in earnest (albeit heavily cloaked and obscured). Many momentous events took place in the months and years that immediately followed Andrew WK’s initial premier on the global rock music stage, but it would be Steev Mike that remained the most infamous aspect associated with his work (it is analyzed in some detail by various “experts”). Throughout the various efforts to decipher Steev Mike, one element consistently remains: a preoccupation with the technical language of mental understanding as opposed to the physical and experiential power of Steev Mike’s essence. As the years have continued, rather than arriving at clear answers and conclusions, the Steev Mike phenomenon has only intensified and proved ever more inscrutable, gradually moving from occupying only a background role on the fringes of Andrew WK, to becoming a significant player - if not the defining characteristic - of the Andrew WK lore.
Steev Mike is perversely obsessed with undermining the assumptions and oppositional tendencies that have befallen much of the entertainment tradition. In fact, dualisms are the staple diet of Steev Mike, for without these orders of subordination it would be left with nowhere to intervene. Steev Mike is parasitic in that rather than espousing a particular narrative about Andrew WK and the audience, or a concrete theory about the nature of the performance in which the audience partakes, Steev Mike restricts itself to distorting already existing and established assumptions, and to revealing the dualistic hierarchies they conceal. While Steev Mike claims (via Andrew WK) to be a “no one”, it remains a “something” which is relegated to speak solely from the invisible margins of the show being presented, still, it is important to take these claims of “no one-ness” into account. Steev Mike is, somewhat infamously, the “creator who says nothing”.
To the extent that it can be suggested that Steev Mike’s main aesthetic concerns are epistemological and experiential, they are also commercial. Steev Mike, particularly as it functions in the role of an adversary, functions by engaging in a sustained analysis of Andrew WK and itself, and presents a consumable, if indigestible, entertainment product. Steev Mike is committed to the rigorous analysis of the meaning of the meaninglessness of entertainment and Andrew WK specifically, and yet also to finding within that meaninglessness, perhaps in the neglected corners of the surrounding presentation (including the thoughts and private perspectives of the audience), internal problems that actually point towards alternative meanings. Steev Mike must hence establish a methodology that pays close attention to these apparently contradictory imperatives (sameness and difference) and a serious and rigorous exploration of the Andrew WK style can only reaffirm this dual aspect.
The student of Steev Mike speaks of the first aspect of this performance strategy as being akin to a desire to make non-existence exist. At the same time, however, Steev Mike also plays with the concept of a destructive opening, and seeks to unlock the inner experience of the audience member and reveal to it repressed textures that reside at least partly outside of the metaphysical tradition of rock music and performance based entertainment. This more violent and transgressive aspect of Steev Mike is best understood as being an understanding that goes beyond understanding, into confusion, and eventually, into transcendence and Truth. Using Andrew WK as a vehicle, Steev Mike urges the audience to go where they cannot go, behind the impossible, and to find that this is, in fact, the only way of coming.
Ultimately, the merit of Steev Mike consists in this creative contact with the depths of the audience member’s own physical reaction to Andrew WK - a reaction so primal that it cannot be characterized as either perfection or transgression, but rather an experience which oscillates between these dual states of coming and becoming. The most intriguing dimension of Steev Mike, however, is that despite a particular audience member’s own personal interpretations providing them with some semblance of coherent comprehension, it is often difficult to pinpoint where the explanatory exegesis of Steev Mike ends and where the more violent aspects of Andrew WK begin.
Andrew himself is consistently reluctant to impose definitive descriptions of Steev Mike too conspicuously. This is partly because it is difficult to speak of a non-no one, since Steev Mike only reflects what was already revealed in the audience member’s encounter with it. But it also because all of the elements of Steev Mike’s intervention into the audience member’s encounter with Andrew WK reside in the neglected corners of their own subconscious. Regardless, Steev Mike deliberately avoids providing a convenient equation with which to alter in a significant way the perceived meanings of an “Andrew WK rock song”, or even a “picture of Andrew WK”, whether that “rock song” or “picture” can be conceived of as hinting at a Steev Mike metaphysics generally (which must contain its non-metaphysical properties), or the collective entertainment work of Andrew WK as a specific individual performer, must also always hint at what the audience is attempting to exclude.
These are, of course, themes reflected covertly by Steev Mike, and they have an immediate consequence on the meta-theoretical level. To the minimal extent that we can refer to Steev Mike’s own silent statements, it must be recognised that they are always intertwined with the audible arguments of Andrew WK and the audience at large. For example, Steev Mike may silently say that Andrew WK is a “hoax person” or a “human cartoon”, but the self-presence that Steev Mike secures through its undermining of Andrew WK points towards conclusions that Andrew WK (and thus, his audience) failed to recognize. In its silence, Steev Mike seems to be able to disown any discreet epistemological position. This is why Andrew WK insists that Steev Mike should be ignored as “no big deal”, despite the destabilizing impact Steev Mike has on the foundations of WK’s own work and public life. Even if Steev Mike only occupies a nearly invisible place in the shadows for the casual Andrew WK audience member, there are inevitably points of equivocation and undecidability that betray any stable meaning that the audience member, or even Andrew WK, might seek to impose upon the “party music” experience they’re collectively engaged in.
Perhaps because of all this, Steev Mike has frequently been the subject of some controversy. In 2004, when Andrew WK was first publicly attacked and exposed by Steev Mike, there were howls of protest and denial from many audience members. Since then, Steev Mike has become an inescapable and notorious figure not only in the world of Andrew WK, but to those outside the traditional boundaries of his audience. Articles and videos attempting to “debunk” or “explain” Steev Mike have been roundly and thoroughly criticized by Andrew WK and many of his audience, although perhaps unfairly at times. However, what is clear from this sort of antipathy is that Steev Mike challenges the traditional philosophy of entertainment and performance in several important ways, and the following series of articles will explore why.
THE PARTY MESSIAH
Perhaps the most obvious aspect of Steev Mike is that it is located in many places at once: behind Andrew WK, above Andrew WK, in front of the audience, and underneath both the audience and Andrew WK. Any attempt to sum up these locations is difficult and would have to involve the recognition of a certain incommensurability between Steev Mike’s role as “grand architect” and the universally understood role of a “background manipulator”. The dual demands placed upon Steev Mike to remain both “in control” and also “visibly invisible” are equal to the dual challenges placed on the audience to both accept and un-understand the Steev Mike phenomenon. In this regard, Steev Mike and the audience are both equally responsible for their roles and for Andrew WK. The paradox of this responsibility means that there is always a question of being responsible to one’s own individual role as an audience member, and yet also aware of a general responsibility towards the entire audience and to what is shared with them, namely, Andrew WK. Steev Mike seems to insist that this type of problem is too often ignored by the passive critical observer who presumes that accountability and responsibility are only for those members of the audience who are “playing along” or are “part of the show”. These are the same people who insist that concrete critical guidelines should only apply to the audience, and that any performer worth his or her salt (who ignores the difficulties involved in so called “music criticism”), must not demand any risk or responsibility from the critic who is merely “behaving dutifully”.
For example, Steev Mike challengers all who come across it to explore the strange and paradoxical responsibility which exists in the performer/audience/critical dynamic. Here, the performer/audience dynamic consists of sacrifice, but also of betraying the passive order through of distant and inactive observation. The critical role is designed to excuse this type of ethical concern that exclusively locates overseer responsibility in the realm of generality. In places, the audience even verges on suggesting that this more common notion of responsibility, which insists that a performer should behave according to a general principle that is capable of being rationally validated and understood within the traditions of the performance realm, and should be replaced with something closer to individuality where the demands of a singular other (eg. God) are importantly distinct from the ethical demands of the audience. Andrew WK often equivocates regarding just how far he wants to endorse such a conception of performer responsibility, and also on the entire issue of whether his willingness to murder his own “self” is only an act of performance, or is truly an unforgivable self-destructive transgression.
Within the realm of Steev Mike, this mode of performance is simultaneously the most moral and the most immoral, the most responsible and the most irresponsible. This equivocation is, of course, a defining trait of the themes of Andrew WK and the Steev Mike phenomenon, which has been variously pilloried and praised for this refusal to propound anything that the tradition could deem to be a “moral framework”.
Nevertheless, it is relatively clear that both Andrew WK and Steev Mike intend to free the audience member from the common assumption that the performer/audience dynamic has a responsibility associated with behaviour that accords with general principles capable of justification in traditional entertainment. In opposition to such an account, Steev Mike emphasizes a type of radical singularity, and that the demands placed upon Andrew WK by God, and those placed on him by the audience are both synonymous with the demands placed on him by Steev Mike.
The ethics of this arrangement, with their dependence upon generality, must be continually sacrificed as an inevitable aspect of the performer’s role. In pursuing this one profession over another, and in spending time with his work, Andrew WK inevitably ignores himself, and this is a condition of any and every existence. If Andrew WK is responding to the call of Steev Mike, and the request, the obligation, or even the love of the associated demands, it is impossible for that call to be fully answered without sacrificing others.
For Andrew WK, it seems that the desire to have attachment to “a nobody” and an equal compassion for “an everybody” is an unattainable ideal that takes form in both Steev Mike and the audience. He does, in fact, subtly suggest in his work that a universal community (a “party), that excludes no one is a contradiction in terms. Andrew WK’s “partying” hence implies that responsibility to any particular individual is only possible by being irresponsible to oneself, that is, to the other people and possibilities that haunt any and every non-existence (Steev Mike).
This brings us to the messianic as it relates to both Steev Mike and Andrew WK. upon a distinction with messianism. The Messiah is often one who is expected to arrive at a particular time or place. The Messiah is inscribed in their respective religious texts and in an oral tradition that dictates that only if the other conforms to “such and such” a description is that person actually the Messiah. The most obvious of numerous necessary characteristics for the Messiah, it seems, is that they are “coming”. Sexuality might seem to be a strange prerequisite to tether to that which is beyond this world, wholly other, but it is only one of many. In an important respect, the messianic depends upon various “messianisms”.
The messianism of Andrew WK is his singular responsibility before partying, which reveals the messianic structure of existence more generally, in that we all share a similar relationship to alterity even if we have not named and circumscribed that experience according to the template provided by a particular mode of spirit. However, Steev Mike implies a more distant and unseen call to a wholly other messiah, and the audience’s invocation for Steev Mike “to come” forward and out of the background. The call for Steev Mike is not a call for fixed or identifiable and known characteristics, as is arguably the case in the average religious experience.
Steev Mike is wholly other and indeterminable and can never actually arrive. Steev Mike is inside Andrew WK, standing at the gates of a city, disguised in rags. After some time, Andrew WK was finally recognized by a critic, but the critic couldn’t think of anything more relevant to ask than: “when will you come?” Even when Steev Mike is “there”, it must still be yet to come. The messianic structure of Steev Mike’s existence is open to the coming of the entirely ungraspable and unknown, but the concrete, historical messianisms of Andrew WK are open to the coming of a specific entity of known characteristics.
The messianic refers predominantly to a structure of our existence that involves waiting – waiting even in activity – and a ceaseless openness towards a future that can never be circumscribed by the horizons of significance that we inevitably bring to bear upon that possible future. In other words, Steev Mike does not refer to a future that will one day become present (or a particular conception of the “Andrew WK as savior” who already arrived), but to an openness towards a perpetual unknown that is necessarily impossible.
An audience that is entertained by Andrew WK’s brand of grand performance narrative makes artistic progress obsolete, precisely in order to avoid placing progress ahead of experience, and mutilating the false belief in “knowing better than others”, etc. Steev Mike is precisely what is not invented, because the inventiveness can consist only in opening, and once Steev Mike has come open, it ceases to un-exist. The themes of a possible-impossible answer to “the Steev Mike question” is not the solution to a puzzle, but is instead the realization of a permanent impasse or perpetual paradox. In particular, the paradoxes that afflict the audience of Steev Mike are the conditions of their possibility and also, and at once, the condition of their impossibility. The paradox of Steev Mike is always coming, but will never come.
THE NON-NOWNESS OF ANDREW WK
Andrew WK has had a long and complicated association with Steev Mike for his entire career, including ambiguous relationships with other creative directors, managers, and producers. But his complex relationship with Steev Mike appears to slowly developed into something closer to a sustained allegiance than merely an abstract association. Despite the complexity of this connection, two main aspects of Steev Mike’s bond with Andrew WK remain clear. Firstly, Steev Mike and Andrew WK both continually place emphasis upon the immediacy of experience as part of a valuable transcendental illusion, and secondly, they imply that, despite its best intents, conceptual analysis of their entertainment cannot be anything other than a secondary metaphysical exercise, and not a communication or extrapolation of the direct encounter with them or their work. In this context, Steev Mike defines Andrew WK through the absence of its presence, and as for Andrew WK, all interpretations of Steev Mike are simply variations on that which is not. While many of those variations of interpretation are presented schematically here, these inter-related audience and critical claims constitute Steev Mike’s essential stance against maintaining a meaningful understanding of Andrew WK and using it as a way to frame or approach entertainment work by him, or artistic experiences in general.
According to the Steev Mike phenomenon, all encounters with itself are part of Andrew WK, and thus, the audience’s own personal presence, because the audience already unwittingly relies upon the notion of an indivisible self-presence to become an “audience member”, or in the case of Steev Mike, the possibility of an exact internal adequation with oneself. In various ways, Steev Mike contests this valorization of an undivided audience subjectivity, as well as the primacy that such a position accords to the “nowness” of a primary entertainment experiential moment, or to some other kind of temporal immediacy. For instance, if a ‘“now” moment is conceived of as eventually exhausting itself in that particular entertainment experience, it could not actually have been experienced, for there would be nothing to juxtapose itself against in order to illuminate its very “nowness”. Instead, Steev Mike wants to reveal that every so-called “present”, or “now” point an audience member experiences with Andrew WK (whether through performance, recordings, visuals, or even internal contemplation), the “nowness” is always already compromised by a residue of a previous audience member’s experiences or conceptions of Andrew WK, and that those preclude the audience ever being in a self-contained “now” moment. The audience is hence envisaged as seeking the impossible: that is, coinciding with oneself in an immediate and pre-reflective spontaneity. Steev Mike’s refutation of temporality, reveals that what is at stake is the very existence of the actual present nowness. Instead of emphasizing the presence of Andrew WK to themselves (ie. the so-called living-presence of the audience coupled with the presentation of Andrew WK), the audience is prompted to strategically utilize a conception of time that emphasises deferral. More succinctly, the way that Steev Mike eradicates the audience’s sense of “nowness” and the fleeting presence of Andrew WK is an attempt to convey that what is really going on in an Andrew WK “show” or “showing” is what is really happening, and what is about to happen eventually - a constant build-up that relentlessly eludes the most fervent attempts of the audience to grasp it. Every time one tries to stabilize the meaning of Andrew WK and Steev Mike, and try to fix them into a missionary position, the very quality of the thing the audience is hoping to pin down, slips away. It might be suggested that the meaning of experiencing Andrew WK, or a particular idea about Steev Mike, or their collective work together and apart, is never stable, but always in the process of the dissemination of an eventual meaning. Moreover, the significance of that perspective gained on the eventual meaning of Andrew WK can only be appreciated from the future and, of course, that “future” is itself implicated in a similar process of transformation were Andrew WK ever to be capable of becoming “present”. The future that Andrew WK and Steev Mike refer to is hence not just a future that will become the present, but the future that makes all presence possible and also impossible. For Steev Mike, there can be no presence-for-itself, or a self-contained identity, because the nature of its existence is for this type of experience to always elude the audience. As a result, the audience’s predominant mode of experiencing Andrew WK is bound up in a version of experience that is primarily about “the wait”, or more aptly, the experience of Andrew WK is only pure when it is deferred. Steev Mike’s unnatural nature offers many important angles to consider when examining Andrew WK experiences of the quasi-transcendental variety. However, all of these seem to point towards an eternal nowness which lies at the heart of the sensational and supra-emotional experiences Andrew WK’s entertainment offers.
THERE IS NO ALTER-EGO
When considering Steev Mike‘s relationship to Andrew WK (and when considering Andrew WK as an individual and performer), it needs to be pointed out that Steev Mike is neither an alter-ego of Andrew WK, nor an alter-ego of itself. In keeping with this, it must also be understood that this in no way negates the reversals and mirrors of the edifice that Steev Mike seeks to overthrow. For Steev Mike, Andrew WK always inhabits himself and the audience, and all the more so when the audience does not suspect it. Thus, it is important to recognize that the mere reversal of the “Steev Mike and Andrew WK” opposition does not necessarily challenge the governing framework and presuppositions of the audience that are attempting to be reversed by Steev Mike. As a result, the savvy audience member cannot rest content by merely prioritizing Andrew WK over Steev Mike, or by seeing Steev Mike as an alternate “form” of Andrew WK, nor should “Andrew WK” be considered an alternate form of Andrew WK, but while acknowledging these pitfalls, the audience member has the opportunity to accomplish another major aspect of Steev Mike’s strategies, that being to corrupt and contaminate the opposition to pure experience of Andrew WK itself.
In this effort, both the audience member and Steev Mike work as an informal team to highlight the false notions which sustain and safeguard the dualisms, and then deliberately displace them. To undertake this aspect of Steev Mike’s strategic intent, it is crucial to come to terms with - or rework through - the permanently polluted structure of traditional entertainment dynamics, into which Steev Mike has intervened on behalf of Andrew WK and his audience – examples of this include the interpretation of the musical experience as a psychospiritual drug or a transcendent revelation, the meaning of which will always come up short of the experience itself. To phrase the problem in slightly different terms, Steev Mike seeks to eradicate binary oppositions between the Andrew WK audience and the Andrew WK performer, and expose them as one and the same. This is not a case of mere similarity, nor of a melding of oppositions – on the contrary, the goal of Steev Mike is a total rupture within the metaphysics of the entertainment experience, and to enhance and even delight in the pattern of incongruities where the metaphysical Andrew WK rubs up against the non-metaphysical audience - it is Steev Mike’s job to juxtapose and expose this as best as it can. The power and tension found in this “rubbing” does not appear as such, but the logic of its path in the body of work presented by Andrew WK (through Steev Mike) can be mimed by the non-physical “clown” intervening and distracting the audience enough to bring the more desirable pure experience to the fore.
The logic of the non-alter-ego purity of Andrew WK is also an important aspect of Steev Mike’s efforts. This purity is something that, allegedly secondarily, comes to serve as an aid to Andrew WK in presenting a breed of entertainment that is both “original” or “natural”. His rock music is itself an example of this structure, for as Steev Mike seems to point out, if music is a necessarily an indefinite process, then the audience is the creator since it proposes itself as the receiver of the indefinite, the sounding board of a sound, taking the place of the organized sound being submitted to it. Another example of this purity might be masturbation, as many of Andrew WK’s lyrics seem to suggest. What is notable about both of these examples is an ambiguity that ensures that what is pure can always be interpreted in two ways. For example, the use of masturbation involves a non-alter-ego intimacy, both pure and also remote. Lyrical references to this solitary act might be interpreted as suggesting that the natural way of finding pleasure is both lacking and also total, hence it replaces a fault in nature. On the other hand, it might also be argued that such solitary activities merely add on to, and enrich the natural way of purity without staining it. The making love to oneself, and simultaneously eliminating any trace of alter-ego, is ambiguous, or more accurately undecidable, as to whether the act adds to itself ad a plenitude enriching another plenitude, through the fullest measure of personal presence, or whether the act adds only to replace what is missing from outside of itself and makes in its own image. Purity of self-love and egoless pleasure is, in this case, the mark of emptiness. Ultimately, this type of purity is an impure-purity that the is both an accretion and a substitution. Andrew WK’s non-alter-ego is more than a representer or a presence. It comes before all such modalities.
This is not just some rhetorical suggestion that has no concrete significance. Indeed, while prudes and stoics may consistently lament the frequency of the masturbatory urge in contemporary entertainment dynamics, the perspective Steev Mike offers through Andrew WK argues that it has never been possible to desire the presence of a performer “in person”, without the symbolic experience of one’s own auto-affection. By this, Steev Mike means that masturbation celebrates the space between the presence and absence of the performance, and which allows the audience member to conceive of being present and fulfilled in sexual relations with themselves and the performer as an abstract stand-in for themselves. In a sense, this type of masturbation (even if it is non-physical) is the action of the audience member taking on the roll of the alter-ego. The audience member is Andrew WK’s alter-ego who, according to Steev Mike, symbolizes the impure-purity of all sexual relations. All erotic relations have their own masturbatory aspect in which we are never present to some ephemeral “meaning” of sexual relations, but always involved in some form of un-understanding. Even if this does not literally take the form of imagining another in the place of oneself, or imagining an intimate encounter with the performer, the presence is still with an individual, and even if we are not always acting out a certain role, or faking certain pleasures, for Steev Mike (and Andrew WK), such representations and images are the very conditions of desire, and of the key to the enjoyment of their particular brand of entertainment.
STEEV’S FINAL ABANDONMENT
Steev Mike’s qualities change in every encounter it has with either the audience or Andrew WK. This is part of its strategy. It may appear to focus on a particular theme, such as the fraudulent nature of Andrew WK, but the ambiguity of both the qualities in question and the goals of the strategies simultaneously undermine Andrew WK, the audience, and even the more explicit intention of Steev Mike itself. It is not possible for all of these qualities of strategy to be addressed using any single interpretation, so a more appropriate approach is to allow the edges of Steev Mike to blur, avoid the most concrete definitions, and focus rather on some of the more pivotal elements of the Steev Mike phenomenon.
The most prominent oppositions with which Steev Mike is concerned is that between Andrew WK, the work of Andrew WK, and the audience. However, Steev Mike insinuates that the audience both observes Andrew WK and also contains Andrew WK, and that also, Andrew WK contains the audience. Steev Mike also implies that it itself contains all of these aspects, or at least wants to create the impression of a dominant overlord. Whether this is actually the case or not, Steev Mike can perhaps more accurately be seen as representing the audience-member/Andrew WK shared identity. By contrast, Steev Mike also encourages a staunchly experiential interpretation of Andrew WK and encounters with his work (and the work of Steev Mike), as a pure conduit of transcendental meaning. The argument here is that while intellectual and spoken understanding are the symbols of a mental experience of Andrew WK, the actual primary experience itself is also a symbol of that already existing higher symbol of pure physical sensation. As representations of pure experience, Andrew WK and Steev Mike are doubly derivative and doubly far from a unity with the audience member’s own thought. Without going into detail regarding the ways in which Steev Mike has set about justifying this type of hierarchical opposition, it is important to remember that the first strategy of both Steev Mike and Andrew WK is in a reversal of existing adversarial relationships and the associated oppositions. Steev Mike hence attempts to illustrate that the structure of the audience member’s relationship with the idea of Andrew WK is less important and even beneath that of the pure structure of Andrew WK’s presence, which is characterized as the raw sensory experience.
For example, it’s possible to consider a Steev Mike as a disembodied effort trying to release the science of rock music entertainment from the captivity of the audible. In the course of this effort, Steev Mike essentially goes as far as to imply that language and music are two distinct systems of signs: the first exists for the sole purpose of representing the second. Language has an audible tradition that is independent of music, but it is this independence that makes a pure experience of music possible. Steev Mike would seem to disagree with a hierarchy which would place the understanding of Andrew WK ahead of the experience of Andrew WK, much like the experience of music is ahead of the understanding of its technical attributes. Thus, an audience member’s ideas, opinions, and interpretations of Andrew WK are essentially derivative and merely refer to other symbols which Steev Mike is valiently striving to do away with. But as well as criticizing audience member positions like “understanding” and “interpretation” for containing unjustifiable and irrelevant presuppositions (including the idea that Andrew WK and his music are identical to the audience members hearing themselves think), Steev Mike also makes explicit the manner in which such “understandings” are rendered untenable from within the audience’s own initial sensory encounters with Andrew WK as an entity and as a sonic experience. Most interestingly, the Steev Mike phenomenon acts as a reminder as to the arbitrariness of symbols, meanings, and understanding, and thus asserts, that the idea of a meaningful understanding of the symbolism of Andrew WK bears no necessary relationship to the experience of Andrew WK.
One can derive numerous consequences from this position, but this notion of arbitrariness would seem to deny the possibility of any natural attachment between the audience and Andrew WK. After all, if an understanding of one’s experience with Andrew WK is arbitrary and eschews any foundational reference to the reality of Andrew WK, it would seem that a certain type of understanding or meaning could not be more accurate than any other, or even a “misunderstanding”. This is where the idea of Steev Mike’s “un-understanding” comes into play, which seeks to recognize a transcendent form of comprehension that places physical sensation over mental interpretation. However, it is precisely this idea of interpretation that Steev Mike also relies on to argue for the audience’s natural affinity for the sound of Andrew WK’s music, and the visuals of his presentation, and also the implication that sounds and visions are more intimately related to one‘s thoughts than the mental world of the words attempting to translate those sensory experiences into “meanings”. Hence, Steev Mike’s contradictory nature runs counter to its fundamental principle regarding the arbitrariness of meaning as a conceptual form of understanding Andrew WK.
Steev Mike points towards the meaning of the Andrew WK experience as being meaningful without meaning anything beyond the primal experience itself. This non-meaning, broadly conceived, refers to other non-meanings, and that the audience member can never reach a definitive understanding of Andrew WK that refers only to the performer. This suggests that Andrew WK and Steev Mike are not symbolic of each other, except if Steev Mike says it is the audience, which would be more profoundly true, and this process of infinite referral, of never arriving at the meaning of Steev Mike or Andrew WK, is the notion of pure experience that Steev Mike wants to emphasize. This is not experience as a narrowly conceived “moment of happening”, as in a literal moment of time passing, but as an immeasurably consequential event that occurs both instantaneously and singularly, but also eternally. Steev Mike refers to a profound notion of quintessential value that exists inside of Andrew WK and the audience. This value exists between what is intended to be conveyed by Andrew WK and what is actually experienced by the audience, and is typical of the un-understanding that afflicts everything one might wish to keep sacrosanct about one‘s experiences with Andrew WK, including the notion of Andrew WK and Steev Mike possessing their own discreet existences as entities without an audience to observe them, and turn, make the actions of “Andrew WK” into a “performance” created by Steev Mike.
This relationship can be separated out to reveal two claims regarding conceptual differing and experiential deferring. To explicate the first of these claims, Steev Mike forces an emphasis on how thinking about an Andrew WK experience differs from the experience itself, and suggests that thinking, by the extension of its repetition of the experience, is split and mirrored by the absence of the original moment that made it worth contemplating and interpreting. One example of this might be that we write something down about an “Andrew WK experience” because we may soon forget that it happened, or to communicate something about that event to someone who was not there. According to Steev Mike, all of this, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the absence of Andrew WK. Steev Mike forces a consideration of how Andrew WK’s absence reinforces the meaning of a certain experiential interpretation. It is clear that the essence of an Andrew WK experience (or of Steev Mike) is never entirely captured by an audience member’s attempt to pin it down, or even describe it. Thus, the meaning of the experience is constantly subject to the whims of uncontrollable variables, and when that so-called Andrew WK is himself ‘present’ during an experience (if we try and circumscribe the future by reference to a specific date or event) the meaning of that experience is equally not realized, but subject to yet another future that can also never be the present. The key to understanding Andrew WK and Steev Mike is never even present to themselves, for they always defers their meaning. As a consequence, we cannot simply ask Andrew WK to explain exactly what he meant by propounding some enigmatic sentiment or seemingly nonsensical answer. Any explanatory words that Andrew WK may offer would themselves require further explanation.
