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

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.

To simply say "he's a dumbass" reeks of anti-intellectualism.

if his pompous, self-absorbed gibberish is "intellectualism," then count me in on the anti- side. i'm not against grad school, i'm against people whose every word sounds like they're secretly saying "I WENT TO GRAD SCHOOL"

language is a virus

now you've got it too whiney

... the only cure is to post this to ten of your facebook friends before sundown tonight!

then u will get a surprise kiss from john maus

@ Whiney, I just don't see any immediate difference between his self-absorbed gibberish and anybody else's except that John Maus makes records that you can't stand.

don't think there's anything wrong with 'attacking' this fellow since he made such provocative comments in a public space.

it is also possible to think self-absorbed gibberish is across-the-board annoying, wherever the interviewee's tongue is in relation to his cheek.

^^^ this also.

xp That's an important factor. Personally I give far more leeway to artists whose music I like, as do most people - hence the general collapse in tolerance for MIA's no-dafter-than-usual rhetoric once it became apparent that MAYA was a dud.

It's a shame that, by his own admission, Maus botched it. If you look at an early Manic Street Preachers interview, they'd thought about what they wanted to say, put it brilliantly and lapped up the outrage. Maus's painful self-awareness and attempts to interrogate the format are far too convoluted and sincere to be trolling, hence the subsequent remorse. Even the jokes feel sincere if you know what I mean. I know the meaning of trolling has become diffuse but I always think of it as essentially motivated by a nihilistic "ha ha, fuck you if you're offended" attitude (hence Tyler qualifies) and that's not what's going on here.

Maus's painful self-awareness

don't think this guy is self-aware at all.

Self-aware about his role as an interviewee, not self-aware about his capacity to sound like a douche.

interview was a great read. i always appreciated maus's ability to come off as simultaneously smart/dumb, irreverent/serious, provocative/harmless in his lyrics, and this seems to have carried over into the shitstorm of actual internet discourse and that is awesome.

the semi-annual ilm tradition of getting pissed off by a new p4k-darling is embarrassing enough as is, but things get several degrees more embarrassing when record store employees are moved to action because of comments made one of ariel pink's proteges in a friggin guest list feature on pitchfork

yes, we should continue to support someone who wants us out of our jobs. makes sense to me! (p.s. never heaed this guy's music, not a pitchfork reader.)

xpost,

indie is a small universe, yo

Q: Are there any other records Academy refuses 2 carry?

my point is that this whole thing is so stupid and harmless! and pulling his records seems silly and reactionary, regardless of whether or not he actually meant what he said

I don't disagree with any of his obvious and portentously made points, he just clearly had no idea that he was in completely the wrong forum to make those points without coming off like a solipsistic fool. Given the tone of his apologies I have the sense he had no idea how obnoxious he would come off.

xp If you're a record-store employee I think you have every right to be pissed off. That was the only bit that made me angry because it was so ignorant - the rest varied from interesting to comically pretentious.

if this guy is doing a bad parody of tortured philosophy grad student speak applied to an innocuous form questionnaire in order to get a brief rise out of people, it's annoying

if he's expressing actual deeply held feelings, in this sort of language, on the subject of the pervasiveness of ringtone discussion vs. the paucity of war atrocity discussion in popular online war atrocity discussion outlet pitchfork, it's annoying.

p.s. never heard this guy's music, suspect i'd want to claw my eyes out if i even bothered.

p.p.s. given the vagaries of xposts, basically what hoos said.

my point is that this whole thing is so stupid and harmless! and pulling his records seems silly and reactionary, regardless of whether or not he actually meant what he said

― a lagoon par la mer (psychgawsple), Thursday, August 4, 2011 4:19 PM (49 seconds ago) Bookmark

as a small business specializing in used records and reissues of old, rare LPs rather than new records, we have the choice to stock what we want--and in this case, the choice has been made so much easier. this also sort of answers whiney's question--there is nothing i have been outright like "i will not order this record for the store" aside from skrewdriver bootlegs & john maus. there are, however, plenty of things we don't stock because we don't have the room and our staff doesn't have enthusiasm for them.