Media Musings #01 - John Maus
"That’s what the cell phone commercial argues, that the miraculous is everywhere."
Each week, I’ll share a conversation about art, media and/or existence that I’ve had with an artist I deeply admire.
The musician, composer, philosopher and artist John Maus makes dark synth pop so vintage, it’s practically medieval. He’s also got a brilliant, mercurial mind and speaks with the candor of an oracle whose city is in flames.
The following chat took place in Hudson, NY, at Melissa Auf der Maur’s beloved Basilica Soundscape festival, in 2017. Some of it ran in The National Sawdust Log as part of my Basilica Soundscape coverage that year, and another 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.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
How would you classify yourself, genre-wise?
I’m very unfamiliar with the landscape right now, unfortunately, with what supposedly lies at the vanguard of popular... I never know. We gotta settle on some terminology. I always just say, ‘Post-war popular rock’n’roll, pop, punk, whatever.’ I don’t know what’s going on now.
Is that why the language on your new album [“Screen Memories”] is so focused on pop culture?
The new record, I think, is almost fucking exclusively fixated in a way [that] none of the other records were thematically focused on the Apocalypse, the end of ends. I felt that it was in the air, though the record was done before the last election.
Leonard Cohen died the night of the election.
Yeah, yeah, I was readin’ those obits. He was certainly touched, there’s no doubt about that. The idea’s appropriate.
The master of duality in prose dies the night before our communal conceptions of duality turn to shit.
That might be, if I was going to come at him, that would be where. I think most of his strength was in verse, in a way, or most of his interest was in verse. But popular music as a genre enabled him to write the sort of verse that would have maybe been forbidden in more lofty, ivory tower answering to English poetry.
So I had hoped the record would have come out just then, because it may have been more apropos, but the fixation was totally on the Apocalypse, on the edge of forever.
What do you mean when you sing about “the combine coming?”
I’ve said this, but I didn’t understand that the parable of the wheat and the chaff was so foreign to people today. I guess there’s a video game where the combine are the enemies, and people thought I was talking about that. One guy was making a joke that it was about farm machinery.
That song, and this record, got me thinking about this idea of accelerationism. All these different ways that we consume information are speeding up intentionally to bring about some new age.
That’s great—that may very well be the correct reading. Then we reach other with how we read it at the point where it reaches its termination, when the acceleration is faster than sea, is faster than is allowed, [and] just becomes that black hole. And there is where the gist of the message, in so far as I imagined it, was ‘repent!’ Because it’s at hand, and if you believe as I do…
—It’s a spiritual record for you?
“Yeah, not without lots of apologies. Because there’s the idea, what sets me apart from the techgnostics of Silicone Valley, that the techgnostic more and more becomes the spirituality that holds sway, the ideology that holds sway.
I don’t believe that the concept of life or time could be given it’s due from within time, I don’t think that history could ever be justified from a standpoint that’s historical. With human progress and whatever values they’ve put on the throne, they’re going to explain why the child is being beaten. I don’t go in for any of that. I’m old fashioned—I think that time can only be explained by its end, from some standpoint outside of time, when everything that has a history of its own, and isn’t merely a setting for history, is credited with that history. That would involve some sort of end in the old-fashioned, mythological, messianic, scatological sense.
Hence the wheat and the chaff. The wheat is the gold, the chaff is the bad stuff. The wheat is the gold that’s preserved onto eternity. The wheat’s the reality show, you know? The moment when we turn our back on the hand that’s reaching out—that’s the stuff that’s gotta be somehow impossibly erased to make the whole of it rise, right? So I thought it would resonate in our situation. And it seems all initial indications are, I guess I should’ve known this, that it’s not gonna land that way at all.
Where does your idea of ‘eternia’ fit into this?
“It’s interesting, I mean, I knew in general, ‘City on the Edge of Forever’ is a well-known phrase, that’s a Star Trek episode, but it’s apropos. Indeed, if we embrace the jargon and ideology as it becomes ever-more omnipresent and holds sway in our situation more and more, we are on the edge of some grand some sort of thing, the miraculous. That’s what the cell phone commercial argues, that the miraculous is everywhere.
It used to be my old man like, ‘Buy Brillo, it’ll clean your house!’ Now it’s a commercial that shows a baby grow into an old man and die saying, ‘Buy Sprint!’ and it’s infused with this sort of sublime, all-expansive religious thing that would have been in horror movies when I was a kid. It’s a blasphemy!
That line you asked about, I’m always stealing shit from other places. My brother’s a writer, went to New School. He had a line, like ‘There is an ever eternity, there is an eternity” and then I just kind of flipped it into the He-Man thing so as to make it less… it just seemed to work that way. I liked that idea that, in the context a whole series of fragments about standing on the edge of forever, we need to forget the idea of an all-embracing one and suppose instead that there’s infinite multiplicity of those.
You traffic in a pop psychology on this record very consciously. When did you discover in your own career that looking at these big ideas through the lens of pop jargon or pop iconography was a useful tool for sharing them?
Oh, I don’t mean to suggest that I stand outside of that, any more than I stand outside of English. I don’t suppose that I could ever look at it from afar, I think that’d be very presumptuous. Finally, it’s the language that I’m meant to use. These are the concepts that I’m meant to mobilize, these sorts of images, these memes. These are the tools that we’ve got to work with.
But it carries over to the vanguard of science and technology, though, because if the idea is that these mechanisms all too often if not altogether are meant and supposed to direct everything at the vanguard of molecular biology, artificial intelligence research and network technology, if these dictate the flows of life even more than Washington D.C., if not exponentially more, the networks of AT&T than these residues of 18th Century Enlightenment government, Congress, Senate and a president, that isn’t just a spectacle.