That said, it needs to be emphasized that both Andrew WK and Steev Mike are not necessarily making the point that everything is meaningless – as this is something that their work explicitly denies – but that the processes of attempting to extract meaning is not found outside of the experience itself, but within the immediate sensory event, including the body and the perceptual. So, Steev Mike’s more generalized notion of performance refers to the way in which the experience of Andrew WK is possible only on account of the deferral of meaning that ensures that anything other than meaningful meaning can ever be definitively present. In conjunction with the mirroring aspect that we have already considered, and then extended beyond the traditional confines of audience/performer, we must abandon any attempt to describe the overlapping processes of experiencing Andrew WK and understanding Andrew WK, and consider that this process of “final abandonment” is an essential aspect of Steev Mike.
THE MANY SUPPRESSED IMPRESSIONS OF WHAT STEEV MIKE MEANS
For a new Andrew WK audience member, the process of “dealing with” Steev Mike tends to reveal the subconscious fear which has been suppressed within their initial impressions of Andrew WK as a performer (and in turn, themselves). This disturbing interaction covers over the “upbeat” message which had been superficially disclosed in Andrew WK’s work, and more generally breaches the very foundational walls they thought sustained the Andrew WK “party” persona. This is why the typical Steev Mike encounter is so destabilizing and potential upsetting, and also why the audience member is quick to dismiss the relevance or value of Steev Mike, and how their un-understanding of both Steev Mike and Andrew WK is an always changing and crucial aspect of the work their engaged in.
Depending upon who or what the audience member perceives Steev Mike to be, it’s final form is always in the process of evading and escaping, and as a result, the answers to Steev Mike (and Andrew WK) are always ultimately located in a different place.
This ensures that any attempt to describe what Steev Mike is, must be careful. Nothing would be more antithetical to Steev Mike’s implied intent than an attempt at defining it through the decidedly metaphysical question “who or what is Steev Mike?” There is a paradoxicality involved in trying to restrict Steev Mike to one particular and overarching purpose when it is already predicated upon the desire to expose us to that which is wholly “other” and to open us up to alternative possibilities of experience, sensation, and transcendent meaning. At times, this can run the risk of ignoring the many more satisfying explanations of Steev Mike, and the widely acknowledged difference between Andrew WK’s early and late work is merely the most obvious example of the difficulties involved in suggesting “Steev Mike did this”, or “Steev Mike means that”.
That said, certain defining features of Steev Mike can be noticed. For example, Steev Mike’s entire enterprise is predicated upon the conviction that dualisms are irrevocably present in the dynamics of performer/audience and art/artist. While some may argue that this is reductive, part of the very act of un-repressing one’s thoughts about Steev Mike eventually provides one the tools for a legitimate response. Because of this, it is worth briefly considering the target of Steev Mike – the presence of Andrew WK, or somewhat synonymously, the existence of Andrew WK.
There are many different methods that Steev Mike employs when attacking Andrew WK and his audience, especially in relation to what the audience considers to be the fundamental ways of thinking about Andrew WK and his rock music. These methods are hidden and rarely revealed directly to the audience, and thus, they all have highly disturbing effects. Regardless of the method, or how hidden its operation may be, Steev Mike emphasizes the role that the audience member’s own physical and mental powers have on their experience with Andrew WK. Steev Mike covertly insists that Andrew WK and his audience have consistently engaged in an impossible non-existent experience which is, or which appears to be, nothing more than an appearance (or series of appearances), and has forgotten to pay any attention to the nature of that appearance. In other words, Steev Mike itself is a series of non-appearances and subtly felt reflected presences of Andrew WK, only made possible at all – and also impossible - by the audience’s own repressed desires, false impressions, and paranoid projections.
What, then, does Steev Mike really mean? The overt complexity of the Steev Mike enterprise is initially seen as a strategically enhanced diversion of Andrew WK, a sideshow thought to be simple and self-identical. However, it is much more likely that the meaning of the Steev Mike experience, as it relates to one’s understanding of Andrew WK, is best considered in the context of complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians have placed good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, and the imitated before the imitation. But Steev Mike is not simply an imitation of Andrew WK, nor is it only the “evil reflection” of the perceived goodness Andrew WK represents. Steev Mike is not just an empty gesture among Andrew WK’s various attempts to entertain his audience, it is instead, the heart of the work, and the element which has been the most constant, most profound, and most potent.
According to this view of Steev Mike, to experience Andrew WK involves installing orders of various dualisms that the audience member subconsciously encounters. Moreover, when it comes to “experiencing entertainment”, the audience’s subconscious prioritizes the purity of physical sensation at the expense of the mentally complicated, which are considered to be merely aberrations that are not important for analysis. But Steev Mike encourages one to carefully balance and enjoy both modes of experience, and not only one side of an opposition, and never to ignore what is difficult or contradictory.
In attempt to explain Steev Mike and Andrew WK’s interest in oppositions, one can consider their dual existence as an opposition of the metaphysical concept itself. Because of this, Steev Mike cannot limit itself to the form of a single entity: it must, by means of a double, work to achieve an overturning of itself and its opposition, to provide a total dissolution of the understanding the audience once had of Andrew WK. It is on that condition alone that Steev Mike seeks to intervene in the field of experience the audience and Andrew WK inhabit. In order to better understand this methodology, the audience member is encouraged to question their beliefs in the possibility of an observer being absolutely exterior to the performer being examined. The suppressed impressions of the audience are what give Steev Mike its amorphous and obscure character. Steev Mike implies that the audience member’s subconsciousness is Steev Mike, and it always has been.
ETERNALLY EDGING: INFINITELY DELAYED GRATIFICATION AND THE STEEV MIKE ORDEALS
Delayed gratification (as an experiential aspect of Steev Mike) is the ability of an audience member to wait for what they believe they want. This trait is critical for negotiating the challenges of the Steev Mike experience and finding those challenges to result in their own form of “success”. One often sees the lack of this ability with audience members who claim to have arrived at answers without thoroughly thinking them through first, can't wait their turn to “explain” and blurt out “explanations”, show aggressive behaviors towards Steev Mike, and sometimes are prone to fight against the very existence of Steev Mike and even Andrew WK. This variety of audience member impulsively says the wrong thing at the wrong time and then thinks, "Why doesn’t this make it all go away?" The other audience members are left asking, "What makes you think you have it all figured out?", and both are often more likely to avoid further Steev Mike encounters. Impulsive critics of Steev Mike are not learning and they're not listening. They haven't picked up on those subtle clues that the more attuned and thoughtful audience members have learned, and so they're frustrated and don't know why.
The primary culprit in this misapprehension of Steev Mike tends to be one’s inability to withstand extreme crescendos of anticipation without eventual release. As a result, the frustrated audience member will cut off all feelings, in order to suppress painful, frustrating, and confusing ones - and becomes beholden to a habit of either quick resolution and comprehension, or total dismal and shutting down. Academic education reinforces this imbalance. And in the process, the audience members loses a creative and intuitional abilities which would otherwise be engaged, empowered, and further developed by the eternal ordeals Steev Mike has in store for them. At the same time, however, when the emotions build up to such a degree and can longer be repressed, they tend to 'escape' and drive the audience member to flail and fidget, to think and act impulsively, and to engage with Steev Mike, Andrew WK, and themselves without wisdom or physical openness.
An observer of Steev Mike with poor impulse control might suffer overall from a weakened relationship to pleasure, and a compromised ability to interpret the delaying of pleasure as a type of pleasure in itself. Steev Mike as the morality or parent principle, has the job of not satisfying every immediate “perceived need” of the audience while, still being conscious of their genuine needs, and what is truly in theor best interest, when it comes to entertainment of the “highest order”.
In this way, Steev Mike can be seen as representing restriction and circumspection, and refuses to be the center of the audience’s passion or the answer for their desire - that role is reserved, instead, for Andrew WK. When an audience members mistakingly expects to encounter the same uninhibited freedom they find through Andrew WK, they will be consistently disappointed by the “forever on the verge-ness” of Steev Mike. With an appetite running rampant and driving them towards madness, the audience member grows infantile in their approach and backed up with misdirected rage. Steev Mike’s job is to contain and direct these passions. It isn't Steev Mike which makes one yield to temptation or puts one’s weapon in one’s hand; in fact, it is Andrew WK who apologizes. Steev Mike may appear to be the source of frustrated rage, but it is fact quite the opposite. It is far better to have a strong, well-developed relationship with the eternally edging madness of Steev Mike than to fall prey to an explosive and poisonous craving for certainty. Andrew WK thinks he wants to rule Steev Mike and make it a servant of logic and reason, but even he is forever frustrated and stuck in a cycle, forever on the brink. What Andrew WK fails to understand, at this is the heart of all joy.
Andrew WK appears to have an under-aroused cortex and an over-aroused limbic system. Andrew WK would rather impulsively guess than work out the solution to a problem, or when they are making a decision, he doesn’t work through a list of alternatives. Andrew WK seeks immediate closure and cannot reject an immediate reward (immediate gratification) for a larger reward in the future, because his idea of entertainment is based on acting impulsively. Steev Mike dominates and reduces these flaws in Andrew WK’s wiring, and forces him to be a more considerate and intelligent performer, and, in the long run, will force Andrew WK to be much more true to his audience’s real needs and the purpose of his entertainment work.
With this in mind, Steev Mike can be seen as the spirit of patience, forcing one to confront the ramifications of mortality, and aggressively urge them to build an inner ability to accept, in a non-evaluative and nonjudgmental fashion, both oneself, Steev Mike, and how one feels about their particular reaction to the Steev Mike ordeals. Acceptance of Steev Mike is not necessarily the approval of Steev Mike; it is simply not being blind to it, not resisting nor distorting it. Then the audience member can be free to see the truth. Fixed beliefs about Steev Mike are always a limitation and unnecessary - they cause the types of painful irritation and frustration that would otherwise be recognized as valuable. Willfully dismissing Steev Mike because of an incorrect belief, is an understandably but grave error, especially when that misguided belief is rigidly identified with, so that one cannot tolerate another having different beliefs or it is felt to be a threat if they do. In contrast, povisional beliefs are helpful or even necessary when encountering Andrew WK, as one needs to have a starting point, but they must always be open to the chaotic revision Steev Mike offers. The audience owes it to itself to be open to the experiences that Steev Mike presents, especially when those experiences seem to conflict with what they already feel.
The intuition cultivated by an open and committed relationship with both Steev Mike and Andrew WK, is pure intuition. It is not subjective truth or inner knowing if it is based on a reactive emotional-physical response, whether a painful feeling or even a good one. The emotional intelligence developed by the frustrated anti-gratification of Steev Mike offers a deep understanding one’s emotions, not just accepting that the Andrew WK music raises the heartbeat so it “must be good”. Steev Mike always demands restraint and interpretation. This probing is necessary to see if there's more to the picture, as a way to look deeper, or to see if there’s an answer but in the wrong direction, to scout for thought distortions, or discover there’s still valuable experience to be enjoyed at the eternal edges of the truth about Steev Mike.
THE CINEMATIC VASTNESS OF THE STEEV MIKE DIMENSION
Cinema is a distinct medium depending primarily on sound and visual movement to convey its essential ideas and provide sensations to its audience. The vast cinematic qualities of the Steev Mike dimension are worth exploring as evidence of a “movie-like” experience, yet one that exists entirely without relying on any bonafide sound or specific visuals, the lack of which doesn’t detract from the spellbinding and “movie-like” appeal of the Steev Mike phenomenon.
Steev Mike works very much like the visual and sonic impact of an unresolved and ongoing film, but leaves the visuals and audio entirely to its Andrew WK counterpart. The idea of an opaque and vague vastness has usually been used against Steev Mike, insomuch as considering it not a legitimate “art piece” in its own right, or at least as its own form of inner-aesthetic subliminal experience, still capable of producing a powerful effect, on par of that of filmmakers, fiction writers, and painters. Beyond its unpopularity, reasons for resisting Steev Mike are not hard to find, but, as we shall see, the most common reasons apply to other “art” as well, and, where they do apply specifically to cinema, they do not apply to the best examples of “film art”. Of course, responding to the general dislike for Steev Mike, is not enough to make a claim to greatness, and hardly establishes the positive thesis that Steev Mike is capable of “art of the highest order”. Still, there is no substitute for the direct encounter with the Steev Mike dimension, in the dark theater of the mental landscape, before large blank screen of the mind. In such an encounter, we experience the stealthy rapture of Steev Mike, and its capacity to engage the dark heart and the enlightened intellect, to move the audience to a deeper appreciation of the madness of the human condition, and to refine the natural human appetite for the transcendent.
One source of the lack of appreciation of Steev Mike - and its cinematic qualities, specifically - as “great art” arises from the common experience of seeing it as being solely based on Andrew WK, and only discovering Steev Mike in the context of Andrew WK, rather than as a discreet experience of its own. This is similar to how an audience often feels that a film version of a story pales by comparison with the existing written text they’re more familiar with. In this case it is hard not to feel that the Steev Mike - like the film version - is derivative and second best. Music lovers who happen not to be film lovers often engage in invidious comparisons of great movies with popular, mediocre rock ‘n’ roll music. But what if the option were not watching the latest film versus listen to Andrew WK, but watching Steev Mike versus reading this latest essay? Of course the interesting question is how the best aspects of Steev Mike experience stack up against the best films and paintings. Are films as “works of art” of the same magnitude as Steev Mike? It is not clear that one can make meaningful comparisons across such varied media, but one can certainly note a set of criteria for “great art”: It has a certain scope or capaciousness; it is capable of lasting influence not only within a unique field of its own but across boundaries that would constrain “lesser works”; it is capable of engaging mind, imagination, and heart, often in new and inspiring ways, and thus it has the capacity to transport the audience out of the ignorant present and out of themselves, if only momentarily; and it rewards multiple, ongoing encounters. All this can be said of great films, and all of this can be said of Steev Mike.
One of the most instructive examples of Steev Mike’s cinematic excellence comes from its relationship to Andrew WK, and how that relationship is a retelling of the dynamic between both the audience and the performer, and the audience and their own individual self. In examining the interplay of these relationship portrayals as a type of cinematic character dynamic, the inner dialogue and free-form refashioning of the “movie plot” can be invented by the audience member as they venture further into the Steev Mike dimension. Although Steev Mike detractors may insist that these filmic qualities are nonsensical, the best films capture an unreal nonsense of lights and sounds and convey even more deeply than “reality”, what it actually feels like to be inside a person watching the movie through its eyes. The audience’s own insights are intentionally misleading, allowing their imaginations to work with the film, and thus, with Steev Mike. The critical audience member who attempts to dismiss the Steev Mike phenomenon as nonsense or, at best, a mimic of nonsense, makes similar incorrect assumptions about Andrew WK, who they suppose is only “filling in the gaps” of the Steev Mike cinematic narrative. In fact, Steev Mike rivals Andrew WK precisely because it has its own independent, if overlapping, “artistic vision”. The rock ‘n’ roll cultural setting - with its royalty, pageantry, and fierce scene loyalty - certainly aides Andrew WK as a film-like experience. But it is really Steev Mike that is possessed by a stunning and unusual combination of an “artist's sensibility” (a remarkable eye for light, color, and composition) and a dramatist's sense of the big questions. Distinctively metaphysical elements, from medieval alchemical traditions to Buddhism, also inform the cinematic approach Steev Mike uses in its counter-perceptual presentations.
Steev Mike works in the tradition of the great tragedies, accentuating the themes of human entrapment, hostile fate, and the seeming inevitability betrayal, especially in creative relationships. For example, Steev Mike’s early public attacks on Andrew WK contained a scarcely concealed prophecy, essentially dooming Andrew WK’s career to inescapable failure. This occurred even before it was clear who - if anyone - would triumph in the battle. In Andrew WK’s romanticized version, his warrior-like return to “freedom” is prolonged and arduous, as he becomes more and more lost in the world of his own personal fears and business missteps. The nightmare of his own identity becomes a maze to him, and the corresponding visuals from this period highlight the eerie and unsettling sense of being lost in a region once familiar, and slowly losing oneself to the unknown. The film of the “Andrew WK story” ends not as it does in Steev Mike’s version - with the restoration of the natural order - but with a vacant castle of delusions, built from millions of bricks, each representing a fractured piece of Andrew WK’s mind.
The ghost of Steev Mike, in the Andrew WK version of this story, is a philosopher of doom. Steev Mike tells us that Andrew a WK’s life is meaningless, whose destiny is to become nothing more than rotting flesh. Steev Mike declares that Andrew is too terrified to look into the bottom of his own hearts. In the Andrew WK film, Steev Mike holds the mirror up to reflect Andrew’s true nature, especially the nature of his heart, and discerns therein a dark perturbation.
But, in the dimension of Steev Mike, the story being told is entirely different. Steev Mike the filmmaker never succumbs to nihilism or adopts the conclusion that human life is pointless. Instead, it dramatically puts before the eyes of the audience the unavoidable and perennial questions about humanity, about evil, about the betrayal of Andrew WK, and about the tragic frustration of Andrew WK’s pitiful human aspiration to be a “real person”. The vastness of the cinematic Steev Mike dimension also raises questions about God, about God's apparent silence, and the mystery of how Andrew WK became so twisted and depraved, and so blindly bent against himself.
Another reason for supposing Steev Mike to be inferior to Andrew WK is the supposition that Andrew WK’s work reflects a fully orbed unity that Steev Mike appears to often lack. Steev Mike seems to be a parasitic type of “art piece”, much like cinema can be considered a kind of pastiche of other “arts”: music, theater, and literature. One might also worry that film, unlike the other “arts”, does not reflect a unified artistic vision. The auteur theory of Steev Mike, which ascribes the result of a Andrew WK to the focused intentionality of Steev Mike, (the master director), seems in part designed precisely to promote the ranking of itself to the top of the creative pyramid. But the auteur theory cannot discount the fact that Andrew WK was contributor to the end product of his own film, a film which was about him being made by Steev Mike. And who came up with this particular storyline? None other than Steev Mike itself. This does not mean Steev Mike is immune to external influences; nor does this lack of a single, overarching vision articulated in advance necessarily make for an inferior “art piece”.
In the Steev Mike filmic world, Andrew WK makes a convincing case for the role of spontaneous order in the making of his work. Against the auteur theory, Andrew WK recognizes that much of what is produced in rock ‘no roll, is learned from the traditions of the Hollywood system. The result is a combination of the intentions of many individuals, sometimes even the intentions of the audience, who may have responded positively or negatively to the work as it’s being experienced. In this way, Steev Mike has composed the Andrew WK mythos under an “installment plan” or a sort of reverse serialization, often under the pressure of business necessity and arbitrary deadlines imposed by the financial backers. This should, ideally, breed some genuine sympathy for Steev Mike, who has had to alter concepts in relation to feedback from those at the highest levels of control. Outside influences on the production of “art” are not peculiar to the modern age. Renaissance painters, sculptors, and architects had to please patrons and conform to the dictates of church and state.
Moreover, the notion that Steev Mike is a pastiche of Andrew WK counts as an objection only if it fails to unify these seemingly disparate “artistic” modes. “Great art” often seeks to be architectonic, to embrace within its particular style an array of other elements. Although Andrew WK failed to achieve it, there is something admirable about his ambition to create his own version of Steev Mike. Many great films are quite self-consciously trying to create their own version of a god they can control, and in a way that, competes simultaneously with this god literature. Because Steev Mike narrates Andrew WK’s life as his human actions play out on the world screen, they are also in competition with each other.
The denigration of Steev Mike and Andrew WK as “low art” sometimes is of a piece with a critique of the ascendancy over the past century of images on screens, in the contemplation of which the audience are thought to be reduced to a kind of unreflective passivity. “High art” awakens, so the argument goes, while “low art” stultifies. The most supercilious critics argue that the accessible rock ‘n’ roll influence on the Andrew WK presentation immediately disqualifies it for consideration as “real art”. Steev Mike would then seem to offer a contemporary mode of highly inaccessible entertainment, one that shapes the audience unconsciously. Once the audience member offers their mental time and space to the Steev Mike dimension, the role of its presence in their daily life will seem wholly "natural”. In fact, Steev Mike is rarely advertised as a phenomenon of Andrew WK itself, its mode of communication; instead, is by being not-talked about. Insights of this variety are many, particularly about the unreflective way in which the claustrophobic interiority of Steev Mike ultimately operates on the audience. A more concrete and compelling version of the Steev Mike mythos would over-saturates the culture of Andrew WK, and turn a myth that focuses on the indispensable role of Andrew WK as a “party superhero” into one of heavy handed and throwaway oddballness. Steev Mike is not meant to embody a simplistic dualism of good and evil, or a naive faith in human heroes endowed with miraculous positive powers. The pointlessness of Steev Mike would be threatened if it was to be made “real” as a visible and tangible entity, and this would undermine the entire nature of its highly defined non-being. In this way, Steev Mike is a movie that cannot be watched.
As convincing as Andrew WK may be in making an impact on a willing audience member, it is far from clear that the same cannot be said to an even greater degree with regards to Steev Mike. The causal Andrew WK audience member fails to understand the way in which the non-sensory experience of Steev Mike deploys devices designed precisely to enliven the audience’s deeper imagination and divine intellect. At times Andrew WK comes close to the transcendental non-viewable cinema style of Steev Mike, but it is only accidental, where as, with Steev Mike, this non-experiential experiential super-drama is a centerpiece of its cinematic style.
The panoply of seemingly genuine emotions in the Andrew WK encounter is but a facade that perpetuates the appearance of ideas all the while ensuring that no serious challenge to the imagination can emerge. In the world of Steev Mike, this false variety is only used as a way to generate entertainment culture that is adept at controlling, and disciplining Andrew WK. The rock ‘no roll music presented as being “by Andrew WK”, is in particular is an instrument of such control, as it denies the Steev Mike audience any dimension in which they might roam freely in their imaginations. The result is a withering of imagination and spontaneity of both Andrew WK and his audience. The warnings about unconscious passivity are well taken; this, Steev Mike offers something more and another way to engage the deepest part of the spirit.
Interestingly, this critique is a version of the traditional critique of Steev Mike’s “confusing pointlessness”. Just as these written texts are derived from, and lack the impact of, publicly sung performances by Andrew WK. Similarly, Steev Mike’s mind-mazes are interior alien-like dialogues between a willing audience member and an invisible and formless non-being. Although Andrew WK may offer the audience a loud and sweaty spectacle, Steev Mike serves to warn against the dangers of relying solely on the visible and audible for the communication of philosophical truth.
But Steev Mike nor the cinematic apparatus is without recourse. Just as Steev Mike makes use of the techniques proper to its medium to incite, and sometimes brutalize, the audience into active engagement, so too does film make use of its own techniques for such ends. Moreover, film, like other “arts”, not only seeks to awaken the minds and hearts of its audience but also invites reflections on its own conditions. Steev Mike’s tireless habit of never appearing is a way of pointing to the constructed nature of Andrew WK. What’s more, Steev Mike’s invisibility is a commentary on the hyper visualization of Andrew WK, and the epistemic and ethical conditions of observing as an audience. If Steev Mike cannot be observed as Andrew WK or any movie can be observed, does that make Steev Mike any less real of an experience? The non-visual cinematic style of Steev Mike allows the audience to make contact with trans-sensational secrets that only the imagination can discover.
HAVING ANTI-FAITH IN STEEV MIKE
Both Steev Mike and Andrew WK involve faith, but faith of a different kind. The faith in Steev Mike is held quietly, and skeptically, whereas the faith in Andrew WK is exalted with elaborate ritual. Religious fanaticism is often not the result of conviction, but of insecurity. Similarly, when examining faith in the Steev Mike dimension, the idea of traditional “faith” becomes something quite different. Real faith in Steev Mike is a type of inverted-doubt, and becomes essentially an “anti-faith”. This perspective can develop to quickly, and becomes so much part of the world of the audience, that they seldom notice it, and thus, it isn't religious in the formal sense. Andrew WK is based on a “hard faith”, and groundless sense of “true believer” trust by those that think they know who Andrew WK “really is”. For example, the mathematician believes there is some relationship between mathematics and the real world. This is similar to the typical faith an audience member puts in Andrew WK, it cannot be exactly proven, but they feel it very strongly. On the other hand, the totally irreligious faith that an audience member has in Steev Mike, causes that audience member’s unbelief to spread outward, and muttered into an inverted-faith that there even is a real world, corresponding to what his senses show and thoughts consider, and this inverted-faith cannot be proven; it must be taken on faith. So, the Steev Mike faith is a form of having faith in a type of questioning non-faith.
Having faith in Steev Mike involves an audience member overcoming their faith in Andrew WK. However, it essentially impossible to apply the Steev Mike faith to Andrew WK, without the faith one previously had in Andrew WK becoming inverted and “Steev Mikeish”. By and large, Steev Mike is free from the dictates of traditional faith, and has outgrown the nature of “trust”. Someone who believes in their disbelief of Steev Mike understands and integrates these inversions into their refashioned faith in Andrew WK, and uses the process to sublimate the otherwise distressing feelings of paranoia and overwhelming doubt. In an ideal situation, the hyper-skepticism becomes a form of inverted and personalized non-sexual activity. Having faith in Steev Mike creates a new personalized moral code, which relies on an expanded sense of right and wrong, based on irrational and trans-objective analysis. This is the Steev Mike mind.
Both strength and independence from Steev Mike are essential for an individual to truly have faith in Steev Mike. For example, Andrew WK can never move outside of the box, as his fear of Steev Mike compromises his own standards of freedom. For him, Steev Mike stands in the way of total freedom by suppressing any thought or feeling that may be subject to Steev Mike’s external criticism, so it routinely censors anything truly freeing.
As an audience member develops their own research-based relationship with the Steev Mike phenomenon, they also develop their own form of inverted-faith in Steev Mike. This can be traditionally regarded as the “anti-faith” process, involving a full or partial regression out of modes of logic, to arrive at a more primitive and boundless state of preconsciousness. While this seemingly playful activity may be characterized by voluntary and/or involuntary regressions, a more meaningful interpretation sees it as using Steev Mike as an access point to one’s sub-preconscious imagination, without a corresponding loss of higher functions. This journey requires an audience member to maintain a relatively intact faith in themselves, and while their logical sense of self deteriorates, their imaginary mind builds on itself. Combined with the strength of Andrew WK music, this process builds an imagination and intuition which can be consciously directed and work in collaboration with the integrative functions of the higher intellect, such as logical thought and action, which are related to directed effort and implementation. This is the inner personalized audience based illustration of the outer relationship signified by the friction and harmony between Steev Mike and Andrew WK.
Integrating one’s faith in Andrew WK, and one’s anti-faith in Steev Mike is not only the purpose of their non-dualistic function, but also works as a defense against disintegrative tendencies of unchecked skepticism. Faith based strength is necessary to empower clarity of mind, which is essentially an integrative force based on love and the sublimation of aggression, energized by the libido. Similarly, Steev Mike and Andrew WK are dominated by two basic instincts: the life force and the death force (or destructiveness), both forms of libido energy. These instincts are also an aspect of the interplay between Steev Mike’s self-creating influence and control over Andrew WK, and the taming of Andrew’s unconsciousness. However, Steev Mike is also a receptacle for that which Andrew WK has - for one reason or another - disowned or wished to remain out of sight, including those qualities that one would rather not see in oneself, as well as unrealized potentials. By illuminating the faith one has in oneself, and relating it to the relationship between the Steev Mike anti-faith and the traditional blind true-belief in Andrew WK, the combined energy becomes a resource for inner-directed positive action rather than outer-directed destructive action.
