Media Musings #6 - Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Operators, Stellium)
"We've gone through the reality melt...the stress test has been applied to reality, and reality lost."
Dan with Operators @ Bowery Ballroom, 7/11/19 (Justin Joffe)
Each week, I’ve been sharing a conversation about art, media and/or existence I’ve had with an artist I deeply admire. As the main newsletter moves to a biweekly publishing schedule, “Media Musings” may follow suit. But for now, we soldier on.
I first met Dan Boeckner, a musician best known for his work in Wolf Parade and Operators, in 2017. Wolf Parade invited me to eat sushi before their Late Night With Stephen Colbert taping, and we discussed existentialism’s role in protest music for Vulture and National Sawdust (RIP). We’ve since talked at length about Operators, Dan’s dystopian sci-fi electronic duo with musician Devojka, and he graciously invited me to write the bio for Wolf Parade’s latest LP, 2019’s Thin Mind.
It goes without saying, but much has happened since then. I caught up with Dan by phone last week, at this critical juncture in Western civilization, because he’s long shown to be the most well-read rocker in the game — diving deep into researching international affairs and using his platforms (Twitter, podcasts) to drag out into the light those under-reported, often fascistic forces that threaten freedom and liberty for normal, working people.
Dan and I talked about the long con of Spotify, the merits of creator-first platforms like Patreon, the connection between QAnon and a ‘60s prankster religion called Discordianism, the pseudo-academic jargon of John Maus, how the working artistic community is getting by right now, and how collectivism can save us.
Before we started recording, you were telling me about a great Rush documentary from 10 years ago.
Yeah, It's Beyond The Lighted Stage by this guy, Sam Dunn. He was a radio DJ for college radio, at Victoria, and was the metal guru. He knew everything about metal. He had all the rare bootlegs, all the hard-to-find Scandinavian black metal records.
And he made an incredible documentary about Rush. They come off looking just very charming even if you can't stand their music. It's a really good portrait of a band that never fit in anywhere and was still successful.
You strike me as a musician who both appreciates the brevity of a tight punk song, but also can get down with good prog rock. I thought that a lot of the rockabilly-influenced grit of ‘70s New York punk, at least, was a complete reaction against the bloat of prog.
Oh, totally. There's a balance between that full-on Sham '69 style, musically reactionary way of presenting something as new while basically just doing an amped-up version of 1950s rock. I know where the impetus to do that comes from, but there is a balance between that, and, say, the Emerson, Lake and Palmer Tarkus record.
I think that middle ground exists in bands like Wire, or even to a certain extent, the English Beat or General Public. With General Public, the small feeling of punk is still in there, but they're just pulling from so many different corners.
English Beat had a really weirdly democratic way of doing a reunion where I think there are, at any given time, two or three English Beats touring.
That's a good idea for a franchise [laughs].
Yeah. It's kind of a Marxist idea for splitting a band up. It's just like, "Okay. We all own this name. We can all go tour and play as The English Beat."
I’ve written a bunch about the hologram of protest and activism in popular music, which looks like something of substance but is ultimately hollow. You and I have talked about this a bit, too, specifically though the lens of Adam Curtis and Hypernormalisation. And there seems to be a difference between speaking in political platitudes of healing and reconciliation versus actually putting a name to something like fascism, actually calling it out. You and Wolf Parade have alluded to the ever-present threat of fascism in songs like, “You’re Dreaming,” but I don't know why more musicians aren't leaning into anti-fascist art aggressively right now.
I don't know either. I think it's because either they're not thinking about it, they're not politically committed to it, or they haven't just fucking melted their brains. We could call it a big pent of anti-fascist writing and film and literature. I've definitely spent most of my adult life trying to learn as much as possible about resistance to fascism and fascist urges, and waves, and politics.
I don't think a lot of people have my particular brain disease for that. But people are aware — you can’t not be aware of it. I think part of it is, there’s a feeling like you don't want to alienate anyone. You are selling a product, and that product is you. If you come down on one side or another, you consciously know that you are excluding, or potentially excluding, a buyer base.
That mentality seems baked into a lot of new up and coming acts, too, who may have a platform but don't exercise it. But that wasn’t always the case. I would argue that Wolf Parade falls within that last group of "indie bands" to get signed to tentpole indie labels when there was still a meritocracy, when bands were getting discovered based largely on their ability to come up in a live scene organically, or create one, and compose really compelling work.
