Ween

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
/wiki/Weencreator
It's kinda like that.

Ween's a band. Ween is Two Guys. Those Two Guys are Dean Ween and Gene Ween, no relation. They make the songs with the music, the music and the Scotchgard.

They're multi-instrumentalists and sometimes the only performers on their albums. Gene is usually the lead singer, and Dean the lead guitarist.

Here's the Tropes they got:
  • Affectionate Parody: The cover art to The Pod is a parody of the cover of Leonard Cohen's The Best of album.
  • Album Title Drop: Almost done during "Candi" with the line "Chocolate with cheese." The actual name of the album is "Chocolate and Cheese."
    • They do it on "Mononucleosis" from The Pod ("When you came into the Pod, you told me that something was wrong..."). [1]
  • A Good Name for a Rock Band: When asked where the name Ween came from, Dean and Gene often say it's just a word they came up with as teens that they thought sounded kind of cool. Aside from just the band name, Dean has also stated that this is how many album and song titles are named, for example, they wanted to go for a Beatles-esque sound on their White Pepper album and Dean claimed "White Pepper" sounded like a classic rock title, so the album's title references the Beatles' albums The Beatles (commonly known as The White Album) and Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.
  • Arc Words: Guava
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: "Reggaejunkiejew" is a hurricane of seething insults toward whoever the song is about - including telling the person to overdose on heroin and drop dead - but then there's the significantly less harsh but still rude line, "Maybe some people like to eat it, but I think you're a dick!"
  • Black Sheep Hit: "Push th' Little Daisies"
  • Blatant Lies: On the live album, At the Cat's Cradle 1992, during some stage banter, Dean lists a few songs including "Reggaejunkiejew" and says "We don't play any of those songs live." Right after this, they played "Reggaejunkiejew."
  • Brain Bleach: With song titles like "Suckin' Blood from the Devil's Dick," new listeners should keep some handy.
  • Broken Record: The phrase, "Pork roll egg and cheese on a kaiser bun," is repeated in the background throughout the entirety of "She Fucks Me."
  • Captain Obvious: "Mister Would You Please Help My Pony?" gives us the line, "He can't talk because he's a pony."
  • Cluster F-Bomb: "Baby, Baby, Baby Bitch/Fuck you, you stinkin' asshole" and a lot of other songs as well.
    • They greeted the world with, "You fucked up! You bitch! You really fucked up! You fucked up! You fucking Nazi whore!" They relied on this a lot early on.
  • Continuity Nod: "Big Jilm" features the line "It's a pleazel, it's a pleazel my weasel," a reference to their earlier tune, "I Gots A Weasel," whose lyrics were based on similar lines.
    • "Baby Bitch" has the line "Wrote 'Birthday Boy' for ya babe", which is a reference to an earlier song of that name. It might also be a Shout-Out to Bob Dylan, since in the song "Sara" Dylan mentions "Writin' 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you".
  • Dead Baby Comedy
  • Digital Piracy Is Evil: Inverted, for the most part. They have actually encouraged the use of fan torrents like browntracker for those who want digital copies of their live songs as well as their now-rare home demos/albums like The Crucial Squeegie Lip and Axis: Bold As Boognish, though they haven't advocated piracy of their studio releases. Dean also runs Ween Radio, an Internet radio stream where fans can request songs and listen to obscure, unreleased, and/or live songs in addition to songs found on their studio albums.
  • Epic Rocking: When playing live, they've been known to do 30+ minute renditions of songs that are only a fraction of that length on the album and Dean Ween plays noticeably extended solos. It is also not uncommon for their concerts to last three or more hours.
  • Everything Is an Instrument: "Never Squeal" features a chainsaw solo.
