Wesley Willis

My cousin and I send each other a lot of cds through the mail. He lives in denver and i live in wichita and we are always trying to find new fucked up bands. I was recently going through a batch of discs he sent me and i came across 1 by Wesley Willis the first words that came to mind were What in the fuck is this. So i did a little research and i found this article.

When you're listening to the radio, do you ever stop to think about how few songs are played by obese schizophrenic black musicians from the streets of Chicago? I know that I think about this all of the time. The airwaves are cluttered with alternative rock, rap, and R&B; meanwhile, the "obese schizophrenic" musical genre is severely underrepresented. That's why everyone should start calling their local radio station and requesting songs by Wesley Willis.

Wesley Willis is 6 foot 5, weighs between 300 and 350 pounds, and likes to greet people with a headbutt. Shortly after he made his first album, he was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia, and he now claims to have "schizophrenia demons" in his head that take him off of his "harmony joy rides" to put him on "torture hell rides".

Never heard of Willis before? Until recently, no one had. He lived on the streets of Chicago, homeless, selling his city landscape line drawings and playing music on his late 80's Casio keyboard from K-Mart. After saving for a while, he pulled together the money to cut a few albums, and suddenly his musical career took off. Willis was "discovered", and is now an artist under Dino Paredes and the major record label American Recordings. He has released at least 20 albums as a solo artist and with his punk rock band, the Wesley Willis Fiasco, and has over 400 songs in circulation.

Full article Here