There was still a channel, a pipeline for those acts to get signed — I don't know if it was CMJ and the college radio network or whatever, but it seems like maybe streaming killed those pipelines. There's more risk assessment now by those holding the money.
I guess what I’m saying is, you’re a liability.
[laughs] Yeah, exactly. The streaming angle made things a lot more difficult in this very weird way, in that the people who were pushing the streaming platforms like Daniel Ek, Spotify's CEO… the ‘Swedish Meatball’. Fuck that guy, man. Anyway, I recently went on the Trash Future podcast to unpack the financials behind Spotify, which — surprise, surprise — is a literal fucking house of cards.
Doing research for guests on the podcast, I found an article with Daniel Ek talking about how Spotify was good because it was going to pay artists, whereas pirating was not paying artists at all. And what happened was, Spotify got sold to the music industry as a democratizing tool that would completely level the playing field.
When I get a free promo for a record, I buy the vinyl or I buy a shirt. When I'm at a show that I’m on the list for because I’m covering it, I spend money places where I know goes directly to the artist. I think something similar happened with pirating, where, people were engaging with artists more directly. You were getting their work for free, but it was almost like putting a dollar in the tip jar, and then, there was an exchange opened.
I remember having a CD that I burned that I would listen to on my way to work, that was just, really low bitrate rips of Spoon demos and Wilco demos, improperly tagged, not even the albums I was looking for [laughs]. But every time those bands came through Montreal, I'd get to see the show and I would buy the records. I would buy a t-shirt. And I think that was the same experience for a lot of people. Those pirating communities just fed fandom and there was still a way to financially support bands by buying the physical albums.
I think it was really overstated how much LimeWire and Napster were going to kill the music industry. And then Spotify came along as this "democratizing force" that was going to pay musicians and it totally collapsed the industry. Well, it heavily damaged record labels that didn't buy stock options, or interest in Spotify. It hurt the middle, like what you're talking about, the big tentpole Indie labels, I think really got hammered by streaming.
Dan with Operators @ Bowery Ballroom, 7/11/19 (Justin Joffe)
One thing that hasn't really been explored by non-major record labels like Merge, Sub Pop, Anti Is a collectivization of that part of the industry, that segment of the industry. I know it exists for electronic music and for hip hop. If these labels could find commonality, collectivize, and then move everything over to a different platform, I think that would be a start.
I guess the parallel in electronic music would be a platform like Boiler Room where all these niche labels like Warp, Ghostly, Mute give their artists a shared destination to share and promote their work. Is that what you mean, more of a single, centralized content platform and network community?
Yeah. This is pure fantasy, but my best case scenario is that it is an owner's cooperative where you enter into some agreement with your distributor and with your record label, where the collective gets to vote on how we are going to run royalty payments, what are we going to set the royalty rates at. Hand power back to the workers. Because right now with Spotify, you are utterly powerless. And, I know there's been a lot of artists organization against Spotify with grassroots petitions —
— Making literally, no traction. It's opened no window for dialogue.
No. And not only has it opened no window, it's like ... I respect the Music Workers Alliance. I think they're doing some of the better work in trying to collectively organize musicians. It's a lot of work, and it's going to be a long process.
But, when that open letter to Spotify came out, which I signed, Spotify came back with a press release saying, "Hey, we have a new option for artists. We will promote you on our platform for a lowered royalty rate." And then in the fine print, it's like, "This may not actually work." It spit in the faces of people trying to organize against them.
The point being is that, without leverage, Spotify and these platforms in general will just continue to do whatever the fuck they want. If you zoom out, the idea that a company like Spotify can be publicly shamed into doing anything is absurd. They don't care. They don't have a corporate conscience. Even if people leave the platform, it doesn't matter.
This thing is just generating its own... it doesn't make money. It's just a bizarre bunch of interwoven financial schemes between record labels, Tencent, and Spotify itself, who all own little pieces of each other and have essentially created an ecosystem that generates money out of speculation.
The idea that 10,000 people saying "stop being mean to artists" is going to make them do anything different, is… I feel the only way out is a fucking collectivization of record labels and artists with common interests pulling their ship off of Spotify.
