The Tardigrade Times #4
How label Don Giovanni inspires honest marketing narratives | Music's role in last week's failed coup | An unpublished interview with Destroyer's Dan Bejar
Don Giovanni co-founder Joe Steinhardt on cultivating narrative truth
Joe Steinhardt harbors no delusions that telling a true story makes for easy marketing. And in a musical sea of exaggerated, marketing-driven narratives, that focus on honesty is what makes Don Giovanni Records so special.
Steinhardt, who co-founded Don Giovanni with Zack Gajewski in 2003, has fostered an eclectic, diverse community of artists and musicians creating work that spans multiple genres. This past 2020 brought powerful and provocative releases from Philadelphia poet, noise musician and activist Moor Mother’s whose Circuit City made many a year-end top albums list. The Cycle by Mourning [A] BLKstar, a self-described “multi-generational, gender and genre non-conforming amalgam of Black Culture,” arrived in May, a week and a half before the murder of George Floyd, as a timely reflection on the zeitgeist. There was also the S/T full length from pop punk band Teenage Halloween, who hail from Don Giovanni’s hometown of New Brunswick, NJ, archival releases from the vaults of American fiddle player Peter Stampfel, and much more. Connecting all these disparate sounds is Don Giovanni’s love of real music, fortified by the label’s commitment to helping each artist tell their own story.
“With narrative, it’s easy to try to bend it,” Stenhardt told me in a lengthy chat by a few days before the new year. “It takes a whole lot more work to figure out what your truth and reality is.”
Read the rest at Rock & Roll Globe
Music's role in last week's failed coup
We can’t understand the treasonous, traitorous insurrection that went down in Washington last week without talking about it through the lens of culture. And among the most frustrating and confounding bits of cultural mutation on display last Wednesday, music certainly played a role.
John Maus @ Basilica Soundscape in 2017 (By Justin Joffe)
Yes, we should definitely talk about musicians Ariel Pink and John Maus, two previously beloved independent artists who confirmed their attendance at the insurrection. Their work has long inspired and provoked, and generated countless features, think pieces and interviews (in fact, a previously unpublished conversation I had with Maus kicked off this newsletter, but more on that later).
There were other musicians present, too, all of whom seemed to suffer some consequences — Georgia musician Jeff Zagers was released from his contract and dropped by his label, while the frontman for Tampa, Fl-based metal band Iced Earth is being sought by cops for storming the Capitol.
But it’s important to remember that music played a role in the events of the day well before the physical insurrection went down. In what was first assumed to be a renegade, trolling dude in the sound booth at Trump’s rally, clips emerged of many ironic songs blaring over the loudspeakers to the MAGA crowd, including Linkin Park’s “In The End,” Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage,” Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend” and Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”.
As the rally was about to get going, these ironic, on-the-nose song choices inspired many a laugh on Twitter, and hot takes flowed like wine.
After what went down later that afternoon, though, I can’t help but wonder if these song choices further antagonized an already militant, mobilized lot. Whatever the case, a few hours later, that joke wasn’t funny anymore.
But music would come up again in the context of the insurrection, most notably when filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer, most known for making a feature documentary about incel culture, published a photo on Instagram of her hanging with musicians Ariel Pink and John Maus in a hotel room.
Pink and Maus already had a bit of a reputation for being provocative — Pink as a bit of a sleazy but charming L.A. flâneur who revels in tacky, kitsch culture, parties wit porn stars and more; Maus as an esoteric philosopher who embeds topical social criticism in his dark, lo-fi synth-based pop music.
But their fans clearly skewed progressive, and when each artist doubled down on their presence in D.C. last week, confirming their support for Trump and last Wednesday’s events, the backlash by those who promote and represent them was swift. Bookings were cancelled, and Pink’s label dropped him.
As the right-wing trolls descended on Mexican Summer, Market Hotel and others for ‘canceling’ Pink, some funny exchanges emerged as music fans imagined how awkward it must be for Trump supporters listening to Pink and Maus for the first time and trying to pretend they liked their music.
For those who followed Pink’s career, from recording his music on tape for Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label to getting a band together and signing to 4AD, his trashy marketing and press aesthetic came off as nothing more than branding, an attempt to associate himself with a Zappa-esque image of profane, but brilliant, absurdity. But after the events of last week, it seems that Pink’s personality in press releases and interviews wasn’t all that much of a farce, after all.
More surprising to music fans was the news that John Maus was there to support Trump, too. Maus has a doctorate in Philosophy, and an assumed reputation for writing from a deeply progressive perspective. He even once released a song called “Cop Killer.”