If the idea is to somehow accomplish something [other] than the end that those mechanisms have in store for us, the best way to do it is at the vanguard they’re operating at. The hack already knows this, but also certain instances of recreational drug use, in the sense that they’re the antithesis of psychiatry in a certain way. They’re using the same instruments [to different means].
That was the idea behind Timothy Leary’s vision of utopia.
The figure I’d put to Leary is somebody like [Alexander] Shulgin. He wasn’t necessarily totally clean in the sense that he also made reference a little too much to the cosmic, harebrained mysticism that is complicit entirely with the world, as it stands, as far as I’m concerned. But he was a chemist in Berkley. So instead of pontificating or speculating on some philosophy about these things, the discipline was organic chemistry. That’s the way the machine operates.
There’s a figure operating this way by and large, if not entirely, and so in my mind he’s much more adequate than the Harvard psychologist who got a bunch of acid, bought a house and started talking about how everybody should take it. Shulgin synthesized and substituted thousands of tryptamines and phenethylamines, wrote two books…
And did so in the interest of discovery.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at the very same vanguard, the apparatuses of psychology and molecular biology were operating right alongside him. Things can go so wrong there, though, maybe that’s a bad scene to get into this from.
There’s this newish theory called ‘Hypernormalisation’ that suggests we’re speeding up our rate of consuming the news, art, media etc to a point we can’t possibly keep up with. It suggests that there are vested interests with goals political, financial, ideological et cetera in promoting this speediness.
It’s already been handed over to those, in a sense that I would take further. The wheels that we put in motion already… the interest is not in any one person or one class at all, even though it might have been intended to [be] when the thing was put in place. It’s in the interest of nothing. It’s in the interest of the cogs.
But it’s already too late, because the cogs are already going, the ideology is already in place so that more and more will already be relinquished to their operation because, after all, they’re more intelligent than we are. We’re just hairless apes that believe in tribal gods and kill each other, so listen to Google autocomplete, because just like we are more intelligent than a worm or an ant, it is more intelligent than us.
That’s why it makes my skin crawl when the popular scientists talk about intelligence! [They] always make these sorts of equivocations. They don’t see what’s right in front of them. It’s like the creative scientists thing. The best scientists, the most revolutionary, were born and raised in the German age of Enlightenment. They loved the humanities, they loved poetry, they understood a place for philosophy. They weren’t straight-A students, there was poetry in their education. Heisenberg, Einstein, they were kids, not kids who scored well on their SATs, you know? And they certainly didn't believe that the discipline they were beholden to was somehow mutually exclusive with the humanities, which are totally useless now.
The late night talk show host is joking, ‘What are you gonna do with your degree in Art History, dumbass?! Why don’t you go study Math and Computers. Yeah, fine, math, but if it was this Medieval time with the beautiful ratios…”
“I think it was Kierkegaard musing after someone showed a microscope to Socrates, he thought it was a tool of the selfless, look through here and see everything, what do you see? I have one, they’re weird, but I’m into it. It’s mobilized creatively, which I don’t deny the possibility of. These public intellectuals, these scientists, you crack open their heads and liquid metal will come out. It’s finally pure ideology, isn’t it?
Planet Earth, the BBC documentary, always has to have this Anglo-Darwinist agenda to the narration. ‘Now, see how cruel and hard nature is and how everybody sick and weak… the Americans do that to a lesser extent in their nature programs, but all of them have this moment where, instead of telling us that a spark happened where Copernicus had this idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, they tell us that ‘man was set free from his shackles, from his miserable superstitious state’... no! The Middle Ages are a great example, when some of the most beautiful humanity came to us in all our existence.
What about the Native or Indigenous wisdom? I’m thinking about the concept of ‘erasing your personal history,’ specifically—where does that fit into your understanding of the intersection of science and the humanities?
Yeah, you ushered in the indigenous cultures and I suppose I wouldn’t know. I think it’s really awful when the descendants of whiteness give into this as a sort of exoticism, like going down to the Amazon to take Ayahuasca. It’s very voyeuristic, and it’s a bad bet.
You can’t erase the otherness that Sartre wrote about.
Yeah, and there’s a [distinction to be made between] the oral cultures versus the literate ones. All I’m prepared to do in that instance is bear witness to the difference. I think that’s the only safe bet I can make.
The act of writing is also about how we absorb shit.
You should read Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. He was a Jesuit anthropologist who makes this defense, through field work, of oral peoples against the claims that they’re somehow at a disadvantage, or somehow beneath the literate peoples. It’s a different field of possibility in either case. Six one way, half a dozen the other. But it’s really the other ones who have a conceit that they stand at an advantage.
But we’ve got to bring this back to Existential Music?
Well, existence is what I’m concerned with. Isn’t that something you’re thinking about?
‘Mortality’ is a word I’m more comfortable with, because ‘existence’ is close to consciousness that everybody’s prepared to suppose is understood in advance, but nobody’s even begun to scratch at that wormhole. ‘Sense’ is another word I’ve come to, ‘sense’ in the sense of colors and sounds.
What about our existence, our mortality? Fascism?
It’s all horrifying and obscene for reasons that shouldn’t have to be argued. But strangely enough, and perhaps wrongly, more concerning for me is what I think is a more prevalent conceit in our situation that enables this other thing so on its face vulgar, the more ubiquitous cell phone ideologies, the silicone valley intelligence, which all boils down to the narrative that the bare ass in the Amazon is too stupid to build himself an iPhone because he doesn’t need anything.