In lieu of that collectivization, more artists are just going directly to their fans. I know you've been leaning into Patreon this past year, and appearing on more podcasts than ever.
Can these platforms help more creative people share their process, and be their own PR agents, so to speak, without profaning their work?
It's hard. I'll be very candid. In late February of last year, Wolf Parade played what is definitely going to be the last live show we play for at least another year. By the time we get back on stage, I think over two years will have passed.
So, we played a show in New York and canceled a tour in Europe, which turned out to be the right move considering we would have been stuck in Ireland had we done it, because Canada sealed its borders. After that, Wolf Parade stopped making money and Operators stopped making money.
Dan at Wolf Parade’s first reunion show, 5/17/16 (Justin Joffe)
So I make money, I get songwriter royalties, I get measly check from Sound Exchange that reflects some of my Spotify earnings and streaming earnings. But without touring, my income has effectively been cut by 90%, which is unsustainable for a living.
I immediately pivoted to Patreon, and Devojka and I spent a month or two setting up what we thought would be a sustainable Patreon. That was was a ton of work. It was a huge learning curve to go from a life where you're constantly preparing to be on the road, and everything is focused around live performance, to learning how to use OBS [Open Broadcaster Software] for livestreaming, investing in equipment to actually put out a Patreon that isn't just a pile of garbage.
I wonder if, for a person who makes a living off of their creative practice, having to lean into the logistics of your own output that much and build yourself a sustainable model can be somewhat psychically threatening to your creative process, to your making time for yourself to be lucid and to be weird.
Yeah, I mean, the happy ending to this is that it works. And one of the side effects was that I realized this way of doing music production and being creative allowed me to expose this fan base to a totally different side of our creative process and things that we were interested in. I can put up a 20 minute modular ambient jam, or just hang out with patrons, stream films and talk about politics or music theory.
And that for me, has been really good. It hasn't been a one-to-one replacement for touring. Besides the fact that it's paying my rent, I can take away that it truly opened up this other part of the creative process.
Has appearing on podcasts and speaking about these processes helped you codify your own ideas and thoughts to keep them from falling into the fucking black hole we're living in? Are you taking any of that hustle back to your own practice or your own work?
Yeah. I mean, I think I am. It basically allowed me to work out a lot of things in a format that is built to work those things out in, and it opened up some space in my own creative side.
We’ve spoken before about the obscure theory of Accelerationism, and this idea that accelerationist and the futurist ideas can act as a gateway to fascism. We were also talking about John Maus, and his words on both theories. How do you interpret this public drama of his that's been unfolding around his persona after he showed up in Washington to support Trump on the day of the Capitol riot?
I almost hate giving it more oxygen, but, if you look at Ariel Pink and John Maus's careers, respectively — music aside, right? I'm not making an aesthetic judgment and I'm leaving their music out of it. I actually like John Maus’ stuff, but if you look at both of their careers, and look at everything that they've said since they were popularized by Pitchfork and stuff like that, they've always been like this. And it just getting worse, the older they get. Ariel Pink has always been a fucking troll.
Ariel Pink at “Mexican Summer: A Decade Deeper”, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, 11/17/18 (Justin Joffe)
The same day he went on Tucker Carlson and you had this reality melt of MAGA people asking how they can support this new musician they just heard, he launched a Slapp lawsuit to silence someone who accused him of sexually assaulting them, right? It's pretty fucking obvious.
For that pop existentialism story I talked to you, Maus, Protomartyr, and Dan Bejar. I wound up publishing the Maus interview in this newsletter late last year, because I hadn't published it in its entirety.
Just pulling out some of these quotes, I just want to read these to you because they now read as a precursor, or weird pseudo academic justification, for fascism. And I didn't catch that at the time.
‘Pseudo academic’ being the phrase that's going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Yeah, but I didn't pick out the pseudo. He said:
"I don't believe that the concept of life or time could be given a few from within time. I don't think that history would ever be justified from a standpoint that's historical. With human progress and whatever values they put on the throne, they're going to explain why the child was being beaten. I don't go in for any of that. I'm old fashioned. I think that time can be explained by its end. From some standpoint outside of time. When everything that has a history of its own, and isn't nearly a setting for history is credited with that history. That would involve some end in the old fashioned mythological, messianic, scatological sense.”
Now I'm reassessing my responsibility in my role as the journalist. How do I catch that stuff? What could I have done differently going into that interview to have observed his jargon it for what it was? How could I have better stepped outside as my own immediate benefits from it?
Yeah. Honestly, I don't know, I mean, his form of public communication is academic pseudo babble shock and awe, right? That’s his whole thing. We covered a really long interview that he did years ago on Fortune Kit. He wrote something like 24,000 words in response to a review of his album, including emails to this poor woman that made the mistake of giving him her email address.
And he just published all of his unrequited emails to her. She never answered a single one, and they just get progressively more and more creepy. Basically what he's saying there is just a weird mix of post-modernism and extremely surface level readings of trad-cath (traditional Catholic) stuff.
It's just academic shock and awe bluster, but I think what it's hiding is that there is no coherent political theory underneath it, right? You never really get a sense of what this person believes in. Maybe they know that they don't believe in anything, and they feel they need to convey the fact that they believe in something, so they just couch it.
John Maus @ Basilica Hudson, 9/15/17 (Justin Joffe)
He's just couching it into these academic terms that are meant to distract you from the fact that there's fucking nothing there, except for, now, just a weird return to Catholicism. It’s an ideological cul-de-sac.
To position yourself as the anti, as the all-seeing resistor, and then, your only exit is the arms of the church? The arms of the Vatican, after he got criticized for going to that rally, he just posted like it was the—
Yeah, on his Twitter he posted a link to The Reichstag Pope's address to people after they were already taken over by the Third Reich, but before they were all murdered by them.
Okay. Sure. Interesting thing to post, but let's talk about what the Catholic church did after fucking the war, and during the war. You want to know why fucking Klaus Barbie ended up in South America or about the creation of Ustaše, whose grandchildren are actively trying to do coups against the working class?
In a lot of Catholic countries that went fascist, Croatia being a huge example, the church helped establish what were called ‘rough lines’ to get these fascists out after the communists.
Like the opposite of an underground railroad?
Exactly. The evil underground railroad. I know that true. My friend Michael Judge has gone on True Anon to talk with Bryce and Elizabeth about what Bryce calls The Spider Network.
This is a great series on True Anon featuring Michael Judge, who also has a podcast also called Death Is Around The Corner. And they get into this. The role that the Catholic church played in post-World War II in essentially continuing the work of fascism with things like P2 Lodge, Operation Gladio, means the church is complicit in suppression of the left and support of these fugitive Nazis. So, [John Maus’ Twitter post] was funny to me. I was like, "What is the point of this? What point are you trying to make here?”
And he's full of shit either way, because it means the academic side of him didn't do research, or he's trying to retcon that part out-
Or he doesn't know or he'll explain it later. I mean, if you stare at an apple long enough and think about an orange, you'll eventually see an orange.
So are you a permanent Fortune Kit co-host?
Yeah! We got Patrick from Titus Andronicus coming in tonight. So, should be good.
I have a good media diet as a reader, but part of what's prevented me from having such a pulse on the podcast landscape is the vastness and niche of it all. How do you keep abreast of all this stuff? And logistically, how do you make time to listen?
The time thing is easy. When Devojka and I are doing domestic stuff, if I'm in the kitchen cooking dinner or preparing food for the week, I listen to a podcast. If I'm cleaning the house, I listen to a podcast. I rarely ever just sit down and listen to one without doing some manual labor along with it. It just replaced the radio for me. And for a lot of people, I think. I find out about stuff that I want to listen to through my network of Twitter friends.
What would you describe as the main thrust of Fortune Kit?
People talking about music. It's basically that. It's the loosest theme for a podcast ever.
I would say, one or two of our best our have been the more political ones that we've done. So I can give you the ideological yin and yang of the podcast — on one hand, we had Noah Kulwin and Brendan James on from the Blowback podcast, which is a chronicle of the Iraq war and one of the best pieces of media I've ever listened to. We had them on to talk about the music. The political and cultural climate of music during the Iraq war in America.
And we had Michael Judge on to talk about the CIA weaponizing music as a regime change tool in Cuba, specifically. This was a failed attempt to start a pro democracy rap band that would flip the Cuban government, which was an utter failure.
