Andrew WK and US gun control

A recording from the UK’s Truck Festival in 2014 – before Andrew WK took to the stage to deliver his hard-partying set, there was an increasingly-intense warmup guy and intro tape, culminating in the crowd chanting ‘tonight we party’ over the sound of air raid sirens.

All quite dramatic, and unsettling once you listen back to it for how much it brings to mind political rallying, the madness of crowds and the danger of the herd mentality.

Listening through, I was reminded of stage rhetoric and orators, and of recent coverage I’d seen of the gun control debate in the USA.

I decided to present the chanting intro tape through the filter of onstage rhetoric and snippets from both sides of the gun control debate – the measured passion of Obama’s anti-gun messaging, and the outright bombast of Charlton Heston delivering his most famous line.

This is presented over a bed of multiple drones and a simple melody that spaces out the rhetoric and moves the piece along to its climax, leaving the final word to the US president.

City version:

Memory version: