Watch GWAR Cover "I'm Just Ken" From Barbie

They're just GWAR.

By Russ Burlingame

The A.V. Club, now under new ownership, has resurrected one of the site's most popular forgotten features in a big way. Yesterday, the pop culture news site brought back A.V. Undercover, an in-studio video series where popular bands come and play covers of someone else's song. Often, the songs are two things: huge hits, and a little silly. They Might Be Giants, for example, covered "Tubthumping" by Chumbawumba. The A.V. Club doubled down on the concept this week with GWAR, the beloved, costumed shock-rock band, doing their rendition of "I'm Just Ken" from the Barbie soundtrack.

(Okay, so really they did "We're Just GWAR," but it's the thoguht that counts.) You can see the video here:

"I'm Just Ken," which was nominated for an Oscar, was originally performed by Gosling, with contributions from Simu Liu, who played Ken's arch-nemesis (also Ken), and joined the song as part of a huge music video-style song-and-dance war during the movie's third act. Liu has also performed it in concert on his own since the film's release, and Gosling performed it at the Academy Awards. The song was a hit on streaming sites, too, and became a viral success independent of Barbie.

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GWAR, who always perform in costume and use their demonic stage names, was founded in 1984, and has always featured a rotating cast of talent. Their material features over-the-top rhetoric, violence, sex, and politics among other things. They have earned plenty of acclaim and scorn over the life of the band, and broke into the mainstream in a big way back when Beavis and Butt-Head and Empire Records featured the band in the 1990s. They have also spawned a mountain of merch, including as books, comic books, board games, beer, whiskey, toys, and sex toys.

"That's what we were kind of hoping to do because Ken is like the character, and Ryan Gosling, who's just so incredible in the film. He's so ridiculous, but yet, you feel all his pain, I feel like," songwriter Mark Ronson said recently. "So, I was walking down the street, and I don't usually write lyrics. I usually come up with the music, but I just had that line. Like, 'I'm just Ken, anywhere else I'd be a ten.' You know? I just thought, this guy is so hot, but he can't get what he needs in life, which is the love of this woman. So, I came up with that line, went to the piano and came up with some chords. Then, my brother Andrew, my songwriting partner, came over and we wrote the rest of the song." 

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