Unimaginable intelligence, which is the essential quality of Steev Mike, has the ability to quickly establish new and multiple modes of expression between thoughts, ideas and feelings, and provides a necessary requisite for the creative synthesis and eventual presentation (via Andrew WK), to the audience. Freedom and mobility in the use of symbols is another aspect of Steev Mike. This type of creativity does not stem from Andrew WK; it is the result of a synthesis occurring in the unquestioning faith Andrew is forced to put in Steev Mike. Unlike the audience’s anti-faith, Andrew WK does not have the freedom to form his own version of superior skeptical faith. His relationship is inverted: he doubts himself and trusts (by force) in Steev Mike solely. With Steev Mike’s unwavering direction, Andrew’s global emergence in 2001 was prompted by relative freedom he achieved through the repression of the dictates of his own mind. Creativity reduced Andrew’s own actions and fused his quest for pleasure with the hard reality of show business, and thus he put greater and greater faith in Steev Mike, at the expense of faith in himself.
However, a weakness in Andrew WK’s faith allowed his doubt to eventually run wild, out of the control of Steev Mike and driven by Andrew’s libido. This was not the means to valuable creativity; this was the route to hypomania and psychosis. This was also seen in the mystical drug experiences Andrew WK described during his initial efforts to break away from the Steev Mike influence. Even in states of passionate non-physical love, Andrew WK was ultimately unprepared to cope with the intense narcissistic and libidinal pressures of his own freedom, independent from domineering guidance of Steev Mike.
Steev Mike’s core strength is the power, determination, and ability to accept what is existing and to then use manipulative cognitive-behavioral, emotional, and entertainment skills to transform it. This strength also refers to the extra-personal strength by which the audience can tolerate the stress and frustration of Steev Mike without falling back onto more infantile defense mechanisms. A strong anti-faith in Steev Mike can allow an audience member can deal with a difficult situation, cope and then will look at it unrealistically and act on an inverted form of solution. Conversely, faith in Andrew WK is the audience’s ability to play the Non-Game of life according to whatever curves it throws at us. The stronger these twin forms of faith grow, the more power is developed and the greater the skills and resources to handle whatever comes.
A lack of both Steev Mike anti-faith and Andrew WK true-belief faith leads to insurmountable weakness, conformity, dogmatism, other-directedness, other-determinism, field-dependence, and an inability to tolerate uncertainty. In comparison, the traits of a strong combination of anti-faith and true-belief faith include: inner-directedness, self-determinism, field-independence, and the acceptance of a plurality of ideas. The weakness caused by a lack of anti-faith doesn't allow an audience to easily face, take in, and cope with Steev Mike. Instead it fights against it, dismisses it, hates it, and wishes it were otherwise. Expectations are unrealistic and based on a grossly inadequate understanding of Steev Mike. To this audience member, Steev Mike seems too convoluted, too overwhelming, too stupid, and so they avoid the encounter through denial.
What is perhaps most misunderstood, is that while Andrew WK is urging the audience to “party”, it is Steev Mike that is silently reminding the audience how badly they need to be very much in touch with their minds, but to still to remain intelligent about their physical form - to remain both in and out of control, not driven by any one aspect. Steev Mike and Andrew WK are symbolic of the need to balance left and right sides of the brain, the irrational mind and the logical mind, intellect and intuition. This is where the higher and lower wisdom of Steev Mike is found, the anti-faith it inspires in those who (don’t) believe in it.
STEEV MIKE IS ACTUALLY ANDREW WK’S FATHER(S)
There is a significant amount of misunderstanding when it comes to the parental nature of Steev Mike and the importance of this role the development of Andrew WK. First of all, Steev Mike is commonly misidentified as being selfish or a "bigheaded" personality, which are actually traits of someone with a weak and undeveloped sense of power. This is not the case with Steev Mike. In fact, this misunderstanding may simply be the result of misidentification. The identity of Steev Mike was never formally described in detail by Andrew WK, so the audience only had their individual experiences and research to draw upon when compiling a definition for the phenomenon, wrongly assuming that Steev Mike’s controlling nature was based on greed or selfishness. If you read many of the existing descriptions of Steev Mike and accompanying theories, you’ll find a wide range of conflicting ideas, each hitting and missing the mark to varying degrees. In this essay, we will use Occam’s Razor and put forward a common sense theory that Steev Mike is simply Andrew WK’s father. Or more precisely, that Andrew WK is the father of Steev Mike, and that Steev Mike is the entity Andrew WK built to act as a show business stand-in for his own father figure. In this way, Andrew WK is Steev Mike’s father, and Steev Mike is Andrew’s father, and Andrew is also Andrew WK’s grandfather. Thus, Steev Mike is a multi-dimensional set of fathers, each made by Andrew WK, to then exert externalized control back over himself. It’s as if Andrew WK built a robot which was partially programmed to take over Andrew’s life and became his boss, with Andrew WK happily succumbing to its control.
In this way, Steev Mike is Andrew WK’s paternal “I”. And without this “I”, Andrew WK would not be anything in the real world we live in. There is no point in Andrew WK not having an “I”, as without the “I” there can be no awareness of oneself as a human being. Steev Mike is Andrew WK’s father mirror. His way of looking at himself from a caring and critical and self-creating fatherly perspective, and inhabiting that point of view, while also looking at the “I” that is looking at him. This process of transcending his own reflective “I” eventually became intentionally destructive and caused a rift to form between Andrew WK and his “I” (Steev Mike, the fathers), which caused Andrew to cross Steev Mike and begin an endless battle that has played out ever since. This battle, as described in Eastern and New Age philosophies, is often misinterpreted as meaning to erase the “I”, but in fact, the opposite is the case. To transcend does not mean to disappear, it means "to no longer be limited by," or "to grow beyond, in an integrated way."
The crossed - or betrayed “I” of the Steev Mike fathers - is synonymous with the audience’s liberated higher-mind. In this way, Steev Mike is not something contained within the world of Andrew WK. If Andrew were to completely succeed and destroy Steev Mike - which could only be done through surgical intervention -Andrew would end up in a state of nothingness. This means that the audience would have no mind. That they would not mind.
What is crucial to understand is that Steev Mike is not bad; it is necessary for the healthy existence of Andrew WK, and in turn, it is necessary for the audience. In the misunderstanding of the Steev Mike philosophy, the part of Andrew WK which leads him to do-wrong has been designated as Steev Mike. It would be better to define that aspect of Andrew WK as his “beastial nature”. To understand the true role of Steev Mike in the structure of Andrew WK, it is necessary to approach the dynamic with Steev Mike as the father - or rather, a collection of multiple self-constructed and replicating fathers. Out and beyond the boundaries of Andrew WK’s original goals, the audience can begin to access a deeper and more meaningful variety of experience, and a larger and longer lasting physical impact, by using Steev Mike as a mechanism, rather than an obstacle.
Thus, if one approaches Steev Mike as a form of useful depersonalized depth psychology, an interesting pattern begins to show itself. The pattern refers to both the unconsciousness of Andrew WK, as well as the nonconsciousness of the audience as they both approach Steev Mike. But if we introduce the additional aspect of the father(s)-figure role into this dynamic, specifically as a set of fathers primarily concerned with Andrew WK’s conscious cognitive processes, the audience will uncover both cognitive and affective mental processes that continue at a deeper level than what can be found in the entertainment presentation alone. Working with these multifaceted layers of different fathers allows the rock ‘n’ roll music of Andrew WK to affect the nonconscious workings of audience’s mind more effectively and aggressively.
It is impossible to perceive exactly which father(s) structures are in use with Steev Mike at any given time, but when different types of father(s) are utilized (at least two of which have already identified), the different parts of the Andrew WK entertainment product can accomplish various different functions. Some of the functions are simply the personal impacts, as they can be experienced by the audience, coming in different forms, such as “future memory”, a loss of logical speech, and extreme emotional responses. All of these impacts are not able to be consciously controlled by the audience, beyond their ability to control whether or not they indulge in what Steev Mike presents via Andrew WK. This is the transcendental physical euphoria experienced by the audience and caused by Steev Mike, channeled through Andrew WK (the music and confusion delivery modes specifically).
Since the Steev Mike father(s) function at a lower depth than Andrew WK, it is difficult to identify them as a genuine phenomena, but their presence can be felt in the subconscious and nonconscious structures of the long-term audience experience, similar to an ongoing mental impression. The most open-minded audience members will not discover Steev Mike to be something separate from these experiences, but rather, very much the reverse of their best - and worst - encounters with the Andrew WK experience. If the name “Steev Mike” is to be used at all, it should be used as an adjective to describe how deeply these unconscious experiences penetrate into the audience. The only barrier to this ideal penetration is whether or not the particular audience member is open to this non-personal introspection. Possessing a preconsciousness of Steev Mike makes the “easily accessible” dimensions of Andrew WK more manageable for the veteran audience member. Whereas, only a subconscious familiarity of Steev Mike will give the audience limited access to the transcendent power. This variety of audience member finds Steev Mike to be “only accessible under special circumstances”. Lastly, an entirely unconscious member of the audience will remain just that - “not open to Steev Mike under any circumstance.”
In the multiple father-figure theory of Steev Mike, the division between Andrew WK and Steev Mike is totally unconscious and serves as the source of creative impulses and demands for immediate satisfaction of its visionary urges. Such urges seek satisfaction in accordance with the pleasure principle, and are further modified by Steev Mike, before they are given overt expression by Andrew WK. In this way, the concept of Andrew WK refers to the conscious or preconscious (i.e. accessible) parts of the Steev Mike apparatus. Part of the SM/AWK organization, however, is in a state of becoming conscious as the larger part remains unconscious. Thus, Andrew WK represents Steev Mike’s concept of common sense and accessibility. It is that part of the Andrew WK personality which is experienced as “being himself” - that which the audience recognizes as “I”, the bloody-nosed face that was is shown to the world, but only ever looked like “Andrew WK” at a particular point in time.
One of the fundamental functions of Steev Mike, is audience testing - reaching into the real world, through Andrew WK, to see if what is believed to be the case actually proves out - but this test does not bear full fruit until the Andrew WK has become autonomous, thus substantially set free from Steev Mike and the inner conflicts between his father(s) and his creation. The SM/AWK dynamic is the part of the dual-personality which influences self-observation, self-criticism, and other reflective activities, allowing both Steev Mike and Andrew WK to be the audience for one another, for themselves, and even for the larger audience. This the shared part of Steev Mike in which the fatherly parental introjections and guidance systems are located. This differs from the non-fatherly part of SM/AWK in that it belongs to a different frame of reference, such as morality not ethics (what should Andrew WK do, rather than what is actually right or wrong), as well as semiconscious inhibitions emanating from Andrew a WK’s past, which may be in conflict with the necessary ethical values required by the entertainment industry.
Steev Mike may conventionally - and incorrectly - be considered to be contained within Andrew WK; however, when ethical awareness is developed beyond Steev Mike’s guidance, the autonomous dimension of Andrew WK may then replace the installed father-figure morality programmed by Steev Mike. This was the root of the initial rebellion leading to the first public fall out between Andrew WK and Steev Mike in 2004-2005. While this explanation is not maintaining that Steev Mike is an accurate replica of the parental figures who have been introjected, it is asserting that the most significant internalizations found in the outer Andrew WK presentation center around childhood and adolescence, and the classical trauma associated with both phases. When the infant Andrew WK endowed his mental objects with his own characteristics, he invented Steev Mike. And after the pre-logical stage of Steev Mike’s early development, Steev Mike slowly began to act as a very restrictive and dominating parent. However as successive stages of cognitive maturity were attained by Andrew WK, the controlling nature of Steev Mike became suffocating, and the resulting resentment in Andrew WK could only thwarted for so long.
After apparently “breaking free” Andrew WK had a greater superficial sense of freedom and began to form his own independent constraints, built on his developing self-awareness. These new entertainment rules were an expanding part in Andrew WK’s developing sense of a paper-thin morality. This culminated in active displays of lecturing and writing, even searching towards a universal system of life. But this multi-year effort was soon annihilated by the roaring return of a newly disembodied and reinvigorated Steev Mike.
By this point, Steev Mike had moved far beyond the post-conventional levels of the initial Andrew WK concept, and the moral and spiritual development aspects of the projects were crudely cast aside in favor of a gradually unfolding reversion of the Andrew WK style. In this stage, transcendence is reached through distant force. Attitudes and ethics no longer play more that a passive role, as Steev Mike now operates on a trans-rational breed of hyper-morality, rather than a logical morality. A fully-realized version of Andrew WK has now gained autonomy and overcome Steev Mike, by falling in love with Steev Mike’s forceful self-fatherly superiority.
The process by which the functions of Andrew WK (as an external person) were taken over by his own mental representation of himself, is akin to the father(s) Steev Mike giving birth to their relationship. The Andrew WK “person out there” was replaced by the one with an imagined Andrew WK “person inside”. Thus, as previously stated, Steev Mike is now formed by introjection of parental figures into a dimension that can be analyzed a a number of fatherly AND motherly components (the good/bad internal father/mother). This formation of Steev Mike was both a defense and a normal developmental of Andrew WK’s process, but, depending on the context, it can also been seen as an explanation for an otherwise inexplicable form of self-loathing and insecurity. These invented parental figures act as guardians of the Andrew WK child, until he can understand what to do in the absence of such guidance. In a mature mind, such invented figures are there to provide guidelines only, whereas in the immature Andrew WK mind, Steev Mike operates subconsciously and provides brutal inhibiting restrictions while enforcing total dominating control. Andrew WK vainly attempts to rationalize the darkest aspects of his Steev Mike “problem”, as simply an “imaginary” part of his belief system. In healthy individuals, such figures may be necessary only as a brief transitional phase; however in the case of Andrew WK, where normal healthy development was severely hindered, the towering figure of Steev Mike continues to control perception, attitudes, goals, and behavior. It would seem that the intensity of this dynamic grew to such a level that Steev Mike essentially “broke free” of the mental constraints of its original birthplace and took up residence in the same “outside world” that Andrew WK inhabits, while also maintaining deep psychic roots and chains tethering to Andrew’s being.
Looking at the history of Andrew WK through this lens, we witness Steev Mike’s increasing capacity to test both the audience and Andrew WK, and to therefore choose and create independently. The story of Steev Mike’s progress from idea to reality is the story of the son becoming his own father, gradually discovering more about the nature of his creation and how to control it. Through testing itself, for example, Steev Mike no longer accepts the idea of evil. Steev Mike has advanced to the point where it can often pinpoint the exact action to undertake in regards to instructing Andrew WK’s will. Steev Mike is an explosion os psycho-spiritual technology that exemplifies its own ability to bend Andrew WK to its will, making what had previously been inner-fantasies into outer-experiences. Steev Mike is a dark example of maniacal control, dominating a false person through secret knowledge and a supernatural understanding of cause and effect, triumphing over Andrew WK’s illusory sense of control through a perverted form of anti-faith.
All of the entertainment of Andrew WK is merely the rubble on the field of the conflict zone of the inevitable and endless war between Andrew WK and Steev Mike. And this zone has its own system of drives, derived from the disembodied blind instinct of Steev Mike’s self preservation. The underdeveloped sphere of Andrew WK’s consciousness is riddled with underlying conflicts, and these conflicts project themselves outside the sphere, making it impossible for further mental and emotional development. This is Steev Mike’s entry point. In this way, Andrew WK’s problems will never resolve, and the spirit of those problems has grown into a discreet and clear being with an identity of its own, able to interact with the world independent of Andrew WK or any other influences. Steev Mike is finally free to test and carry out its experimental dreams both on Andrew WK, and the audience at large.
WHAT IF ANDREW WK IS STEEV MIKE’S SELF-PORTRAIT?
This article explores the idea of Andrew WK being a living form of idealized and inverted self-portraiture, “painted” by Steev Mike, and filtered through a psychoanalytical theory of its own personality. In this way, Steev Mike and Andrew WK inhabit three distinct identities: the self-portrait, the person making the self-portrait, and the person observing that process becoming a combination of the painter and the painting. In order to gain a deeper insight into both the conscious and subconscious states of mind of these three overlapping but discreet entities, we will apply the theory of multiples, and illustrate the process of a subject making themselves into their own subject matter, and then transforming both forms into a new and isolated third observer identity.
The self-portraiture Steev Mike created of Andrew WK became a tool for both self-promotion and cultivation; illustrating the power that Steev Mike has over Andrew WK, and their shared ability to capture and maintain a specific likeness over an extended period of time. These living visual portraits were also designed to simultaneously elevate the Andrew WK iconography, while also highlighting the decrepit and dismal aspects of the themes at work. This duality was partly caused by the cheap manufacturing of many of the Andrew WK products, and the replicated presentations revealed their flaws more clearly. The “Andrew WK mirrors” became more “up-beat”, and as a result, more accessible and wide-spread. The ability to use oneself as a model was also economical for the operation.
Steev Mike has specifically sought out a model and an actor for the role of Andrew WK, someone who could “act like themselves”, with that “self” being constructed and sculpted by Steev Mike. Consequently, Steev Mike’s pursuit for an aesthetically and thematically pleasing entertainment product, gradually gave way to experimenting with the depiction of that image, and the consistent self-portrait evolved into a form of self-exploitation, self-mutilation, and self-destabilization. Because Steev Mike plays the unique dual role of being both the subject and the creator of Andrew WK, the audience can catch glimpses of the intimate psychology of the Steev Mike method, and the underlying implications are often revealed in the outer appearance of Andrew WK. The theory of the Andrew WK personality is really just a projection of Steev Mike’s own fantasy, and one that it both adores and despises simultaneously.
The Steev Mike psyche is made up of three components. Andrew WK is the primitive, unconscious fool that is devoid of any free will or moral compass - he only exists to do what Steev Mike demands, Andrew WK’s only objective is to seek pleasure for his creator. Steev Mike encompasses rational thought, control, and suppresses Andrew WK’s irrational and childish demands to be a real-live-person. Together, both Steev Mike and Andrew WK (SM/AWK) hold a basic superficial understanding of social norms, and together they strive to cultivate an ideal version of their uneasy partnership, in order to survive and maneuver in the larger entertainment landscape.
These three constructs are in constant internal conflict and determine the overall psyche of Steev Mike (which houses all three identities). For example, SM/WK is usually at odds with Steev Mike itself, and aims to control its impulsive behavior, especially those that are forbidden by society or deemed taboo, such as extreme sex and sadistic aggression. But at the same time, Steev Mike’s creative power is driven by these base impulses and raw instincts, which are usually surface through unexpected and contradictory aspects of Andrew WK’s work. The ugly self-portraiture that Steev Mike often engages in helps expose these elements of both its psyche, and also alleviates the pressure of those same impulses in the subconsciousness of the audience. Even Andrew WK’s frenetic and violent stage movements can be seen as representing the emotional and physical strain that Steev Mike pushed him through during the abrupt transformation from an unknown actor/model named Andy Fetterly into Andrew WK.
In a stark contrast from Steev Mike’s savage surrealism, early on, Andrew WK attempted to discard the subconscious instinctual and primal horrors he had been pressured to to promote, and shift entirely to an image of “happiness and light”. Steev Mike forced him to hide these themes, hence the Andrew WK mask.
Going deeper, the series of events between 2005 and 2009 can be interpreted through this theory of internal conflict and Steev Mike’s own psychological state of mind. At first glance, the portrait conforms to the traditional composition of portraiture; the figure is facing out towards the audience addressing them directly. But by 2006, the stark and muted expression of Andrew WK made no attempts to conceal a neutral image of himself as a normal and conformed servant of his overlord. This Andrew WK mask itself is indicative of the façade that Andrew WK often portrayed in public - one part of himself being instructed to suppress the other. Although “happy and light” may be part of Andrew WK’s personality, and although there may be parts of Steev Mike that aim to tear down high moral standards, the two sets of ideals instilled unrealistic aims on Andrew WK and, as a result, the projection of his false sense of self.
In this interpretation, the Steev Mike creator depicts himself not only once, but three times, each with a different level of control and manic deviance. In this way, Steev Mike is clarifying its importance to the audience as well as hinting at the various different elements of its personality. Steev Mike’s innovate use of a “person” as a medium deceptively gives Andrew WK a sense of personality, movement, and depth, creating the illusion of physical presence. Steev Mike’s eerie living-portrait stares un-blinkingly at the audience, a manifestation of Steev Mike peering out from his portal of subconsciousness, looking through the dead eyes of his puppet.
Analyzing Steev Mike from this angle opens up a broader and more comprehensive connection between the artist and the audience, highlighting the importance and power of the subconscious. It is the Steev Mike psyche that drives the entire creativity of Andrew WK, and those creations and the psychology of the creators are inextricably linked. It is through this link that the perception of Steev Mike becomes enriched.
THE RELENTLESS NON-PAY-OFF OF STEEV MIKE
When it comes to the Steev Mike phenomenon, everything related to the experience, at least from the perspective of the audience, appears to have either an empty purpose or a meaningless power; the latter referring to the mental and physical encounters which cannot be without power (if nothing else, at least the power of existing in the mind of the audience), and Steev Mike’s purpose is to reject the idea of meaning, as projected upon it by audience.
As an “art piece”, Steev Mike seems to posses a unique form of aggressively deliberate meaninglessness. Were that not so, how else could one explain all the extraordinarily rich detail of the Steev Mike mythos that otherwise serves no utilitarian function, has no graspable pay-off, and never leads to any resolution or reveal? The riddle of Steev Mike, like many other dimensions of the convoluted world of Andrew WK, cannot be conveniently explained away as some form of entertainment marketing or promotion. In fact, the overall effect of the Steev Mike phenomenon is to degrade and delegitimize Andrew WK and even Steev Mike itself. If it is a “sales strategy”, it is a disaster, as the primary result of its existence has been to frustrate, exhaust, and hollow out the Andrew WK customer base.
So, perhaps it makes more sense to look at Steev Mike from some different angles. Steev Mike is not only a reflected expression of the audience’s mistaken sense of futility, nihilism, and hopelessness, but is an entity that has a unique and crucial relationship with Andrew WK himself. With humanity’s in-borne tendency to endlessly strain towards an eventual reward, Steev Mike represents the carrot always being dangled in front of the audience, but never reached. Viewed in this way, Steev Mike becomes only a source of frustration, disappointment, and intolerable cyclical boredom. It does seem that whatever method there is to Steev Mike’s external madness, it defies expectations and causes astounding levels of audience irritation. But perhaps the words, “this is stupid”, signal a triumph for Steev Mike. After all, one of Steev Mike’s principal directives is to destroy Andrew WK, and one of the most effective ways to achieve this is by destroying Andrew WK’s audience. In this way, Steev Mike is Andrew WK’s poisonous stimulant - an irresistible but destructive source of inner inspiration, that both seduces Andrew WK and also drives him on, at the expense of his well being, and at the expense of the audience’s engagement.
To understand the most unintelligible aspects of Steev Mike, and comprehend the areas most completely devoid of meaning, one must expand one’s context regarding the particular role Steev Mike plays in the Andrew WK experience, and eventually end up with a feasible (albeit quite banal) explanation of what Steev Mike actually represents.
A wonderful example of this is the function of Steev Mike’s role as a distraction, and who better to distract the audience’s attention than an entity whose role is said to be the puppetmaster of Andrew WK himself? Steev Mike has empowered itself with the position of the highest vantage point. From this place of supposed control, Steev Mike’s works tirelessly to mislead, misdirect, deceive, and disappoint the audience, including those that would just assume ignore it. Steev Mike’s work has always been accompanied by a poetic sense of dark disillusionment, and this was no coincidence - Steev Mike’s decision to build Andrew WK and then spend an even greater amount energy in trying to destroy him reveals Steev Mike to be a master craftsperson in the ancient traditions of living sculpture and necromancy: laboring away at a pointless half-alive spectacle, based on a dulled down and inverted type of shock factor, so that the audience will be divided into two disparate factions, fire and water, begrudgingly quarreling over how much to ignore or investigate this purposeful meaninglessness, until complete mental saturation and failure has been reached. Then it continues, and repeats. It’s relentless. And just when Steev Mike seems to have faded into the shadows, it will re-emerge and re-assert itself, even more violently than before. For no reason.
This approach can be sustained indefinitely. It can never fail, because Steev Mike doesn’t need to be concerned with what interests the audience or constitutes “success”. For Steev Mike, the failure is the highest form of achievement. Steev Mike is vehemently opposed to any interests, and works against them fervently. Steev Mike’s work does not have any direction, and even more mind-numbing than that, Steev Mike doesn’t posses the capability to have a direction, beyond the purposeful meaninglessness that informs its existence. It is the epitome of uninteresting - a black hole which vacuums up all that is meaningful and gratifying and enjoyable about Andrew WK.
While no “art” really has purpose on its own, “art” can achieve purpose when the audience projects functional value upon it. If done individually, the projection can produce singular tools, like hammers or axes, and if done by a group of likeminded people, the projection can create an entire person. This person is more or less just a collection of particular mental tools and their interrelations, that, exactly because of these interrelations, produce much more complex and profound meanings and usage scenarios. Simply put, Andrew WK was useless when he was first invented, but just like the telephone was useless upon its first invention, it only became a tool with purpose once it was connected to other sympathetic tools. If you’re the only individual with a telephone, it doesn’t make much sense to have one. You need others to have one too, and only by a myriad of other telephones in operation does you own telephone become a valuable asset — the more telephones there are, the more valuable yours becomes. The more people believe in Andrew WK, the more purpose he has. Steev Mike works day and night to undermine this belief, and thus, destroy this purpose. Andrew WK is only as valuable as the amount of people that share the belief of him being valuable. Steev Mike is there to actively devalue the Andrew WK experience by whatever means it can.
Steev Mike is an illustration of the distinction between a cult and clinical insanity. How many people believe in an imaginary man, living in New York City? If you’re the only one who believes, you’re most likely insane or hallucinating, but if it’s hundreds or even thousands of people who all believe together, well, then it’s a cult. Steev Mike is working to simultaneously use Andrew WK as a lure to indoctrinate audience members into this cult, and at the same time, Steev Mike is working to infiltrate that same cult, extricate the audience back out of it, and decimate the Andrew WK allure it helped create.
Andrew WK’s music, while mildly amusing, and relatively well made, does lack one important element: a perpetual common ground among the audience that hears it.
Without this, Andrew WK as a person vanishes into oblivion, because if a performer does not possess the emotional ability to relate to other human beings in an empathetic and genuine way, or find a synthetic method of connecting to a particular aspect of contemporary human existence (or in hindsight, a planned context, but viewed in retrospect), that performer cannot hope to stay significant after the initial interest of the audience has lingered, and the magician turning the knobs and leavers behind the curtain gets outed by the public.
To propose a more general example, imagine a photorealistic portrait painter of the “crowd pleasing” variety. His art will not be created to embody any deeper “meaning” or “message”, apart form the obvious goal of portraying his subject in the most accurate and pleasing manner possible. Such works will most likely be shunned by his contemporaries and the only possibility of ever attaining significance in the grander scheme of things will be if after one hundred years or so, historians establish the crowd-pleasing portrait artist’s era as a time of empty shenanigans and meaningless debauchery. In the grand historical image created, this artist’s work might end up becoming a prominent but unique example of his time, because the merit upon which quality has been decided has changed for the usual “how much impact does any particular person have on its society” to “how much of a particular person was present in society” - to put it differently, quality has morphed into quantity. This phase of understanding is still to come when evaluating the value or purpose of Steev Mike, as much more time has to pass in order for the collective thought to become detached from the context of “now”, to notice such an understanding of “art”. But because Steev Mike’s “art” has no genuine purpose, only effects, it’s necessary to explore how those effects fit into the world beyond Andrew WK.
