Their imitations sometimes get taken as satire or parody but the brothers have fought against this criticism for years, most notably in a 1995 interview with Spin: Prince especially has a treasured place in their musical hearts, as seen on tracks like “Monique The Freak”. The Ween brothers have played with genre throughout their career, from funk and prog rock to sea shanties. Narrating over the music video for “Push Th’ Little Daisies”, the animated pair announced to the audience watching that Ween “had no future.” Little did they know that the brothers would go on to record nine albums and would still sell out shows nearly thirty years later. Despite signing to Elektra Records, one of the forefront labels for alternative music at the time, and putting out their first studio album with them in 1994, they were publicly ridiculed, most famously on a Beavis and Butthead episode. The brothers received very mixed reactions when they came onto the scene in the 1990s. We were just trying to do something that was weird.” After playing and recording solo for Ween’s first decade, the brothers teamed up with Claude Coleman Jr., Glenn McClelland, and David Dreiwitz for their live performances, eventually accompanied by many others in the studio. Dean explained the origins in an interview with Sam Strzelec, “It somehow described this juvenile sound that we made, it was the perfect name for the band because at that time anyway the music was really designed to be obnoxious. The name “Ween” has just about as juvenile an origin as you can imagine: a combination of the words “wuss” and “penis”. This article will hopefully provide a guide to enter the universe of Ween. To really get into it, it’s important to approach Ween’s discography from a specific angle, starting with the more “traditional” songs, only later proceeding onto their experimental tracks. This does make it hard to recommend to people. Only then can you start to realize that just because it’s funny doesn’t mean it’s bad: in fact, it’s brilliant. They break the perception of what “sounds good” and make me realize that “serious” listening isn’t always the goal. But I kept listening, not only because I really liked the girl and wanted her to think I was cool but because I realized that there was something about Ween that hooked me. The voice of Gene, who sings on most of the songs, took some getting used to. I found the “normal” songs generic and the “wacky” ones just plain unlistenable. Like a lot of music that I’ve gotten into, Ween came at the recommendation of a girl I was kind of seeing at the time. I first listened to Ween in the Spring of 2021. Dean and Gene didn’t care, although they eventually invested in a drum machine. They then proceeded to the “studio”-their childhood bedrooms-where they played and recorded demos on out-of-tune guitars and half a working drum set. Dean and Gene ended up using class time to jot down the names of their first songs, despite the songs themselves remaining unwritten. They were not destined to be friends, coming from opposite ends of the jock-geek spectrum at their New Hope, Pennsylvania middle school, but they managed to find common ground in music. Aaron Freeman and Michael Melochiondo, known by their stage names Gene and Dean Ween, met in an eighth-grade computing class. While the Ween brothers weren’t the first to make silly music, I’d argue that they were the best.
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