One of the most important things to understand about Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman, the band's lead vocalist and a solid support guitarist) and Dean Ween (Mickey Melchiondo, the band's occasional vocalist and an awesome guitarist) is that they had a genuine love for all of the kinds of music they dabbled in. The main thing I'd say in response is that the "humor" aspects of Ween are rather exaggerated and misrepresented by their detractors.
Given all of this, why should they be taken seriously by anybody? Ween are a joke band, right? After all, they often sing their songs with silly voices, and they often fill their songs with utterly ridiculous, often humorous lyrics, and a large part of their diversity comes from wanting to make fun of the genres they're dabbling in, and they don't really seem to take anything they're doing seriously. Perhaps I'm a fool, but we all have our biases.īut still. Well, as I've said many times before, my lack of interest in 90s rock kept me away from rock music until '95 and almost exclusively bound to classic rock and prog rock until the early 00s, so there's no great overarching love for 90s rock to act as a hindrance for me to get into this band.
If you're somebody who genuinely enjoys 90s rock music (and also all of the other genres that really started to take off in that decade), and who's intimately familiar with and invested in the major developments and the major groups of the decade, the idea of a band like Ween being treated as anything more than a stupid joke must be really irksome. Ween's contributions to the development of 90s rock are negligible if we want to be generous, and aside from a couple of songs here and there that kinda sorta incorporated some influences from what was going on around them, they didn't really let 90s music contribute to them. For a second (I'll get back to it), let's put aside the main argument against the band, which basically comes down to two words: "NOVELTY ACT." The most legitimate objection I can see towards putting Ween on a pedestal in relation to other 90s bands is that Ween basically ignored the 90s. Of course, I can see where having that opinion could seem utterly atrocious and even offensive. Of bands whose peaks were in the 90s, Ween would definitely have to be near the top of the pile for me. Whatever objections can be raised about the band, there's no escaping the fact that I freely enjoy an absurd number of their songs and a good number of their albums, and the bizarre eclecticism of their discography (and in individual albums when they so desire) scratches enough itches for me to rate them very highly. Ween wrote the great songs that other bands wouldn't (other bands were hindered by factors like "good taste," "common sense" and "artistic restraint," none of which Ween cared a pittance about).
Ween Completely confused by the rating system? Go here for an explanation.
0 kommentar(er)