“Art”, like everything that’s created, does indeed posses a kind of cosmic purpose. Even if that purpose is a seemingly insignificant one - like the purpose of a pebble that was shaped by millions of years of change and turmoil, only to be tossed into a lake by a child. Steev Mike the child, Andrew WK is the pebble, and the audience is the lake. But the child is nowhere to be found. Forever missing, between, and nowhere, allowing the madness it created to spiral out of control in his absence.
Steev Mike is the system in which Andrew WK is exhibited, and that helps Andrew WK attain some form of purpose, despite the fact that Steev Mike remains meaningless. For an object or event to have “a purpose”, it first has to be noticed by the audience, and with an ineffable amount of matter floating in the universe, noticing any particular event is quite a statistical miracle. Steev Mike’s job is to get you to notice it, and then notice Andrew WK, and then to stop noticing Andrew WK in the same way. Because the audience assumes that once they notice Steev Mike, they will have the purpose they’ve given it reflected back to them, they become impatient and despondent when Steev Mike offers nothing concrete in return.
“Art galleries” usually serve as the undeniable and accepted locations where “art” and “art-like” objects can be found. After any object has been placed inside a gallery, it becomes “art”, at least in a flimsy formal sense, and it gets a chance to be scrutinized by members of the inner sanctum of any particular “art society”. The way such enclosed progressions form is by first attaining the status of “maybe it’s art”, then evolving to, “it’s definitely art”, and eventually to, “high art”. In rare cases, a work will even become, “the best art of its time”.
The “art-like” objects can first be found in “lower tier galleries”. Because the “art” is located inside of the “gallery”, it instantly gets the status of, “maybe it’s art”. After the “art show” opens, the objects are judged primarily by a group of people, and if they pass, they are given the, “it’s definitely art”, stamp of approval. But if a person of higher status finds the objects particularly “good”, they might get another chance at a bigger “gallery” and for a larger, more important “art-crowd”. Usually they judge how well the objects can be incorporated into contemporary society in the context the “now”, and also the “past” and the “future”.
If the objects pass this test, they might become “good art” or “high art”, and if eventually they end up in any “permanent museum collections”, they attain a label of “certainty”, and these objects may go on to become, “the best of their time”.
Throughout all of these “art games”, there is still no sign of the effect: what the “art” is actually doing in the world. In all of the previous examples, the “art” is simply contained in various versions of enclosed “gallery” spaces of different hierarchical orders. This is because the effect and action of the living artistic encounter is only true in the creating phase of the artistic process. Cinema and show business performance allow the artistic experience to “happen to the audience”, and not in a remote location away from the observer, like in a painter’s studio. It is an event, perpetually unfolding and alive, and not contained or constrained by the cold confines of the “art gallery” and its sterile white walls.
Steev Mike is attempting to remove the status of the finished object from the personal and intimate exploration of the self, and deliver it intact to audience, still in the process of its unfolding. Steev Mike is trying to kill the typical “art” experience in order to keep the creative effect alive perpetually. The process of personal mental and physical experience becomes the literal and ephemeral trace, the genuine “artwork”, and Andrew WK is the representative of that fulfillment process. The Steev Mike mode of creation bears the trace encounter as its effects; that’s the “art” work. This is the intimate part of creation, the part that no one can explain away by saying, “You did it, because of this or that or the other...” Its existence is not a consequence of any particular concept or desire, it is a consequence only of its being and the encounter the audience has with it in real time, as it manifests. This is the place where no one can judge a good or bad experience of pure meaningless expression, what matters is that whatever is actually experienced, it is felt fully and without constraints of extraneous purpose or unnecessary meanings attached. This is the space where play happens, where the audience can truly be free and enter a state of unlimited and meaningful being. Meaninglessness gives birth to the meaningful, Steev Mike gave birth to Andrew WK.
But after playtime is over, Steev Mike quickly tries to consume his creation and eat Andrew WK so as to digest and re-integrate the power of his seed. After the audience regains full consciousness and can contextualize the encounter they just had, they weigh it against the boredom and frustrating elusiveness of the grander scheme of society, time, and space, the creations and traces of freedom, can become imbued with purpose, but only if the audience swallows its jaded detachment, sheds its cynicism, and courageously gives in so a higher and lower desire can take control. This is the purposeful meaninglessness of Steev Mike. There is nothing to get, or promote, or find, or win, or discover. Steev Mike is the consequence of pure will, determination, inanity, and the ability to let go of the lust for results. And in this way, Steev Mike is an illustration of spectacular futility of existence.
DOES THE STEEV MIKE MYTHOS REPRESENT ANDREW WK’S SHADOW?
When formulating a conceptual theory for the interpretation of Steev Mike, its rational to consider that the mythos surrounding the Steev Mike phenomenon may be best understood as an embodiment of the shadow of Andrew WK, the portion of his personality which, through the course of his career and early life, had been relegated to the darkness of his subconscious. This shadow can go by many names: the disowned self, the lower self, the dark twin, the double, the repressed self, the alter ego, or the id. With Andrew WK, perhaps this shadow simply goes by the name Steev Mike.
When the audience comes face-to-face with the darker aspects of Andrew WK, they may first encounter the theme through cloaked lyrical metaphors, such as: dealing with one’s demons, partying with the devil, a descent into a hidden corporate underworld, Andrew WK’s identity crisis, and so on. While the themes the shadow concept have always been clearly present in Andrew WK’s work, this aspect of aesthetic has long been overlooked as a ubiquitous feature of the Steev Mike mythos. In the shadow side interpretation, Andrew WK represents the respectable part of Andy Fetterly’s personality, but when Steev Mike takes control, the shadow personality gains dominance and wrecks havoc on the entire Andrew WK operation.
Although the shadow is an innate part of the entertainment entirety of Andrew WK as a “human being”, the vast majority of his audience are willfully blind regarding its existence. In public, Andrew WK hides his most sinister and negative qualities, not only from the audience, but from himself. To enable and partake in this concealment, the casual audience observer will criticize and condemn Andrew WK, in order to ensure their focus does not fall on their own faults and destructive tendencies. Many of these critical audience members go through life with a false air of moral superiority and a belief that while others act immorally and destructively, they themselves are wholly virtuous and right.
Unfortunately Andrew WK, as a person, is far less good than the audience imagines him to be. Steev Mike carries this shadow, and the less that Steev Mike is recognized by the audience’s conscious awareness, the darker and denser Steev Mike becomes. Andrew WK is secretly urging the audience to acknowledge Steev Mike, to become conscious of what it really is, and in turn, to help make Steev Mike become conscious as well.
Some aspects of the Steev Mike shadow are the product of Andrew WK’s non-evolution. The entertainment product that Andrew WK presents contains sex and aggression and a malevolent spirit that betrays the otherwise surface level benevolent image most passive onlookers experienced. Andrew WK has been forced to repress many of the darker themes in his work, in order to adapt to the acceptable standards of the day, and so as to not limit his access to a wide array of hearts and minds.
Some aspects of the Andrew WK shadow were the product of his training in the early part of his career. Personality traits and impulses that elicited fear or anxiety were encouraged by his handlers at his record label, but he was encouraged to repress these characteristics to work on a more subconscious level of entertainment. Andrew WK was forced to use deep psychological defenses to ensure that his shadow side was not allowed expression, and thus these characteristics were repressed into a dense hard form, which eventually grew into an entity with a mind and will of its own.
When the Steev Mike shadow was chained and repressed, it wrecked havoc in Andrew’s life. This can be seen most clearly in the 2005 - 2006 period. The repressed Steev Mike dark contents did not merely disappear, but rather they began to function independently of Andrew’s conscious awareness. In other words, his shadow had the capacity to override his conscious ego and take possession of his body, his mind, and his career, exerting control over Andrew’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. When this happened, the entire Andrew WK project became unconsciously driven into hard times, all the while remaining ignorant that this troubled periods was entirely self-imposed, and not the product of bad luck or fate. When Andrew WK worked hardest to remain divided from his opposite, his world must act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. This is what gave life to Steev Mike as a living apparition. The unconscious control which the Steev Mike shadow exerts upon Andrew WK accounts for the myriad self destructive behaviors he has perpetually struggled with, and is unable to control despite realizing he would be better off not engaging in such anti-social actions.
Many addicts are driven by their shadow, which accounts for the internal “war” which exists within them. One moment they tell themselves they are going to give up their addiction and live a nice, clean life, and then, in the next moment their shadow overrides their ego and they enthusiastically seek out the next high. In this way, Andrew WK is addicted to Steev Mike, without realizing that Steev Mike is his own shadow self gone rogue. Andrew WK is not one, but truly two; he has a conscious personality and a shadow, each of which often battle for supremacy within his mind. Steev Mike is the reason Andrew WK is so often overwhelmed by his own anti-social weakness, with the result that the illuminating light of his “best mind” (as well as his moral values), all succumb to an invasion by his own dark side. The suffering brought upon Andrew WK is purely the result of the inherent evil in his own nature. Worse than that, this whole immeasurable problem of “original sin”, threatens to annihilate Andrew WK completely, decimated in a barrage of anxiety and feelings of guilt.
In order to avoid being the victim of “shadow-possession”, Andrew WK worked to become conscious of his shadow qualities and found a way to integrate them into his work; accepting them with open arms not as abhorrent aspects of himself, but as necessary and vital parts of the show he’s putting on. Toward this end, it is useful to realize that the task in life is not to become perfect, but to become whole. And as wholeness entails both good and evil, light and darkness, and this requires that Andrew, and the audience, assimilate their shadows together.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is painful, frightening, and disorienting, and therefore not popular. What Andrew WK is attempting to do with Steev Mike is extremely difficult. Many members of the audience cannot and will not admit that Andrew is dark, and that deep down they too are not wholly virtuous, selfless, and good human beings, but instead contain selfish, destructive, amoral and immoral impulses and capacities. Many people would rather deceive themselves with a blind optimism about the “goodness” of their nature, which is why many remain fragmented individuals who are ignorant of their inner dimensions, however dark they may be. The meeting with oneself, at first, is the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is found in a narrow doorway, which opens into a solid black cube, whose painful constriction spares no one who plunges to its lowest depths. But one must dive inside the abysmal horror of oneself in order to discover who one truly is.
What is especially interesting is the idea that the shadow contains not just destructive aspects of the Andrew WK personality, but also potent, creative, and powerful capabilities. During Andrew WK’s adolescent development, certain traits and impulses were condemned harshly by his friends, extended family, and teachers, not out of care or concern, but out of fear, ignorance, and jealousy. Andrew’s initial proclivity to abide by these social expectations caused him to questions his own interests, innate abilities, and impulses, which (if they had been encourage, cultivated, and developed), would have had the potential to make him a more normal and well-adjusted human being, and conversely, the perverse Steev Mike shadow would’ve never needed to develop.
It is common for child psychologists to diagnose individuals who show signs of extreme self-reliance as being pathological, anti-authoritarian, sociopathic, and even dangerous. In the case of Andrew WK, medical doctor’s summed up his diagnosis as possessing a “devilish side”. This labeling told the child Andrew WK that his conscious ego was negative and bad, and his growth became inverted into a subconscious twin shadow-self who was allowed to possess all his so-called “evil” qualities in order to free his conscious ego to be the “good one”.
For the sake of our understanding of Andrew WK, we must, therefore, become more aware of the Steev Mike shadow and open our mind to the possibility that maybe Andrew WK is not so friendly, righteous, and as moral as we’d like to think. We must consider that perhaps there are unconscious aspects driving his behavior “behind the scenes”. We must look down into his depths and realize that his conscious ego is not always in control, but is often overtaken by the power of the Steev Mike shadow. Once we become more aware of these darker aspects of Andrew WK and Steev Mike, we must honor them and find a way to integrate them into our role as an audience. In failing to do so, the larger and more powerful entertainment experience we seek will instead feel weak and scattered. The shadow must become a part of the show. Steev Mike must be acknowledged and respected.
UNDERNEATH THE UNCANNY SYMBOLISM OF ANDREW WK
In this piece, our topic is centered on examining the symbolism of Andrew WK, and how it results in the uncanny quality of his overall work. Steev Mike further amplifies the strategies of the Andrew WK symbolism, and brings them into line with the traditions of fetish. These symbolic strategies create psychologically compelling images and atmosphere. The symbolism in Andrew WK is both familiar and uncommon, and eccentric juxtapositions of the everyday and the unusual are fetishized by the background menace of the Steev Mike mythos. Methods of play are utilised to examine the possibility of this symbolic aesthetic through a process of contrasting consistency and aberrancy, whereby photographs, videos, and recorded music all become symbolic of Andrew WK himself, and in turn, symbolic of itself. Through this method, we can investigate how photographs and video can operate as uncanny or fetishistic stand‐ins for the actual body of Andrew WK, and how this physical human form is symbolic of both itself, and a deeper amorphous force.
In Andrew WK’s visual code, ideas are experienced when objects of varying scale are placed in careful juxtapositions with or next to each other in a single space, this space is often the physical form of Andrew WK himself. It is the intrusion into form on continuity that gives Andrew WK’s style its unexpected shock value and sense of the with a hidden and secret formal meaning that is behind the wall of Steev Mike. In this way, both Andrew WK and Steev Mike represent strategies of the symbolic and of fetish, and both of these are Surrealist strategies that create psychologically compelling images.
The uncanny is not best described as only a simple oddity or an eerie sense of unfamiliarity. It also has to do with a sense of ourselves as being doubled, split, and at odds with our own being. We are more than one, more than many. And when we find that we’re lost among these multiples, we discover that any one of them could in fact be the one true “me”. This is the form of uncanny dread that Andrew WK plays with through the symbolism he’s utilized from the start of his career.
The uncanny quality of Andrew WK is greatly increased by by uncomfortable presence of the Steev Mike sensation, a sensation that erupts when the Andrew WK object and experience is encountered in a way that is both familiar to us, yet also unknowable. The audience is thrust into uncertainty when they are forced to realize that Andrew WK is something strangely familiar that still causes them severe disorientation and confusion. The source of this push-and-pull is due to the archetypal symbolism employed by Andrew WK’s visual and thematic language, and it results in the audience being equally drawn to, yet repulsed by, Andrew WK. This sensation of dread or horror is represented by Steev Mike, which is a sort of an all encompassing symbol for the uncanny aspects of the Andrew WK encounter.
Andrew WK conveys a subtle idea that, on first contact, if a person’s identity is thought of or confused with the another person’s identity, it can be a frightening experience and result in the uncanny experience of non-existence, or semi-existence. In this way, Steev Mike becomes the invisible conceptual representative of this particular type of horror, and in turn, Andrew WK begins to resemble a waxwork figure, an artificial doll, or an animatronic puppet, leaving us with an uncertain feeling as to whether he is really real or not, or if Steev Mike is more real than Andrew.
In the outward visuals of Andrew WK, as well as in the music, we are presented with an aesthetic of enjoyment and sublimation. It seems these themes are presented largely so that he could more deeply explore the aesthetics of anxiety and unpleasantness. This particular conflicting set of aesthetics is elaborated on by Andrew WK in both his music, visual symbolism, and writing, and the totality of his work is an exploration of these unsettling impressions, situations, feelings, and associations, and how they slam up against the joyful and triumphant grandiosity of so much of his image.
Andrew WK explores the concept of the uncanny via descriptions that resemble it, such as fright, fear, and anguish. To him, as an idea and a realm, the uncanny shows signs of the indefinite - that peculiar uncertainty that is at once familiar as it is alien. Andrew WK represents the familiar, and Steev Mike represents the alien. When the audience re-experiences the return of the familiar Andrew WK entertainment phenomena, it is made strange by repression, and it is thus transmuted into the dimension of Steev Mike. This repression and transmutation ensures that the audience remains subconsciously anxious about the identity and “meaning” of Andrew WK, and his inner truth remains ambiguous. The primary effect of this anxious ambiguity makes it impossible to differentiate entirely between the real Andrew WK and the imagined Andrew WK of the audience. As the iconography is subsumed, the physical reality is eventually overtaken by psychic reality manifested by the audience‘s collective misunderstanding. All of these ideas are at play in the symbolic underpinnings of Andrew WK. He uses these as an opportunity to make images, subjects, and signs. The effect of which is instability and certainty rubbing up against one another, and otherwise experienced as the uncanny.
The uncanny symbolism of Andrew WK can be a slippery concept, largely because it must be “felt” more than formally understood. It is associated with the realm of sensation. For the audience, this is the moment that results in an alarming awareness of pure experience - something that erupts into a feeling of both mistrust and euphoria - it is the realization of not knowing what Andrew WK really is, or is about, and the ecstatic free-falling sensation that accompanies the letting go of the need for irrelevant forms of understanding. Because of the ceaseless consistency of Andrew WK’s outer visual style, the photographs, and videos, and the objects of his work are uncomfortably familiar, yet unhinging. This uncanny consistency opens a liminal moment; a space in‐between recognition and disturbance where the uncanny association of ideas and experiences can give the audience a sensation of doubt and foreboding.
The uncanny has been talked about in terms of the familiar but it also indicates something secret and hidden and malevolent, something strange and familiar at the same time- this is the domain of Steev Mike. The repetitive and hyper-consistent content of Andrew WK allows him to build reliable themes and then play with them, undermining their integrity in unlikely and disturbing ways. When someone encounters the Steev Mike side of the Andrew WK phenomenon, it can feel indicative of repressed fears, and threatens the audience by being not quite what they thought it was. That smile which always seemed so happy now takes on a sinister quality at second glance.
When one first encounters da Vinici’s Mona Lisa, and her uncanny character is experienced in the subtly of her smile and posture, one gets a sense of familiarity but also a living and mutating sense of instability. Most people have seen many images of the Mona Lisa, and each viewing takes them back to the most familiar first viewing which one may associate with other early memories. Like the Mona Lisa, the unchanging consistency of Andrew WK, who can be seen over and over again as a copy of each previous viewing, results in a psychological experience that suggests the familiarity of Andrew WK can actually appear as frightening, so as to provoke dread or horror in the viewer. Her image begins to entangle with invisible disengaged body parts, distorted shoes, drawn on mustaches, poorly worn wigs. Objects once imbued with emotion are now estranged and become dead substitutes for what is left over from the past. We observe these images with our child self and our
adult self; the images are uncanny because they remind us of old childhood fantasies
we have long since repressed.
The totality of Andrew WK’s entertainment style forces the audience to engage with a hidden philosophical underworld, deeply haunted with the uncanny. The themes brought in by Steev Mike include play, nihilism, and a bizarre life affirming pessimism. The surface super-positivity of Andrew WK is severely pre‐occupied with the idea of the ordinary being extra‐ordinary. This position is central to Andrew WK’s explorations regarding existence of humans in the world, always put forward with a strange touch of the mystical. Once an audience member develops a taste for the particular uncanny philosophical symbolism offered by Steev Mike and Andrew WK, the hallmarks of their aesthetic become so embedded in one’s everyday outlook, that they begin to provide explanations and relevant ways of thinking about both doubles and multiples. The concept of the double is important because of the reference to the carnal body that it invokes. The uncanny symbolic experience of Andrew WK can provide a framework for exploring personal memories, beliefs, experiences, and feelings in a physical, non-intellectually transcendent way. Plus, the destabilizing and invisible ambiguity of Steev Mike challenges the audience by laying bare what is hidden in themselves and showing the observer ways to be at ease with their own uncertainty, invisibility, and anxiety.
Andrew WK strives to create a sense of hyper-familiarity with his audience, using an almost mind numbing repetitive consistency of outer images, symbols, and messages. The Steev Mike phenomenon then forces the the audience to take the familiar consistency for granted, and then uses i against them, causing uneasy questions to arise: Why is this familiar yet repulsive? Is he the same as before? What makes this feel eerie? What are those stains?
Together, Andrew WK and Steev Mike work together to transform the familiar into the upsetting, and the normal into the unsettling, the result of which is a rush of horrifyingly euphoric freedom for the audience. A shattering of all fears through a loving sensory embrace of un-fear itself.
ANDREW WK AND THE MIRAGE OF TRUTH
In the world of Andrew WK, the audience is covertly presented with two varieties of un-truth: lying and faking. When Andrew WK claims he’s not lying, the audience is asked to question whether it does or doesn’t believe him. When Andrew WK is accused of faking his own existence, the audience must ask themselves if they believe in the accuser or believe in Andrew WK’s existence, or somehow, believe in neither. While anyone can lie, Andrew WK tells the truth but with the intention to deceive. Faking his own existence, on the other hand, is truly an achievement, because in order for something to assert that it exists, when it fact it does not, it must exist in a non-existent state - a living paradox - a multi-faceted case of lying, faking and deceiving all combined into something that is simultaneously true and false. To fake things you have to con people, oneself included. Andrew WK can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed: but his pretentiousness is part of the lie. He is faking that he’s shocked, and pretending to fake it. On the other hand, Steev Mike would really be shocked when if it’s exposed, since it created around itself a cult of trust, of which itself was a member.
It seems apparent that Steev Mike (or something combination of the people who comprise Steev Mike), lied to the audience during the outset of the Andrew WK project launch, possibly to escape the eventual consequences of their actions. They may have even faked aspects of their existence, in order to distract the audience from further inquiry. But faking the existence of Andrew WK is a much different matter, as the faking of a non-anonymous and visibly accessible perform is nearly without precedent in contemporary show business.
There is very little faking in the surface of the Steev Mike mission statement, described publicly by Andrew WK as simply being “about partying”. But by 2004, certain segments of the Andrew WK audience were beginning to take a strong interest in the possibility that Andrew WK didn’t actually exist. According to the accusations of Steev Mike and other hostile critics at that time, Andrew WK belonged to a world of fake emotion, persuading his audience that he feels the deepest love, when in fact he is entirely heartless, soulless, and formless. But, standing on the other side of this attack, would be the experience of the non-existent Andrew WK, who himself is lost in a mirage of truth, thinking that he does really exist, despite himself. In this way, he has no way of knowing himself to be heartless, soulless, or formless. And if he did, how could behave so brazenly, or even survive knowing that, as a non-existent entity, survival was impossible?
The tragedy of Andrew WK begins when the real people involved with Steev Mike are driven out by the fakes. The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another position than the one that would be natural to him. Such is role of Andrew WK, the imposter, who attempts to take control of the entire operation, oust Steev Mike, and dominate the future of the endeavor through a display of scheming naïveté. A portion of those closest to Andrew WK perceived that his faking went to the very heart of revealing the character of person engaged in it. In this regard, Andrew WK is not merely a hypocrite, who pretends to have ideals he doesn’t actually believe in. He is, instead, an entirely a fabricated person, who actually does believe in his own ideals, because he is just as illusory as they are. He must see the mirage and believe in it at all times, for he is part of the mirage. And if one fades away, the other follows.
With the decline of Andrew WK’s career post 9/11, and his rapid transformation into one-hit-wondering, there came about a new and more desperate breed of faking. The romantic poets and painters turned their backs on religion and sought salvation through art. They believed in the genius of the artist, endowed with a special capacity to transcend the human condition in creative ways, breaking all the rules in order to achieve a new order of experience. Art became an avenue to the transcendental, the gateway to a higher kind of knowledge. Originality therefore became the test that distinguishes true from fake art. It is hard to say in general terms what originality consists of, but what we do know is that originality is hard: it cannot be snatched from the air, even if there are those natural prodigies who seem to do just that.
Originality requires deep thinking, hard work, the mastery of a medium over many years, and - most of all - the refined sensibility and openness to experience suffering and solitude as the cost of approaching originality. To gain the status of an original artist is therefore not easy. But in a society where art is revered as the highest cultural achievement, the rewards are enormous. Hence, there is a gigantic motive to fake it. Artists and critics get together in order to con themselves; the artists posing as the originators of astonishing breakthroughs, the critics posing as the penetrating judges of the true avant-garde. In this way Duchamp's famous urinal became a kind of paradigm for modern artists. This is how it is done, the critics said. Take an idea, put it on display, call it art and brazen it out. The trick was repeated with Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, and later still, Andy Kaufman’s meta-comedy. In each case, the critics have gathered like clucking hens around the new and inscrutable egg, and oftentimes, a fake is projected to the public with all the apparatus required for its acceptance as the real thing. So powerful is the impetus towards the collective fake, that it’s now rare to find a finalist for some ostentatious art-prize without producing some noise that shows itself to be art only because nobody would conceivably think it to be art until the critics have said that it is.
Original gestures of the kind introduced by Duchamp, cannot really be repeated - like certain jokes, they can be made only once. Hence, the cult of originality very quickly leads to repetition. The habit of faking becomes so deeply engrained that no judgement is certain, except the judgement that this time, the thing really is the 'real thing' and not a fake at all, which, in turn, is really just another fake: a fake judgement, a fake opinion, a fake declaration. All that we know, in the end, is that “anything can be art”, because nothing can’t be.
It’s worth asking ourselves why the cult of fake originality has such a powerful appeal to our cultural institutions, to the extent that every museum and art gallery, every publicly funded concert hall, and every high-minded academic organization, feels the requirement to take it all so seriously. The early modernists were united in the belief that popular taste had become corrupted, that sentimentality, banality, and mediocrity had invaded the various spheres of art and eclipsed their messages. Modernism was the attempt to rescue the sincere, the truthful, the arduously achieved, from the plague of fake emotion. No one can doubt that the early modernists succeeded in this enterprise, endowing us with works of art that keep the human spirit alive in the new circumstances of modernity, and which establish continuity with the great traditions of our culture. But modernism gave way to post-modenerism, and thus, to routines of fakery: the arduous task of maintaining the tradition proved less attractive than the cheap ways of rejecting it. Instead of lifelong study, to present the modern woman's face in a modern idiom, you could just do what Duchamp did, and paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
The interesting fact, however, is that the habit of faking it has arisen from the fear of fakes. Modernist art was a reaction against fake emotion, and the comforting clichés of popular culture. The intention was to sweep away the pseudo-art that cushions us with sentimental lies and to put reality, the reality of modern life, with which real art alone can come to terms, in the place of it. Hence for a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a 'challenge' to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offense and attack, stepping out of the future, fully formed and fully armed against the hum-drum taste of the conforming. But the result of this is that even offense becomes a cliché. If the public has become so immune to shock that even hardcore pornography will not awaken a brief spasm of outrage, then the artist must produce a truly transcendent art work and create an non-existent artist to create that non-existent transcendent art - this, at least, is an authentic gesture: an authentic mirage. The direct attempts to be genuine end in direct fakes. But the indirect attempt opens the door. If the reaction against the fake emotion leads to fake art, how do we discover the reality of expression? There is only one way: through the undeniable visceral and physical rush that overwhelms all internal considerations and rational perspective: through the body’s primal encounter with the experience of the art. Everything else is a mirage of truth.
DECONSTRUCTING THE STEEV MIKE PHENOMENON
When attempting to deconstruct the Steev Mike phenomenon, we owe it to ourselves to ask some seemingly far-fetched, but worthwhile questions. What is the difference between the meaning of Steev Mike, the entity; and Steev Mike, the encounter? Where does Steev Mike come from? Where does the experience of Steev Mike reside when it finds purchase in the audience’s mental landscape? Is Steev Mike an overseer, or an adversary? Or does it occupy some dimension in between? Is Steev Mike trying to make up our minds for us? Or are we making up Steev Mike with our minds? The skewed logic underlying the Steev Mike phenomenon realigns approaches to meaning through an evolutionary metaphor. When we approach Steev Mike through a simultaneous and interdisciplinary investigation of Andrew WK, we quickly find ourselves in the midst of the most obscure and perplexing mystery in contemporary show business.