Suffice to say, this song takes on a different meaning after last week’s insurrection (though Maus and Pink claim they just went to the rally — not the insurrection proper).
In lieu of issuing any response or statement to fans who were distraught to learn that Maus joined Pink in Washington, Maus just tweeted a link to an obscure speech by the Pope of the Reichskonkordat from 1939, well after The Catholic Church had submitted to Nazi rule.
Maus highlighted one passage in particular as a seeming condemnation of the insurrection:
Other budding theologians and philosophers were quick to place these words in their proper historical context:
Expressing their shock and sadness, some John Maus fans pleaded with Maus to abandon his obtuse pontificating and speak his political positions plainly and clearly:
The lesson here is that there’s danger in cryptic communication — be it through art, journalism or public office — when ideas and expressions are vague enough to leave room for interpretation by those intent on practicing hate or violence. And though my role was much smaller, I too fell for Maus’ cryptic bullshit when I interviewed him in 2017. Eyes dilated, he was clearly in a manic state, rambling at a rate I could hardly process.
It made for compelling copy, though, and that’s all that I was thinking while we talked— that there were more than enough usable, juicy quotes there. A more responsible approach would have been to wonder if I was ignoring the potential danger in the manic, spiraling connections that he made because they sounded cool.
There was one particular rant of his that, knowing about him what I know now, I would have challenged more.
“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.”
Just as the Futurist art movement gave way to fascistic impulses and ideas, Maus’ suggesting the concept of Accelerationism — here seemingly a support of things accelerating to a what he arbitrarily deems to be a logical conclusion — is also closely tied to fascist philosophy. While I’m leaving the interview up for now, I’m also calling it what it is — jargon and propaganda that’s harmless on its own but could easily be used to justify Machiavellian violence. And I urge journalist with a platform to not feel satisfied with eccentrics when they spew rhetoric that has a potential to support or foster fascistic, destructive and/or violent ideas.
Media Musings #04 - Destroyer
"I don’t see the state of things as this wildfire that’s gone out of control. I feel like in the case of America, it’s a slow, steady crawl to this exact point."
Each week, I’ll share a conversation about art, media and/or existence that I’ve had with an artist I deeply admire.
The brainchild of renowned Vancouver musician Dan Bejar, Destroyer has released records of idiosyncratic indie rock, subversively smooth easy listening, krautrock and dark post-pop, just to name a few. Whatever the form, each sound serves as an appropriate vessel for the sentiments contained in Bejar’s powerful prose.
The following chat with Bejar took place by phone in 2017 before the release of their fantastic album, “Ken,” and I subsequently interviewed him again ahead of Destroyer’s 2020 album, “Have We Met,” which appeared in the Spring issue of Relix Magaizne.
A couple of quotes from the following chat 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.
Dan Bejar, 3/9/20 @ Brooklyn Steel (by Justin Joffe)
On Ken, are you using pop jargon to discuss other ideas? What’s the poet got to say about the zeitgeist?
I don’t know if it’s an outward-looking record or an inward-looking record, and I don’t know how much it varies lyrically from other Destroyer records. But I would say that it’s kind of more rock-based lyrics, maybe, in some ways. In a way, the style of the record was my version of conjuring up the music that first got me really into music, when I was a teenager in the mid-late ‘80s. A lot of that music had a certain harshness to it, if you think about it. I was into UK indie bands, and they still sounded like they were making pop music. And it was, it was Top 40 music in England. That was the big difference for me.
You mention in the press release that this isn’t a Suede record. But there’s definitely some love for them being explored here, too. You seem to tie it to a time and place.
Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t really thinking about Suede when I made the record, but I was thinking about the certain dour, gray, mystic poet-rocker type. Whether it was Ian McCulloch or not, I was listening to his solo record from the late ‘80s a lot.
There’s a Morrissey/Leonard Cohen line too.
Yeah, those lines come up. I always kind of liked the way that those English post-punk new wave guys would claim Leonard Cohen as an influence, which, in American music, was non-existent at the time. He was someone who could barely put out an album in the states. There was a supreme indifference from the American public, while in UK/Europe this kind of dark poetry could be embraced as a mass thing by a different generation of musicians who weren’t actually that interested in folk music.
The music critic for The New Yorker says that at certain inflective points in history, less accessible music can still find a large audience and make a tremendous impact.
Sure, that’s possible. I personally think that time is over and he should go rewrite his book, but in other cultures outside of the States it was true in the ‘80s, I guess. Teenagers really exoticizing and embracing that darkness as a three-minute rock song, even if it was just new wave bands getting really into Leonard Cohen and The Doors.