  • Executive Meddling: The band wanted the cover for the album Chocolate And Cheese to have a "gay sailor theme." The studio shot down that idea, thinking it would be extremely politically incorrect especially on an album with a song called "The HIV Song."
  • Fan Nickname: Deaner and Gener.
  • Genre Busting: Every kind of music and noise.
  • Genre Roulette
  • Heterosexual Life Partners: Dean and Gene have been best friends since middle school and donned stage names that would suggest they're brothers.
  • "I Am" Song: The STALLION (mang)!
  • Indecipherable Lyrics: In some songs like "The Stallion (Part 2)," "Mourning Glory," and "Poopship Destroyer," there are lines that are so hard to make out that even the official lyrics replace some words with question marks.
    • "My Own Bare Hands" devolves into Dean spewing absolute nonsense constructed only partly out of swears.
  • Intentionally Awkward Title: The first album, God-Ween-Satan: The Oneness, is itself an example, and gives us: "Licking the Palm for Guava", "Mushroom Festival in Hell", "Marble Tulip Juicy Tree", "Squelch the Weasel", and "L.M.L.Y.P." ("Let Me Lick Your Pussy")
  • Intercourse with You
  • I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: "She Wanted to Leave," " It's Gonna Be (Alright)"
  • Letters 2 Numbers: The band has songs with titles like "Pumpin' 4 The Man" and "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)." They also substitute "You" with "U" frequently, such as "Can U Taste The Waste?" and "Loving U Thru It All." This is probably done as a Shout-Out to Prince, one of the band's primary influences.
  • Lyrical Dissonance: Never more so than when they write one of the prettiest tunes you've ever heard and fill it with Incredible Vulgarity.
  • Man of a Thousand Voices: Gene Ween. His vocal range is so broad it's almost mindblowing to listen to Chocolate And Cheese when you realize yes, that's him doing the Jim Morrison style vocals on "Take Me Away," the bizarre growling of "I Can't Put My Finger On It," the Mexican speaking in "Beunos Tardes, Amigo," the country drawl of "Drifter in the Dark," and the falsetto soul singing of "Freedom of '76." And that's just five songs on one album.
  • Mind Screw: They actually use the phrase in "Marble Tulip Juicy Tree," making them possibly the Trope Namer. It also happens in a lot of their songs, such as "Mourning Glory."
  • Missing Episode: The follow up to Chocolate And Cheese was originally going to be a throwback to the more lo-fi "brown" sound of their earlier albums like GodWeenSatan and The Pod. A water pipe at the beach house they rented to record the album burst, however, resulting in the destruction of their recording equipment and recordings of songs they were working on.
  • Murder Ballad: "Buenos Tardes, Amigo"
  • Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly: But it works, when its not noise.
  • New Sound Album: While most of their albums tend to experiment with several different genres, it's fairly easy to tell which album a song is from. GodWeenSatan is mainly punk, hard rock, and metal, The Pod has mostly slow songs with distorted vocals, 12 Golden Country Greats is nothing but country music, The Mollusk has a nautical theme, etc.
  • Noise Rock: Also Noise Pop, Noise Country ("Piss Up A Rope" has a breakdown that would be a good example), Noise Jazz, Noise Reggae ("Voodoo Lady"), Noise Ragtime, Noise Classical, Noise Easy Listening, Noise R & B, and Noise Noise.
  • Non-Indicative Name: 12 Golden Country Greats has 10 tracks.
  • Old Shame: Their role in the movie It's Pat could qualify.
  • Overly Long Gag: At the beginning of "Wayne's Pet Youngin'," rather than counting to 4 like most bands, Dean counts to 25, even though the song is in 4/4.
    • In "The Stallion (Part 2)," Gene Ween randomly starts singing the alphabet only to spell "stallion" once he gets to "S-T." ("A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-A-L-L-I-O-N I am the stallion mang!")
  • Refuge in Audacity
  • Refuge in Vulgarity
  • Rhyming with Itself: "Puffy Cloud":

Drift away on a puffy cloud
Go away on a puffy cloud
My brain is dead from too much pot
Cause Deaner and I smoke too much pot

