Father John Misty - Pure Comedy
Part 1: Talking to Yourself
The further the news and the world progresses, the more it feels like Father John Misty’s Pure Comedy might be the most controversial album released in 2017. I’ve heard it called preachy, pretentious, and soulless, and I’ve heard it praised to the heavens by the prestigious critics as self-aware, relevant and beautiful. I’m not trying to convince anyone to love or hate this album – I might mention my own opinions while making a point, but I’m not out to explain or justify my personal feelings. Instead of rank or assess this album, I want to give a foothold to people who initially felt as confused by and ambivalent towards the album as I did.
I’d argue Pure Comedy doesn’t work very well as a conventional album which gives you stories about people, because I don’t believe the text of this album – by which I mean the music and lyrics, free of any context – stands very well on its own. Death of the author is all well and good, but to appreciate Pure Comedy I found it helpful, and sometimes necessary, to think about its nature as a work made by a person. The humanity in this album isn’t in the text – which is mostly clever philosophy, sweeping generalizations about humankind, and strange, fairytale-like parables – but in the fact that a person thought of all of these things, did all of this intellectualizing. Taken individually, each song is a philosophical idea, which may or may not be interesting but is always coldly abstract, distanced. Taken together, the album is a stream of thought, and it’s easy to infer things about the emotional state of the person who made it.
When I first listened to Pure Comedy, I believed it was a remarkably impersonal album. I thought it sounded more like an essay in music form, something that aimed to make assertions about society and back them up with evidence. For a while, I just thought it was bad. Some of the songs felt too preachy to me, like “Total Entertainment Forever,” which felt like the premise of a science fiction story without any details to make it seem believable or real. The song tried to diagnose all the “ills of society” by blaming society’s flaws on technology and entertainment, by imagining a future in which everyone escapes hurt and pain by spending all their time in a hedonistic virtual reality. But the more I listened, the more I felt like FJM’s (Father John Misty's) points fall apart, like he contradicts himself all the time, like the album doesn’t work as an essay trying to advance an ideology. When I started to recognize the album as a conflict, as an argument with oneself, I started to find FJM in these songs – find the same tension between a love of and a resistance to cliches that animated his previous album, "I Love You, Honeybear."
For an album about love, Honeybear contains a surprising amount of tension and conflict. On one hand, FJM wants to celebrate the normal and the universal, the melodramatic mixture of love, lust and embarrassment shown and celebrated in romantic comedies and TV shows. On the other hand, FJM knows that societal ideas about love can be toxic. Many of the songs on Honeybear that show FJM buying into cliches that end up dehumanizing him or the person he supposedly loves. He pretends to be a macho man in Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Damn Thirsty Crow, which involves bragging about his girl like she’s a piece of property. He compares her to a blow up doll, but dresses it up as a complement, as if any girl would want to be bragged about and fought over. Bored In the USA is a savage satire of our obsession with our own lack of fulfillment. It pokes fun at wallowing, self pitying people who would laugh at FJM’s own expressions of wallowing self pity and consider it somehow funny or deep. In the end, it all becomes ridiculous echo chamber, where no amount of self awareness allows you to escape the cycle of self-pity. FJM at once wants to be part of our crazy, cliche society and wants to separate himself from it. There’s an impulse to embrace the pedestrian, to embrace trashy media and melodrama, and, alternatively, to criticize it, to tear it down, to be aloof and look down on everyone else.
