Most tedious thing said by worthless VHS idiot JOHN MAUS in p4k interview

WE GOT CHEESE FLYIN OUT

I don't rate his music but give everything I've read (interviews) and seen (live performance) he is fucking hilarious, and I'm pretty sure it's intentional (to a degree).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c2/WikipediaCounterVandalism20060611.png

is carrot top a lecturer or a student?

thought that was dj mom jeans

So, I called him an asshole on Twitter (though not directly) and he read it and struck up a surprisingly gentlemanly exchange where he apologised for coming across as a dick and I apologised for badmouthing someone I've never met off the back of a Q&A. (I don't like slagging people off on Twitter but it's easy to do it in a flash of irritation.) He seems genuinely depressed and regretful about the whole thing. He's since deleted our conversation so that the only thing on his Twitter feed is his apology.

Made me realise that I normally applaud provocative, pretentious interviewees but when one of them says something I violently disagree with (ie the record shops line) I can be as quick to shoot down their whole personality as anybody. Anyway, he seems like a decent enough guy who wanted to have some fun with a meat-and-potatoes Q&A and was naive enough not to anticipate a backlash. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for anyone who responds to criticism with "my bad" rather than "fuck you".

THIS is what happens when the accelerated blog culture forces us to play firsties firsties firsties all the time, and thus pull some dysfunctional social retard from obscurity and shove a microphone in his face and tweetblast his moron dribblings to 1,000,000 twitter followers.

This is bullshit. The music press has always run short, early interviews with acclaimed but cult-level new artists. You seem to forget that music journalism existed before the internet. And whatever else Maus may be he's clearly not a moron.

I am still waiting for this ridiculous man to endear himself to me and he's not doing a very good job of it.

but having read DL's post just there, I guess some people just aren't supposed to be interviewed.

I thought whiney was the dude who is super into chillwave!?

― lizard tails, a self-regenerating food source for survival (wk), Wednesday, August 3, 2011 8:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://i.imgur.com/zi7hd.gif

If you look at the Billboard in the last decade the only number-one hit that hasn’t been hip hop was Nickleback--

Kind of lol to think of James Blunt, Carrie Underwood, Daniel Powter, Plain White Ts, Coldplay, etc., as rappers.

can we talk about jean-luc nancy in this thread too? I am reading his book the deconstruction of christianity right now and enjoying it; I read some of corpus before and dug that too

also I guess I'm late to this clusterfuck but how hilarious is it that the artist/audience/retailer/media relationship in the indie blogosphere has become so poisonous that everyone would assume [random indie flavor-of-the-month X] is looking to take some totally unprovoked shots at their barely-solvent mom&pop operations, when he is p.clearly taking part in the time-honored indie tradition of anti-corporate rhetoric

(answer: less hilarious than it is sad)

It's interesting that Whiney's perspective is so warped by the internet's hall of mirrors that Maus's comments can only be read as "trolling" (just as a certain kind of reader assumes that every contentious opinion piece is just a SEO ploy) rather than part of a decades-old tradition of smart musicians mouthing off in interviews. It's a faulty assumption to think that every single musician working today is as interested in the mechanics of online discourse as most ILXors are. In the 80s people used to say all kinds of interesting, sometimes asshole-ish, inflammatory shit - it's not some new development.

I wasn't the one who said he was trolling, I said he was a dumbass

'trolling' not really exclusively used to talk abt online interaction either at this point

It's interesting that Whiney's perspective is so warped by the internet's hall of mirrors that Maus's comments can only be read as "trolling" (just as a certain kind of reader assumes that every contentious opinion piece is just a SEO ploy) rather than part of a decades-old tradition of smart musicians mouthing off in interviews. It's a faulty assumption to think that every single musician working today is as interested in the mechanics of online discourse as most ILXors are. In the 80s people used to say all kinds of interesting, sometimes asshole-ish, inflammatory shit - it's not some new development.

r u trolling now?

Um, no.

Sorry if I misassigned "trolling" to you in this case Whiney. I just feel like your analysis is generally so inside-baseball that it ignores all the other reasons musicians do and say certain things.

Nope, this is just dumbass opens mouth, is dumbass.

when he is p.clearly taking part in the time-honored indie tradition of anti-corporate rhetoric

nonsense. his comments make it pretty clear he's talking about a stereotype of the 'hip' independent record store.

not wishing to go too far down this road of argument but the 80s version of this would've presumably been someone advocating taping all your LPs and never buying anything, or even *dumdumdum* STEALING them from the store in the name of 'anti-corporate rhetoric'... which I don't think would get blithe acceptance from any corner of rock fandom at any time

xpost did you ever buy a punk CD at a sam goody's

did you ever worry that the slightly-older teenage girls working at coconut's would tell all their friends you were a total fuckin weirdo

The only thing that really upset me was his Beethoven-with-an-iPod bit because everyone knows Beethoven went deaf and Mr. Maus obviously knows this. So in the midst of so much Classical Music namedropping it kind of comes across as kind of pandering, like he was aware he was sounding a bit pompous and decided to play dumb for a minute.

did you ever buy rap CDs at wherehouse from a dude who had never heard of public enemy

did you hear the one about the guy who went out of his way to be offended by something somebody said about 'hipsters' on the internet

Traditionally before we made our artists heroes they have a few years to do zine interviews and local things and fuck up and learn what not to say and how not to say it. But THIS is what happens when the accelerated blog culture forces us to play firsties firsties firsties all the time, and thus pull some dysfunctional social retard from obscurity and shove a microphone in his face and tweetblast his moron dribblings to 1,000,000 twitter followers. It's not cute or funny, but sad.