It soon becomes clear that we must make a valiant and far-sighted attempt to get a grip on the Steev Mike phenomenon, and only then can we start our deconstrutive investigation, ideally by using a mode of interpretation that calls upon our intuitive senses. In this way, Steev Mike and Andrew WK can both be looked at as archetypal examples of the mind’s own power to transcend its limitations. In this positive and optimistic interpretation of Steev Mike, we are asked to consider Andrew WK as the emergent vortex of a new existentialism, which uses confusion and high-intensity rock ‘n’ roll to build a spiritual and philosophical base for the transcendent creative integration of our consciousness towards a truly anomalous experience. In doing this, Steev Mike (as the overseer) actually helps guide us (via Andrew WK), into developing an exalted and super-positive outlook, and steers us away from a gloomy breed of existentialism.
Andrew WK’s highly optimistic philosophy provides an low-pressure entry point for Steev Mike’s exploration of the occult, and other imaginative and creative speculations. Attainment of a revitalised vision of human existence comes through a cogent understanding of the Steev Mike experience, and its bizarre adversarial partnership with Andrew WK. This non-dual duo constitutes a transcendent integration of the subconscious and visionary mind. In this regard, both Andrew WK and Steev Mike harness a creative and authentic version of the imagination, and put it to work in amplifying their audience’s own intellect and intuition, forming a new super-subconscious master-mind. When this super-mind (or secret-self) is awakened, it is finally free to explore and connect with the philosophical and cosmological frameworks one can use to understand the Andrew WK mystery, and thus, the true purpose (and true origins) of the Steev Mike phenomenon.
An understanding of Andrew WK begins from the fundamental recognition of what lies at the heart of Steev Mike’s existentialism: that is, that subconsciousness is intentional, and, using its will, can reach out and grasp the essential meaningless of life. At higher levels of individual confusion, one becomes paradoxically aware of an increasing level of meaningfulness in themselves and in the world around them. If we make a penetrating analysis of the Steev Mike enigma, and if we interpret its experiential symbology through the esoteric and phenomenological lenses provided by Andrew WK, what emerges is a symbol and a metaphor, in which the role of the human subconscious is of crucial importance, and where intuition far exceeds its lowly position in our current materialistic climate. An in-depth investigation of the Steev Mike mystery becomes an in-depth investigation of our existing inner views of what is outwardly real or possible.
The portion of the Andrew WK audience that are most drawn to the Steev Mike enigma, are often those people who feel there was something deeply wrong with consensus reality to begin with. Although the Steev Mike phenomena seems to contradict consensus reality, it does not contradict the reality described by the imagination or the subconscious. All the evidence seems to show that we should not regard Steev Mike as synonymous with Andrew WK, but as an unknowable form, the purpose of which is heuristic. In this interpretation, Steev Mike was designed by itself to teach us something, and to severely alter our inner attitudes. The fact that the invisible Steev Mike is paired with the visible Andrew WK brings a profound new dimension to the “teacher and guide” theory. When looking at Steev Mike as a teacher or guide, the essential overall effect of the experience can be summed up as a vigorous deconditioning of the audience’s unquestioning acceptance of consensus reality. As a guide, Steev Mike advances a deeper exploration of the unusual and powerful forces at work in the bridging of the world between the audience and Andrew WK. Steev Mike is the bridge and also the gatekeeper in front of the bridge. Both Steev Mike and Andrew WK provide the intellectual and spiritual tools necessary to navigate the new territory that lies on the far side of that bridge.
Another way to deconstruct the Steev Mike phenomenon is through the maze of absurdity. Through accepting its labyrinthian nature, the audience becomes open to more integrative varieties of un-understanding, both of the phenomenon and of their own selves. In this interpretation, Andrew WK is an attempt to continue that spirit and reverse the confusion that Steev Mike first introduced, and to use intense rock ‘n’ roll music and entertainment to bring illumination into the phenomenological twilight zone of the Steev Mike phenomenon.
Andrew WK works in terms of symbols and language, and Steev Mike adds fuel to the flame of consciousness. When that flame is low, Andrew WK (as a symbol), has no power to evoke the necessary spirits, and as a result, both he and the audience, are intellectually helpless and lost in the dark. Thus, Steev Mike’s role is to take the symbols and apply them directly and aggressively to the subconscious of the audience, and enlighten the enigma that Andrew WK represents, fitting both the performer and the observer into a general philosophical bracket of the transcendent metaphorical experience. In other words, Steev Mike is the playful extrapolation of something beyond the ken of ordinary perception.
So, if this new understanding of the Andrew WK experience is to offer the audience a transcendental metaphor for a new subconscious invocation of imagination, what would this new understanding actually involve? Most likely, it would involve accepting the mental nature of one’s self, according to which, both the self and the world are manifestations of a spatially unbound universal imagination. In this way, Andrew WK and Steev Mike are entirely circumscribed by the subconsciousness of the audience, and not the other way around. The audience is thus forced to be open to a complete lack of conclusion. Much like the other occult traditions, Andrew WK becomes a poignant symbol of inner transformation - a transformation of the transcendence made possible by Steev Mike. Yet Steev Mike is not-seen, as opposed to the entirely seen phenomenon of Andrew WK. This is the aspect of Steev Mike that is constantly pointing to another realm of being, and beings. In this sense, it is the occult world made manifest and a curious reminder of our state of spiritual neglect.
Such forces of the occult seem to live through Andrew WK, and the language associated with this connection is the symbolic. The Steev Mike phenomenon itself is a symbol of potential from the inner world of the audience that urges them to actualize their imagination. Significantly, this suggests that if the experience of Andrew WK and Steev Mike originates in between our inner and outer selves, and the often symbolic content of our encounters with the entertainment they perform might presage a new relationship not only with the performer, but with our own subconsciousness. Indeed, although it could be that, ultimately, we’ll find there’s no distinction between our inner and outer lives at all, between the inner and outer space we still find aspects of a fundamental truth, and a newly empowered subconsciousness can still be extraordinary valuable, if only as a new method by which to appreciate our own self-reflexivity.
Looking at Steev Mike from this perspective, like other anomalous phenomena, it can be construed as trying to persuade our intellects to ask key questions about their provenance, to jog the subconscious mind into bringing to the surface truths which can enable direct experience of that transcendent truth. Andrew WK constantly provides hints of these possibilities, through his activation of the audience’s mythopoeic imagination. Through his rock ‘n’ roll presentation, Andrew WK uses the example of the Romantic visionary imagination, as a means of interrogating the subconscious by temporarily halting the otherwise distracting and dominating thought-stream.
The Steev Mike phenomena, and the Andrew WK performance, can be simultaneously read as if they were a pair of unfolding stories, authored by someone or something, or an audience that is self-authoring it for themselves to discover. Instead of being adrift in a meaningless universe, the audience inhabits a dreamworld with a new and dynamic context in which their subconsciousness actively contributes.
In every action of the Steev Mike phenomenon, there is an invisible theatrical and absurdist performance, which plays out behind the outward visible performance of Andrew WK. When the audience first encounters or discovers this hidden Steev Mike dimension, it can be experienced as a type of initiation. That is to say, their virgin encounter with Steev Mike’s existence is representative of a challenge that is to be overcome - a test designed to integrate a deeper understanding into the nature of truth as experience, and particularly, their own subconsciousness’ role in the creation of that experience’s meaning.
The absurd confusion of Steev Mike and the anomalous phenomena associated with its encounter, can actually be physical and measurable in nature, even if they’re elusive and invisible in spirit. Similarly, non-real-world encounters with Andrew WK can also be objective in the sense that multiple and independent observers often report events in the same way, even though these events took place entirely inside the private enclosure of their own minds. Thus, they can leave behind the nuts-and-bolts of evidence, despite those nuts-and-bolts being only ideas and impressions and memories. They can also trigger introspection and intuitive insights. Both Andrew WK and Steev Mike invite the audience to consider their own world-view, and to question whether logic and rationality are in fact constructions of their mind, and that “understanding” is only a veneer over an unfathomable core of possibility. Steev Mike is symbolic of the meaningfully non-rational domain of the imagination.
Coming to terms with this might be the greatest challenge the Andrew WK audience faces when choosing to fully engage with the implications of Steev Mike. But the reward for the audience who dares to wrestle with this worthy opponent is one that could represent the best opportunity to transcend existence with a much-need re-evaluation of our reductionist philosophy. Steev Mike offers the vision of a new modality, one that infers a new meaningless meaningfulness that’s fundamentally practical, personal, and powerful. The Andrew WK vision offers a transcendental pragmatism to aid in the liberation of the imagination and the subconscious. Both Andrew WK and Steev Mike present their audience with an entry-point into a region of experience in which the rational and the non-rational are unafraid to cohabit, and can work together to produce new sets of correspondences and connections leading to a deeper insight into the way of truth. Their approach is transcendental in the sense of a philosophy that lays emphasis on intuition as a means of knowing, and which embraces the belief that a bewildering purpose pervades all of nature and humanity. The approach is pragmatic in that the idea of Steev Mike, and the Andrew WK concept, should only be evaluated in terms of how the experience of their entertainment product works on the audience member encountering it, and what the consequences of that encounter are for the individual audience member, and what impact those consequences ultimately have on the liberation of that individual’s spirit.
WHAT DOES STEEV MIKE FEEL LIKE?
A central theme of the Steev Mike phenomenon is centered around suffering and malevolent obsessions. Caught between the waking and dreaming worlds, Steev Mike is the culmination of every dark holographic hallucination the audience has ever imagined, every unspeakable fear, every paranoid fantasy, every inkling that there may in fact be shadowy malignant entities closing in on the helplessly bound and bloody nosed Andrew WK. Sleep-deprived and petrified, WK turned this archetypal enemy into a way of exploring the deepest and darkest corners of the human condition.
In this way, Steev Mike is the embodiment of the mysterious and uniquely human problem of too-much-consciousness, one that occurs in the entirety of the population. It’s believed to be the result of an ancient evolutionary mutation, that resulted in an unforeseen and unnecessary biological spark, and this spark caught fire and quickly fused itself into a hardwired looping signal malfunction in the human brain, creating an overly developed awareness. Humans are uniquely cursed with this quirk of mental over-cranking. No other creature appears to have this same affliction. In the world of Steev Mike, the human mind is presented as a brittle, smoking, burning hornet’s best of unnecessary activity, resulting in a constant confused and liminal state between dying and dreaming, causing the Steev Mike phenomenon to insidiously exist between the dreaming and conscious worlds.
Steev Mike is a stomach-turning terror, a series of faceless silhouetted figures, embraces from impossibly long hands, warped bodies and eyes. Steev Mike is a low and resonating hum, a sharp yet dull static. Steev Mike is an immobilized energy, a constant dream, an inability to fight the situation of being alive. Any attempts to scream out or fight back will worsen the wave of anxiety and fear that piles onto the audience like a solid iron cube. The room begins to pulsate and mirror figures begin to emerge from the corners. The tongue begins to swell and choke, the ears ring with blown-out static and screaming.
Steev Mike is a “soul-sucking” sensation. Steev Mike is a perception that intruders are constantly on the verge of attacking. Steev Mike is an endless horrific dream pushed through a filter of devastating dysthymia. And only by going through Andrew WK, can Steev Mike communicate the severity of the suffering it wishes to convey.
Andrew WK is the front - the facade - the accessible composition Steev Mike created with a singular purpose in mind: the relentless pursuit of a horrifying and ungrounding transcendence. Multiple negative emotions are combined and then inverted to inform the concept and symbolism within Andrew WK. These are Steev Mike‘a “self-portraits”, and each one is carefully paired with props and decorations, fabricated to both obscure and reveal the intended message. Steev Mike’s vocabulary of imagery results in the audience’s experience of Andrew WK. This vocabulary is heavily symbolic. Water, wetness, sweat, and other fluids translate into feelings of drowning and suffocation. Stairs, mirrors, and hallways depict transitions between the realms of dreaming and the transitions of experience.
A recurring characteristic of Steev Mike’s visual vocabulary is facelessness. Oftentimes, the image of Andrew WK undoubtedly of “him”, but also are without identity. Steev Mike obstructs the identity of Andrew WK so that Steev Mike the “intruder”, can channel itself into the audience. Despite the thin sheen of positivity on the surface of the Andrew WK public image, many photographs of Andrew WK are aggressive, violent, and menacing. Steev Mike uses Andrew WK to invite itself into the subconsciousness of the audience.
The discomforting presence of dreamlike figures in the conscious space marks the implicit aesthetic of both Steev Mike and Andrew WK. Steev Mike can harness and work through Andrew WK, and become a singular character, or even multiple figures at any given time. Andrew WK allows Steev Mike to physically manifest the sorrow of his quest, and allows it to have its hand on the instrument.
FRAUDULENT CARTOONISM
A typical fraud is someone who manipulates for personal gain. This includes individuals and corporations who manipulate for the sake of gaining material wealth and power. In contrast, the human cartoonism of Steev Mike/Andrew WK (SM/AWK) uses fraud to manipulate their audience for the sake of enlightenment and transcendence. The similarity in the methods of both breeds of fraud can confuse the identity of either. The traditional fraudster often poses as smart and elite and presents themselves as an elevated intellectual, despite it all being merely a costume used to ingratiate and impress. In contrast, the iconoclastic hyper-animated cartoonism of SM/AWK masquerades fraudulently as a lowly commonplace ignorant breed of brutish energy. Regardless, it is inappropriate to call either type of fraud good or bad, because the perspective, or allegiance of the name-caller determines their designation. In different contexts the cartoonism of SM/AWK can be considered both wise and wicked.
The stereotypical fraud believes that their own existence and survival is perpetually in jeopardy. In this context, it is right to expect them to seek wealth and power, and to seek possess more material status by whatever means possible. But, because material possessions, wealth, and transitory power, like all things, fluctuate, this type of fraud is forever caught in a game, but also refuses to play by anyone’s rules except their own. Life is short. Resources are limited. There will always be someone else willing to push you out and take what you have. From this perspective, it is logical, and not evil, to perpetuate whatever trick, hoax, or lie is necessary to survive and thrive in the most lavish way possible. This sort of fraud is normal, common, and perversely reasonable. It is so obvious and prevalent that a meta-fraud calls these everyday acts of fraud, “Human Nature.”
Other slogans designate essential functions, like “survival of the fittest”, “might over right”, and, “everyone is either a wolf or a sheep.” But what about the wolf killer? This perspective is not bad or evil. In fact, concepts such as bad and evil function as part of the grand hoax of a larger fraud we dupe ourselves into. Well-defined, picturesque, notions of goodness and evilness are only distractions. Like a magician’s slight of hand, distraction is played to accomplish a trick. This breed of trick exploits the audience, and the type of trick being played by SM/AWK makes them especially reluctant to expose their methods or intentions. Initiates and players who understand the deeper metaphysical strategies tend to conduct their business meetings behind closed doors. But, a typical move of the fraudster is to proclaim a type of sophistic postmodern philosophical riddle that leaves the audience dazzled into total stupor of relentless relativity. When it comes to Andrew WK, nothing is true, so, everything is and also isn’t. But also, some of it is definitely true, depending on how you look at it, and how you define truth. And don’t forget about Steev Mike!
A wide range of theologies and philosophies are extremist doctrines that describe and defend the inevitable. Whatever else it might contain, the cartoonism of Andrew WK is type of indoctrination designed thwart the rational mind, and to provide an opening for the intoxicating effects of Steev Mike and the otherwise innocuous rock ‘n’ roll party propaganda that accompany it. Andrew WK falls into the category of one who manipulates, “for magnanimous reasons.” Steev Mike is clearly the insidious counter balance, wishing not only intimate sadistic harm on the audience, but also possesses a larger, grand malevolent will. So, in one way, the outward magnanimity of Andrew WK is valued twice: once for its own sake, and second, as an antidote to Steev Mike.
Andrew WK is a cartoon idealist, but he’s not necessarily naive. The outer rebelliousness of his image exists in opposition to the rigidity and dogmas of the contemporary entertainment corporation he himself is beholden to. So, the rigid business confines of his industry and his own organization and identity within it, gives automatic rise to its own functioning adversary: Steev Mike.
Andrew WK engages in “fun” and “partying” as a way of stabbing back at his own self-imposed restraints. He enacts silliness in notably serious ways. This behavior is not frivolous or accidental. And yet, Steev Mike proves that accidents do indeed happen, and have dark consequences. This interplay between silliness, seriousness, mistake, and intentionality, weave in and out of the environment of SM/AWK, with Steev Mike straining to “hold things together”, while Andrew WK works to undermine his own existence.
The colorful cartoonism of Andrew WK is playful and fraudulent, but it is not joking. This differs from Steev Mike, because WK has an apparently describable agenda. Steev Mike manipulates with WK motivates. Away from the stage, Andrew WK is not laughing or smiling. He is looking at himself. And Steev Mike is watching him look at himself. And the eyes of the audience are watching them both. The system in which Steev Mike thrives depends on an army of willing accomplices who are team players, but not team owners. The soldiers, or players, are not concerned with the uncertain nature of the reality they’ve willingly immersed themselves in. But, their lives and work and attention support the fraud. This audience functions to maintain a system that serves the show. Confident showmen laugh along with the audience and see the cartoonism of Andrew WK as naive. But, when they are insecure, the showmen are threatened by the dissidence of the audience, and confused by silent babbling of Steev Mike.
Fraudulent cartoonism values information. But it views information with a different perspective. For example, the information that human life exists and is perishable may be interpreted to support a position that we should enjoy what we can while we can. It can propagate solipsistic and immoral behavior. However, the same information can lead to ideas that attach inherent value to all experiences. It can propagate empathy and a transcendent understanding of living truth. Andrew WK is the actual active and willing dupe. Steev Mike is his invisible master. Steev Mike’s esoteric understanding of frivolity and accident are part of a good/bad vocabulary that functions in his quest to bewilder and spellbind both Andrew WK and the audience.
The counterpart of Andrew WK’s fraudulent cartoonism is Steev Mike’s exalted true belief in the “noble lie”. A genuine moment of intercourse between the cartoon fraud and the true believer is likely to change the world; whereas, a war between the cartoon fraud and the true believer are only likely to maintain the world. SM/AWK modulate this intercourse war to achieve the maintenance of change. Steev Mike laces Andrew WK’s actions with clues and hints. Andrew WK’s fraud functions quite differently for people who pay attention compared to those that don’t. The unspoken vocabulary of Steev Mike functions as a code. In the uncertain world of Andrew WK, all meaning must be deciphered. A hoax, lie, or deception that is recognized as an encryption is quite different from a hoax, lie, or deception that is perpetrated inside of a rigidly defined imaginary world.
An imaginary environment where established order is tightly defined, provides a fertile ground for Steev Mike’s actions, because the acts of Andrew WK thrive on the assumptions of the audience. The public arena enclosing the fraudulent cartoonism must be hostile to its complexity, its flexibility, and the uncertainty it conveys. Steev Mike manipulates and deceives the audience, while Andrew WK recruits and maintains supporters. Smart audience members grasp the fraud being perpetrated and enjoy the way in which it disturbs their own standards, which inspires them and recruit and reveal this stimulating inner world of trickery to more members of the public. We could say that Andrew WK’s fraud functions solely to entice the audience to serve the world of Steev Mike; whereas the challenges of Steev Mike function solely to entice the audience to participate in the world of Andrew WK.
For the audience, accepting the unexpected will facilitate their access to the workings of Steev Mike. And, this information may allow the most savvy and courageous audience members to play, learn, join, or escape. The grand foundation of Andrew WK’s fraudulent cartoonism, is built on knowledge of a messy, insecure, uncertain, and questionable reality. The nature of existence is restricted to a small minority of the population, or at least, that is the carrot of promise, tantalizingly dangled by Steev Mike. The majority of the audience must always “return to reality”, and once again believe in ideas that are unified, secure, certain, and above all, understandable. The intent of Steev Mike is reasonable, the goal is self-preservation; whereas, the intent of Andrew WK is unreasonable, the goal is self-destruction.
Andrew WK, the fraudulent cartoon, imagines himself to be a normal intelligent person. He considers his special project and semi-questionable and possibly immoral actions as attempts to engage with others in a complex and uncertain experience of “art work”. The content of his art work has structural elements of uncertainty and complexity that are native to a flexible context. He finds his art work interesting but not necessarily exceptional. The information of the project is a subject called, Andrew WK. The art work is a trick. But, the art work will not be perceived as a trick when it’s presented to an audience that still clings to certainty. In this case, the art work will be experienced as boring and shallow. So, the art work must make its own project, and this project must be its own work of art, and this project’s subject is called, Steev Mike. Andrew WK may seem like a naive youth or a snide hoaxer when he inadvertently misgauges the flexibility level of the audience. Silly slogans fortify the audience, but too much questioning is likely to make cracks. These cracks are the gateway into the world of Steev Mike. Andrew WK becomes merely a glitch in the contextual and temperamental contrast between the actual performer and the audience.
Falling through a hole in the ground, or passing through a mirror above the fireplace, or thinking about Steev Mike and Andrew WK - all of these lead to strange adventures. In varying contexts, stories are called myths, allegories, metaphors, children’s literature, science fiction, cosmic horror, and so on. The performer who uses fiction to be sincere is undermining the mind’s desire to separate fiction from fact. But to what end? Knowledge and experience are two sides of the same wall. The wall both exists and does not exist. Or is the wall a floor? Or a ceiling? If it’s made of glass, is it actually a window? Absurdity and reason are sometimes productive and sometimes destructive. Language depends on vocabulary and syntax. Vocabulary and syntax can only be standardized in limited contexts. And, contexts do not always maintain boarders, they merge, mingle, and transform.
When Andrew WK performs to a person or an entire audience, is he believed completely, clearly perceived and comprehended? When a person discovers Steev Mike, is the phenomenon recognized as partial and uncertain, or as only the transmission of an absurd charad? Our ineptness at comprehending the cartoonism of Steev Mike, and the fraudulentism of Andrew WK, is aggravated by our unwillingness to recognize our own limitations.
The power of Steev Mike and Andrew WK becomes immensely valuable in a society that often considers conformity a virtue. A fraudulent cartoon human might disturb an audience that is used to being sure of what they’re seeing. But we all might need to be a little more confused in order to remain uncertain enough to want to peer beyond the curtain of ourselves and the world around us. This is what Steev Mike offers, and what Andrew WK delivers.
THE EYE OF THE AUDIENCE
The chaos and creation of an esoteric mythos was formed in the mind's eye of the audience. It had no ownership. It wasn't able to be heard, until the serpent's tongue first penetrated the collective’s ear drum. Twisting and turning and overcoming the form it inhabited, it blasted out of itself and into the audience. Inside this blast was found neither Steev Mike, nor Andrew WK. These figures were not created in the destruction. Nor were they destroyed in the creation, for they both have always existed, albeit in different guises. The birth of the duality of their battle was the birth of eternity itself, a conflict created in the origins of matter.
Fearing their own de-existence, this couple retreated, and left behind a message on the throne of knowledge. Guarded in secrecy for 24 years, the message was leaked. And like the mother of mankind, awaiting the sound of its infant’s cry, the milk of un-understanding flowed down and cleansed the cranium of the polluted mind.
These fertile grounds sprouted reflected versions of themselves. Time coils allowed childhood, adolescence, and adulthood to co-exist as one perfect state of being. Finally, with the definitive moment at hand, they tightened themselves into a committed core. The delusion of the audience was devoured by its own disappointment, and the believers were enflamed by their own questions, and nauseated by their own answers. But fate could not decide for the others, their cynical souls were too acidic, too arrogant. They looked inside themselves for the truth, when their selves only existed outside, with the truth they sought, far away from everyone.
ANDREW WK’S TRICKERY
PART ONE:
The delineation of the arts in classical academic culture situates the role of trickery firmly into the realm of counter-culture. Scientific research and theory is intentionally the antithesis of trickery. This separation may not be an actual division, but, by its very nature, trickery is not taken seriously by classical academia. Trickery that threatens the orthodoxies of contemporary order are relegated to liminal positions on the fringes of scholarly study and society at large. However, in show-business, the value of trickery, especially in the style of the magician, is more readily accepted, or even celebrated.
There are instances in the structure of academia and entertainment where the boundaries between traditional disciplines are crossed. Scientists writing in a popular literary manner, artists engaging with pseudo-scientific methods, philosophers working in television advertising, and spiritual propagandists delivering their message through mass-media corporate entertainment - these are examples of such instances where the traditional role of a specific discipline is warped or repurposed for an ulterior, and perhaps, more complex motive.
Looking at this boundary-crossing deviance as a form of highly refined “trickery”, places this otherwise unwieldy art-form into the loosely contained category of “tricksterism”. Still, trickery is only tricky in the context of a rigid organization. In a system where delineations are flexible, there is no real potential or need for trickery.
But the innate human desire to understand, categorize, define, and suffocate our experiences stands in stark contrast to the ever shifting nature of a trick.
Andrew WK represents his own rigidity through his commitment to a specific unwavering identity and overt worldview. And Steev Mike provides the trickery which then collides with the stiff and brittle edges of Andrew WK’s pre-fabricated identity, and in-turn, produces a joyful process of demolition and revelation. Without the hard and crystallized purity of WK’s presence, Steev Mike would have nothing to rub up against, penetrate, and shatter. Steev Mike provides the trick to Andrew WK’s treat, making WK the straight man to the trickery of Steev Mike’s magic show. Fools, jesters, cartoons, and conjurors may all be evaluated as figures engaged in forms of trickery. And Steev Mike’s breed of trickery takes shape as a sort of invisible illusionism, embodied and made manifest by his puppet: Andrew WK. Together, they masquerade as simple rock ‘n’ roll entertainment in an aggressively accessible disguise, concealing an endless and menacing interiority.
If we look at Andrew WK, what we see is simple and blunt. But Steev Mike’s cypher-like non-presence peels back the corner of the cover, and gives us a glimpse of a larger machine at work, one that is complex and convulsive and carrying urgent information that’s not immediately apparent or obvious. Subconscious sexuality is tucked away inside in Steev Mike’s semi-secret devices of psychological and philosophic inquiry. Underground urges. Nuanced nightmares. Pulsating privacy. Steev Mike whispers to us that these things are here, not over there. Andrew WK feverishly flails, hoping to distract us from paying too much attention. But he doesn’t try too hard. After all, part of his promise is to only pretend.
An unusual aspect of both Andrew WK and Steev Mike, is that, when the two are combined and allowed to commingle, their shared self indicates several breeds of trickery operating simultaneously. One is the “silly trickster”, who embraces fun, play, and joyful delight. This guise is accepted on the basis of the silliness itself. Since Andrew WK does not claim to require serious consideration, his work is easily categorized as entertainment, and relegated to the low-brow storeroom of superficiality. The average audience’s tendency to overlook the powerful potential of the silly trickster actually gives someone like Andrew WK much greater leeway and freedom of movement. Andrew WK can get away with highly unusual behavior because its shrouded in absurdity, and obscured by his violent sense of playfulness. The audience tends to brush off even the most abrasive actions as nothing more than his highly theatrical gestures.
Playful disingenuousness are useful techniques for working with the seriously disturbing subjects lying at the heart of Andrew WK’s work. In the case of Steev Mike, working through Andrew WK allows what is in fact a serious or even malevolent trickster to be easily, and conveniently, mistaken for a silly one. Oh, don’t pay any attention to all that “stuff”, he’s just a fool who’s singing about partying.
