Andrew WK: The rock star who never existed?
Everybody loves a good conspiracy theory, and the world of popular music is full of them. Over the years, countless bizarre conspiracies have been levelled against musicians, ranging in believability from ‘Paul McCartney died in 1966’ to ‘Lars Ulrich is a good drummer’. In more recent times, one of the most bizarre conspiracies to grip rock music fans is the strange case of Andrew WK, which still draws questions to this very day.
For the uninitiated, Andrew WK is a singer and multi-instrumentalist who burst onto the American hard-rock scene during the early 2000s with a unique blend of hard rock, metal, and pop. Despite being a relative unknown before releasing his debut album, I Get Wet, in 2001, WK rapidly rose to prominence, with chart success in both the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK. However, not everything is quite as it seems when it comes to WK, as the singer has left multiple unanswered questions with regard to his true identity, collaborators, and music itself.
On the face of it, Andrew WK is merely a stage name for Andrew Wilkes-Krier, who got his start in music by playing in a variety of teenage rock bands in California during the 1990s. However, if you dig a little deeper, the hard rock star attracts a great deal of mystery. First of all, to go from an unknown kid to an overnight sensation, producing arena rock-style tracks for a major record label is pretty surprising, if not technically impossible. The likelihood seems to be that Andrew WK is a manufactured persona.
WK himself all but admitted to such a fact, once telling an interviewer, “Everything since ’99 or ’98 when I moved to NY – ’99 is when I signed up to do Andrew WK – everything since then is kind of a blur, okay? I admit that. It’s a bit of a blur.” The idea of “signing up to do Andrew WK” suggests that the entire rock star persona is nothing more than a fabrication, and this has been theorised countless times since.
Adding to the mystery, fans have noticed drastic changes in WK’s appearance over the years. While it is not out of the question for a rock star to change his appearance over time, with regard to changing weight, the ageing process, or even plastic surgery, WK’s face has changed drastically and repeatedly, leading many to assume that ‘Andrew WK’ is just a character being played by multiple different actors and musicians.
Furthermore, while onstage in London back in 2008, WK told fans, “I’m not the same guy that you may have seen from the I Get Wet album,” explaining, “I’m not that same person, and I don’t just mean that in a philosophical or conceptual way, it’s not the same person at all. Do I look the same as that person?” Case closed, it would seem.
So, if Andrew Wilkes-Krier is, in fact, an invention, then who is writing and performing all those songs? There are multiple theories about who might be behind the mask, including Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl. The idea put forward by conspiracy theorists is that Grohl wrote a variety of songs that did not fit with the sound of Foo Fighters, so they invented a different entity to get them out into the world.
The Grohl theory is easily disprovable: not only were Andrew WK and Foo Fighters on different record labels at the time, but the material recorded by Wilkes-Krier does not bear resemblance to anything the Foo Fighters frontman has ever written. Whats more, it feels unlikely that Grohl would keep quiet about such an elaborate scheme for such a long period of time.
Another theory is that Andrew WK is actually a man by the name of Steev Mike. Back in 2004, the musician’s website was hacked by somebody claiming to be Mike, revealing that he had allegedly written the music on WK’s records. In response, WK issued a statement claiming, “I used to call myself Steev Mike a long time ago and it’s nothing now.” In contrast, WK has repeatedly refused to answer questions about the Steev Mike persona, and multiple people who worked closely with him have affirmed that Mike is an actual person, not just a pseudonym for WK.
Even if Steev Mike is the brains behind the Andrew WK persona, that still does not explain the unnecessary personal details that have been revealed about the musician along the way. If he is simply an interchangeable entity used as a vehicle for somebody else’s songs, why go to the effort of making such an elaborate backstory for that character? Would anybody even care if Andrew WK turned out to be a music industry invention?
There are lots of details within the tale of Andrew WK that do not make any sense, and the singer himself has given many cryptic and contradictory answers over the years. Whether or not music fans will ever find out the truth behind the singer remains to be seen.
