Andrew W.K. is the musical equivalent to a M. Night Shyamalan film. If you’ve heard of Andrew W.K. usually your first reaction is, “That guy is a douche, his music sucks,” or you just laugh. If you’ve never heard Andrew W.K. and you listen for the first time, the perspective you listen with will greatly effect the opinion you have of him afterward, but regardless of that the opinion you come away with will probably be pretty negative.

You’ll probably think: “Damn, this shit is just rowdy childish noise,” and, “Is he really singing a whole song about going to sleep? How ridiculous! Who would listen to this stuff?” but a little bit later you’ll find yourself wanting to listen to it again. You’ll start to like it and you’re not really sure why. You’ll ask your friends to listen to it, and they’ll mock you, but after a while, they, too, will start to see what it is you like about it. The twist is, indeed, that Andrew W.K. is something you were always in love with but didn’t know you had it in you.

When Andrew W.K. released I Get Wet back in 2001 I was living with an older woman who managed a music store. I downloaded I Get Wet over the modem we had in the apartment and when she got home and heard was I was listening to, she put on a disgusted face and said some derogatory, but even though my musical pursuits at this time were David Bowie and Eels, I heard something in Party Hard that I liked a lot—and it wasn’t just that the guitars sounded a lot like the music from Twisted Metal 2.

I understood what was happening here: Andrew W.K. was making music that was tongue in cheek but the philosophy behind the lyrics was deadly serious. I think the reason a lot of people (especially people at the 2001 Ozzfest) can’t stomach AWK is that hard rock isn’t supposed to be happy. The lyrics are supposed to be dark in some way, about broken hearts or stupid women or military dying in battle or who knows what. Hard rock is supposed to be manly. People who listen to hard rock don’t party, they get drunk and talk shit to each other. Partying is something kids or yuppies do. (Not even Pitchfork got it.)

Andrew W.K. was preaching the joy of living to the wrong crowd. Luckily, at the tender age of 16, I got it. I saw nothing wrong with writing songs purely about being happy and partying hard. Little did I know AWK was setting me up for a future love affair with The Polyphonic Spree.

There’s a lot of factoids about Andrew W.K. to love, like how he claims he hit himself in the face with a brick to achieve the cover of I Get Wet, or how during a tour for his second album, The Wolf, he broke his foot on stage and instead of cancelling his tour like a rock star, he performed the rest of the tour in a wheelchair so as to not disappoint his fans.

But, in the end, what matters to a lot of people is not the heart of the person making the music, but the talent, and to prove that Andrew W.K. has talent unimaginable by listening to his recorded music, check out his NPR Tiny Desk Concert, with him alone at a keyboard, blowing away your expectations.