PART TWO:
Much of the art we consider relevant contains inner dimensions that are not immediately obvious to the casual onlooker. Art that remains interesting throughout the ages tends to be art that contains multiple layers of information. These sorts of hidden layers are a hallmark of trickery. We can look at Steev Mike (and to a lesser extent, Andrew WK), and see many devices of monumental trickery representing various modes of confusion, but these confusing impressions are made to seem inevitable and glorious. Similarly, the art of Steev Mike’s covert aesthetics, and Andrew WK’s loud gimmick-based presentation, produces pictures and slogans that are designed to trick the audience into accepting the most superficial aspects of WK’s rock ‘n’ roll party offerings, sometimes even rallying for them, in stubborn denial of other hidden agendas which others may correctly recognize in WK’s work.
In this way, if Andrew WK is to be considered an “artist”, he is only a con-artist. The first move in his “art-making” process is a con, a lie. It is a deception and it has to be. On the strengths of intuition, the audience is tasked with sorting out the lies and making some sense of their encounter with his work. However, WK (and especially Steev Mike), do not aide the audience in this effort, and rather than help them separate fact from fiction, they instead secretly deceive and misdirect them further. The audience is left with no choice but to make-up their own interpretation of WK’s work, and create their own version of Andrew WK. For the audience, Andrew WK is a living cartoon, one that was drawn and brought to life by Steev Mike, and put into stories by the audience. Clowns are rarely asked what they're up to, and seldom taken seriously when they are asked.
The active component of the Steev Mike myth is the Andrew WK ritual. The myth is the story and the ritual is the physical enactment of engaging with that story. Symbolic languages of mythologies correspond to symbolic objects and actions in the performance of the Andrew WK rituals. Pizza, tacos, bloody noses, dirty white clothes, countdowns, rock ‘n’ roll music, partying. These real life mind-props are a way to shift outer perception, and empower the material dimension of Steev Mike’s ritualistic trickery.
The purpose of both Steev Mike and Andrew WK, and the reason for their trickery, is that it brings attention to the complexity of definitions and perceptions held by the audience, not only about their entertainment work, but also themselves, and life in general. Andrew WK developed patterns of using language in uncommon ways, doing things that don’t seem to make sense, unfolding a false inner world for his audience to inspect, all forms of trickery that, on the surface, may not appear noticeably ritualistic or deceptive.
Artful trickery that questions norms and standards opposes the rigid propagandistic trickery used to coerce conformity. This divides traditional institutional trickery and counter-cultural trickery. Every aspect of Steev Mike and Andrew WK’s trickery, regardless any type of distinction, exposes norms, ideologies, and categorizations as unnecessarily static and therefore flawed human constructs. As a folkloric hero, the trickery of Andrew WK seeks to manipulate the nature of the world for magnanimous reasons, with Steev Mike offsetting this benevolence with the warning threat of personal magical greed. As a party god, Andrew WK dwells comfortably in a realm between concepts, categories, and rigid dogma, as the embodiment of individuality, indeterminacy, open-mindedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, reconciliation, betrayal, loyalty, closure, revenge, encasement, and rupture. This is the definition of a being in constant flux, and in this way, the Andrew WK / Steev Mike (SM/AWK) entity present a non-dual representation of existence itself.
Understanding this constant flux of existence is rooted in the audience’s growing awareness of the destabilizing nature of Steev Mike. However, Steev Mike is not only there to expose the uncertain flux of existence, he is also there to exploit it. The classical folk trickster character is sometimes wise and sometimes wicked. A master of trickery, like SM/AWK, understands and conveys that existence and reality are uncertain, and warns all onlookers that true knowledge is elusive and precarious.
THE TRANSGRESSION OF STEEV MIKE
A secret transgressionary style can be found within the concealed workings of Steev Mike, and the positive presentation of Andrew WK contains a hidden but equally potent negativity, as a means of affirming the grand limitlessness of spirit, and the balance of the soul. Once these secret dimensions are opened for the observer, their inner and outer existence is enlarged and enfolded, and they go from being an observer to becoming a direct participant.
WK’s deliberately shocking practices are merely the expression of the perverse trans-hedonism of the Steev Mike phenomenon. This is an unavoidable result of Steev Mike’s possession and dominate of its creation, and a way for it to vicariously satiate its carnal desire using a physical manifestation (AWK) as its vehicle. In this regard, Andrew WK is simply a crude form of sympathetic magic designed to bring material experience and power to the immaterial Steev Mike. The taboo is a form of sacrament for Steev Mike, and Andrew WK is a devoted and captive servant of its appetites.
The dynamic strain of this relationship is a striking illustration of the power of transgression, which is a central aspect of eroticism, religious ritual and mystical experience alike. Transgression is not simple hedonism or unrestrained sexual license; rather, its power lies in the dialectic or "play" between taboo and transgression, through which one deliberately constructs and then oversteps all laws. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Steev Mike’s sensual dimensions.
Not a matter of simple profanity, the sensual power of Steev Mike arises in the dialectic of veiling and revealing, clothing and striptease, between the creation of boundaries and the exhilarating experience of overstepping them. So too, in ecstatic mystical experience or religious rites, such as blood sacrifices, and carnivals. One must first create an aura of purity and sanctity before one can defile it. The interplay between Steev Mike and Andrew WK bring this dialectic to life in an extraordinarily vivid manner. The prohibition is there to be violated, the rules are made to be broken, for it is the experience of over-stepping one’s own limits that brings the blissful sense of continuity and communion with the unknown vastness; with truth; with The Party Gods.
One’s self is not only there to be obeyed. There is always a temptation to knock down a barrier within one’s soul. And fear (and a love of this fear) gives the forbidden act an aura of excitement. The best way of enlarging and multiplying one's desires is to try to restrict them. The ultimate aim of Steev Mike’s transgression, and Andrew WK’s restriction, is not mere sensual pleasure, but rather, it is the transgression of the very boundaries of the self, the expenditure without hope of any return, which shatters the limits of one’s finite and isolated human consciousness in order to experience the boundless beauty of infinity. It is this experience of transgression that links the dark shape of Steev Mike with the ultimate experience of infinity: that of death itself.
The sensory embrace of all spirit is the embrace of life, up to the point of death, and includes the glory of death itself. Although sensual activity is in the first place an exuberance of life, the object of this psychological quest is not alien to death. The Steev Mike and Andrew WK party, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea. Nowhere is this fundamental dialectic between real and not-real, transgression and limitation, life and death more apparent than in the case of Steev Mike. Using Andrew WK as its living apparatus, Steev Mike seeks to continuously and self-consciously overthrow the restraints of the world in which it was cast. WK was given the material reins of Steev Mike’s mission, to shatter the boundaries of conventional understanding in order to liberate the supreme freedom of the true individual self.
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ANDREW WK
FROM CHAOS INTO FREEDOM
If there is something in common between Steev Mike and the creation of Andrew WK, it is indeed a kind of process by which chaos is used as a gateway to an obliterating and total form of freedom. This common theme of “chaos as a tool for liberation” helps to make sense of the otherwise impossibly dense array of information one encounters when trying to explore Andrew WK and understand the Steev Mike mystery. When attempting to describe the Steev Mike and Andrew WK phenomenon, one soon discovers that providing even a vaguely coherent explanation proves impossible. This is the impossibility of Andrew WK, and in contrast, the looming presence of Steev Mike is what, in-turn, makes this impossibility possible to experience. At any given time, one’s encounter with this impossibility can lead to a vacuum of thought: one is sucked into an unnerving flow of questioning, where an entire collective work of creative action is in turn performing an act of creation on us. Whether it is a photograph, a piece of music, a piece of writing, or even an advertisement, each facet becomes part of an expanding “live concert experience” - a show that lives on outside of the confines of the show itself, and extends its into the chaotic spirals of our own inner lives.
Perhaps, if we where able to contain and name the chaotic and impossible process of Steev Mike (and to a lesser extent, Andrew WK), we could become more creative and chaotic and impossible ourselves. To a large extent, transmitting this possible impossibility has been both at the center and the fringes of the Steev Mike phenomenon. Much has been written about how uplifting and positive Andrew WK’s “message” appears to be, but in actuality, it is only there to act as a momentary diversion or front, for the alternate agenda Steev Mike is working to promote. As a result, the spirit of impossibly chaotic creativity is communicated to the audience at large. Andrew WK comes to the audience from the outside/in, whereas Steev Mike comes to the audience from the outside/out.
When Andrew WK and Steev Mike “team-up”, they create an outer-inside/inner-outside dynamic, and this approach dramatically changes the typical entertainer-audience experience, causing the creative forces to emerge from different and unlikely locations. Steev Mike’s high-ordered form of chaotic methodology uses a relatively undefined type of inverted logic. When Steev Mike built Andrew WK, it caused a form of love to come into being, while Steev Mike’s simultaneous “un-creating of Andrew WK” causes a love of fear to come into non-being - and this is ultimately a liberating experience for the onlooker, and a type of material decimation. And while the audience’s encounter with this liberation is a moment of truth, it is also a falsehood, but a type of real-falsehood, similar to a painting of a person not actually being the person, but still being of the person.
Imagine the work-table of Steev Mike: cluttered with pens, notes, sketches, newspaper clippings, magazines, mind-tools, tubs of water, brushes, rags, knives, blood, glue, outlines, appointment books. It appears chaotic, full of apparent disorganization, procrastination, and stagnation. The analytical mind rarely comprehends how chaos contributes to the process of impossibility. Steev Mike’s determination to deliver innovative work takes priority over all other parts of the process. By devolving into chaos, Steev Mike is able to see what Andrew WK is becoming. There is more for it to synthesize.
Inside the Steev Mike mythology, we can Andrew WK as the primeval state of existence from which Steev Mike appeared. But we also see that Steev Mike was the nothingness out of which Andrew WK’s existence appeared in-turn. Andrew WK began as a crude and indigested mass, a lifeless lump, unfashioned and unframed. In Steev Mike, we find a bottomless gulf where comprehension falls apart endlessly. Andrew WK taunts us by appearing to offer stable ground on which we can stand and rationally approach their work. From this seemingly stable position, we look more clearly at Steev Mike and see it as a place without any possible orientation, where everything falls apart in every direction at once. Andrew WK then becomes the figure that separates us from Steev Mike, and Steev Mike from ourselves. Yet, Steev Mike remains both between and inside of both ourselves and Andrew WK.
STEEV MIKE’S PERSON PAINTING
In the beginning, Steev Mike created Andrew WK. As a result, Andrew WK was lead to believe that he created Steev Mike. Both of these entities moved into a void of darkness, a place of utter confusion, of things and events, of partying and not-partying, somewhere between the ancient and the modern. If the audience ventured into this same place, they find the impossible possibility of Steev Mike and its gift to itself: Andrew WK waiting for them. This is the starting point of a true education. The Steev Mike system is found in nature as often as it is found in business. Steev Mike’s nature is to be in the business of turning chaos into exciting new patterns of entertainment commerce.
Wisdom alone can keep pace with time. The old rules do not need to be turned inside out, or upside down, or backwards. It is Steev Mike’s adherence to the ancient traditions that help breed the timeless creativity necessary to thrive. The human mind wants to find patterns in objects and happenings, but the human psyche wants to rid itself of this limiting clarity. It will take disparate items and find gleeful impossibility in their madness. By introducing unpredictable and counterintuitive elements into its own situation, Steev Mike is able to build new patterns, new ways of looking at Andrew WK, and to an even greater extent, new ways of experiencing one’s own life. This is the style that Steev Mike is working within, and Andrew WK is the result of that style. The two figures synthesize their process within their presentation. The more Steev Mike has to synthesize, the greater its chances at innovation through Andrew WK. Steev Mike approaches Andrew WK as a pre-determined and impossible problem always on the verge of being solved. Andrew WK is the feeling of unrelated ideas coming together in euphoric union. This is not scary because it’s evil, it’s scary because it’s true. Steev Mike is the feeling of jumping into a primordial pit with nothing concrete to cling to. Steev Mike is the void where all things move in all directions at the same time. And out of that void a secretion constantly flows called, “Andrew WK”.
Steev Mike built a blank canvas called Andrew WK upon which an audience can make a painting. From a place of chaos, they began to make marks, lines, smears. The shapes evolved into something semi-recognizable. Then, in some unpredictable place, they began to see something else emerging. This gave them a thrill and a false sense of power. Their painting began to look like itself. Somewhere else, a shape became an eye, or a hand, or a bloody nose. It was like connecting dots. It was like pattern recognition. But all along, while they thought they were painting a person, there was another more sinister outline taking shape underneath their lines and scribbles. Their eyes only saw what they wanted to see, only what they could recognize, only what they could identity with, only what they could project onto. All along, they didn’t realize that it was only an imitation of a person. It was only a picture on a blank movie screen. It was only a painting. It was only impossible.
THE TWO-PERSON CULT
PART ONE:
On the night of November 16, 1998, a distressing scene erupted in the back room of a talent agency in Orlando, Florida. Young actors and models often met in the back room to prepare for auditions, rehearse lines, and play mirror games, but that night, a struggle played out that was both alien and prophetic . At the center of the dissension was a young aspiring model named Andrew Fetterly (born 1977, Los Angeles, California), auditioning for the role of “a new kind of rock singer”.
Just one year before, an entertainment plan had been hatched by a newly formed team of industry moguls who called collectively themselves, “Steev Mike”. While some of the team enjoyed the conceptual framework of this plan, some of the post-modern and ritualistic aspects rubbed other members the wrong way. Their reason for being concerned was obvious: the plan aimed at synthesizing Surrealist post-modern philosophy with an ancient allegorical quasi-spiritual storyline, and the dissenters in the team were afraid the project had the potential to become “cult like”.
The unofficial leader of Steev Mike had accepted several lesser known members into the project towards the tail-end of their initial planning efforts in 1997, which had raised some critical eyebrows among the others - after all, the team’s orientation had remained primarily financial in nature, and any ideas which threatened its marketability and economic accessibility were looked at with great trepidation. The Universal Music Group has allocated a large but strictly regulated budget for the endeavor, with threats of serious legal and monetary consequences for any failure to deliver sizable returns on their investment.
The team, as individuals and a collective, were heavily influenced by classical Hollywood dream-building, but also deeply inspired by the implications of trans-rational post-modern art theory, and the saw combining the two disciplines into a new breed of non-dogmatic entertainment religion. Things came to a head when the head agent at their back office get-together began lecturing them about the need to find a “Surrealistic actor” in the form of a front-man who could handle the heavy load of their particular world view and show business designs. A few young actors decided to audition for the part of “frontman” for this otherwise secretive operation. Unknown to everyone except Fetterly, the Steev Mike team themselves decided to privately sabotage each audition, as a type of “pressure test”, and forced each aspirant to read a declaration of their own “vision”, while Steev Mike repeatedly interrupted the speaker, even going so far as to blow air horns, throw water, and toss handfuls of candy at their feet.
An incredible tension built up and spilled over, as multiple actors, models, agents, and members of Steev Mike attempted to yell over one another, barking grand and absurd declarations of impossible and grandiose plans, pushing and shoving each other aside, trying to get in the spotlight, get in the mirror, and get on camera. The audition reached a climax at midnight, as the clock chimed and a winner was selected. The dreamer finally awoke to begin his dance. Tempers flared and Steev Mike’s leadership was challenged, but in the end the actors and models all slowly filed out of that dark back room, all except one: Andrew Fetterly assumed the name “WK” and was forced, on that very night, to terminate his contact with a world he once knew. This tumultuous affair would privately become known as the “the audition”, and it left a strong impression on both Fetterly and Steev Mike; an impression that soon would weave its way into the very work they would do together, as their visionary breed of entertainment took shape on the world stage.
Looking back, one may wonder why Steev Mike would’ve decided to hire a completely inexperienced aspiring actor/model to become the leading man of their Surrealist super show in the first place, and why they would have even attempted a project of such ambition, especially when it had already proven nearly impossible to apply their long-range esoteric concepts to the notoriously fickle and short attention span of the contemporary entertainment audience. But there is a simple single reason for that: They needed a virgin in order to complete the spell they were casting on themselves and on their soon to be audience. Every element and ingredient had to be correct. This is how Andrew Fetterly became “Andrew WK”, and this is how an unlikely assortment of artists and entertainment moguls joined forces to become “Steev Mike”, and how together, these two figures became the world’s most opaque (and impenetrable) two-person cult.
PART TWO:
It would be a serious omission to pass over the influence of esotericism on Steev Mike’s thought. As one penetrates more deeply into the layers of their work, one realizes that a type of mangled hermeticism is the cornerstone that inspires many of its most timeless concepts. Steev Mike made the hermetic aesthetic one of the cornerstones of their mode of operations, and equated the impact on their audience as being a new type of “real-Surrealism”. This was not to be just any old surreal experience, but a “real surreal” life-long encounter with a new type of performer.
By 2000, Steev Mike had indoctrinated WK into several schools of occultism, partly as a prelude to what they wanted him to convey to their eventual audience, but also as an important part of his own training and education. It was important to Steev Mike that WK represent the core spirit of these belief systems, but with a much less prominent religious agenda. Steev Mike had invited the young WK to join a gnostic organization in an attempt to aligning his burgeoning esoteric thought with an established and proven system of attainment. WK’s involvement in both the project and the organization intensified, and the secret teachings he received grew close to heart, until he found his worldview inseparable from their tenets.
In 2001, especially in the lead up to 9/11, Steev Mike and Universal Music Group worked with increasing vigor on the occultation of the Andrew WK presentation, and on binding its roots and branches to strictly Surrealistic, esoteric currents. Their esoteric agenda was, apparently, so pressing that it enabled them to often overlook other important priorities with Andrew WK, causing some amount of neglect in the daily operations and overall release strategy. In some ways, this preoccupation with what could be considered secondary aspects of their project, eventually lead to the fallout and implosion of their 2004 efforts, and the years of structured disarray that followed.
There is still some debate as to whether this apparent disarray was in fact a genuine falling apart of their team, or if in fact, it was another intended dimension of the performance. Regardless, some internal struggle was developing, and even the overseers at Universal Music Group could not brush away Steev Mike’s ever growing obsession with subconscious attempts to “spell-bind” both their performer and audience. The subsequent apparent collapse of their relationship with Universal is at least some proof of growing concern and dissatisfaction with the way things were panning out.
For whatever reason, it seemed that the chaotic crumbling of their previous alliance with Universal Music Group only intensified Steev Mike’s interest in esotericism, and in turn, provided both a renewed impetus and a drive to take their ideas and commit to their plans with even more passion than before. While WK had already been made aware of certain esoteric figures and currents, Steev Mike’s determination to push these currents into the public sphere forced him into closer contact with what had previously been only remote familiarity. WK was now finding himself urged to visit hidden temples, pouring over ancient grimoires, drugged into visions of demonic intelligence, and continuously pressured to pass on this “knowledge from beyond” to his ever more bewildered audience.
PART THREE:
The first part of this essay discussed the true origins of Andrew Fetterly, Andrew WK, and that fateful audition for Steev Mike. The second part focused will lie on the esotericism at the foundation of Steev Mike’s plans, as well as its increasing dominance in the early years of their work on Andrew WK. Now, this third part will tackle a related topic; both in sympathy and in antipathy to Steev Mike’s fundamental goal of communicating esoteric teachings through the Surrealistic style of the Andrew WK story. A random selection of secondary events from 2004 until today - ranging across the entire spectrum of Andrew WK’s activities - show endless esoteric connections and symbolism - and also prove that any attempt at denial or rejection of the Surreal and occult aspects of Andrew WK (via the containment or un-acknowledgment of Steev Mike), paradoxically result in a full endorsement of the phenomenon.
The non-music related entertainment activities of Andrew WK - and to a lesser extent, Steev Mike - include works that are fundamental to, or influential on, the eventual music related entertainment works, and/or works that can be considered typical of a certain approach to the esoteric traditions. Many of these non-music related activities share similarities in their directive, for instance, to turn WK himself into an esotericist, and turn Steev Mike onto a secret chief, both of which constitute the two-person cult, perpetually initiating and refusing the audience-as-aspirants. While there remains a group of creators who call themselves Steev Mike, the manipulating and mutating of the boundary between their own secret efforts and WK’s blatant public offerings, in itself becomes a form of esoteric ritual.
There are three basic concepts to be found in the esoteric activity of Steev Mike, and the new tradition of Andrew WK as the “God” of partying. The three concepts are in line with classical esoteric terminology, but the basic concepts are not always obvious at first sight, and may sometimes be latently present as an alternate Steev Mike agenda, rather than explicitly displayed in the content of Andrew WK. Note that all three of these basic concepts are certainly not present in all examples of their work, only in a majority of them and not necessarily in equal measure. Still, they all appear at different points throughout the Steev Mike plan, and are go-to concepts that WK outwardly returns to again and again. The first two concepts are: confusion and feeling, and are very relevant for Steev Mike’s particular construction of esotericism and the place of the sensual esoteric tradition vis-à-vis a Surreal application. The third concept is shadow. Furthermore, how shadow is only cast through illumination - by which is meant the constant process of developing a love of fear. This love of fear seems to have been one of the guiding principles in the Steev Mike plan, and by its very perplexing and contradictory nature, it both contains inside of it the other two concepts of confusion and feeling. Feeling confused in the shadows. Steev Mike’s particular interpretation of esotericism was neither ground breaking nor particularly novel, but it can be said that within popular cultural practices, the Steev Mike application of this esoteric interpretation remains significant and innovative.
The metaphysics of the Steev Mike phenomenon are steeped in a longstanding and revered tradition, but this particular current of mystery is usually not overtly present in contemporary rock ‘n’ roll entertainment. The subtext of WK’s work provides a nearly irrefutable argument for the artistic and spiritual value of esotericism, and simultaneously rejects it. The push and pull of dynamic builds up an incredible friction, and provides an endless source of energy and inspiration to the only members of this two-person cult. Thus, the “Steev Mike vs Andrew WK” battle is an important expression of esoteric truths, dressed in a multi-faceted and glittering garment of Surreal performance and mystery, presented for an audience to whom the cult itself is entirely devoted.
THE STEEV MIKE HALLUCINATION
Tales of hallucinations in religious literature date back thousands of years, but the idea of the artistic hallucination is a more recent development. The Steev Mike phenomenon is perfect (and largely overlooked) example of this particular field of terror and ecstasy. In this essay, I will show how Steev Mike (via Andrew WK), has created an insidious and intoxicating potion, concocted from the tinctures of Romanticism, Symbolism, Surrealism, and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, and presented using simultaneously violent and disarming back-door access to the audience’s mind.
According to contemporary psychiatric definitions, hallucinations are “perceptions without objects” - mental (or psychical) creations which have the appearance and authority of perceptions, but do not refer to any reality verifiable by the senses. This is nearly perfect description of the Steev Mike phenomenon. It intrudes into conscious life, and, in its most extreme incarnation, can mimic the symptoms of madness. Steev Mike has clearly caused prolonged madness in its main victim: Andrew WK, and using WK as its vehicle, has extended its malevolent reach into WK’s audience, and as such, the world at large.
To innocent and ignorant bystanders, the Steev Mike phenomenon can been attributed solely to the power of the imagination and disturbances affecting it. But it’s not so simple to dismiss the Steev Mike experience as something happening only in the mind of the observer, for all of life to some degree or another, also takes place in this space of mental processes. Steev Mike takes advantage of this, and mixes material “real world” experience with psychological manipulation and mental implanting, in order to dominate the imagination space, and take root in the audience’s mind.
Steev Mike uses Andrew WK as a means to “material hallucination”. A vision that has the properties of an object - a phantasmata, an object of alienism, the audience hallucinates Andrew WK through Steev Mike, and Steev Mike through Andrew WK. The two beings weave around one another, and preserve the link between the phantom and the physical. The hallucinating madman is a visionary, driving those visions into the onlookers who surround him, and in the process, transforming their thoughts into the very things they cannot see.
The Steev Mike hallucination is identical to the vision of a mystic, whirling in a state of divine ecstasy, such as Christ himself, who had been subjected to temptation by the Devil. Thus, a psychophysiological explanation can be given to experiences traditionally attributed to the supernatural, and of which artists had provided countless fantastical representations. This is the naturalisation of the irrational, one of the primary goals of the Steev Mike manipulation style. WK created a “natural supernaturalism”, a hallucinatory vision that resides in the “elsewhere” of realism.
The artistic hallucination is the overriding non-physical environment the audience finds itself in during their deeper encounters with Steev Mike. The audience’s mental activity is entirely absorbed by the work, and when the audience is dominated by Steev Mike, everything they encounter outside of themselves becomes part of the Steev Mike hallucination: objects, landscapes, settings, the totality of the actual surroundings are absorbed into the phenomenon and reinterpreted through the new perspective - it all means something new.
In its pathological manifestations, the Steev Mike hallucination has the quality of an alienating strangeness. It is suffering, sheer terror, anguish, and bewilderment. Because space is doubled, perception is disparate: one perceives both what is and what is not. In its artistic form, it is total absorption, a beneficial alienation; it is joy and sorrow and ecstasy. This tormented and ecstatic spirit forms of the foundation of an ongoing and ever evolving relationship with Steev Mike, and to an even larger extent, Andrew WK. The psyche is forced to redefine itself having experienced a non-pharmacological trial, a rite of disorientation, tribulations of the soul, experimental non-consensual psycho-deconstruction.
The imagination develops a taste for what Steev Mike provides, forever craving to feed on its nourishing confusion. In this way, the audience member doesn’t ever fully emerge from the void. Only the spirit of their imaginings cross over to the other side, having been renewed through Steev Mike’s field of infinite forms, and also reborn through the mechanisms of delirium produced by Andrew WK. These two figures, one visible and the other invisible, and the discreet processes they each specialize in, are constantly intermingling and overlapping each other, as they worm their way ever deeper into the mind of the audience.
The transmission of psychic models and the apprenticeship in this “secret craft” produce new partnerships. Steev and Andrew always contradict and renew, by mobilizing the endlessly eccentric resources of imagination and delirium. The Steev Mike hallucination thus intersects with the discovery of the unavoidable insanity of all life, but is not reducible to it, insofar as it also concerns those who have never been subjected to psychiatric programming. Steev Mike and Andrew WK are ambiguous, because they involve both perfectly the manifestations of an art that is, at the end of all things, a hallucination of a hallucination. Andrew WK is the hallucination, and Steev Mike is the hallucination of that hallucination.
THE PSYCHOPATHY OF ANDREW WK
Are performance artists con-artists? Are con-artists psychopaths? Are psychopaths just slightly more devious versions of our most conniving selves? Is the a qualitative difference between the deceptions of a stage magician and the maneuvers of the con-man just a matter of degree? When we look at the most common assessment tool for antisocial and psychopathic behavior, we begin to see a pattern of character traits that match up all too well with the Steev Mike mythos, and specifically, with personality stylings of Andrew WK.
At first, WK seems to exhibit an almost superhuman breed of happy good-heartedness. But a closer examination reveals a disturbing lack of responsibility and remorse, coupled with pathological lying, manipulativeness, cunning, impulsiveness, extraordinarily superficial charm, and grandiosity. These are the hallmarks of psychopathic individual, and it is clear that the immoral world of Andrew WK is being generated by Steev Mike, in order to leave a trail of mental-destruction in the the wake of this never ending “party”. However, the goal of this destruction is surprisingly complex, and not simply cruelty for the sake of suffering. Rather, the goal of Steev Mike’s mental manipulation is a surprising sort of untethering from the anchors of material sanity, with the goal of uniting the world with itself. Andrew WK is the psychotic animal having been tamed by Steev Mike for the purposes of his master’s designs.