"Pure Comedy" even more explicitly fluctuates between romanticization and cynicism. In one song, FJM will express horror at the shallow cruelty of people, and fall into a nihilistic spiral. In the next, you feel his need to reclaim the trashy shallowness of humanity as something real and genuine. The album reminds me of a Louie CK sketch called “Definitely, maybe.” Louie turns to the audience and forthrightly, definitively states a well known belief: “Definitely, it’s true,” he’ll enunciate, “Obviously, we need to make sure people with nut allergies are kept safe. Definitely. But maybe…” he’ll say, breaking into a high, uncertain voice, “…sometimes I think, just maybe, people with severe allergies are kind of supposed to die?” Pure Comedy shows FJM going through the same mental process, with a slight twist: instead of examining widely held beliefs, he begins with logical pessimism, backing himself into a corner where total nihilism seems like the logical conclusion. “Definitely, people are terrible,” he’ll seem to say, “Definitely. But maybe…” “Ballad of the Dying Man,” for example, is one of the album's most unpleasant songs: FJM describes a character obsessed with proving points to internet strangers at the expense of ever interrogating his own beliefs (or even figuring out what he really believes). Like most of FJM’s songs, it’s self aware, and implies that FJM is no better than the Dying Man – after all, he is wasting time writing songs that satirize culture rather than living his own life. Listening to it reminds me of being trapped in some kind of self-perpetuating dystopia, where people relentlessly judge each other, and attempts to criticize the culture only perpetuate the tide of negativity.
But just as FJM seems to have come to a depressing conclusion, brave defiance comes in to save him: “Wait,” it says, “I’m a person, and the situation of humanity must be a little more nuanced than that.” On the best songs, he turns his anger outward, to the people who paint overly simplistic portraits of the world, who separate themselves from people rather than living in the world. FJM’s on the front line defending humanity in “When the God of Love Comes There Will Be Hell to Pay,” when a just God comes down to punish humans for being sinful. “We just want light in the dark,” FJM pleads, “We just want warmth in the cold.” In one stroke, the album pivots from hating people for being entertainment obsessed, self absorbed and shallow, towards wanting to defend humanity from those who would hate and judge them. The album seems to be about FJM’s own desire, on one hand, to confront harsh realities without sugarcoating, and, on the other hand, to immerse himself in all of the noise and cliches of society. The former leads to proselytizing, to being arrogant and aloof, to buying into the idea that you are better than other people. The later can lead to its own kind of blindness, an acceptance of flaws that maybe should be condemned. But coursing through all of it is the sense that ultimately, we’re going to need to accept the uglier side of human nature to begin to solve our problems.
Part 2: Confession is Selfish
I liked "Honeybear" because it was confessional, but it never romanticized the idea of being vulnerable. Rock stars who come onstage to confess sins and share personal stories are usually treated as more interesting or more special than the rest of us. We look up to them because we think they have experienced deeper lows and higher highs than the rest of us, that they can take our ordinary feelings and make them into extraordinary art. Honeybear was so honest and so unromantic that it challenged the whole idea that people should be rewarded for being confessional. FJM wasn’t sharing his dirty secrets in I Love You Honeybear, he was showing off the fact that he was just a regular person, someone who buys into cliches and dresses up his own pettiness as something romantic and appealing. It often feels like he’s fighting against his own impulse to romanticize himself, by revealing his experiences as universal and everyday, instead of unique and edgy. With songs like “Honeybear” and “Chateau Lounge,” FJM surrenders to the kind of romantic fantasies every teenager has. On “Honeybear,” he waltzes right into a fantasy in which he and his wife are some of the last people on earth, having crazy sex while they watch the world burn. It’s totally silly and irresponsible, and it’s to FJM’s credit that he can make it seem both embarrassing and appealing. On “Ideal Husband,” he confesses to a series of vices that at first seem scandalizing or rebellious, then gradually become more and more petty, ugly, and mundane. I got the sense that FJM hated it when people tried to romanticize him, tried to put him on that rock star pedestal he pushed so hard against.
"Pure Comedy" reeks with the embarrassment you feel after you confess too much, maybe when you are drunk. You know you haven’t lied, and that you may have even done a pretty good job accurately representing your feelings, but you still come away with the sense that it’s somehow wrong to take yourself so seriously. On “The Memo,” FJM makes fun of the people who worship him, and practically begs you not to take him at his word. He describes how he’s going to make a sports team, and watch as people fall for the scrappy-underdog narrative he makes up on the spot. He sinks to a new level of mean spiritedness when he tells us his fans “won’t just sell themselves into slavery, they’ll get on their knees and beg to believe.” But a few seconds later, he goes into a deeper register over a tinkling piano melody, and reveals that he’s also been duped. “It’s not self love that kills you, it’s when those who hate you are allowed/To sell that you’re the glorious shit the entire world evolves around,” FJM sings, and he spits out the words in a deep, bitter voice. The anger that people sell you cliches and falsehoods about your own self worth – and that you buy into them, and separate yourself from the world even further – is the poison that FJM tries to avoid at all costs. It is the same anger he spits at the judging God, or the dying man: the idea of using a lie of superiority, or intellectual separation, or nihilism, to escape having to actually get on and deal with things.
