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.

First, a bit about Maus. He’s working toward two (2) (!) PhDs, one in Political Science and another in Philosophy, and he’s a musical auto-didact and artist’s artist, having self-released a slew of stuff since he was a teenager. His latest—quite good—album happens to be inspired by the Lacanian political philosophy of Alain Badiou, specifically his 15 Theses on Contemporary Art. Here’s #14:

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

The last sentence of that quote gave Maus’s new album its title. The sentence directly before it explains things a bit more: “Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy.” In other words, once we agree to the terms provided to us by Power (here, the State), it doesn’t have to actively propagandize, or limit our expression—we internalize their ideology and unconsciously do it ourselves. Then there’s #11: “The abstraction of non-imperial art is not concerned with any particular public or audience.” I’m not going to lengthily expound on how he folds this into his music, but I will ask a question (of myself, and others): Does this sound like the sort of worldview that jibes with 1) the foundational populist/democratic principles of rock and pop, let alone 2) a magazine piece about one’s favorite commodities? Of course not, and that’s why we should appreciate Maus for responding how he did.

On a personal level, after re-reading the feature a few times, I started seeing lots of myself in his responses. If we accept his Badiouian reverence (which is very much not me, by the way), Maus makes music for polemical and personal reasons, not to garner Best New Music designations or submit to the superficial rigors of the online music PR machine. But he’s pals with Ariel Pink, and his newest album taps into the sort of soft-focus early-80s FM nostalgia that happens to be really hip right now, and despite his wishes, he gets upstreamed to a larger public, and he’s dealing with it in his own unique way. I can’t prove this, but I’d argue that he’s signifying a bit, stepping in front of the narrative critics and journalists might want to build around him, and asserting his theoretical and high-culture bonafides before anything else.

On a much smaller level, it’s a very similar thing I did for the first few years I worked as a blogger and music critic. I knew my writing chops weren’t at the level of my favorite writers, so I foregrounded the stuff I knew I had on them—all the books I was reading for grad seminars. Hell, I still do that fairly often: it’s what I got, why not flaunt it? For the record, I’m also an Adorno fan, despite his failings. In fact, Maus’s public persona has more than a bit of Cranky Old Theodor in it as well, if I may be so bold.

Which is the third and most important point I want to make: we need public musical figures like John Maus. Cranky, irascible, contradictory, polemical, and most of all button-pushing public figures. Don’t get me wrong: I firmly draw the line at those who pump bile into the public sphere for shock’s sake, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the effort. To put it another way: if we want to grant certain members of society who possess particular talents the privilege of publicly entertaining us, we need to allow them to behave in ways we wouldn’t, for instance, want from our friends. They can fill that role for us.

This past March, I watched a Smith Westerns set at South By Southwest, during which frontman Cullen Omori berated a girl in the front of the crowd, asserting that she (I’m paraphrasing) “talked shit about me on Twitter.” My friend rolled her eyes, but I was moved to defend the barely-legal little shit. My argument: doesn’t someone have to act like this? Like film villains, isn’t it best when those people are over there entertaining us, letting us use them as a dartboard for our own anxieties and antipathies in exchange for our attention and money?

Music of course predates film, if not written language, and it’s a vastly more atmospheric element of our everyday lives, which often leads us to unconsciously feel an intimacy (or fear, loathing, etc.) toward musicians that we don’t toward actors. We often assume that musicians aren’t playing a role; that what we see is who they really are. It’s a distinction a lot of folks like to make, but I think it’s the wrong one. Performances are public, and though Maus and Badiou likely disagree, they inherently have to assume some sort of stance or relationship to an audience. And one particularly entertaining (see also: infuriating, enlightening, time/money-wasting, etc) stance is that of the brat. Like when Maus’s pal Ariel stormed off the stage at the most recent Pitchfork Fest. Because fuck what you want; this is what I’m giving you.

Now, we should always feel obligated to call artists on their bullshit when it’s purposefully hateful (and I can excuse my Maus-memes because they were responding to an interview he gave to a major music magazine), but I’m still convinced that music, and society at large, needs brats. Theory-quoting aesthetes like Maus are only using a slightly different language than nihilistic punks, boyish tantrum throwers, and general-issue arrogant fucksticks. They can challenge our preconceptions about what makes an effective performance, push our conversations forward, give subsequent artists something to respond to.  We may despise their attitudes, but—and this is something I need to personally account for much more—we need to account for the fact that they have no interest in hanging out with us, or making us love them. Quite the opposite, actually. That’s why they’re artists.