So, there's that side of things. And then, the other side is that, we just spent a month reading Tommy Lee's biography.
If there's one theme that I noticed in your work really, aside from the sci-fi dystopian stuff, it’s this interest in flash in the pan social movements and demonstrations that stand outside of the system, or the ecosystem or structure of the time that they're in. There seems to be an untold history of movements and demonstration-oriented bands that aren't exactly punk bands.
Yeah. There was a great band from Montreal — besides, Think About Life, they're my favorite — called Les Georges Leningrad, and they fit into that whole world that you're talking about.
What's next for you? What are you looking forward to this year, in terms of the podcast? How involved are you in Stellium?
I'm a full member. It's basically Devojka, me, and Tim Kingsbury from Arcade Fire, but it's Devojka’s project. She writes the songs, Tim and I see what she says and record them. And I love it. I mean, it's super liberating to be in a band like that, and we had a really great set. Our last session was up at the Arcade Fire’s recording studio.
And it's just really nice to just click with three people like that. My personal relationship with Devojka and my relationship with Tim aside, just artistically, I think it really works.
Looking in, there appeared to have been a genuine sense of collectivism in the Montreal indie scene during the early aughts. That sense of community is what made it look so special to us outsiders. Also a sense of spectacle, an almost baroque theatricality to the performance. I feel like you understand that idea of what it means to build a DIY spectacle and that seems like a distinctly like Quebecois style to me. Does that make any sense?
It does. I've less absorbed the cultural lessons of the Quebecois as a “Cirque Du Soleil” type spectacle. But I will say, one thing that Victoria and then Vancouver exported to Montreal and melded with Montreal culture was the idea of ‘the royal clown.’
Dan with Operators @ Bowery Ballroom, 7/11/19 (Justin Joffe)
Just a dirt bag with a flower in their lapel delivering a poem and then falling down a flight of stairs. The cosmic fool. The educated clown. I think that was a big part of Wolf Parade’s early aesthetic presence.
And in a way there's a demonstrative angle to that shtick too. It's saying here, this theatricality, this performative spectacle, is portable. It liberates it from the opera box or whatever.
Yeah. Going back to John Maus, when I saw the first PR cycle around him, and him creating his persona, it was funny to me because the aesthetic within my group of friends had always been academia. Because they're all a lot of Wolf Parade adjacent, and even some members of Wolf Parade have gone on to academia. Hadji has a PhD. Dante became a professor. So, we were always half-dirt bag, half-Hadji busting out critical theory or whatever.
But I think the difference between us and the Maus approaches would be, in our case, it'd be like, you would talk about Walter Benjamin and then do a Chris Farley-style face plant on a coffee table, destroying it to get laughs.
Let’s talk about influential writers. You recently told me to read this Eric Davis book.
Yeah. Eric Davis’ writing on Discordianism is interesting. I think it came to mind because I'm 3/4 of the way through High Weirdness, which touches on how the hippie philosophy mutated in the ‘70s into something which, on one hand, was very light and apolitical in the new age movement and a retreat from material politics in political philosophy, or personal philosophy that resulted in a lot of lighter, new age thinking being more and more self-focused.
And then on the other hand, hippie philosophy split into another apolitical cul-de-sac, which was Discordianism. Discordianism was outlined in Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson Illuminatus trilogy, which is like the vast dumber version of Gravity's Rainbow that is totally nihilistic.
So, this Discordianism idea as it pertains to the Illuminatus trilogy... how do you connect that term to this alternate branch of hippy idealism in High Weirdness?
The middle section of High Weirdness covers the creation and metabolization of the Illuminatus trilogy, and one big function of Discordianism is this idea that shows up in Illuminatus is called ‘Operation Mindfuck’ which is pretty interesting. I want to just read from a Wiki article on Illuminatus, but I think it explains it pretty well:
“ Every view of reality that is introduced in the story is later derided in some way, whether that view is traditional or iconoclastic. The trilogy is an exercise in cognitive dissonance, with an absurdist plot built of seemingly plausible, if unprovable, components. Ultimately, the readers are left to form their own interpretations as to which if any of the numerous contradictory conspiracy theories presented by the characters are valid or plausible and which ones are simply satire gags, or shaggy dog jokes.”