As the album progresses, FJM's focus on ego gets wrapped up in the idea of entertainment, notably the way entertainment can focus on one person at the expense of the world. For many people, “entertainment” implies falseness, deception, a nice veneer over an uglier truth. And while FJM does address obviously false and empty entertainment – the lies sold by advertisers or celebrity culture – I don’t think fakeness is what he is railing against. Instead, FJM seems more often to be dealing with art in general – which contains, but is not limited to, the blatantly deceptive. “I’ll be your mirror,” FJM tells his fans on “A Bigger Paper Bag,” “but know, there are just a few angles I tend to prefer.” Art contains truth; like a mirror, it has to reflect something real. The problem is the context: art can never tell a whole story, it will always be shot from “an angle” chosen by the creator. “Tell me White Lies” contains a writer’s real emotions, seeks to capture something authentic, but that doesn’t make it any less strange and out of place as a backdrop to FJM’s panic and his mother’s desperation. In “The Memo,” FJM continues to describe the world through the lens of devices, describing a day as “Coffee in the morning, alcohol at night/Cameras to record you, mirrors to recognize/And as the world gets smaller, small things take up all your time.” FJM’s worried that art is small, that it is not worth it for people to be concerned with his personal problems, and that, by talking about big issues in such a particular, confessional way, he is somehow breaking the universality of these concepts. What he’s really looking for is a context that justifies his own art, or the art of those around him.
Because of the intellectual detachment that characterizes most of the album, “Pure Comedy”’s concerns are often easiest to access on the first-person-narrative, autobiographical songs. A few lines in “Leaving LA” shows he’s still battling his own arrogance: “Maura taunts me neath the tree/she says ‘That’s just what we all need/Another white man in 2017/who takes himself so seriously.’ She’s not far off, the strange thing is/ that’s pretty much what I thought when I started this.” At first, I thought this line was just throwaway self deprecating statement to show us that FJM’s still very much aware of his own self absorption. But I think what it actually is a sneaky way to tell us what the whole album’s about – that he’s trying to decide whether it’s worth it to self-seriously explore your own circumstances and feelings. You could probably make a good argument that FJM made Pure Comedy just to deal with the feeling that he is not worthy of being taken seriously. I’d argue that his statement isn’t just cheap self deprecation or false humbleness – it’s more of an indictment of himself than that. At the end of the song, FJM remembers walking through a department store with his mom. When he suddenly choked on his hard candy, “Tell Me Lies” by Fleetwood Mac was playing in the background. That song will always be the soundtrack for his brush with death – he “relives the moment each time the radio’s on/That ‘white lies, tell me little white lies’ song.” The point isn’t just that “Tell Me Lies” is particularly dishonest or cliched, or that we surround ourselves with songs created to satisfy corporations and make money. The point is that the song “Tell Me Lies,” just like the album “Pure Comedy,” is an emotional statement that intrudes on the world and effects other people’s lives in ways Fleetwood Mac cannot predict or control. Fleetwood Mac’s music takes up space in the world. It gave the department store a certain atmosphere, an emotional feeling, that was not interrupted by a boy choking to death.
Despite the fact that his music isn’t “commercially appealing,” FJM’s art accidentally and unpredictably influences people. And all the worry about entertainment, the conscious attempts to remove himself from these songs or else deconstruct his intentions within an inch of their life, show that FJM is very scared of influencing the world with his music. Pure Comedy ends with FJM telling us that “there’s nothing to fear,” but I think FJM is terrified of the responsibilities he has as a creator of art, as someone who puts feelings and opinions out into the world.
