John Maus

xp ha fair. theres a long list of things that tweet is 'not very'

god that's an annoying, pretentious, opaque way to try and defend himself

Par for the course. From a Vice interview when he was asked about the Adult Swim fiasco:

...a few months later or whatever, one of the people from the label was like, “Yo, did you see this? You gotta say something.” “They’re Nazis,” or something like that.

Shit. A cult of a race and blood—that’s an absolute obscenity. That’s nothing other than disaster. That’s just inarguably obscene, that sort of ideology.

If the question too is why not just throw in your two cents about it or whatever, it’s just so insanely complicated the way the biopolitics and the cults of race and blood, the residues of that, are rearing their ugly faces again in our situation. That’s too complicated a thing to try to touch with [140] characters without running the risk of just turning the screw.

I don’t want to make any apology, but I also didn’t want to… The guys I met were nice. They weren’t burning crosses or doing anything like that. In other words, I never had, from what I know about it, any indication that anything other than certain instances of a sort of trolling was going on. What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it. Or why were they alt-right people?

When he was asked about one particular sketch:

The one I was on, there was a sketch at the beginning of it where these guys are sitting at a wine-tasting party or something like that, and their wives are there, and they make a point of the character—one of the wives is off-putting. She scowls and things like that. One of the guys trips her, and she falls through glass, and it tears up her face, and she’s bleeding.

Now immediately, I’m thinking of "Metalocalypse." I’m thinking of phantasmagorical humor, like a person gets their arm ripped off or something, and there’s something absurd about that. I didn’t think much beyond that about it.

Then people were like, “This is a misogynist sketch.” Then in that sense I’m thinking of the French feminist theory, this whole reading of it from that standpoint: the men do not acknowledge the woman as an agent, as having any subjectivity. She’s just an object in their patriarchal economy. In that sense, it’s like a feminist critique of where a woman is made to stand in a patriarchal, heteronormative reality. The idea that it just encourages violence against women, maybe I’m just too dumb. I didn’t see that or something like that. I don’t know.

ay ay ay. please fuck off john you total wank

"maybe I'm just too dumb" following a long equivocating non-apology....classic bullshit move

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-n35wAjB_u78/T1G-sL_peBI/AAAAAAAABJc/UZc0x2bI0M8/s400/Caveman+Lawyer+Jury.png

What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.
What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.
What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.
What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.
What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.
What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.
What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.
What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.
What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.
What did they do that made them Nazis? Maybe I haven’t looked into it.

well uh I guess based on recent developments “cop killer” makes him pretty consistent.

my guess is when he eventually gets pressed further on this, he'll deny any support for trump & denounce him further in a convoluted manner, explain that he "has his disagreements with ariel" and that he was just observing & not participating in the protests

i don't think he's sincerely a trump supporter or anything like ariel is, just very stupid about this sort of stuff as he has been in the past, which is enough to make me say "come on dude"

That's the most waffling, arse-covering, disingenuous reading of that Adult Swim sketch. The woman isn't 'off-putting' she doesn't 'scowl and things' she's considered too unattractive to marry the guy's brother, he says so and then trips her up deliberately. It was revolting and anyone with any sense called it out at the time. 'Feminist theory'?? What a complete arsehole.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/the-raging-battle-over-adult-swims-alt-right-tv-show/508016/

guys like this just think they are so interesting

I forgot that Brett Gelman quit Adult Swim because of that show, as well as the network's poor track record on working with female talent... that was pretty cool, and somewhat ahead of the game.

John Maus was radicalised by this post pic.twitter.com/XwC79T2ZhD

— All Watched Over By Machines of Drum and Bass (@bartlebooth45) January 7, 2021

Lol that was so satisfying after that overwrought and pretentious explanation.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91p17bGVEXL.jpg

In case anyone was wondering, I'm a lifelong supporter of Antifa. Like most of us, I was appalled by what we saw in DC this week and by the people present there. In response to this DSA and Night School Records have decided to release a 7” single of my original song Hey Moon (2008), with ALL PROFITS from the sale donated to BLACK LIVES MATTER worldwide.
Pre-orders available now and shipping as soon as we have them (approximately 10 weeks from the moment I type this). Pre-orders from DSA online shop or Bandcamp available now
Molly Nilsson, 2021
https://mollynilsson.bandcamp.com/album/hey-moon

worthless VHS idiot JOHN MAUS #neverforget

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

don't wanna be the poster boy for the unintended effects of so-called cancel culture but I'd never heard of this guy before the Trump shit last week and then this revive in which he comes off like a total douche but I was curious so I checked out some of his music and really liked it in spite of myself

not gonna buy any of his albums or anything though

We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves is a bona fide indie-synth albun and I think that's why this is hurting us all a bit. As you say though, he's never come across as a super-great dude though.

"bona fide classic indie synth album" I should say

I had "Believer" at #2 in my tracks list for 2011, the only year I ever put a top 200 together, the rest of the LP was less good but still annoyed that it feels tainted now.

We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves is a bona fide indie-synth albun and I think that's why this is hurting us all a bit.

yeah that's the one I randomly sampled, hoping I'd dislike it as much as I have always disliked or at least been indifferent to Ariel Pink, but I couldn't really deny how much I immediately liked it.

yeah i still love that album, it's not like ariel where i wrote him off as intolerable years ago and this hasn't changed that. i'm disappointed but it's par for the cause with him being buddies with ariel. if he fully commits to the sort of shit that ariel has then that would probably be exhausting enough to be done with him though

he's mostly come across as a pretentious fool though in general, and this is just an extension of that. there's a weird disconnect though because he's always going off on elaborate philosophical tangents in interviews and you can tell he deeply thinks and cares about what he's doing in his art in that vein but that pretentiousness doesn't really come across at all in his music which is fairly minimal both musically and lyrically. like maybe it's possible to find the classical composition techniques he deeply cares about in his music but it's not something that's particularly obvious.

as far as him coming across badly in the past, not just as a fool, there's this strange piece (somewhat like an interview but not really) https://www.adhoc.fm/post/re-dear-john-maus-how-are-you/ where he says that "bennington" is autobiographical and proceeds to share his deeply weird & somewhat creepy email correspondence with its subject. that section is near the bottom after some walls of text on other topics.

