Me Pelas El Chorizo

It's easy to scoff at juvenile humor. You hear a single utterance of "fuck" or "pussy," and you turn your nose up at the lack of sophistication. No laughter escapes your tightly pursed lips. You fume with rage, images of smug, pathetic 13-year-olds spending daddy's cash on the newest Adam Sandler record cascading through your highly evolved brain.

But those tightly pursed lips are trembling. Somewhere deep inside you, buried beneath back issues of The New Yorker and piles of free jazz CDs, something is happening. Almost like a little 13-year-old boy kicking you in the nuts from the inside and saying, "Dude! Holy shit! That is fucking funny!" Sure, you can deny this reaction. But the fact remains that, when executed properly, juvenile humor can be absolutely hilarious. If the timing's right, the phrasing's right, and the context's right, a well-placed "fuck!" can translate into unquestioned excellence.

Of course, establishing the correct context, timing, and phrasing is not at all easy. And establishing it in such a way that it will entertain upon repeated listening is practically impossible. Ween's debut album, God Ween Satan: The Oneness, is a massive, near-overwhelming bombardment of profanity, hard rock riffing, and goofy genre parody. But no matter how absurd Ween are being, they always manage to accomplish a seemingly contradictory task: sounding exactly like every band operating within the genres they attack while sounding only like themselves.

"You Fucked Up" is a perfect mission statement for Ween-- a sloppy, furious faux-metal number with recklessly shrieked, flat-out hilarious vocals. Granted, there's nothing particularly funny about the lyric, "You fucked up/ You fucking Nazi whore!" But in the context of a psychotic hard rock song, it's difficult to miss the humor. "Tick" couples the overblown rage of "You Fucked Up" with a unique brand of twisted, gleeful pop, while "Don't Laugh (I Love You)" distills this warped glee to its purest, most cloyingly twee essence.

Songs like "Tick" and "You Fucked Up" succeed largely because they tap into that most primal, basic urge to rock out. Sure, there's an undeniable element of parody to these songs. But the parody is backed up by the fact that the songs themselves are actually really, really good.

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