The further the news and the world progresses, the more it feels like Father John Misty’s Pure Comedy might be the most controversial album released in 2017. I’ve heard it called preachy, pretentious, and soulless, and I’ve heard it praised to the heavens by the prestigious critics as self-aware, relevant and beautiful. I’m not trying to convince anyone to love or hate this album – I might mention my own opinions while making a point, but I’m not out to explain or justify my personal feelings. Instead of rank or assess this album, I want to give a foothold to people who initially felt as confused by and ambivalent towards the album as I did.
I’d argue Pure Comedy doesn’t work very well as a conventional album which gives you stories about people, because I don’t believe the text of this album – by which I mean the music and lyrics, free of any context – stands very well on its own. Death of the author is all well and good, but to appreciate Pure Comedy I found it helpful, and sometimes necessary, to think about its nature as a work made by a person. The humanity in this album isn’t in the text – which is mostly clever philosophy, sweeping generalizations about humankind, and strange, fairytale-like parables – but in the fact that a person thought of all of these things, did all of this intellectualizing. Taken individually, each song is a philosophical idea, which may or may not be interesting but is always coldly abstract, distanced. Taken together, the album is a stream of thought, and it’s easy to infer things about the emotional state of the person who made it.
When I first listened to Pure Comedy, I believed it was a remarkably impersonal album. I thought it sounded more like an essay in music form, something that aimed to make assertions about society and back them up with evidence. For a while, I just thought it was bad. Some of the songs felt too preachy to me, like “Total Entertainment Forever,” which felt like the premise of a science fiction story without any details to make it seem believable or real. The song tried to diagnose all the “ills of society” by blaming society’s flaws on technology and entertainment, by imagining a future in which everyone escapes hurt and pain by spending all their time in a hedonistic virtual reality. But the more I listened, the more I felt like FJM’s (Father John Misty's) points fall apart, like he contradicts himself all the time, like the album doesn’t work as an essay trying to advance an ideology. When I started to recognize the album as a conflict, as an argument with oneself, I started to find FJM in these songs – find the same tension between a love of and a resistance to cliches that animated his previous album, "I Love You, Honeybear."
For an album about love, Honeybear contains a surprising amount of tension and conflict. On one hand, FJM wants to celebrate the normal and the universal, the melodramatic mixture of love, lust and embarrassment shown and celebrated in romantic comedies and TV shows. On the other hand, FJM knows that societal ideas about love can be toxic. Many of the songs on Honeybear that show FJM buying into cliches that end up dehumanizing him or the person he supposedly loves. He pretends to be a macho man in Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Damn Thirsty Crow, which involves bragging about his girl like she’s a piece of property. He compares her to a blow up doll, but dresses it up as a complement, as if any girl would want to be bragged about and fought over. Bored In the USA is a savage satire of our obsession with our own lack of fulfillment. It pokes fun at wallowing, self pitying people who would laugh at FJM’s own expressions of wallowing self pity and consider it somehow funny or deep. In the end, it all becomes ridiculous echo chamber, where no amount of self awareness allows you to escape the cycle of self-pity. FJM at once wants to be part of our crazy, cliche society and wants to separate himself from it. There’s an impulse to embrace the pedestrian, to embrace trashy media and melodrama, and, alternatively, to criticize it, to tear it down, to be aloof and look down on everyone else.