"Quantum Leap" is a good song but I always thought his live sets looked stupid af

Someone on his Facebook fan group has uncovered evidence which appears to show that Maus has donated to Sanders, Yang and Trump in the last 12 months

lol

He loves politics, all of it!

poisoned galaxy brain

galaxy brainworms

idk still workshopping this post

PaulTMA at 3:16 14 Jan 21
Someone on his Facebook fan group has uncovered evidence which appears to show that Maus has donated to Sanders, Yang and Trump in the last 12 months


think we're gonna need a bigger galaxybrain.jpg

Best I can do

trying to cover all his bases if he needed a pardon in the future?

lol imagine being john maus and donating your actual money to donald trump, lol i cant even with this guy

"JOHN M., we need your help! Donate now and claim your FREE GIFT!" lolol what a fucking moron

i bet he thought he was playing 5D chess donating to bernie & yang on some rush limbaugh Operation Chaos shit

From what I saw the trajectory of the donations was early 2020: Bernie & Yang; late 2020: Winred. This is reminiscent of an anything-but-Hilary bro type I encountered in grad school (though I dunno if he would have joined the Yang gang).

i want to say, "wtf?? This guy seemed too smart for this garbage behavior/ideology" ... however I know a guy who graduated from Harvard and was also a smart guy that has somehow expatriated to stupid QAnon talking points, so ... I sense a pattern. Also Maus' donation pattern is definitely that of a white dude.

idk donating to all three is a little strange and I don't think I've ever met anyone who would do this

like I can definitely think of a couple Types Of Guys who would do this for a couple different reasons but I've never actually encountered any in the wild

i realize his responses to this were insufficient (he quoted some part of the Bible? lol) but i kinda feel bad for the backlash he’s getting which should really be directed 100% to abuser and trump supporter ariel pink. maybe im naive but i buy that he was attending out of sociological curiosity, i feel like the presence of the tfw no gf documentarian is corroborative

i was reading his statements about the alt right cartoon show, where he doesnt defend it but also resists giving the kind of pro forma denunciation that’s necessary. he’s just like “from the clips i saw i thought it was hyper violence like superjail and the animators seemed nice.” i get why that’s not enough for some, but it’s not like he says “no this show is actually good” it’s more pleading ignorance

i get that some people thought it was cool that he was a dark radical philosophy prof and connected with what they imagined to be his politics and are letdown. i have some friends who are in humanities and do the edgy pseudo profundity thing where you flirt with dark ideas and go on evil parts of the internet in this anthropological way and then smoke cigarettes and talk about Bataille, and they all think of themselves as radical leftists but also have some truly idiotic and reactionary opinions (mostly around race/gender) that would get them cancelled if they were public figures. that part of vhs idiot Jon Maus was always lame to me, so i don’t feel letdown and feel no anguish blasting ‘cop killer’

maus donated to winred? Jesus...

don't worry flopson i know that ariel pink is a worse person than john maus

its weird to me that ppl are so invested in a framing of this that casts ariel pink as a charismatic villain and maus as a Good Guy Who Got In Over His Head. Maus donated 4-figure sums to getting trump reelected, attended the protest, then got busted trying to cover his ass about it, saying 'ariel went down there to meet with someone about a project and i tagged along', and then pink saying 'hell yeah i went there to go to support donald j trump'. at what point does engaging with trump support in a detached anthropological way become actual trump support?

simplest explanation just seems like he supports trump but is afraid of the financial/career consequences of being publicly identified with it, not exactly the first person to get caught in that quandary

There are radical leftists, especially Marxists, who supported Trump out of a Hegelian desire to heighten the contradictions of our society. Some of these people are appalled at the idea that this is accelerationism, which is too crude in their view. I feel that John Maus, with his talk of the truth content of his work lying in negation and other sort of Adornian themes or whatever, is likely one of these guys. And in the words of Jeff Tweedy, liberal sentimentalist, “no it’s not OK.”

i have some friends who are in humanities and do the edgy pseudo profundity thing where you flirt with dark ideas and go on evil parts of the internet in this anthropological way and then smoke cigarettes and talk about Bataille, and they all think of themselves as radical leftists but also have some truly idiotic and reactionary opinions (mostly around race/gender) that would get them cancelled if they were public figures.

yeah, i think that's how it started with this Harvard guy ... and I definitely have other friends (who are also friends of this guy) who are similar but not quite as "far gone" ... and I haven't quite gotten to the point where I unfriend them, possibly out of my own anthropological curiosity about them ... but a number of other friends have done this, at least one of whom had been friends with these guys for 20 years. One of these dudes did get kinda called out and his band broke up sorta as a result of it, though not because he got called out, because at least one of the other band members was sick of the gross bullshit that included racism.

basically the Gen X hipster bros are dividing into factions: the ones that are actually kinda stupid and sexist / racist / transphobic and the ones that aren't.

Someone posted a photo of a Vietnamese restaurant that was still flying the Pete 2020 flag months after he was done and then cut to the owner of said restaurant at the Capitol riot. Lots of people seem to have caught the brainworms after August.

His wife donated a bunch to WINRED fwiw