Media Musings #02 - Protomartyr
"Writing music that has nothing to do with the world also serves a purpose."
Each week, I’ll share a conversation about art, media and/or existence that I’ve had with an artist I deeply admire.
The band Protomartyr makes transgressive, poetic post-punk that chugs along with a cynical wit while bearing witness to the countless hypocrisies of faith and culture in modern life.
The following chat with frontman Joe Casey took place by phone in 2017 before the release of their fantastic album, “Relatives in Descent” It opens with a question about a scene Casey sings about wherein he Elvis Presley finds himself asking big questions toward the end of his life.
A couple of quotes ran in this piece I wrote for Vulture about ‘existential pop’, a phrase I was very much trying to identify as a trend before my editor changed the headline. The rest has remained unpublished.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
What’s Elvis doing outside of Flagstaff?
Well, he’s trying to search for meaning, I guess. What’s interesting is, there’s this two book series on Elvis’ biography, the first one is Last Train to Memphis and I believe the second is Careless Love. The first book ends with him coming back from the war, and then his mom dies. So that’s the first part.
The book that I liked the best was his slow decline. I like that he used to drive his buddies everywhere, and when he first started getting into questioning things, there’s a scene where he’s driving, looking up at the clouds and sees the face of Joseph Stalin, asking “What does it mean?” Then the cloud changes and it turns into Jesus. He tries to explain it to his friends and his buddies kind of blow him off. But he had a spiritual friend, a guru guy, who he explains it to.
Eventually he gives that spiritual searching up. After I put it in the song I found out that Al Stewart, who wrote “Year of the Cat”... he has a song that he wrote after reading that book, specifically about Elvis driving through the desert (“Elvis at the Wheel”). So it must be the best part of the book.
I also interviewed John Maus about using pop music as a device for headier ideas. I mean, on his new record he really traffics in this pop jargon. He has a lot of heavy ideas he’s working through, but packages them in talk of Game Boys, He-Man, etc. He uses these ubiquitous images that anyone could sit with or be present with.
I guess that kinda makes sense. A lot of people’s first deep thoughts come from pop culture nowadays, where it used to be from religion or something. When you first get frightened by a movie as a kid, that has as much of a profound effect on you as going to church.
What’s the deal with the blasting trumpets you sing about on “A Private Understanding”?
When I was a kid I used to be very frightened of tornado warnings, even though I don’t think a tornado’s ever really hit Detroit. It seems like it happened a lot more when I was a kid. If a storm blew through, I’d immediately wanna run down the stairs and get to the right corner of the house. The broadcasting clarion alarms have frightened me since I was a kid, so it’s always something I’ve gone to. When something bad’s happening, an alarm’s going off.
The biblical trumpets, sure. I talk about trumpets in the first song, and in the second song it’s also “the airhorn age.” I don’t think it’s these beautiful, brass trumpets that angels are blowing to mark the end of the world, I think it’s idiots holding airhorns. I don’t know if you’ve ever walked the Vic Berger SuperDeluxe videos. He uses airhorns a lot when Trump is talking. It’s almost apocalyptic in a sense.
He’s become a politically-pointed dude, even though he came out of the Tim and Eric universe.
Yeah, and we’re finding now that making fun of Trump doesn’t make him go away. Humor is taking a sour turn now because our usual deflating of someone’s ego didn’t work on the guy with this really thin skin. How many jokes can you make?
Isn’t that what “The Chuckler” is about in some way? The guy who’s laughing because he has to, not because he wants to?
Yeah. I get asked all the time if this must be a really political record. Well, no, all the other ones are just as political as this one. Talking about Detroit and things like that. But now, because the world is so fucked up, a lot more people are paying attention. I get asked all the time in interviews if I think an artist must address these things, and say, no, an artist can do whatever they want. Writing music that has nothing to do with the world also serves a purpose.
Also being comfortable sitting with abstraction. The working guy who’s had a really shitty day, rambling just before he’s about to finally snap.
Right. It’s like, you’re trying to get through your day, you have a shitty job dealing with customers, and there might be a nuclear war. So in the abstract sense you have this thing hanging over your head, then you have the daily shit you’ve gotta go through. And you still have to go through your day to day, you still have to laugh at jokes. But it seems a little bit more hollow now. That’s kind of “The Chuckler”.
When you talk about abstraction, that’s kind of the point. I’ve always been better at expressing my emotional state about things, not giving “this is what’s wrong with the world and this is how we fix it” but “this is what’s wrong with the world and this is how it fucks me up”. That’s a little bit easier to do.
There’s this “it” in “Here is the Thing” that makes you choose between necessity and health. What is the “it”?
Well I wanted to keep it kind of vague, but really, it’s unfettered capitalism, I guess [laughs]. It runs through the whole song. I don’t have an answer to what economic system is the best, but…
My connection to that lyric is shitty food. It’s all over Brooklyn, we still very much live in a food desert, and it’s necessity versus health. You have to pay more to eat the food with less garbage in it.
Right. And then they’re gonna slap a label on it to say something’s better then charge a bit more, but it really isn’t any better. Necessity and health is, I know so many people who can’t really go to the doctor so they get themselves drunk to get through the pain, self-medicating. The fact that people have to choose between living and dying is pretty intense. I don’t have it as worse as a lot of people in Detroit, but I can still feel it, when you have to choose between food and heat, paying for all these things.
Like Baltimore, that membrane between the haves and have-nots in Detroit feels very fragile.
Right. That songs starts as the more comedic or local version of the first song. The first song is all dramatic, but the second is saying “Detroit changed, but I was too busy drinking and sleeping all day.” I’m waking up and all of a sudden there are stadiums.
Where do we wind up by the end? In “Half Sister” she’s still trying to read you.
Yeah, that song is about the stories that you tell yourself. So I made up the story about the half sister and the talking horse. Let’s say there IS a horse that’s hit by lightning and starts to talk, but instead of saying, “Hello, gimme an apple!” it’s saying “You people are all scum.” So they shoot it, stuff it, put it in a museum to show to the kids.
The lesson is, follow your dreams. The people that hold on to this high religion version of America while their actual rights are being swept away. It’s the same thing—look at this statue while we rob you blind. So it’s that. We want to believe in a lie, but there is some sort of truth out there.