And this is where it gets interesting. “This postmodern lack of belief in consensus reality is a cornerstone of the semi-humorous chaos-based religion of Discordianism. Extracts from its sacred text, the Principia Discordia by Malaclypse the Younger, are extensively quoted throughout the trilogy.”
Dan with Operators @ Bowery Ballroom, 7/11/19 (Justin Joffe)
The key Discordian practice known as ‘Operation Mindfuck’ is a deliberate attempt to create practical jokes with the purpose of positive social confusion. So, this is the darkest version of the cosmic fool. And I was thinking about that a lot when I was watching the Capitol insurrection, because I feel like QAnon, and that entire movement, is a bizarre outgrowth of Discordianism that has no purpose.
Even though it claims to just be a big joke, I think its purpose was to weaken the state. To break down reality. Whereas with this QAnon stuff, I don't think it actually has a purpose. Its horrible race of intention and philosophy where, you see, when they get into the Capitol, they have no idea what they're going to do. There's no goal beyond keeping the TV man as president.
That part about how this philosophy allows the reader, or whomever, to draw their own conclusions seems ripe for weaponization, ripe for bad actors to hijack, or ripe for manipulation by people who are conscious of how this works.
The phrase ‘to draw your own conclusions’ is at the center of whatever this breakdown of consensus reality is, you know what I mean? You see that rhetoric echoed over and over again. And QAnon posts where they will be talking about mole children and under central park in New York, for instance, right? They'll say, "I've got this from my own research. I recommend that you do your own research and draw your own conclusion."
With QAnon itself, resistance to election results, and then the greater anger and frustration with these people's place in the world, whether it's valid or not… it's not so much that this movement represents a new Discordian branch of thought.
I think we are living in the shattered consensus reality that Discordianism wants to bring about, and we have to ask ourselves, "What is a new religion look like if the Discordians won?” It looks like QAnon.
We've gone through the reality melt of Discordianism. The stress test has been applied to reality, and reality lost. So now QAnon is the perfect movement to spring up in that post-reality melt environment.
There’s just a general lack of consensus reality, and that has been my deep sadness over the last couple of days. Even watching the Biden inauguration and watching liberal reaction to the Biden inauguration was upsetting to me.
Well, they definitely edited the socialist-leaning verses out of “This Land is Your Land.” And Garth Brooks singing “Amazing Grace” after we swore in the first Black female VP certainly was something, too.
I mean, you want to talk about cognitive dissonance? Watching the centrist liberal reaction to the inauguration, which was pretty much across the board, finally, we can breathe again, everything is different, America is normal, right?
And the danger of it was born out, almost immediately, and quietly. On the first day of Joe Biden's presidency, he recognized Juan Guaidó as the acting legitimate president of Venezuela. The country of Venezuela approached the bank that is holding most of their funds in the UK to buy a bunch of vaccines. Basically, they wanted to withdraw funds to buy, I think, a million vaccines and Guaidó blocked it. Because he has tacit legitimization from Canada and the United States.
And that to me, is just like, when you see liberals posting about, "Now racism is..." Mostly white liberals, posting about how racism has been solved because Joe Biden is president, and then, you read the shit about Venezuela desperately trying to get money out of a fucking international bank so they could buy vaccines being blocked by a guy that no one voted for.
Your ability to go deep into these sort of scandals that stay outside of the main news cycle, to synthesize and understand them with nuance, never ceases to amaze me. How do you keep your watchdog antennae up? And how do you keep that energy up while finding some solace in sharing these narratives that get suppressed?
I talk to my friends. During the pandemic, even a little bit before the pandemic, I realized the limitations of going online in whatever form and talking about, doing policy political change. I see that as more of a pressure valve for myself, so I don't go insane.
Devojka and Dan as Operators @ Bowery Ballroom, 7/11/19 (Justin Joffe)
But where I feel the real emotional nourishment and material political organizing is in knowing my neighbors, and making sure to take time out to talk to my friends about these things. Even if they completely disagree with me. I know saying that aloud sounds trite and stupid, but I think it's the only way to make —
Well, that's the seed where collectivism starts.
Yeah. Knowing the people in your neighborhood, exchanging ideas with your friends, and supporting them. If the pandemic has taught me anything, I've just gone completely back to basics.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.