People who were being dumbasses in zine interviews in pre-Internet days usually just kept on acting like dumbasses when they got music press attention. If anything they realized that acting like a dumbass got them huge attention and they amplified that even more when a bigger audience was reading. Not that Maus is a dumbass. On the contrary, his interviews (including this P4K one) are hugely entertaining. And besides, he's in his 30s and has been doing this for years. How does "firsties" apply in this case? His career seems to have grown pretty slowly/naturally compared to a lot of his contemporaries.

"hey, he's clearly talking about me — even though I am, of course, not a hipster — and he's getting me all wrong!"

(it was me. I am the guy who got offended. I am doing it right now.)

xp You're confusing "dumbass" with "clever but has different opinions to me".

what was clever or intelligent about anything he said?

- My round John, what are you drinking?
"Well that would all depend on the deeper contextuality of the question. What am I drinking? This is a mysterious quandary... In fact I dislike such questions because they imply a situation in which I would have a preferred beverage by which I align my tastes and affiliations. I do hate the pub."

- I'm gonna put a couple of quid in the jukebox, John. Any requests?
"Do they have Yakety Sax?"

I just feel like your analysis is generally so inside-baseball that it ignores all the other reasons musicians do and say certain things.

― Now he's doing horse (DL), Thursday, August 4, 2011 2:30 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark

i do feel like this is a good broader point to make about online discourse, whether or not it's relevant to whiney in this instance.

xpost "whatever will make u like me"

I feel like every artist/musician/etc should be allowed to use that answer once per interview (but only once, so choose wisely!)

You're confusing "dumbass" with "clever but has different opinions to me".

lol

neither side in this debate coming off particularly well

Why aren't we hearing from owners of "the concert hall" and how they will refuse to book him?

they couldn't hear him over the sound of some dude's oxygen tank

i had no idea some dude was having lung issues

These questions are difficult because they're part and parcel with a situation that would define us as a list of cultural commodities we've consumed. This is a very banal idea. Facebook doesn't seem to have our genetic code on it-- it has the list of books we "like." That's how we define ourselves today. I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound like a douchebag making an obvious point. One can't help but sound like a douchebag when talking about the books you like.

You could certainly argue that's a precious, pretentious, obnoxious point about the Guest List format and Facebook "like"s but I don't think it's dumb. (xp to call all destroyer)

xp BTW, Beethoven wasn't totally deaf till his late period so I doubt the iPod time-machine scenario was meant to be some clever meta joke.

i just don't get his argument. FFS, how hard is it to answer the question "What are your favourite books?". It's a very simple question.

If they were trying to find out more about his "genetic code" they'd have got him to send in a piss sample.

I take his point to be that the Guest List format is reductive and artifical so he's going to question it and sometimes take the piss out of it. But he comes across so badly in doing so that he would have been better off saying no to the Q&A in the first place. Because it's a Q&A with no comment from the interviewer it's hard to tell if he was being a passive-aggressive asshole in the interview (in which case fuck him) or just having fun with it. I interviewed Jack from These New Puritans and he said loads of things that, if you weren't aware of the humour with which he said them, would have come across just as badly.

Shouldn't it be the interviewer's duty to provide context in this case then? Although I get that Guest List is a Q&A and there's not so much room for background comments. Whatever the case, JM's done a very good job of coming off as indie music's http://images.mylot.com/userImages/images/postphotos/2266518.jpg

I take his point to be that the Guest List format is reductive and artifical so he's going to question it and sometimes take the piss out of it. But he comes across so badly in doing so that he would have been better off saying no to the Q&A in the first place. Because it's a Q&A with no comment from the interviewer it's hard to tell if he was being a passive-aggressive asshole in the interview (in which case fuck him) or just having fun with it. I interviewed Jack from These New Puritans and he said loads of things that, if you weren't aware of the humour with which he said them, would have come across just as badly.

That's exactly how I feel. I know musicians who went the semiotics/MFA/philosophy degree route, and they all talk like this. The academic loopholes, the roundabout, unnecessary caveats thrown in to prove a point. It's jarring, sure, but it's entertaining and interesting to see somebody with such a focused and specific language to grapple with something as unexpressive as a Proust Questionnaire or a Guest List.

To simply say "he's a dumbass" reeks of anti-intellectualism. I'd say he's self-obsessed, he's pretentious in that he assumes that his anti-capitalist attitudes are acceptable to reference in passing with no context. But to raise arms against him I wish you'd form a more coherent argument than posting his publicist's e-mail, slagging off his contributions to other people's music, calling him a 'douchenozzle', etc.

I do agree with Whiney's 'acceleration' statement, but I feel more sympathetic. I used to love doing a band's first interview, trying to suss out even a tiny bit coherence from their green faces.

"you" = the haters on this thread, not you, DL.

Should have known Maus was taking the mickey.

seconds ago: hello, this is john maus, please listen to my new album on spotify *sounds*

Good thing he threw in the "don't want to sound obvious" caveat, because i was going to call him on it before i even finished that sentence.