Shake Your Piggy Bank

AMG Review of Shake Your Piggy Bank

Stewart Mason
All Music Guide

One of the last albums Wesley Willis completed before his career was cut short by the illness that would eventually kill him, 2001's Shake Your Piggy Bank is a collaboration with the /p>

ew wave-ish Dragnews, meaning that it's a bit more accessibly "musical" than his a-man-and-his-Casio recordings. Not by much, however, as each of these 25 songs follows the same familiar premise: a bit of herky-jerky spoken word stuff followed by about two-and-a-half minutes of repeated, obsessive screaming of a single phrase. This time out, the style is so locked into place that every song is musically almost identical, right down to the fact that all 25 songs are between 2:48 and 2:54 in length. Similar themes reappear in the songs as well, with one subset "about" famous punk rock stars, and another with titles and choruses like "Lick My Doberman's Cock" and "Suck a Jackrabbit's Ass." Dull, phoned-in records like this only prove that Wesley Willis was the Wild Man Fischer of the indie generation, only less endearing and with an even higher "Hey, lookit the freak!" quotient.