INTRODUCTION: UPPROACHING 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. 

Steev Mike is hard to pin down, but crucial to understanding “Andrew W.K.”.  The fracturing and weakening of one decisive, agreed-upon “truth” for humanity, and the way these truths interact in different ways with different power structures down to different individual reactions is more important than most people have considered.  Those ways of thinking are great for starting to unpack Steev Mike, but it doesn’t have all the answers - and not having answers is probably what Steev Mike is all about.

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.

Steev Mike deals in building up and destroying stuff you might take for granted with entertainers.  Even though destroy usually means something bad to us, Steev Mike isn’t 100% bad.  He’s about pointing out how silly binaries are, cos the experience of life is a spectrum; not everything is only Here or There.  Steev Mike has at least two ways of working: in your body/soul and in your brain/consciousness.  Steev Mike works in your body/soul through direct senses - hearing, seeing, touching, tasting - informing the sub-conscious part of your brain of things that you probably couldn’t just think up.  The brain/consciousness work only happens when you step back and look at the bigger picture, asking: what kind of existence, or existences, can I see being portrayed throughout this work with all of its contradictions?  You might be tempted to pick a side, but it’s not that simple: Steev Mike is about getting beyond such simple ideas, but also about trying to prevent you from getting beyond.

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.

Steev Mike smashes binaries by playing with old ideas that are just taken for granted now, flipping them on their respective heads and trying to blur the two together.  He also likes to point out that some things just don’t fit into either category of what’s usually a two-sided option - for every Black and White, there is a Grey.  Choosing NOT to put grey under either black or white is at the core of the Steev Mike spirit.  Andrew W.K. even turns this in on himself, by pointing out that because of Steev Mike it’s not possible to know for sure what the actual nature of “Andrew W.K.” is.

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”. 

Steev Mike and Andrew W.K. have been playing together for a long time.

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.

The Steev Mike vibe has been present from the get-go with “Andrew W.K”.  What most people have focused on before now has been trying to express Steev Mike in words about how they think about Steev Mike, rather than how they feel it.  But the Steev Mike vibe has only gotten weirder and more intense, becoming more and more important [note: particularly circa God Is Partying, I’d say].

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”. 

It’s kinda funny how Steev Mike is obsessed with destroying all these old entertainment ideas, because without these simple binaries Steev Mike would no longer have a purpose.  Steev Mike doesn’t really add anything concrete to the work, Steev Mike is all about pointing out how limited some options are and demanding alternatives (without suggesting what those alternatives might be).

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. 

Steev Mike plays a financial role too, cos even if he’s undermining “Andrew W.K.” he’s still getting people to think about it, even if the audience can’t buy anything ‘by’ Steev Mike.  Steev Mike is about tearing through the surface of “Andrew W.K.”, and discovering what other ways of thinking about Andrew W.K. there are, especially from sources that aren’t Andrew.  To do this, you have to hold multiple ideas in your head at once that might not seem to fit together.

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. 

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Steev Mike wants to destroy everything; to make non-existence exist.   But Steev Mike also uses destruction as a starting point, to (re)build, teaching the rubble as much as possible to inform its new building.  This teaching involves dealing with some of the darker aspects of humanity usually forbidden from popular entertainment, but the most helpful mindset is probably to think of Steev pushing you beyond simplistic understandings of the world into accepting all truths as valid at some level.

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. 

Having said all that, it’s really tricky to figure out where the line between helpful destruction and violent malice is, because it all depends on the person who’s experiencing the work and where they’re at in life.

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.

Andrew will probably never give a proper definition of Steev Mike.  This is cos Steev Mike is defined by your own experience of Steev Mike, and there are so many things about you that Andrew could never know, so it would be foolish to prevent any of Steev Mike’s potential.  Despite all this potential, Steev Mike never provides any specific rules to help really understand anything to do with “Andrew W.K.”, Steev Mike is kind of just there pointing out everything you’re not thinking about.

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.

And because Steev Mike isn’t really saying anything, he can easily avoid being pinned down to a specific opinion.  Steev Mike is only there when “Andrew W.K.” is asserting something (or nothing), because Steev Mike exists only in opposition to the assumptions in that assertion - he’s only there to point out what everyone else has missed.  Because “Andrew W.K.” deals mostly with vague words that could be interpreted a whole bunch of ways, Steev Mike is there to help prevent any audience member from getting too attached to one interpretation.

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.

Maybe because Steev Mike’s purpose is to prevent “Andrew W.K.” from ever being knowable, people tend not to like Steev Mike - people understandably tend to prefer things to be the least complicated they can be.  Steev Mike is pushing back against the assumptions baked into popular entertainment in lots of ways, and this is presumably what initially pisses people off.