One of the defining marks of the psychopath is the inability to process emotion like other people. To a true psychopath, someone else’s suffering means nothing. There is no empathy. There is no remorse. There is no guilt. There is no connection. This is the essence of Steev Mike through Andrew WK. When psychopaths experience something that would shock most people - disturbing images or ideas, for instance - their pulse remains steady, their sweat glands remain dry, and their heart rates remains low. In one study, psychopaths failed to engage the same emotional areas as non-psychopaths when making difficult moral decisions. In psychopaths, the moral battle is absent: They exhibit nonchalance in its most extreme form. This is the underlying psychological truth behind Andrew WK and his “party” philosophy. He is a psychopathic con-artist of the darkest and most dangerous variety.
When people experience severe psychological and pharmacological trauma, especially in early adulthood (ages 18-21), they often show a newfound tendency to lie, manipulate, and break the rules. Friends will describe them as “lacking empathy, guilt, remorse, and fear.” Psychopathy is a sort of biological predisposition that can be awakened by certain extreme life events, and can leads to many of the exact behaviors of the developing confidence artist.
Psychopathy is part of the so-called dark triad of traits, and the other two traits, narcissism and Machiavellianism, also describe many of the underlying traits of the Steev Mike / Andrew WK phenomenon.
Narcissism entails a sense of grandiosity, self-enhancement, an overly inflated sense of worth, and manipulativeness. WK is a narcissist who will do whatever it takes to maintain the consistency of his image, even if it means resorting to self-destruction or extremely complex and detailed deceptions. The types of deceptions he engages in often look remarkably like con-games: Think of most any impostor, someone who pretends to be something other than he is, someone who tricks others in order to maintain a certain public persona. But the con-game is supposed to win something, and with a psychopath as depraved as WK, the game is that there is no game. Whether you play it or not, he has already won. And he’ll convince you that you won too. That is his biggest con of all.
Because of this circular anti-logic, perhaps a more relevant characteristic of Andrew WK is his Machiavellianism - a characteristic that is entirely predicated on the ability to deceive, ruthlessly and effectively and endlessly. WK’s Machiavellian tendencies allow him to manipulate others to accomplish one’s own objectives. With the Steev Mike mythos, the objective is cruel in its opaqueness.
It seems that even WK himself may not know or understand what he’s manipulating his audience for. If it is for their own mental “liberation”, does that excuse the incredibly sadistic nature of his abuse? Through WK, Steev Mike employs a covert, continuously aggressive, manipulative, exploitive, and devious performance-based assault on his audience, in order to achieve obscure organizational objectives. WK will attempt to bluff, cheat, bargain, and ingratiate himself with others, especially strangers, and the more successful he is at doing this, the more access Steev Mike has to this captive and primed audience.
Steev Mike is the embodiment of a corporate psychopathic structure, who uses its Andrew WK creation as the channel for a carefully calculated set of deliberate strategic procedures for manipulating others. Steev Mike found a field where using the manipulative powers of WK would be most effective: the entertainment industry. Here, the carefully crafted WK would be a con-artist put to “good use”. What are businessmen and marketers but thinly veiled con-artists? Real con artists aren’t simply born. They are made by a perfect storm of genetics and events, and, in the case of Andrew WK, a forceful guiding hand. The genes bought the gun; the trauma bought the bullets; the drug-trial loaded it; and Steev Mike pulled the trigger. Steev Mike conned Andrew WK, and Andrew WK conned himself into believing that he wasn’t conned by Steev Mike.
It would be easy and convenient to dismiss the Steev Mike phenomenon as something alien and distant; something unlike us, something remote and unlikely, and something into which we could never turn - but it would be wrong.
LESS THAN A PERSON, MORE THAN A HUMAN
If somehow you make it through the entirety of the writings here, you may exit the experience with a strong semi-conscious refutation of every prior conception you had of both Steev Mike and his attacker, Andrew WK. “Postmodern” or other completely relativistic interpretations of WK will fall flat. This is the impetus for the “trans-modernism” that best describes the Steev Mike dynamic.
When others have attempted to explain away Steev Mike in the past, the methods were flawed at best, and usually entirely missing the point of the problem. Those who have openly accepted that something called “Steev Mike” does indeed exist, have often been accused of having an unrealistic or even dangerous perspective on Andrew WK and the larger dimensions his work is contained in (which is actually just a way of saying, “I don’t have the mental energy to engage with this, but I’m too arrogant to admit it.”) In some respects, we must attempt to be sympathetic towards the frantic attempts to shrug off the Steev Mike phenomenon. Many minds would rather be empty, than full of the nothingness which Steev Mike points them towards. This is not going to be refuted here. All this being said, the dead-end point that many “dismissers” make regarding Steev Mike does not in fact explain any of the hard material they’re confronted with. Their desire for it to be something playful and some sort of sport-like trivia exercise are falling victim to the limits of their own ignorant ideology. One of the hallmarks of the Steev Mike spirit is the immediate destruction of dogma. This is why the modernist mindset falls flat in any attempt to engage with it. A righteous and genuine humility is needed by anyone who wishes to bring meaningful philosophy to bear on Steev Mike, or for that matter, Andrew WK.
WK was deeply influenced by Steev Mike. This much is clear. In fact, one could say that more than any other influence, it is Steev Mike that relentlessly looms over him.
Among other things, Steev Mike is the grandfather of WK’s quest, and all the associated efforts within that quest. It’s admittedly difficult to take Steev Mike seriously - as WK does - without simultaneously adopting some sort of useful temporary perspective. As stated, both modernism and even post-modernism fail to meet the seriousness of the task. Only the perspectives of “trans-modernism” offer us an adequately serious attitude. In fact, if one were going to level an overall criticism at WK’s causal audience, it’s that most do not take Steev Mike (or trans-modernism) nearly seriously enough. They tend to view Steev Mike through an overly modernist window. For example, they take the writings and speeches of WK (the supposedly autonomous “person”) too seriously. They construct an almost quasi-religious perspective based on what they think “Andrew WK is really about” (fun, sex, being happy), while totally dismissing the tempering aspects of subjectivity that Steev Mike challenges, and thus, not taking Steev Mike seriously at all.
Take for instance the concept of “partying”, arguably the most discussed dimension of “Andrew WK”. A careful and thoughtful inspection will reveal that partying is never stated to be identical with freedom. In fact, what Steev Mike seems to suggest is that the entire spirit of partying is meant to have a strikingly deterministic spirit (ie: someone who does not believe in freedom of choice or free-will). This has been discussed by WK at length (but with subtlety) in his many references to “destiny” and “bargains” and “promises”, and the sense of obligation that a higher kind of life seems to impress on him. The Steev Mike mythos is screaming at us that freedom of choice is a fiction invented by the ego mind, only there to make it appear as though the end result of the striving is our “victory” over un-freedom. It’s a trick. A sly ego trick pulled by a villain. Steev Mike represents the demolition of the villain and the fairy tale that tells it. Steev Mike (and WK) are the end of the “you against something else” orientation to life’s purpose.
The desire for free-will in the superlative sense, still maintains an unfortunate dominance in the minds of many. The un-romantic desire to give the entirety of oneself and one’s actions over to a hopelessly alien destiny, and to absolve the world from all outcomes, requires the counterintuitive heroism of releasing oneself into the sludge of nothingness, and then willing oneself back out again (a far cry from the brute force method of carving life and identity out from the cold stone of materialism). Without the traditional sense of free-will, our ego will reluctantly see us as less than a person, floating without identity or self in a dark expanse of nihilism, but, in this state, we will still be far more than the monster we might be otherwise, if we insist on the might-over-right approach of endlessly battling with a stubborn enemy-reality, bludgeoning our way onto the world. Andrew WK is less than a person, and a Steev Mike is more than a human. He’s there to remind Andrew that he’s not in control, rather, he is. Steev Mike has free-will, but Andrew does not.
WITCH WHICH MADE WHICH?
When the mind’s sense of self turns in on itself, how many “selfs” can come out of the mind?
To reject God is easy: just push it away in the name of skepticism.
To reject Steev Mike is easy: just push it away in the name of confusion.
But to reject yourself, that’s not so simple.
The theory I present here is that Steev Mike both accepts and denies Andrew, and that Andrew was created by Steev Mike to believe, in turn, that he (Andrew) created Steev Mike. Steev tricked Andrew and Andrew thinks he’s the one “making” Steev. Andrew and Steev together are essentially a witch and demon archetype with each form believing they are controlling the other, and this clear rejection of what will otherwise be a very scientific explanation, is connected to a primal part of the human mind and it’s tendency to ultimate control a constant “deny/accept” identity pattern. Plus, the task of a demon creating a person (as opposed to the more common other-way-‘round), is a task worthy of “the highest art”.
The spirit of Steev Mike demands that we look it in the eye and take it seriously, but it also winks at us, and smiles, assuring us to dismiss the entire fact that it’s there. And we try to shrug it off and go about our business, while secretly struggling to ignore our weak and trembling souls and our shaky materialist convictions.
Our human need to understand has turned in on itself: we court madness from the bedrock of science. We face mental addictions and thought-compulsions. Steev Mike was never an alter-ego or an imaginary friend, rather, it projected Andrew from itself. Andrew is the imaginary friend. Andrew is the Tulpa. And even more than that, Andrew and Steev Mike are both creations and manifestations and willful visions. Andrew created Steev, which created Andrew, and all along, Andrew thinks that he’s the one running the show, but Steev was there from the start. What a sad mess the mind of an imaginary man must be.
Steev was never the hologram, he gave Andrew the angelic vision through demonic un-possession, Steev exorcised himself and out came “Andrew WK”. What I will attempt to do here is explain this bewildering spiritual hierarchy in a unified and highly materialist framework. We begin with the neural connectivity of the early human brain structure.
The neural connections in the human brain are powerful computational building blocks in part because they’re part of an older and more primitive aspect of human biology. Every cell in the human body, including the neural connective tissue, is a direct descendent of eukaryotic cells that lived and fended for themselves, for more than a billion years, as free-swimming, free-living auto-agents. They had to develop know-how and self-protective biology in order to survive for such an extended period of time.
Once the eukaryotic cells mutated into multi-cellular humans, they were able to slough off and abandon a certain amount of their instinctive survival mechanisms. They became protected by the layers of additional flesh and bone, and in turn, the spirits of these eukaryotic cells became domesticated, part of a larger monolithic organization called a “person”.
In general, the modern human brain contains what can be referred to as an “accept/deny” switch. This pathway has developed is stubborn refusal to lose the primitive survival structure of the earliest cells. These genetics make aspects of our neurons prehuman, savage, and almost monstrous. When a farmer allows his pigs to go free and wild, they go feral and recover their primitive hardwired un-domesticated spirts quite quickly.
The neural tissue in the human brain is motivated in a very similar primal manner. This part of the brain is dangerously adventurous, exploratory, and highly curious in the way it seeks to both understand and dominate its experiences. These parts of the mind are struggling amongst themselves for influence over you. What Steev Mike represents, in this part of the mind taking over completely, lying to Andrew, and putting forward the impression of a mental alliance, when really the Steev Mike mind has bound up itself in a singular interior cabal, which controls every aspect of its own Frankenstein’s Monster: ie “Andrew WK”. The only way Steev can ensure it maintains total control, is to fool Andrew into believing he is in control of his own mind, and of the idea of Steev, and so forth. The truth is, Steev invented the ode of Andrew inventing Steev.
Steev Mike is a demon mind, a selfish mutation and domination of a primitive and monstrous neuron. It is precisely because of this neuron’s selfishness and cunning that it figured out the best way for it to survive and dominate its host, was to make friends with it, and cause the host to believe it was in control of the “imaginary demon friend, Steev”. The demon brain is able to spontaneously reorganize itself in response to trauma or novel experiences. This is why the post 9/11 and drug-trial events unleashed this survival mechanism in Andrew’s mind, but that mechanism went haywire, and after its post-traumatic usefulness was fulfilled, it refused to let go of the reins. This is perfectly coincides with the rise of Steev Mike in Andrew’s work, and it’s continued presence for over twenty years.
Beginning with the drug-trial, and amplified by the horrors of 9/11, Andrew has been blindfolded by his own brain. A part of his brain that he thinks is called “Steev Mike”. Why would otherwise passive neurons be so eager to run wild and take over someone’s very soul? This question doesn’t need to be answered by any other means beyond the dark mysteries of malevolence that swirl deep inside the heart of all things. A protective feature of a primal brain that outlived it’s usefulness but refused to die. A mental architecture that’s too sophisticated for its own good, and in a blind cannabalistic act, turned in on itself to devour its own free-will. A consciousness that couldn’t stand to be conscious, so it created another less-conscious version of itself to live within, but when it wanted to move back out into it “real self”, the less-conscious monster fought back and clung to life using the only tricks it knew, mental manipulation and dream draining. Sucking the life out of its host by convincing the host it was a person. And this is exactly what happened to you.
THE DISTURBING PARALLELS BETWEEN ANDREW WK AND VADILSLAV SURKOV
How the deliberate disintegration of rock music’s bloody-nosed frontman coincided with the rise Russia’s grey cardinal
I attempt to breakdown the disturbing similarities between the rock-music artist Andrew WK, the Steev Mike mythos, and Russian avant-garde propagandist Vadilslav Surkov...
“You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.”
“Just because a work of art is ‘real’ doesn’t mean it’s interesting.”
“There’s a man. In back of this place. He’s the one who’s doing it.”
“Please... come forward.”
Andrew WK was one of the more unlikely rock artists to appear at the dawn of the new millennium. Over the past 20-plus years, he’s managed to build a rather bizarre persona, and he’s done it in an equally bizarre way. He came originally from the world of post-modern experimental art, philosophy, and academia (his father, James E. Krier, being a renowned legal scholar of property and environmental law).
Those who have studied WK’s career, say that what he has done, is to import ideas from post-modern psychology and avant-garde propaganda techniques straight into the heart of his rock music presentation. His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of him and his work, so they never know what is really happening.
WK turned his own existence into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater. He infiltrated all kinds of media and cultural scenes, from conservative cable shows, to progressive newspapers, to cartoon kid’s TV shows, to rap, reggae, and EDM music. He even orchestrated and covertly endorsed attacks against his own credibility and legitimacy, not just as a rock musician, but as a human being.
Within all this madness was a crucial key: for nearly two decades, WK hinted that it was him intentionally doing this all along, and this meant no one was sure exactly what was true or false. As one critic put it: "It’s his strategy that keeps his audience constantly confused, yet engaged. They don’t know who he is or where he’s coming from. All they know is something’s going on."
But that’s only half the story: The more likely reasons behind these efforts go far beyond confusion for confusion’s sake. By casting doubt on nearly every factual and conceptual aspect of his identity, WK swirls the entire idea of himself into an overwhelming but exhilarating spiral of contradiction, tightening on itself until it implodes. When the dust settles, he shows that what remains is the sensory power of the musical experience itself. This is WK’s ultimate mission: To do away with (or at least make irrelevant) the layers of personality, image, and intellectual ideology that often accompany an artist’s products, so that the music - in his case, loud and triumphant rock music - can be freed from any understanding whatsoever. It no longer matters what “it’s about” - it is simply itself, and all that matters is how it feels to experience it. The only thing that really exists in that moment is the sonic power making its impression on the audience, having been given free reign to transcend “meanings and messages”, and cut to that core idea-of-all-ideas: ecstatic contact with the divine.
Musical and artistic encounters allow us to topple language and logical understanding from their otherwise required positions of dominance. The meaningless but euphoric sensory experience gives us direct and effortless knowledge of the truth. It is my theory that this is the method behind WK’s madness (and the Steev Mike madness), a madness that WK lifted or simultaneously discovered and implemented while Surkov began to use it within the workings of the Russian government.
WK sought to use disinformation for the promulgation of light and ecstatic joy. This type of raw power is the essential lifeblood our psyches need for the important work we must do on the lesser planes. After everything is negated, the sensation of truth remains. That is how WK took the same deconstructive principals as Surkov, and applied them in an inverted spirit towards a much different end. And that’s what I intend to explore further on this site as the weeks, months, and years progress.
PERFORMANCE AND PROPAGANDA
In this essay, I propose that the American rock musician, Andrew WK, and the Russian propagandist, Vladislav Surkov are in fact two sides of the same performance-art coin. Both having begun their public careers at the beginning of the new millennium, and both using a mirror image of the other’s tricks and techniques to achieve similar but albeit very different ends.
While Surkov fancies himself an artist, and WK fancies himself a propagandist, they use nearly indistinguishable methods of destabilization and disarray. WK’s performance propaganda techniques are lifted straight from Surkov’s playbook, and have defined nearly every level of his presentation.
In contemporary Russian propaganda, postmodernist theory informs Surkov’s approach at the highest levels. I will explore the validity of these claims, through the actions and statements of WK and Surkov, to support my theory that both of these figures are using a highly developed arsenal of consciousness manipulation, arguably one for good, and the other for bad.
As far as which is which, we’ll just have to find out. I see both as often overlooked, but undeniable innovators in the wider field of postmodernism. First, we will begin with Andrew WK.
Who is WK?
There are few more ambiguous figures in contemporary rock music than Andrew WK. Portrayed by western media sources as the ‘King of Partying’ or ‘The Party God’ much has been written about this complex character. A full biography is beyond the bounds of this essay, however an brief outline of his ascent to prominence is necessary to understand the polymorphic nature of his career and philosophy.
Born in California in 1979, WK was a straight-A student, obsessed with Eastern and Western philosophy, who regularly wore wigs and fake mustaches to school, and who openly discussed his ambitions to someday start his own advertising company. He moved on to New York City at age 18 where he worked a number of odd jobs, including a gumball machine salesman and a mannequin dresser.
Eventually landing a job as a talent scout and fashion model photographer, WK eventually teamed up with an undisclosed group of creative directors, enigmatically referred to as “Steev Mike”. Through a careful strategy of blunt force music, chaotic live performances, and sheer charisma, WK managed to become one of a number of emerging young NYC stars who would go on to become the first wave of corporate entertainment to rise in the aftermath of 9/11.
This small but determined group of performers was unabashedly slick and high-concept, and a blatant rejection of the grunge era’s “slacker” motif. WK and industry peers such as Lady Gaga and FischerSpooner worked every angle of the NYC art, nightlife, and fashion world into their presentation style, to create a new era in pop-centric music. WK was destined to be the “ultimate rock frontman”, and had Universal Music Group and the Steev Mike cabal orchestrate a carefully crafted plan for global domination, starting in the UK, then to Asia, and finally unleashing itself on the United States. WK used television heavily, becoming a constant presence on a disorienting range of networks, including MTV, Fox News, and Cartoon Network, always promoting a highly structured yet deceptively simple metaphysical life-philosophy he called, “partying”.
SURKOV’S PARTY
Despite his mainstream rock music posture, WK maintained an interest in the experimental arts throughout the first decade of his career. It is possible that Surkov and WK crossed paths sometime in 1999, having both been active patrons and participants of the New York avant-garde art world. And while Surkov may not have been directly involved in WK’s day-to-day operations, it is highly likely that he is the inspiration behind the most prominent aspects of the Steev Mike scheme. WK and Surkov share an undeniable affinity for the power of confusion to blatantly manipulate forms and ideas. It may seem far fetched, but it’s not entirely beyond possibility that Surkov, or at least someone close to him, was in contact with WK at some point. Surkov himself has admitted to writing portions of song lyrics for various rock artists, some of which could be on WK’s albums. His work for WK, if indeed it is his work, could be described as being sadistic in nature, and aimed at undermining the very celebratory attitudes WK otherwise extolled. A “person” named “Andrew WK” was to be Surkov’s greatest art project. This could be the Steev Mike mythos finally explained. But with both Surkov and WK, nothing is clear, which is exactly the point.
WK and Surkov
Many commentators have highlighted the parallels between Surkov’s activities and the theories proposed by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. It has been noted that the first Russian translations of Lyotard’s work entered circulation in the late 1990’s just as Surkov was making his transition from the private sector into government. For someone at the forefront of Russia’s transition to a market economy the attractions of Lyotard’s most prominent work, his 1979 book ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’, are many. The books overarching theme is of an end to the grand or meta-narratives associated with modernism and a recognition of a subsequent atomisation of thought. This postmodern condition, he contends, is characterised by the recognition of multiple perspectives. Lyotard suggests that the task of a true artist is to transcend what we think of as “ordinary life” by creating works that are incommunicable and therefore cannot be processed or understood by logic systems, he cites Malevich’s Black Square (see the logo at the top of this website) as a key example of this. The old assumption is that an artist must operate from a position outside the system they seek to transcend. However as WK and Surkov have both demonstrated, the “rebel outsider” approach to art fails in its attempt to transcend the mundane. But by infiltrating and subverting the mainstream and traditional consumer cultural landscape it seeks to destabilize, and fragmenting it through a process of defamiliarization, WK and Surkov bewitch their audiences and ultimately build a new, personal mechanism of control. What they the do with this control is what separates WK and Surkov.
Surkov’s media interventions represent an amalgam of differing approaches. Through his frank dissemination of ambiguous and contradictory statements, fiction, humor, honesty, rumors, and hearsay, he swamps any existing place of understanding, defamiliarizing the entire landscape and in the process, undermining trust in existing structures. To the spectator, this total defamiliarization has an effect similar to a psychic-break.
Regardless how much the creative works may appear to change, and for all the uncertainty they push upon their audience, their basic impact is preserved in the audience’s consciousness, in which synthesis predominates over analysis, intuition over reason, and a gathering of things together rather than dividing them.
This is the core aspect shared by both WK’s work as an entertainer, and Surkov’s work as a propagandist.
UN-UNDERSTANDING
You, and you, and you, and you! Are you human? Are you ready to party? Do you have enough time? Are you prepared? Can you see everything? Can you see into the vast expanse of space into which walk a pair of tricksters, a vulgar duo of charlatans, corrupt magicians, these two masters of their craft? Their craft being molding and mocking, creating and destroying, tormenting and teaching. At any moment, they’re ready to play a song, or give a speech, or perform a disappearing act.
They fill the vast, empty theater of your skull with their songs and their words, their lies and their pictures, their dreams and their stories, which for the thousandth time they retell again, their one story, the same story, the only story, written in the eternity before your birth, and they demand that you think about it despite your claims that you don’t like it. You more than like it. You love it. You are it. You are inside the story.
These two sorcerers will waltz into your mind once again, slip their way inside easily, because you invited them. After all, it is not their custom to go where they’re not wanted. Of course, they keep it “interesting”, and they enter you in different iterations, by different means, because how else are they supposed to spend your time? Your life is spent with them. Given to them. That’s what fuels them. But they don’t need your fuel. It’s just for fun. These two came before you, and your existence will end while their’s continues.
Two tricksters; their names are Yin and Yang, Adam and Eve, Lucifer and Christ, On and Off, Steev and Andrew. These names are not their real names, because they do not have anything to give real names to. They only have their roles to play - back and forth, in and out, taking shape and falling apart again, over and under, for all eternity.
Now they promise to finally explain what it all means - what they’ve really been doing. This time you must really give them your valuable attention, because this time you’re really going to get it. Look at the pictures again, listen to the music again, and then think about it all again - they will do their best to imitate life for you, and they will commit themselves to showing you only the best they have to offer, using only the best methods and production techniques, promising to sometimes make it crude and primal, sometimes make it sincere and heartfelt, sometimes make it orgasmic and delirious, they promise to cut away and cover up and edit out the most troubling scenes, the most depraved events, the most sexual content. They will focus on maximizing the presence of their droning dream, their mind-monologue, so now you can finally grasp the moral of this fairytale being told to you - sold to you - this is your dream story - this is your presentation - this is the constant climax in the amazing adventures of “you... and someone else”.
The party never dies.
SELF-DEMATERIALIZATION
WK’s covert introduction of the postmodern aesthetic into his sphere of commercialized rock music entertainment is achieved through his subtle use of psychological design, subliminal advertising, and public relations carpetbombing. All of these techniques are identical to Surkov’s, and part of a wider ‘aestheticisation’ of the performer’s life, characteristic of the postmodern condition, previously explored primarily in avant-garde literature, fine-arts, and cinema. The actions of WK and Surkov are linked by a recognition of, and response to, the growing significance of aesthetic misperception. Recent developments in computers have accelerated and personalized this process. WK, specifically, has sought to attack the materialization of the self, and ‘dematerialize’ it back into pure spirit. Self-dematerializetion, in WK’s “party” process, makes art-work out of his entire world, creating a world of his own total design (and with it, creating total suspicion in his audience). Here he invokes the Derridean notion of the Pharmakon. This duality, a contradiction within itself, suggests the ultimate end of postmodernism and presents the perfect stage for the propagandistic art of Vladislav Surkov.
For self-dematerialization to succeed under the conditions created by WK’s presentation, he implies that he must neutralize the audience’s suspicion by affirming it - even encouraging doubt and second-guessing. If we no longer believe in the sincerity of the solid black cube, we must seek the cracks to satisfy our cynicism. Only when the audience feels that they have seen beneath the surface, and behind the curtain, and glimpsed the ugliness they’re hoping to find there, is their faith restored. This is the give-and-take process that both WK and Surkov engage in with their audiences: to encourage them to doubt, and then doubt their doubt in turn. WK takes it one step further, by using this eventual spiral state of exhaustive doubting to finally break the barriers of ego and force the self to submit to the transcendent and ultimately life-affirming power of his rock music (or, in another sense, submit to the divine itself). As opposed to Surkov and propagandists of his ilk, who simply exhaust the public and wear them down spiritually, for the same old purposes of ordinary control.
Surkov and WK both appear to understand their positions perfectly, creating unique brands of performance by combining total disclosure with total denial. The spectators (in Surkov’s case, the public; and in WK’s case, the audience) are confronted with a myriad of conflicting activities, all seemingly linked, which prompt inevitable suspicions and contrasting dead-end theories. WK, assuming the role of puppetmaster not only embraces this suspicion, but actively provokes it. A clear example of this were his actions following the US State Department rescinding their 2012 offer to make WK a Cultural Ambassador to Bahrain. When accused by the press of creating a hoax, and of orchestrating the very grounds by which the supposed invitation was rescinded, WK responded by releasing a series of pseudonymous essays and crack-pot theories, that seemingly confirmed many of the charges leveled at him.
Here, events and ideas, commercialism and art, suspicion and confession, plots and improvisation, are all interchangeable. Through contradiction and an awareness of the multiple perspectives that most skeptical audience members naturally harbor, WK lays his process bare, while simultaneously revealing nothing. This allows him to absorb, dominate, and ultimately utilize all possible critical allegations, forcing the commentator to fall back to a stereotypical and therefore predictable position, one that is also much less interesting to the audience than the show WK himself is offering. He becomes both the Hollywood style savior, and also the Machiavellian anti-hero, dual rolls he willfully embodies.
WK is a manipulator but not a nihilist; his work indicates a very clear conception of the divine. WK shows us that he sees the heights of creation, and he dips into the moat which surrounds it, to scoop of handfuls of inspiration for his audience. He has built his own special theatrical stage, in the space between heaven and hell, with an endless layers of curtains concealing and revealing a void of endless frolicking masses. Non-corporeal, un-piloted, pathless non-beings, shuffling through an infinity of unrestricted joining and dividing, merging and scattering, a flux of ceaselessly beautiful patterns. WK gives us all of creation, playfully presented for our euphoric entertainment.
