On January 6th, 2021, American democracy gazed into the abyss as Donald Trump supporters descended on Washington, DC, like a horde of orcs in a fantasy movie. It was also the day that changed the life of the cult indie musician John Maus, after he was wrongly labelled a Trump fanboy – a misunderstanding that might well have destroyed his career.
The songwriter and composer was in the city when the outgoing US president’s Maga minions smashed their way into the Capitol building in a dystopian attempt to overturn the results of the election. But Maus had not gone to Washington to riot. He had tagged along with the film-maker Alex Lee Moyer, who was there to gather footage of Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, for a documentary about incel culture.
Maus says he had no idea violence was about to break out and that he and his wife, the Hungarian artist Kika Karadi, left before trouble began. “From my perspective it was, ‘Oh, look at the chuds waving the flags, climbing the walls.’” It was only when they got back to their hotel that they found out people had been shot, Maus explains.
Some of his fans couldn’t understand why he’d been in the city that day. “Is John Maus going right-wing?” one wondered on Reddit. “It’s very disturbing to me that [Maus] is passionate about such a terrible thing,” another wrote.
RM Block
It didn’t help that he was also in the company of Ariel Pink, a fellow underground musician, who had spoken in favour of Trump, and would later appear on Fox News to complain to the conservative host Tucker Carlson that he had been cancelled and was “a recording artist who can’t record”.
‘I want to respond to every comment and go, “No, I’m not for Trump.” But I figure it won’t do any good. So I don’t’
— John Maus
When Maus tried to set the record straight, he arguably made the situation worse by posting an unintelligible papal encyclical from 1937 in which Pius XI condemned nazism.
“Maybe you shouldn’t care if somebody calls you a fascist if you know you’re not one. The ironic thing is that the people calling you that are embodying it more than you yourself are,” Maus says from Antwerp, where he’s in the middle of a European tour that includes two imminent Dublin dates. “It actually sucks. I want to respond to every comment and go, ‘No, I’m not for Trump.’ But I figure it won’t do any good. So I don’t.”
In September Maus released Later Than You Think, his excellent fifth album. Mixing brooding synthscapes and dolorous vocals suggestive of a cyberpunk Ian Curtis, it’s a catchy, accessible pop record. It’s also grippingly bleak – and hardly supportive of Trumpian politics.
On the LP’s opening track, Because We Built It, Maus makes the grim prediction that the political and cultural norms we’ve known since the end of the second World War are coming to an end. Later, on I Hate Antichrist, which features recordings of FBI agents kicking down a door in the manner of Trump’s Ice goons, Maus suggests the dark forces that will undo decades of progress are already among us.
“I feel like we’ve got to be nearing the end of this postwar configuration we’ve been in for 60 years, 70 years,” he says. “Whether it’s the tech feudalists, like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and those guys, that roll in some new configuration that’s an intensification of what we have already, or whether it’s a third World War or something, we’re probably on the verge of a reconfiguration.”
Will rock and pop survive this reboot? Probably not. “This music that we’ve been making for the last 70 years, I tend to think of it as one music, from Little Richard and Chuck Berry to what I’m doing today,” Maus says. “It’s a particular music that’s part and parcel with this configuration of power and this situation. And I think when that passes away, so the music will too.”
Raised in a small town in Minnesota, Maus studied music composition at California Institute of the Arts, where he developed an interest in medieval and Renaissance music. He also played in bands with Ariel Pink, whom he met at college.
He would later go on to teach political philosophy at the University of Hawaii, writing songs at night. After quietly self-releasing his music, he became a cult figure in 2011 with his third album, We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, the title of which originated with one of his professors, the French philosopher Alain Badiou.
The LP was a turning point, gaining Maus widespread recognition.
He remains interested in philosophy, and has a tendency to discuss both music and politics in elevated, slightly abstract terms. He’s too cheery to be pretentious, but talking to him can feel like sitting through a tutorial on a subject you haven’t studied sufficiently.
When it comes to the January 6th riots, he makes clear that he doesn’t see the Democratic Party as a panacea for the United States’ problems.
“Where I was coming from was outside parliamentarianism altogether. The post-Marxist French and Italians that I cut my teeth on regarded all that as a spectacle, as a choice between good cop, bad cop.”
When it comes to the Democrats and Republicans of American politics, he says, “One of them bombs Gaza and is very sad about it. The other one does the same and makes shit-eating memes about it.
“I have liberal friends, and they say, ‘Come on, be an adult. Plug your nose and go vote blue” – which is to say Democratic – “no matter who.”
They’re right to an extent, Maus says.
‘If a populist right ascends, then there are billionaires that can get behind that. But billionaires aren’t going to have any reason to get behind a populist left – a legitimate one’
— John Maus on US politics
“There are real consequences on the ground” to voting for Trump. “But, again, even with respect to the undocumented people,” the Democrats “are still doing the deportations. There’s not a legitimate populist radical left in that apparatus at all.”
Maus’s attempt to move on from January 6th was not helped, he acknowledges, by the revelations that he had donated to the Trump campaign. He says he did so out of frustration at the Democratic Party’s sabotage, as he saw it, of Bernie Sanders’s run for president.
“I donated to Bernie. And the Dems, it was the second time they shafted him.” (Sanders ran for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020.)
Maus wonders whether the election of the socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York will prompt the Democratic Party to move to the left. He isn’t holding out hope.
“It looks like again they are not taking the cue. That’s always going to be the case in the United States. They’ll never let a populist left ascend.
“If a populist right ascends, then there are billionaires that can get behind that. But billionaires aren’t going to have any reason to get behind a populist left – a legitimate one. And you have to have billionaires involved in order to break through in American institutional politics. It’s unlikely that’ll be allowed to happen.”
For the full John Maus experience, you have to see him in concert. A one-man dervish with floppy, sweaty hair and a crazed look, he never stands still and seems possessed by his songs.
On one level he’s commenting on the nature of performance: look at how ridiculous he is, dancing like a deranged Duracell Bunny. On another he’s just a dude freaking in full public view. As one review put it, he “pogos, head-bangs, and gives vent to a succession of feral howls as he jack-knifes at the waist”.
“It’s what I came up with,” Maus says. “When I was a teenager, with punk rock, you were supposed to give a show – go to the limit. It’s not choreographed. It’s not a spectacle in that sense. It’s more a human being at their breaking point.
“I’ve riffed on this whole idea of a hysterical body – these nonsense syllables, an assault on meaning. It looks ridiculous and comical and absurd. It’s antagonistic to the whole regime of ‘consume and enjoy’. It is irreconcilable with that. That’s what I’m hoping to accomplish.”
John Maus plays Button Factory, Dublin, on Saturday, December 6th, and Sunday, December 7th