"Pure Comedy" even more explicitly fluctuates between romanticization and cynicism. In one song, FJM will express horror at the shallow cruelty of people, and fall into a nihilistic spiral. In the next, you feel his need to reclaim the trashy shallowness of humanity as something real and genuine. The album reminds me of a Louie CK sketch called “Definitely, maybe.” Louie turns to the audience and forthrightly, definitively states a well known belief: “Definitely, it’s true,” he’ll enunciate, “Obviously, we need to make sure people with nut allergies are kept safe. Definitely. But maybe…” he’ll say, breaking into a high, uncertain voice, “…sometimes I think, just maybe, people with severe allergies are kind of supposed to die?” Pure Comedy shows FJM going through the same mental process, with a slight twist: instead of examining widely held beliefs, he begins with logical pessimism, backing himself into a corner where total nihilism seems like the logical conclusion. “Definitely, people are terrible,” he’ll seem to say, “Definitely. But maybe…” “Ballad of the Dying Man,” for example, is one of the album's most unpleasant songs: FJM describes a character obsessed with proving points to internet strangers at the expense of ever interrogating his own beliefs (or even figuring out what he really believes). Like most of FJM’s songs, it’s self aware, and implies that FJM is no better than the Dying Man – after all, he is wasting time writing songs that satirize culture rather than living his own life. Listening to it reminds me of being trapped in some kind of self-perpetuating dystopia, where people relentlessly judge each other, and attempts to criticize the culture only perpetuate the tide of negativity.
But just as FJM seems to have come to a depressing conclusion, brave defiance comes in to save him: “Wait,” it says, “I’m a person, and the situation of humanity must be a little more nuanced than that.” On the best songs, he turns his anger outward, to the people who paint overly simplistic portraits of the world, who separate themselves from people rather than living in the world. FJM’s on the front line defending humanity in “When the God of Love Comes There Will Be Hell to Pay,” when a just God comes down to punish humans for being sinful. “We just want light in the dark,” FJM pleads, “We just want warmth in the cold.” In one stroke, the album pivots from hating people for being entertainment obsessed, self absorbed and shallow, towards wanting to defend humanity from those who would hate and judge them. The album seems to be about FJM’s own desire, on one hand, to confront harsh realities without sugarcoating, and, on the other hand, to immerse himself in all of the noise and cliches of society. The former leads to proselytizing, to being arrogant and aloof, to buying into the idea that you are better than other people. The later can lead to its own kind of blindness, an acceptance of flaws that maybe should be condemned. But coursing through all of it is the sense that ultimately, we’re going to need to accept the uglier side of human nature to begin to solve our problems.
Part 2: Confession is Selfish
I liked "Honeybear" because it was confessional, but it never romanticized the idea of being vulnerable. Rock stars who come onstage to confess sins and share personal stories are usually treated as more interesting or more special than the rest of us. We look up to them because we think they have experienced deeper lows and higher highs than the rest of us, that they can take our ordinary feelings and make them into extraordinary art. Honeybear was so honest and so unromantic that it challenged the whole idea that people should be rewarded for being confessional. FJM wasn’t sharing his dirty secrets in I Love You Honeybear, he was showing off the fact that he was just a regular person, someone who buys into cliches and dresses up his own pettiness as something romantic and appealing. It often feels like he’s fighting against his own impulse to romanticize himself, by revealing his experiences as universal and everyday, instead of unique and edgy. With songs like “Honeybear” and “Chateau Lounge,” FJM surrenders to the kind of romantic fantasies every teenager has. On “Honeybear,” he waltzes right into a fantasy in which he and his wife are some of the last people on earth, having crazy sex while they watch the world burn. It’s totally silly and irresponsible, and it’s to FJM’s credit that he can make it seem both embarrassing and appealing. On “Ideal Husband,” he confesses to a series of vices that at first seem scandalizing or rebellious, then gradually become more and more petty, ugly, and mundane. I got the sense that FJM hated it when people tried to romanticize him, tried to put him on that rock star pedestal he pushed so hard against.
"Pure Comedy" reeks with the embarrassment you feel after you confess too much, maybe when you are drunk. You know you haven’t lied, and that you may have even done a pretty good job accurately representing your feelings, but you still come away with the sense that it’s somehow wrong to take yourself so seriously. On “The Memo,” FJM makes fun of the people who worship him, and practically begs you not to take him at his word. He describes how he’s going to make a sports team, and watch as people fall for the scrappy-underdog narrative he makes up on the spot. He sinks to a new level of mean spiritedness when he tells us his fans “won’t just sell themselves into slavery, they’ll get on their knees and beg to believe.” But a few seconds later, he goes into a deeper register over a tinkling piano melody, and reveals that he’s also been duped. “It’s not self love that kills you, it’s when those who hate you are allowed/To sell that you’re the glorious shit the entire world evolves around,” FJM sings, and he spits out the words in a deep, bitter voice. The anger that people sell you cliches and falsehoods about your own self worth – and that you buy into them, and separate yourself from the world even further – is the poison that FJM tries to avoid at all costs. It is the same anger he spits at the judging God, or the dying man: the idea of using a lie of superiority, or intellectual separation, or nihilism, to escape having to actually get on and deal with things.
