Momus: Classic or Dud

Will you ever make a record with the scuffling vole?

Wasn't it Momus who wrote a vicious little song that went:

We corrupted Swiss chocolate
We laced it with strychnine
And said we'd only stop it
For a cool six million

We corrupted Swiss chocolate
And moved to the Philippines
We've come to know exactly
What being fabulously wealthy means
It's beautiful

...and got it into the Japanese singles chart?

Is Momus really an immortal kicked off Mount Olympus for criticizing the other gods, and is there really a Cafe Momus in Act 2 of Puccini's opera La Boheme, as well as a chapter of the New Orleans Mardi Gras called Momus (not to mention lots of gnarly, bearded Dungeons and Dragons players)? And is there a character in Kafka named Momus?

'There's no point lying about this: Momus and I are both active participants on the I Love Music and I Love Everything message boards, and we've butted heads a number of times about a number of things. I still don'T agree with him most of the time, but he's a gracious arguer and a terrific sport, which predisposes me toward liking him. Wish I could say the same about his music -- let's just say he likes Serge Gainsbourg and Japanese pop a lot more than I do, not to mention that his in-your-face amorality I'd find a lot more interesting (not to say endearing) if he weren't so fucking gleeful about it. But I'm going to the show anyway -- partly because I want to meet the guy in person, partly because he's smart enough that I suspect his stage patter will be more interesting than his actual songs.'

You're a funny guy, Momus. But you're no Jon Langford.

Mr Diamond, no.

Speaking of oop north, which famous Britpop group approached Momus asking him to produce their next album and were somewhat miffed that he didn't even write back?

(It's Frasier, BTW)

Does the current edition of British art magazine Modern Painters, in a four page feature, really trumpet Momus as 'a Scottish Serge Gainsbourg with a reputation as a producer to rival Brian Eno's'?

Is it true that Bill Drummond of the KLF demanded £11,000 to remix 'A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24)' in 1998?

And did Channel 4, after securing Serge Gainsbourg's permission to be interviewed by Momus for a show called World Cafe, really demand £2000 from Creation Records to cover travel expenses?

Irony is sadly in no way dead. That, however, is not stopping me from being all about the "new earnestness".

In re the Terence quote, I'd go with "I am a human being, I hold no human thing as alien to myself" - clunkier, but preserves the rather important active voice of "puto." As to whether the character who speaks through your songs can fairly align himself with Terence...well...I mean, it's nice if that's your intention, but the body of work doesn't bear that out very well, since as we both know, authorial intentions don't count for jack. Xgau's problem with your work is mine exactly: the overall mood of it seems mean-spirited, pro-"our-kind-of-people" but generally anti-people, otherwise.

I still think one shouldn't read one's own bad reviews, all it does is give one fits and lead to public plaints of "they haff not understood me," but it's yer thread!

Anyway, I've been thinking about this issue of the moral probity of artists some more.

The big question that distinguishes persona artists from ideology artists (and they could be the same artist at different times: early Tolstoy versus late Tolstoy, for example) is the way they answer this question:

'Which, if you could only be one, would you rather be, interesting or right?'

(Substitute, if you prefer, 'original or exemplary' or 'entertaining or responsible'.)

On this question of 'who we really are' (and hence what the 'Nick Currie solo album' would sound like), I tend to go along with Liam Hudson, the humanist pyschologist, who, in a book called 'Contrary Imaginations' divided people into Convergers and Divergers, ie those who tend to converge down to 'the one right answer' (they usually become scientists of some kind) and those who diverge up and away from the immediate stimulus into a confetti shower of possibilities, never committing to any of them. (Artists, schizophrenics, confidence tricksters and show offs.) BUT, crucially, Hudson saw these as merely 'rival systems of defence', ways of keeping one's true self hidden. You can hide behind objective facts or you can hide behind fictions and masks, but either way you're basically hidden and defended.

I, too, would be extremely curious to hear the Nick Currie solo album. Especially in terms of musical timbre.