  • Sesame Street Cred: "Ocean Man", the ending theme of the SpongeBob SquarePants movie.
    • On top of that, Ween also wrote and recorded "Loop de Loop" for a Spongebob episode.
  • Shaped Like Itself: "A friend's a friend who knows what being a friend is!"
  • Something Completely Different: Pretty much all of their songs; as one critic put it, it's like every track on Chocolate and Cheese was recorded by a different band.
  • Song of Song Titles: "L.M.L.Y.P." directly lifts most of lyrics from Prince's "Shockadelica" and the rap from "Alphabet St."
  • South Park: They were one of the many bands who appeared in the episode "Chef Aid"
  • Stage Name: Dean Ween's real name is Michael "Mickey" Melchiondo, Jr.; Gene Ween's is Aaron Freeman.
  • Stealth Parody: While their genre parodies tend to be more obvious, they have a couple of these as well. For example, "Buckingham Green" almost sounds like a serious song rather than a satire of Progressive Rock.
  • Step Up to the Microphone: Some songs like "Awesome Sound," "Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?," and "Pumpin' 4 the Man" feature Dean Ween on vocals. "Little Birdy" is also the only song with lead vocals by Mean Ween.
  • Straw Fan: Their live-only song, "Leave Deaner Alone," is about this.
  • Studio Chatter: GodWeenSatan: The Oneness is full talking before, after, and sometimes during the songs.
  • Surreal Humor
  • Take That: The rarity, "I Hate The Smiths (And Steven Morrissey)." Several of their early songs seem to be take that's directed at personal acquaintances - "Reggaejunkiejew" was apparently about a real-life freeloading dreadlocked Jewish heroin addict who the band didn't appreciate coming into their social circle.
    • They even delivered a couple take thats to Pizza Hut, of all things. Pizza Hut had a jingle contest and Ween wrote a brief song called "Where'd the Cheese Go?" When Pizza Hut gave them negative feedback on it, they sent in another jingle named "Bitch, Where'd the Motherfucking Cheese Go At?", which was essentially the same song, only with obscenities thrown into nearly every line. In the All Request Live version of the song, they had a more subtle one that talked about going to Papa John's (one of Pizza Hut's main competitors) to get some cheese.
  • The Cover Changes the Meaning: Their cover of Billy Joel's "Piano Man" sounds like an honest attempt at a note-for-note cover with some of the lyrics in the wrong order at first. Then there's the new chorus: "Sing us a song, you're the piano man/Put some coke on my dick tonight!"
  • The Killer in Me: "Buenos Tardes, Amigo"
  • Theme Naming: Dean Ween, Gene Ween, and their former bassist, Mean Ween. In his side project, Moistboyz, Dean is known as Mickey Moist and singer Guy Heller is known as Dickie Moist.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: The Pod contains no less than four songs with references to pork roll, egg, and cheese: "Frank", "Awesome Sound", "She Fucks Me", and "Pork Roll Egg and Cheese".
    • Nearly every album has at least one song that mentions guava, or has it in its title.
    • They also seem to have a thing for bacon; "Awesome Sound" mentions a "pork roll egg cheese and bacon," "Freedom of '76" has a line about a bacon steak, and "Even If You Don't" has a line about bacon.
  • The Something Song: The HIV Song: "Da da, da Da da da da Da! Dada Dada Da Da Da Dun Dun Dun Da Da Dada dada dun. AIDS! Da da, da Da da da da Da! Dada Dada Da Da Da Dun Dun Dun Da Da Dada dada dun. HIV!" repeat.
  • Trey Parker and Matt Stone: Co-directed the music video for "Even If You Don't."
  • Wham! Line: In Buenos Tardes, Amigo - a song about a man hunting down his brother's murderer:

Now... now that I've found you
On this most joyous day
I tell you it was me who killed him
But the truth I'll never have to say.

  1. ↑ The album was named after the apartment they recorded it in, and the song is the true story of them coming down with mononucleosis while they were living there.
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