As the album progresses, FJM's focus on ego gets wrapped up in the idea of entertainment, notably the way entertainment can focus on one person at the expense of the world. For many people, “entertainment” implies falseness, deception, a nice veneer over an uglier truth. And while FJM does address obviously false and empty entertainment – the lies sold by advertisers or celebrity culture – I don’t think fakeness is what he is railing against. Instead, FJM seems more often to be dealing with art in general – which contains, but is not limited to, the blatantly deceptive. “I’ll be your mirror,” FJM tells his fans on “A Bigger Paper Bag,” “but know, there are just a few angles I tend to prefer.” Art contains truth; like a mirror, it has to reflect something real. The problem is the context: art can never tell a whole story, it will always be shot from “an angle” chosen by the creator. “Tell me White Lies” contains a writer’s real emotions, seeks to capture something authentic, but that doesn’t make it any less strange and out of place as a backdrop to FJM’s panic and his mother’s desperation. In “The Memo,” FJM continues to describe the world through the lens of devices, describing a day as “Coffee in the morning, alcohol at night/Cameras to record you, mirrors to recognize/And as the world gets smaller, small things take up all your time.” FJM’s worried that art is small, that it is not worth it for people to be concerned with his personal problems, and that, by talking about big issues in such a particular, confessional way, he is somehow breaking the universality of these concepts. What he’s really looking for is a context that justifies his own art, or the art of those around him.
Because of the intellectual detachment that characterizes most of the album, “Pure Comedy”’s concerns are often easiest to access on the first-person-narrative, autobiographical songs. A few lines in “Leaving LA” shows he’s still battling his own arrogance: “Maura taunts me neath the tree/she says ‘That’s just what we all need/Another white man in 2017/who takes himself so seriously.’ She’s not far off, the strange thing is/ that’s pretty much what I thought when I started this.” At first, I thought this line was just throwaway self deprecating statement to show us that FJM’s still very much aware of his own self absorption. But I think what it actually is a sneaky way to tell us what the whole album’s about – that he’s trying to decide whether it’s worth it to self-seriously explore your own circumstances and feelings. You could probably make a good argument that FJM made Pure Comedy just to deal with the feeling that he is not worthy of being taken seriously. I’d argue that his statement isn’t just cheap self deprecation or false humbleness – it’s more of an indictment of himself than that. At the end of the song, FJM remembers walking through a department store with his mom. When he suddenly choked on his hard candy, “Tell Me Lies” by Fleetwood Mac was playing in the background. That song will always be the soundtrack for his brush with death – he “relives the moment each time the radio’s on/That ‘white lies, tell me little white lies’ song.” The point isn’t just that “Tell Me Lies” is particularly dishonest or cliched, or that we surround ourselves with songs created to satisfy corporations and make money. The point is that the song “Tell Me Lies,” just like the album “Pure Comedy,” is an emotional statement that intrudes on the world and effects other people’s lives in ways Fleetwood Mac cannot predict or control. Fleetwood Mac’s music takes up space in the world. It gave the department store a certain atmosphere, an emotional feeling, that was not interrupted by a boy choking to death.
Despite the fact that his music isn’t “commercially appealing,” FJM’s art accidentally and unpredictably influences people. And all the worry about entertainment, the conscious attempts to remove himself from these songs or else deconstruct his intentions within an inch of their life, show that FJM is very scared of influencing the world with his music. Pure Comedy ends with FJM telling us that “there’s nothing to fear,” but I think FJM is terrified of the responsibilities he has as a creator of art, as someone who puts feelings and opinions out into the world.