Here I totally disagree. Calling someone an asshole is refusing to look at context or contingency, origin or outcome. It's a trite, misanthropic rejection of a human being, a way of ruling a human being 'out of order' and 'out of account', a reduction and a trivialisation. I have never, in all my days of mockery, called anyone an 'asshole', because it's the end of analysis rather the beginning, the refusal to understand rather than the desire to understand, the denial of commonality rather than its shamefaced admission.

Calling someone as asshole is not a good start if you want to 'get inside the character', unless you want to crawl up a back passage. Let me warn anyone who tries: the soul is not located there.

Anyway, as for Momus's final warning, as usual I think he's completely wrong. But I certainly enjoy the back-and-forth here, and admire his attempt to maintain an appropriately Olympian demeanor.

"What I like about ev psych most of all is that it essentially turns morality into a pragmatic engineering problem to be solved, like all pragmatic engineering problems, within a reasonable margin of error. Yes, the default state of humanity is to be kind of a solipstic asshole. Big deal -- that's just one more thing we share with every other species of animal, vegetable, and protozoa. Now, what can we do to mitigate this? That's the interesting question."

Just to put my claims of assholery in perspective, is all.

If love is good, as most agree
Loving two must be twice as good
And loving three... well, you get the idea'

If there's one thing that characterises Momusworld, it's this emphasis on divergence and pluralism -- on doubles ('My Doppelganger'), triangles ('The Beast with 3 Backs'), and parallel worlds ('Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan'). And the way you react to Momusworld depends on whether you're the kind of person who thinks Wire's 'Forty Versions' is a better portrayal of the human soul than 'Don't Ever Change'.

(Cue argument about how rhetorical love songs like 'Don't Ever Change' are poignant precisely because they misrepresent the complexity and inconstancy of life, thereby conjuring up a parallel world and increasing the range of possibilities.)

(And it must have been a Freudian slip that I left 'pervert' out of 'My Pervert Doppelganger' the first time I typed it.)

Wouldn't Momera be more likely -- as for genus and opus -- if this were the case?

It actually is 2nd decl masc, though, following its declension in the original Greek Mômos, with grammatical plural Mômoi.

Is the morphology of Momus' moniker -- the Latin form of a Greek god's name -- a symbol of his contempt for pur(itan)sm, or merely a result of youthful sloppiness?

Momus is good because he made me understand fruitcake and laptop music. Erm, and that's about enough being nice about him for the rest of my life!

Oho, ho ho, how much the champion of postmodernism likes binary oppositions when they suit his purposes! As I've pointed out, though I like to avoid dragging my own work into things whenever possible: I am all persona, work-wise. I don't write confessional songs. My issue is not with persona per-se. It's with the notion that once a persona is in play, anything it says/does is interesting/"allowed" big scare-quotes since, hey, it's a persona. One can be both interesting and unconnected with noxious stances.

the speedfreak who stole my Ovaltine while camping out on my couch when I was eighteen and then told me I needed not to be so attached to material things wasn't stealing the Ovaltine in order to wrest me from my consumerist prison. He just wanted my Ovaltine. But God damn it, that God damned Ovaltine wasn't for any lousy tweeker who waltzed in through the God damned door.

I'm seriously LOLin', here.

Try some, buy some!

Momus, on the other hand, does not seem in any way to be criticising his narrators (vide Lear, above, and Browning, and Poe, and Lovecraft, ad infinitum or at least ad lib) and in fact states that he wishes to celebrate their humanity. This is a crucial difference. The use of personae is perhaps the most interesting thing in all art for me, hence my constant harping on one of its finer points: does persona offer blanket immunity to its wearer? I say no.

Anyway, any pretext to debate persona with Darnielle (I think we're in wuv this month) makes for an interesting thread.

im sure this exact sentiment has been expressed upthread, but its true.

It's weird how many ILM discussions(rockism vs. electronic music, Momus vs his detractors) are covert versions of "culture wars" debates, ie. some approximate version of humanism versus some approximate form of post-modernity.