If you’re like most people, you arrived at college and spent your first five minutes of high-bandwidth-induced euphoria downloading important-sounding music you had always meant to learn to appreciate, like Bob Marley’s Legend. Then your music-stealing tastes turned to novelty songs, and you spent the rest of freshman year clogging the network by downloading such tracks as King Missle’s “Detachable Penis.”
Maybe you also downloaded a song by Wesley Willis, a singer-songwriter and schizophrenic from the streets of Chicago who died last week at age 40 after fighting chronic myelogenous leukemia. Willis released several dozen albums of material, many of them through Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label and none of them particularly distinctive. Most are filled with brief, repetitive lyrical statements like “I whooped Batman’s ass” sung over the demo beat on a Casio keyboard.
Biafra, who used to be in a punk band you maybe downloaded in a “stealing important music” phase, has a Manhattan socialite’s need for “causes.” Willis was such a cause, and Biafra doubtless thought he was championing both the plight of the mentally ill and great misunderstood art by giving the mic to a schizophrenic. The ironic result was to provide entertainment that was equally tasteless and exploitative. I saw Willis once at a bar in Minneapolis (like a car crash, I couldn’t look away). He was up on the stage in stained sweatpants and an old T-shirt, with his “assistants” (more like handlers) standing close at hand, while a room full of people laughed every time he shouted an obscenity. He had a huge swollen bruise on his forehead from giving people head butts, his preferred greeting (my friend got one).
But I guess he seemed happy. Going on tour is probably better than being committed to an institution. But at least the man will live on in the filesharing wasteland of dorm life.
