John Maus is playing @ The Middle East Downstairs, opening for Protomartyr on a bill that also features the Boston-based Blau Blau on 9/14 (Doors @ 8).
On Hiatus from touring since 2012, Maus is set to release his latest record ‘The Combine’ out October 27th through Ribbon Music, the follow up from 2011’s ‘We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves’. His comeback is heavily anticipated. With a string of nationwide US shows through October, Maus will then brings his highly energetic performance & unique sound to the UK & Europe.
John Maus is, in ways, the anti-pop musician; in obvious ways & some not so obvious. His music far surpasses his schooling as a doctor of political philosophy, yet the scope & organization of his catalogue feels like a passage to new boundaries of listening to & talking about music & performance. Digging deep through his many extensive interviews on youtube, with magazines, & even reading 20 pages of his Doctoral Thesis he talks about philosophy, politics & social constructs of control as an eloquent, yet humble renegade.
Taking on famed philosophers like Slavoj Zizek & the more usual perpetrators with succinct criticism while discerning old models from new models with articulation akin to that of the best of social theorists. He talks about his methods of musical creation & performance with the same clarity & enthusiasm, which separates him from musicians & the most pomp theorists.
‘I see the combine come’ the opening lines to his single (“The Combine”) off his forthcoming album (also) ‘The Combine’ fits with the normal melancholy of his catalogue, but the song in other ways gives me the chills anew. A pastiche of disco beats drives his signature dissonance & reverb of haunting organs and succulent hooks & bass lines. His voice reveals the mania & euphoria of his art more as a matter of fact. The accompanying music video underscores this heady musician’s maturation, and offers an unflinching look at human needs in a tone less tawdry than that found on his previous records.
Criticized as pretentious & inaccessible, his music is in many ways the anti-pop & the anti-art form we need. Maus’ work, full of pop music’s whim, indulgence euphoria is spiked with muses of post-Foucalt conceptions of sexuality & philosophers considered as existentialist, whose over-arching theory was artistic inspiration & creation. Pretentious sure, but his music, like his lyrics & enthusiastic performance, is meticulously constructed to affect upon himself & the listener, the energy to live again.
His song ‘Rights for Gays’ off 2007’s Love is Real is a pseudo-take on sexuality where commodification of the ambiguous ‘Gays’ met with chanting their needs for rights makes a stern testament yet also questions core ideas of what rights & for who? Maus in his own way challenges the listener, yet provides a platform, for them to build their own opinions & ways of thinking. His understanding of the label ‘queer’ described in his aforementioned thesis reflects the understanding in his songs & also the appeal of his music to me, a self-described queer & political fanatic.
‘The Queer’ he states ‘involves something unworkable in relation to the apparatuses of liberal pluralism’. This sentiment reveals the frank unworkability, and challenging self-label of queer. Queerness, though negative & destructive, comes to the individual as a pseudo-sacrifice to tear down walls of common sexuality.
People often think of French literature & poetry as something ‘ornamental’ or ‘verbose’. Rimbaud however, wrote some of the finest French poetry in a broken down barn over the course of weeks at the tender age of sixteen. Myth distilled into cultural misperception is often the hallmark of American understanding.
John Maus on a bare stage, pounding his chest, sporadically dancing & head bobbing is doing everything he can to destroy the boundaries of the old, removing the pseudo chains of misunderstanding of live performance, while imposing on the viewer a challenge not to be taken lightly.
Chris Hughes is a Contributor to the Boston Hassle. He can be reached at [email protected] or @crsjh_ via twitter & instagram.
