Wake Up
This is one of those songs that, for me, holds many memories despite being newly introduced into my musical repetoir.
The first time I heard it was, as you might suspect, during the Where the Wild Things Are commercial. It was catchy, cute, child-like and stuck in my head just as it did more or less everyone else’s. After seeing it mentioned on Paste Magazine’s site a couple weeks later, I was assured that it was a good song (I’d still never heard the whole thing). Then, a few days after going to see the movie and being slightly disappointed not to hear it on the film’s actual soundtrack, I walked into art to hear it playing out of the laptop of the teacher, who is very heavy on the Rolling Stones, Guns’n'Roses, and a myriad of other late-80s-to-mid-90s rock, though he’s been known to occasionally crank out some Owl City or Lady Gaga. Turns out he’d been an avid fan since their 1995 release, and that commercial had made him rediscover the bands.
And so the song became the theme song of our class. I’m almost certain that for a while there he kept it on loop for a while there; it definitely seemed like it was always playing at moments when the 23-student composite class crammed into a tiny corner room would finally quiet down. The first time I heard the song in its entirety, when most the class had gone down to the kiln and I remained upstairs with a couple of other Art III students, I was a bit turned of by Win’s seemingly random bursts of yelling and his harsh voice. In time, I learned to love the song as a whole.
Here’s a very unique video of the song as preformed for The Blogotheque, an outstanding take-away concert series that you should be sure to check out. The first song is being performed in a freight elevator, and as for Wake Up itself…Well, I think you’ll be able to figure that out. Feel free to fast forward, but I highly encourage you to watch the whole thing.
For those more traditional, here is the studio version:
School is finally out, finals are over, and break is here. So come on, everyone- wake up from that post finals exhaustion, and let’s party.
