The musicians, the left, and the liberals, [we] come from that world, [where] we’re constantly trying to fight the power of the world with beauty and truth and music and empathy. And if we don’t get that, then we try [to] shame them. The powerful don’t operate on beauty, selflessness, transcendence or shame. They’re purposefully an obfuscation of those ideas in order to acquire as much power as possible.
Art, literature, text, music, creation are empowering to the soul.
My word of the month is ‘earnest’. So if you’re earnest all the time, you get ever-diminishing returns on your authenticity, because it’s not met with anything else.
I don’t want to over-explain my [art]. I just have to [be] real from the heart. The people that [are] listening to it are [thinking], ‘I’ll believe that at least.’ And I think that is the thing: I don’t think people should pretend to not be people anymore. And it’s not post-wokeness; I am bored of wokeness. I do not see it as a viable worldview.
Sincerity is scary and people should be wholly themselves, not an idea, brand or simulation of something else.
And I’m not a liberal academic. I’m a cigarette-smoking bohemian outsider.
It’s annoying being left wing and like making money.
Also Matty.
It’s either your imagination or everything in the past. This desperation to present new ideas but all that’s happening is we’re getting all these new neologisms, new ways presenting quite traditional ideas and it’s happening in like music.
A lack of imagination due to being constantly stimulated online.
It’s interesting with music because that isn’t happening in film [or] TV. We either want content to be six seconds long or six months long. We want the longest story that has Dostoevsky-level narratives and 50 different characters. You want The Sopranos every week, but then we all want it to be six minutes. If somebody says to you, ‘Can I show you a video?’ and you say, ‘Yeah,’ and they pull up YouTube and it says nine minutes, it’s over. That feeling is just the worst feeling.
Music existing in short form media.
That context is important. I don’t mean to say judge based on their history or their [context], but you see how a person works. You start to understand how they came to [an] idea. There’s something that gives an ambient quality to the idea that’s more transformative. That’s less to do with language; it’s way more than just reading a paragraph.
Can you separate an artist and their work? I think you can’t, but that’s fine. I think it’s good, and I think you shouldn’t. I think it’s part of the game. It’s part of what you figure out. I think it shouldn’t affect the way you think about [it].
The art and the artist.
Base level transgression. And that art is designed to be censored and this is [Brad] Troemel—the censorship is the reward and the punishment. All it’s doing is re-establishing the dynamic of order. There is someone who can censor and they will to remind [us]. What Andy Kaufman did was take that level of transcendence to believability. Being GG Allen, covering yourself in shit…so okay, it’s insane.
Censored art.
The best part of New York [is] you just bop around. You absorb other people. You said it was fluid and it has this flâneur about it, which is a pretentious word, but still, it does. It’s [that] you can walk around and be inspired.
I’ll be moving to the Big Apple one day.
He said something along the lines of, ‘You know, if you have a plan, you’ve already fucked it up.’ So, and in the sense of [what] you’re saying, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be plotting out some kind of intellectual [plan]. I always use that Lynch quote: ‘How do you direct movies? I read the script. First thing I think about, I write it down, then I go film it.’ Yeah, I don’t over-intellectualize it. Trust your instinct. Your art is your instinct.
Just write it down.
This is a Lynchian thing. This [set], you’re inside a home—something that’s warm and comfortable, and on the surface about family and comfort and safety. So there’s this weird kind of angst, like [an] under-the-surface internal world thing that’s happening. Which is totally the vibe I get from this kind of Red [pill], blue pill thing. There’s a whole narrative of me becoming—I’d say black-pilled throughout the show because I don’t have a political identity that I’m willing to establish.
The inside and outside of the house on stage.