John Maus - We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves

weird how nobody brought up the fact that he's not so much an impersonator of ariel pink, just a collaborator—he worked with AP on his loverboy album. and if anything, both he and AP have a sort of baroque approach to pop song writing, but at times john maus seems classically influenced.

i mean, come the fuck on, obvious example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcP0WqS8ehU

and i don't remember if this has been posted yet, but also a good introductory track:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2IpwNsJruw

i don't think aynone implied that he IS an impersonator of ariel pink?

john maus is amazing. john maus is the best thing in music right now.

his music gives me hope/faith that the world isn't total shit. personally i prefer his work over Ariel Pink's pretty strongly.

don't play this music for people who don't like music enough to give a fuck in the first place

  On 4/22/2011 at 1:33 AM, futuregirlfriend said:

[youtubehd]dMxpI6bFwmc[/youtubehd]

mindblowing, seriously great

  On 7/3/2011 at 1:07 AM, vamos scorcho said:

don't play this music for people who don't like music enough to give a fuck in the first place

That's just silly.

it certainly is. i must say though that it gets very annoying hearing 'this is the worst music ever' and the like from people who don't go past first impressions. if those people are allowed to declare as if it were a fact that this music is 'bad' or 'terribly bad' then perhaps i should be allowed to express my irritation as well. it seems like Maus and Pink bring out strong reactions in some people as being scary/stupid/hipster bullshit. And while I agree that Maus can come off as some 'Silence of the Lambs' style murder music at times, it's not hipster bullshit and it's not stupid. I find the 'pretentious hipster bullshit' appeal to be particularly irritating because I view that ... way of seeing things ... to be at the center of some segments of the John Maus 'thing.'

i've come to feel rather passionately about this john maus fellow and what i imagine him to be doing in the world, so it's kind of a hot topic for me. music taste is subjective so i shouldn't get too irritated.

certainly part of it is that it brings me joy to demean those who i feel are inferior. hope i'm not writing too much here, i often feel the urge to talk about maus though and show him to people, if only to see what their reaction will be.

do not show Maus to old people.

Actually I'll also explain what I meant in that post. John Maus's music has a sort of 'safety mechanism' I think you could call it. The mechanism is the lo fi sound quality and the general 'strangeness' of the sound.

This aesthetic makes it so that any casual/uneducated listener will likely turn away in a repulsed/confused fashion without necessarily processing the lyrics or possible depth of what's goin on.

So my statement was implying that people who wouldn't listen with an open mind would be less pure as music fans than someone who would approach with interest. This statement is actually really very ridiculous. Taste is subjective, people differ.

More and more though I'm starting to think that there are connections between major belief systems and moral codes, if not serious physical real world occurrences, and the art that people make and consume as individuals and as a society.

Ah yes - I'm old so I must not appreciate it.

Good argument!

I don't think it's terrible music, and his voice doesn't grate on my ears at all. It's just not very inspiring or original in my opinion.

tmt gave it 5/5

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/john-maus-we-must-become-pitiless-censors-ourselves

lots of big words and really damn interesting analyses in that review though, damn. a pretty good summary of his music-related ramblings over the last few years.

im just thinking if tiny mix tapes got that pretentious, what's pitchfork gonna do?

Is this real?

I try my best to ignore chillwave, witchhouse, alteredzones etc and the whole micro-genre artist / fad of the month thing but then Google Reader tells me today I have to read a very long rougesfoam article on this guy, he's pitchfork's best new music, I remember that someone mentioned this on the best of 2011 I hit play on the youtube (and actually liked it) but dismissed it as ironic pastiche fake art. I have to say that after one listen Believer feels like an instant classic and I love the earnest manic nervous energy of the dude in the interview video, most important of all, it would be very cool to have a professor with actual opinions doing this kind of music so I would hate to realize six months from now that this is just another joke.

Don't do this to me Internet.

haha he's been doing this for years. i think he's fairly serious, haha.

this album is getting a lot of love unlike his previous, which had bad words all over the place. i liked love is real but some songs are pretty bad. this one is just great all over tho. cop killer in particular is getting a whole lot of love from me.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/42437461[/vimeo]

edit: how do you embed a vimeo link here on watmm?

Just the ID between the tags.

[vimeo]42437461[/vimeo]