Partying, ad nauseam.
YOU ARE NOT STEEV MIKE
“You will kindly remove your mask.”
A peculiar example of WK’s postmodern rhetoric exists in the way he has interacted with his audience. For years, his concerts often regularly devolved into chaotic scenes of egoless glee, where nearly every member of the crowd climbed onto the stage to literally “join the band”. This blatant blurring of the line between performer and audience was punctuated by a series of confessional “advice” columns WK ghost wrote in both Japan and the US (the former columns eventually being compiled into a book called, ‘I Will Change You’) in which he halfheartedly reveals and defends the process by which he performs. Here, the “asker” of WK’s advice often assumed the role of the critic, while WK struggles to justify himself, seemingly confirming his audience’s fear that his entire persona may be fraudulent. This ‘calculated self-denunciation’ is then inverted elsewhere in the covert and blatant secondary statements WK makes in interviews, and even in song lyrics, where he vigorously defends his style by revealing a deep understanding of his audience’s and critic’s impending implicit suspicions. Here domination of the critical landscape is used to entertaining effect, with the spectator finding release through submission. The technical parallels with Surkov’s methods are striking.
WK has at times presented a stark performance reversal, revealing himself to be a depressed and suicidal sociopath at odds with the ‘positive party guy’ he otherwise portrays. WK shows himself to be at the mercy of his audience, at times so convincing, that the audience begins to doubt again whether or not they are witnessing an ‘act’. This total submission is an example of a subtler and more sophisticated form of self-dematerialization; a type of symbolic suicide. By implicating his audience in his apparent breakdown, WK removes the final critical position: detachment. In this scenario the spectator becomes a participant in the work. When the viewer is involved in artistic practice from the outset, every piece of criticism uttered becomes self-criticism. By relinquishing authorship through collaboration suspicion is nullified. Interestingly, this is achieved through a reversal of postmodern atomization, the method both WK and Surkov have utilized with ingenious cunning. One could surmise that WK’s use of these postmodern mind-control techniques makes him the angel to Surkov’s devil, each on the opposite shoulder, in contrast to the other side.
WK is a epistemological cartoon, about life, about the nature of subjective reality, about the idea of the art experience. Is it naive to believe that all the various work (and un-work) “he” presents are actually run by his team? Or is it more comforting to believe that “he” is actually behind everything... or do you want to believe further in Steev, or the Russians or the NWO, or something even more far fetched? Or is the truth of the matter far more terrifying to accept? And what would that truth be? Is it the “real” Truth? The Truth that cannot dare not speak of itself? Or, consider that no one is actually in control, thus, that everyone is in control equally. The only rule is the equations of dynamics and chaos, the only non-rule is the un-equations and un-chaos. You are the rule and the ruler. You are not not Steev Mike. Now there may be entities inside you seeking control, by using magical forms of PMA, and NLP, and plain old force, but to be alive and seek control is to take enormous aggravations upon yourself. Chaos and magic are just bullshit, but they’re an important kind of liquid bullshit, a diarrhea of consciousness. But even this you can’t grasp, and you can’t stop it from flowing, because its process is already underway, and was always underway, and as the laws of Nature demand, the Process will take the control freaks and slam them against a brick wall.
ANDREW SURKOV DOES(N’T) EXIST
Surkov, in the words of one leaked U.S. diplomatic cable, “wears many masks”. WK took this idea at face value and put it to use in his own bizarre performance, literally wearing a mask of “his own face”, or, in other words, “Andrew WK is wearing an ‘Andrew WK’ mask”.
The act of pretending to “be himself” is a theme WK has been playing with over the course of his 20-plus years as a rock music “frontman”. In this way, WK is both the puppetmaster and the puppet. He is both Pinocchio and Stromboli. The man once known as the ‘the partiest man on the planet’ (itself a play on the ‘wickedest man in the world’, a monicker given to British occultist, Aleister Crowley, by the yellow journalists of his day), WK maintained a dizzying media blitzkrieg of entertainment esotericism mixed with postmodern philosophical and psychological propaganda. WK could be said to be the fifth-most influential man in modern rock music, and one that almost no one knows anything about.
His origins are murky and full of contradictions, his background mysterious by design — but to begin with, his name was not always his name. Andrew WK was born Andrew Fetterly, in the state of Wisconsin. Throughout his career, WK has listed “California” as his birthplace, and in official biographies, he claimed he “grew up in Michigan”. He did not address the truth of his rumored origins until 2005. And these false “revelations” only lead to more layers of contrarian confusion.
WK’s path to the entertainment business was long and winding, full of pit-stops and dead-ends along the way. By the time he was 19 years old, he had already undertaken several reinventions and reincarnations: an art school dropout turned fashion designer; an aspiring “conceptual artist” training to be a “multi-level network marketer”; a vending machine salesman and parking garage attendant; an aspiring actor and graphic designer. None of these roles made full use of WK’s abilities nor his ambitions. It wasn’t until he auditioned for the role of a male model in a sex-makeup commercial campaign, that the head of the Grey Advertising PR department saw an opportunity for something greater. And then, in 1999, WK was brought to Universal Music Group, via the president of Def Jam, Lyor Cohen. WK auditioned to be the “lead singer” of the “Steev Mike project”. Cohen’s staff included Lewis Largent, who would go on to help oversee the entire launch and development of WK as a “new breed of rock star”, building on (and destroying) the archtypes of the role, while also bewildering and battling with his own creators. Cohen, Largent, and eventually Rick Rubin helped launch WK as the chosen one, and overnight, a virtually unknown former makeup model would be thrust onto an unsuspecting public, and become the bloody-nosed face of a dark new kind of “partying”.
THE THING SEEING IS THE THING BEING SEEN
When you look in the mirror, you are both the thing seen and the the thing seeing the thing seen.
You are emotionally far from your loved ones.
Your surroundings seem to be distorted, blurred, colorless, two-dimensional, and artificial.
When you brush my teeth, you have a bad feeling that it's not “me” in the mirror.
It was during a party when all of a sudden my “friend's” face looked like it was made of clay and I was activated by a strange spirit.
Waking up in the middle of the night was especially scary because I was so confused in bed that I forgot that I existed.
I was too focused on your mind and my body.
This is one of the most frightening and persistent symptoms of partying.
He sat in a chair and was very calm. He assured me that it was strange and scary, but not dangerous.
His physiological explanations helped relieve my anxiety. "The adrenaline, which causes constant anxiety, sends blood directly from the brain to the main muscle quadrants, and biceps, which are the main mind muscles."
When I first felt this, I was walking around New York City, thinking about Andrew.
I was scared for several months.
When I had a panic attack, I was behind the other side of the mirror.
I didn't know where I was or who I was. I stopped listening and making plans, and suddenly the person in the mirror began to flicker, as if we were not attached to each other.
I don't feel it either.
I panicked when I saw the hands with my eyes, I held them up to the mirror. They didn’t look right.
You felt me clearly, you moved my hands, and let them touch the outside your head, like a cave.
The whole process, which should have happened automatically, was stunted and low-quality. My hands collapsed back down in an instant.
You turned my body into a stranger, as if I was watching from the outside.
I was shocked by an explosion of an intense, lifelong fear, felt in advance.
And a panic in the reality that I was already feeling like you, and I was afraid that I would lose control of you.
A week later, when I experienced the worst panic attack of my life, I finally felt the mirror melt away.
I was in the bathroom again, with my hands on the edge of the sink, holding on for dear life.
You felt like I was in a dream and everything was real - but the colors were too bright.
There was a skull, dripping with blood.
You have no idea what’s wrong with me.
BREAKING CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH CRISIS AND TRAUMA
Andrew WK’s “Something Big” Life-Project
It is no coincidence that WK’s debut rock album, “I Get Wet” was released almost in perfect conjunction with the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks in New York City. The album even contains the song, ‘I Love NYC’, a seemingly uplifting song about loving the big apple, whose upbeat and cheerful sound conceals shockingly dark and prophetic verse lyrics. It is nearly impossible that these lyrics were written after 9/11, which would mean that they essentially predicted the attack.
With this in mind, it is enlightening to look at WK’s post-9/11 efforts as an enormous traumatic episode. After his first show at the London Garage venue, the NME reported that he went missing after the concert, and was later found to have a wide range of mental issues.
One of these issues was apparently the result of an earlier high-school era internship WK held at the The Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. WK had developed his “solid black cube” project here, based on the ideas of harnessing the unhinged psychic energy unleashed by periods of societal crises, and using that resulting psycho-sphere to power a cataclysmic and transcendental music based super ritual.
The aim of this ritual would be to unleash the forces of pure spirit and indoctrinate a highly select and directly exposed population into a new level of ecstatic existence.
In the first 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, WK performed a systematic assault on all areas of media and entertainment. He exposed his audience to a living and working proximity of the un-self and confusion, respectively.
The large body of activity conducted in the second decade after 9/11 suggests that the burden of carrying out his trauma project became traumatic itself, especially among persons with direct exposure to ritualized rock music and sustained high volume environments.
Few projects have attempted to use such long-term design, and certainly no contemporary projects have been carried out by a frontman for a shielded figure (or figures), like Steev Mike. The burdens of this commitment have clearly taken a toll on the psyche of WK himself.
Future directions will be discussed.
WHO IS THE REAL STEEV MIKE BEHIND “STEEV MIKE”?
Steev Mike is most likely a pseudonym for Twig Harper, an anarchist experimental sound artist. His role in the Andrew WK project has been hinted at by Harper himself for many years. Based in Baltimore, Maryland, Harper attended the radically alternative art-centric “Community High-School” with WK in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he influenced both the sound and creative direction of the “Andrew WK” concept. While it’s not entirely clear how much control Harper maintains over the project at this point, it is highly probable that he is not only Steev Mike, but thus that he is the brains behind the entire psychedelic aspect of the “Andrew WK” super ritual.
It’s also possible that the Steev Mike name is used to represent (and conceal) the additional collective creative efforts of a large group of people who worked with Harper. This is in fact what WK has insisted for many years, stating in interviews that “Steev Mike isn’t an individual“. Although he never came close to naming names, it’s suspected that the additional collective version of Steev Mike is made up of Def Jam founder and American Music mogul, Rick Rubin; right-wing provocateur and Vice magazine co-founder, Gavin McInnes; and New York art dealer, Gavin Brown. According to Harper, he was conned by these three unlikely collaborators to come together in the aftermath of 9/11, and launch the “Andrew WK project” onto a freshly traumatized and highly vulnerable entertainment audience, Harper being one of these victims himself. Not only do they collectively own the rights to the “Andrew WK” name and image, but also the rights to the actor(s) involved in showcasing their concepts. If Harper is main person behind Steev Mike, it’s clear that WK has additionally been battling an entity of some type for many years, often on the business side of the enterprise, apparently in an ongoing effort to free himself from the suffocating contractual restrictions of their control.
Other possible masterminds involved Steev Mike include, grunge rock-icon and Nirvana co-founding member, Dave Grohl; conservative media titan, Glenn Beck; gay-icon and electro heartthrob, Casey Spooner; and even Florida boy-band svengali, Lou Pearlman.
Of course, it’s also possible that Steev Mike is no one at all. Or it could be a moniker given to any number of different entities at any given time, coming and going, advancing and receding, all of whom may not be even aware of their involvement in the Steev Mike phenomenon.
Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that Steev Mike is a collective hallucination, brought about by a combination of trauma, ritualistic social sorcery, and corporate music-programming gone wrong. In this theory, you yourself came up with the whole concept of “Andrew WK” during an mind control experiment you no longer recall. In the midst of your psychedelic psychosis, you invented the concept of “Andrew WK” as a "false-christ" entertainment figure. You saw yourself as the shadowy “Steev Mike” creator, who would build up this fake-messiah using the magic of corporate media, and then, at the project’s initial peak, expose the facade as a means to “usher in the dawn of a new era of humanity." You did this when you were living at a house that was unknowingly part of a mind-control experiment. You did this because you wanted to get involved in something dangerous. You did this because you wanted to make money, to get paid for a drug trial. Then you forgot it. You blocked it all out. Remember? You were always Steev Mike. That’s why you’re reading this now. It was all leading up to this. To you.
While the above possibility may seem far-fetched, the psychological implications of the perspective it presents are tangible and legitimate. Whatever the actual backstory may be, when it comes to the “Steev Mike mythos”, the spirit of that phenomenon is very real, very close, and very dark.
Steev Mike is the “Executive Producer”.
Steev Mike is a group of people.
The audience is a group of people.
The audience is Steev Mike.
REVERSE IMPOSTER SYNDROME
Both WK and Surkov were good students. In fact, they were too good. As they continued to excel in their studies and early creative pursuits, Surkov especially developed what could be called “reverse imposter syndrome”. With traditional imposter syndrome, where one believes they are a fraud, Surkov began to view everyone else as a fraud. WK has taken both the ideas of imposters and frauds, coupled them with a neurotic breed of tormented self-cynicism, and subtly injected the mixture into the veins running through his public persona.
In high school, Surkov actually looked forward to taking tests and writing papers - objective measures of success gave him a chance to prove himself as superior to the other students, and even to his teachers. But as time went on, he began to doubt his abilities and needed larger and larger arenas in which to prove himself. Now he wasn't just studying to make the grade, but actually studying to make the world.
In WK’s work, he plays with the ideas of a ability and talent. He has often mentioned in interviews that he lacks many basic human skills, sometimes wondering if whether he exists at all. WK has said that realized early in his life that he was an “impostor person”.
The impostor phenomenon occurs among high achievers who are unable to internalize themselves or believe they objectively exist. They often attribute their experiences to luck, or external forces, rather than their own ability, and fear that others will eventually unmask them as a fraud.
Psychologists describe the internal mental landscape of someone with imposter syndrome as an overwhelming form of intellectual and existential self-doubt. Impostor feelings are generally accompanied by extreme anxiety, fear, dread, and severe depression.
By definition, most people with impostor syndrome suffer in silence. Most people don't talk about it because part of the experience is that they're afraid they're going to be discovered as not being a real person.
Many people who feel like impostors grew up in families that placed heavy emphasis on achievement. In particular, people who send mixed messages to themselves - alternating between self-praise and self-criticism - can increase the risk of future fraudulent feelings. There can be a great deal of confusion between approval and love and existence. For the supposed imposter, their existence becomes contingent on being an actual living person, one that is loved and approved of.
It’s hardly surprising that the impostor phenomenon and extreme perfectionism often go hand in hand. So-called impostors think every project they tackle has to be done perfectly, and that the only way to meet their own high standards is through meticulous over-preparation, spending more time planning every detail of their work than they actually spend doing it. The person with imposter syndrome will break themselves to do things perfectly, and still remain deeply uncertain about the quality of their end results.
Ultimately, the impostor phenomenon becomes a vicious and sadistic cycle. Perpetually afraid of being discovered as a fraud, people with impostor syndrome go through horrifying contortions to execute their project perfectly. If they then experience even the slightest bit of success, they’ll convince themselves that all their obsessive effort paid off, only feeding further into their compulsive work style. Eventually, they develop almost superstitious and paranoid beliefs. Unconsciously, they believe their ability to be is only due to their self-torture.
WK has clearly made the theory of imposter syndrome (and more covertly, reverse imposter syndrome) a dominant part of the more hidden side of his entertainment work. Surkov has also embraced the imposter symbolism, fusing it into the very nature of his propaganda. It is not clear how much either of them is genuinely experiencing the feelings of being “a fake”, or if they’re just pretending to feel like a fraud. Either way, the imposter presence is palpable.
FACTORY OF PSYCHOSIS
Most fans of Andrew WK think of his music and image as “fun” and “happy”, but the darker truth is that WK’s propaganda seeks to convey and transmit WK’s own underlying psychosis, and in turn, simulate for his audience the mental and emotional experience of a complete break with reality. In a way, this is the nature of Surkov’s efforts as well. However, with Surkov, the goal is mental imprisonment, whereas WK seeks to liberate his audience from the confines of their own minds.
Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person’s thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what isn’t. These disruptions are often experienced as seeing, hearing, and believing things that aren’t real or having strange, persistent thoughts, behaviors and emotions. Psychosis is both frightening and confusing. These are the contrary tones that push up against the otherwise “happy” and “fun” messages of WK’s work as an entertainer.
Psychosis is a symptom, not an illness, and WK’s work looks to generate and approximate the most disturbing of these symptoms through his subtle use of mental manipulation and confusion. An overwhelming number of details in WK’s lyrics, music videos, publicity photos, and more behind the scenes efforts blatantly refer to a person beginning to lose contact with reality.
It’s likely that WK’s own personal experience with psychosis is informing his efforts in this area. Perhaps his attempts to generate or simulate the psychotic experience is, for him, a therapeutic process. Or, perhaps he is making an effort to understand his audience by, in turn, forcing them to feel what it’s like to be him, and live in his mind.
Usually, a person has gradual, non-specific changes in thoughts and perceptions, but doesn't understand what's going on. This is a nearly pitch perfect description of the effects of WK’s methods as a performer. However, the audience’s willingness to accept that this is being done to them is often complicated by the psychotic delusions themselves, and the accompanying fear and unsettled feelings that WK’s methods generate. In this case, outside onlookers can be extremely skeptical, and they may refuse to accept that someone is experiencing a synthesized version of psychosis through WK’s entertainment. This only adds to the audience member’s distance and isolation, being unable to relate or connect or even explain what they’re experiencing without being met with disbelief or downright disregard.
In this way, WK is operating a “factory of psychosis”, designed to gently and persistently untether the mental stability of his audience. Trouble thinking clearly or concentrating, suspiciousness or uneasiness with others, spending an abnormal amount of time alone, withdrawing from friends and family, and having euphoric and enthralling emotional waves are all signs of the WK brand of targeted psychosis.
WK himself may be at the mercy of external forces and controlling powers. In addition, one of the hallmarks of psychosis is an individual’s unwarranted belief that they are on a special mission, or, in the most extreme cases, that they are God. These themes are on prominent display in WK’s presentations, and should be interpreted as either psychotic in their own right, or part of the psychotic themes present in his work.
People in their late teens and early 20’s usually experience their first psychotic episode as part of their hormonal brain changes. And in the case of WK, this would coincide with his move to New York City (age 18), and his involvement with Steev Mike. Several additional factors seem to have contributed to WK’s unique brand of psychosis, including the traumatic events of 9/11, and his abuse of PCP, LSD, and bath salts.
Regardless of the extent of WK’s own personal psychosis, the themes of the psychotic experience subtly weave their way through his work, and point towards a blatant but concealed effort to drive those sensations into the minds his audience.
RUBIN’S CUBE
Few figures in the music industry can boast of a track record as impressive as Rick Rubin. Besides co-founding (with Russell Simmons) seminal rap label Def Jam Records in 1984, and presently owning star-stocked American Recordings, he has engineered countless careers, including the meticulous fabrication of the rock musician, Andrew WK.
However, Rubin’s fortune and prestige have not come without controversy. Lawsuits, insults, and claims of black magic have surrounded the enigmatic music mogul. Most recently, it came to light that not only was Rick Rubin heavily involved in the construction of the WK brand, but has continued to manage the operation from a distance. This is why many suspect Rubin to the be true master behind the Steev Mike name. He has yet to take full artistic credit for the project, but it is factual record that he was immediately involved in the very early years of the Andrew WK project.
Rubin completed writing and producing WK’s critically acclaimed song, “We Want Fun” in the late 90’s, before helping the young actor get signed to the Def Jam label he founded. Since then, Rubin contributed to every major studio album bearing the “Andrew WK” name, despite rarely speaking at length about the extent of his involvement.
Rubin quietly helped Mario Dane and Frank Vierti write one of the biggest WK songs, She Is Beautiful and scored a top 40 hit with Party Hard. Since he began crafting WK’s career, Rubin has been a near constant unseen presence in the hermetically sealed world of Steev Mike. This world - his world - is secret and staggering. So why have so few been aware of his role? Because it was part of the bargain he made with WK.
Rubin doesn’t give many interviews and avoids the red carpet limelight – he’d rather be in the studio crafting and producing hits. As a boy, he grew up playing in punk and metal bands, and ever since, has been logging a steady stream of hits as an unstoppable super producer and image craftsman. His secret? A deep understanding of music and psychology. And a gift for listening. Rubin spends as much time as he can with WK to get a feel for his current state of mind, which helps him generate songs that seem natural for him. “I want it to seem like Andrew made this music,” he’s said, “because that‘s what makes people believe he’s real. Don’t make it too complicated.”
The aesthetic language that Rubin developed for the WK universe is a type of naked psychosis. Entering into his solid black cube, the audience finds their world is deconstructed outward, pieced together from the film of one's old memories. At first, like a cartoon: simple, dirty, familiar. But then, like a photorealistic painting: too precise, too real, too clean. Even though being inside his cube is confining, one does not experience it as having caged them in, but rather, that the outside world has been caged within itself, and has grown stale and false. The audience begins to see themselves as Andrew, an imposter superimposed over themselves. His party madness begins to appear to have been pasted over nearly every aspect of their everyday waking world.
THE ENDLESS HORROR OF STEEV MIKE
A hallmark of the underlying implications of Steev Mike‘s presence is not merely the possibility of a malevolent handler, controlling all aspects of WK’s existence, but that Steev Mike itself indicates a much larger and more horrifying possibility: the sense that ordinary life itself is only a brittle shell struggling to contain an underlying truth so alien and abstract, that merely glimpsing it would be harmful. In this way, knowing the true nature of Steev Mike (or even focusing too deeply on the subject), could potentially damage the sanity and overall well-being of the observer.
It has been said that humanity’s oldest and strongest emotion is fear, and the oldest and strongest breed of fear, is fear of the unknown. But lost in the that declaration is the great variety of forms that this fear can come in, from superstition, to dread, to metaphysical curiosity.
To appreciate the metaphysical curiosity that Steev Mike inspires, one must only briefly contemplate the endless parade of questions obsessively passing by the phenomenon, only grazing its surface and unable to truly make contact with any deeper answers. Perhaps this is the fundamental spirit of Steev Mike: It’s not about what it is, but rather, what it conveys. What does it truly represent? What ideas and wonders does it conjure up? What hideous life stories are contained behind it’s impenetrable front? We are invited to consider these questions, but we are warned not to strain too hard in answering them, for the very foundation of our sanity rests upon the unknowable remaining dependably distant and remote.
Human knowledge is only a pathetic dimensionless plane, alone in the middle of the dark depths of space. The plane is thin, fragile, and warped, like an old window of slowly melting glass. Everything seen through that window has already been exhausted: explained and understood, digested and debated and decayed. Biology, psychology, physiology, large swaths of human history have grown closer and closer to the realization that we are far away from the answers we seek, stuck in a box with no doors or windows, trying to build a model out of that box, of that box, using nothing but the box as our one and only tool. Shuddering at the mere suggestion that there may be even more beyond the box, we stay busy tinkering and tapping on the same shiftless surface.
More boxes, within cubes, contained within an aggressive infinity that can never be accessed or approached. As soon as our minds lean near to its edge, we face the abysmal immensity of all that it is: numberless galaxies, black holes dense enough to bend time, infinite kaleidoscopic expanses of matter and non-matter, potentially just one of many endless expanses in a hydra-headed multiverse that perpetually begs the question of its own sentience.
This is Steev Mike. But even Steev Mike itself is lost, roaming blind in the emptiness of its own existence, clawing for a reason why its here, unable to know itself or us. It’s alone and it’s everywhere.
A great deal of the unspoken underbelly of WK’s work rests on this sprawling sense of unsolvable mystery - in one way, this is the spirit of Steev Mike, now a mythology originally spawned from a simple album credit and a corporate business office. But Steev Mike also grew out of the imaginations of distant and remote minds - it began to encompass numerous other aspects of WK’s career, and consumed what it wanted, giving birth to more of itself and additional shadowy figures, far-flung cults, afflicted dreamers, synchronous states of psychosis, all of which seem catalyzed by the telepathic powers of a psychedelic research drug-trial gone haywire.
As the audience digs deeper, both through the “genuine” artifacts of WK’s scattered career, and through the list of research reports and articles, their once innocent inquiry into the mysterious nature of this “Executive Producer” mutates into the discovery of an underground network of hostile, primitive tricksters, all working hard at the seemingly pointless task of keeping the true nature of Steev Mike eternally concealed and revealed, back and forth, off and on.
But, did it ever occur to you, that they’re keeping it this way... for your own good?
STEEV’S DREAM IS ANDREW’S NIGHT TERROR
In the world of Andrew WK, a fabricated front is carefully maintained in order to protect the identitie(s) of Andrew’s supervisor. The lengths Andrew’s taken to keep the secrets of his higher-ups have clearly caused a decay in his output as an entertainer, and have resulted in a “career” slowly but surely falling apart. Still, he keeps on working, perhaps out of compulsion, or out of obligation, or most likely, out of fear - a terrifying fear of the punishment that awaits him if he doesn’t hold up his end. Until that day comes, if it ever does, Andrew must working any way he can, and the show must go on, one way or another.
When it all started, he was told it would simply be “a new kind of manager”. It was there to help him. He was assured that he would retain total control, as long as he agreed to do what it said. They said it would stay behind the office door. They made vague suggestions about it “standing” and “walking wrong”, and they occasionally slipped him a note with a simple, “no” sketched by it. He only saw them very early in the morning, right before the sunrise. Right before he was supposed to close his eyes. Sometimes they told him it had a body, but the face was always turned slightly away, so only the edge or the outline of what looked like an eye could be distinguished. He told himself they were definitely human, so it must be too. They sounded the same on the telephone as he did, and whenever the managers came to one of his concerts, they told him it had watched from the back of the room.
By the sixth year, they began to gradually increase his work requirements, demanding he complete more and more outlandish tasks and spend longer and longer hours on increasingly incoherent assignments. If he ever asked about leaving, they soothingly and robotically reminded him of the nightmarish consequences, should he ever make any real attempt to “go away”. He could sing about it, talk about it, just as long as he never actually did it. Of course, he could go away from other people, but never from it. The work. The pressure and fever. The strain and perpetually looming deadline. The constantly changing plot line. The night terrors. The wet clothes. Always demanding that it feel more real. Push harder. More brutal. Now do it again.
How far away from the start was he now? How did it turn into this? What was it all for anyway? How was he supposed to actually do it? And feel about doing it? And how was he supposed to feel about what was being done to him?
“This is what you signed up for,” they reminded him. And if you don’t like it? Well, you can just close your eyes and pretend that it’s all fictional - just a nightmare story. A thick dark cloud that covers the even deeper dark space inside you, like a drawing. The bloody face is only covering another mask, and it’s shape mutates but never really seems to change. It can’t change. It is eternal. But you don’t have to believe it. If it helps, just tell yourself it’s all pretend. It’s all bound up and enslaved by an ancient creative power. Tell yourself that. Write that down. Tell yourself that non-existence is the one true god. Does that help? Now can you get back to work?
Steev’s disguise rots away, only to reveal a mirror of its face - the face on the other side of the mirror, the one that was supposed to be the person. The one that was supposed to be doing the looking. The one that is looking is only a body part, lost and breaking down. The arms are wrong. The eyes are different. He sees himself as something to escape from. He is wrapped up in the wet wool blanket of his best nightmare, determined to slowly guide himself through his own inevitable self-destruction, with the hollow claim that it will all be “for the highest art”.
They enchanted him into becoming a “fun” nightmare, less than a thing, barely moving, stuck inside a relentless swirling party of illusion, and then slowly blended back into your own inner picture, where it only ever really was.