A Defense of John Maus and Bratty Artists
Yesterday, Pitchfork ran its “Guest List” feature with John Maus. Subsequently, I and a few other people took umbrage at Maus’s tone through the piece. Not so much an interview as a formulaic, often fun “tell me your favorites” piece, it rubbed Maus the wrong way after a bit. To wit, when questioned about the “last great book” he read:
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.
Oof, right? That’s what I and a bunch of other people thought. There were other aspects of the piece that made us cringe as well. On Odd Future, he lapsed into highbrow crit-speak: “they have an attitude we could all learn from. It’s at the point of piteously forgetting the human condition and becoming its own fetish. It walks that line carefully.” He would later lambaste record stores, expressing contentment that they were going out of business (a statement he would soon retract, though dubiously—how many Megastores ever hired snobby clerks?), and (perhaps glibly) “resent” that he hadn’t “wept at the feet of a leper or something.”
The interview irked me to the degree that on a break from writing, I Googled “meme generator” and made these things. People thought they were funny, which was my goal (if you don’t know, I’m sort of a poorly-edited windbag/class-clown on the web). Then I moved on.
But I soon regretted my little gimmick. Partially because it was immature and catty, partially because it was unfair to Maus as a polemical artist (more on that in a minute), but mostly because 1) in the embedded quote above, he’s both correct and holds to his own personal aesthetic philosophy, 2) I’m more like him than I felt comfortable admitting at the time, presented as I was with the unique opportunity to make an internet joke, and 3) I failed to properly account for my own artist-as-public-figure biases. So, here we go.
