As apathy becomes a political position, an ambiguous genre struggles to pick a side.
SAMUEL HYLAND
Part I: A Peaceful Moment
In the slapstick music video for “Only In My Dreams,” a 2014 hypnagogic-pop ballad, a desperate man is rejected, one by one, by an onslaught of angry young women, irrespective of his winning qualities: a lopsided pink wig, a knack for half-assed queerbaiting, and an insatiable humiliation kink. The man is Ariel Pink, a controversial California musician, and the music video—a sort of thesis statement—finds him in the familiar role of frenzied incel, his career-long character of choice. Performative victimhood, however annoying, is a skill Pink has honed into high art: not necessarily pain, but its potential to convert crises into clout. This was largely at play in the late ‘90s, when Pink, who was born Ariel Rosenberg in Los Angeles, amassed a cult following for his pity-laden love songs, humming with tape hiss and heaving with loserdom. It was also at play in January of 2021, when, two weeks after he was photographed at a Trump rally, he was seated across from Tucker Carlson, retelling the story of how he was dropped from his label. In the beginning of the segment, which opens with an excerpt from “Only In My Dreams,” a smug Carlson briefly introduces the disgraced indie darling: “Ariel Pink is a musician from Los Angeles—and a Trump voter,” he reports, raising an eyebrow. “On January 6th, he attended the President’s speech in Washington. Then, he went back to his hotel room and took a nap. He committed no violence whatsoever; he’s opposed to violence. But what he did was a crime. He attended a political rally.”
“I went to the White House to see our President. Went to the hotel, took a nap, end of story.”
Carlson is the aggressor in the interview, so far as he desires, and fights for, a spectacle: this man was wronged, he wants to communicate, and it isn’t fair. What feels interesting, in retrospect, is that Pink, the presumed victim, is sullen, bordering on uncooperative. (It has since been reported that he might have been on acid.) Carlson knows the story, and in his desire to capitalize on it, guides Pink along a gauntlet of leading questions, like a mother goading an annoyed son into telling Aunt Shirley what happened at school today. “You are an artist,” he opens, “and artists do transgressive things. You did the most transgressive thing: came out as a Trump supporter. What happened next?” Pink is sheepish and wet-eyed, which affords him the vibe of a bullied child: ushered in front of a cell-phone camera, plastered on Facebook, showered with cries of You’re doing great, honey. His response, a muttered groan, echoes the misleading vagueness of his introduction: “I went to the White House to see our President. Went to the hotel, took a nap, end of story.” But Carlson wants more—as a good journalist should—and in order to get it, he must probe the murky gray area of what, exactly, constitutes violence. Pink was at the Ellipse, on January 6th, to support Donald Trump. This is conveniently simple, and when he asks the pivotal question, he seems to know it. “Just to be clear: you committed no violence in Washington?” Pink gives the correct answer—“Of course not. I was there for a peaceful rally.”—and there is a sense that they feel they’ve gotten away with something.
Because, for all intents and purposes, the answer is, in fact, no: Ariel Pink did not commit a crime, or an act of physical violence, by attending a Trump rally. But in 2025, six months into the second Trump presidency, it feels evident, more so now than then, that violence is slipperier, more abstract, than harm inflicted by hands. Semantic arguments have shaped the past half-decade of political debate; among right-wing commentators, the line between “peace” and “violence” has seemed, often, like the difference between Christlike innocence and barbarian guilt. And still, even before January 6th, the verdict on violence—sometimes literally–has appeared contingent, somewhat, upon who exactly was using it. In the summer of 2020, while conservative pundits sermonized, on television, about the nobility of peaceful protest, they also rallied behind the forceful suppression of it: like the tear-gassing of demonstrators, that July, to clear room for a Trump photo op, and the taunting of marchers, that June, by a gun-toting Missouri couple. What hindsight makes clear, if anything, is that the violent images of 2020 are precursors—and maybe, in comparison, whispers—to the violent realities of 2025. And increasingly, though supporting Donald Trump, as Ariel Pink did, is not technically a crime, its implications are glaringly criminal. Peace-good-violence-bad philosophy is convenient, because it equates violence, the act of causing harm upon someone, with its most extreme and visible form, which is upon a physical body. But where the first-term Trump of 2020 struggled to reckon violent crackdowns (and a violent insurrection) with “law and order” rhetoric, the vengeful Trump of 2025 has mastered a muscular form of political violence: not breaking the bones of his enemies, but their families, finances, and futures. Four years ago, Pink was at a peaceful rally; four years later, we are in a peaceful moment.
“They think this is the sound of today. No, this is the sound of your life, and you don’t even know why.”
Peaceful, too—perhaps more so than our moment—is hypnagogic pop, the lo-fi genre Pink spearheaded, decades ago, with second-hand synthesizers and a unique capacity for self-deprecation. In 2009, the journalist David Keenan christened, for the British underground music magazine Wire, a new phenomenon of “pop music refracted through the memory of a memory,” though he might have been a decade or so late: “he can’t leave it behind because he carries it with him,” Mark Fisher wrote of a 1981 song by Japan, and the seeds may well have been sown by then. Fisher and Keenan’s respective labels, of hypnagogic pop and “hauntology,” were somewhat synonymous, denoting a dreamlike conjuring of cultural debris. Incidentally or not, these findings also coincided with the prime of Pink, who had enjoyed, throughout the aughts, a sort of renaissance: buoyed by the indie boom, and enjoyed by an Obama-era culture of weightless optimism. In a New Yorker retrospective on “Obama pop,” Matthew Trammell mourned, a year into Trump’s first term, “a fascination with what was above and ahead of us, and getting to fly like a G6.” Ariel Pink wasn’t locked out of heaven with Bruno Mars, but he was certainly locked out of numerous young women’s bedrooms, which afforded him a distinctly creepy-uncle charm. On “Short Man’s Syndrome,” a 2014 requiem for the vertically challenged, he transcribed, with prophetic accuracy, the self-loathing desperation of the proverbial Short King: “I feel nothing / a short man, I’m not that / I’m not angry at myself […] Dare I say that you are beautiful?” What felt forgivable, maybe endearing, about his pathetic platform was its methodology, a nostalgic messiness that sometimes came across as deeply earnest. Beat-boxed drum parts, shitty guitar amps, whiny vocals that barely beat the mic hiss: this was broken music, so compressed and compromised that it felt like a forgotten dream.
Now, as an aging Pink trades synthesizers for shitposts, remembering the dream doesn’t feel nearly as important, in our era, as reckoning with the rude awakening. How much further can hypnagogic pop take us? In a 2012 profile, Pink was asked about the growing popularity of the genre, then freshly propelled by gloomy contemporaries like John Maus and James Ferraro. “They think this is the sound of today,” he said of its growing base. “No, this is the sound of your life, and you don’t even know why.” A decade and change later, his words still feel salient, though for less peaceful reasons than they might have then. The 2020s began with a cluttered digisphere, overstuffed with tech-savvy teens and their mutant mini-genres: digicore, nightcore, glitchcore, sigilkore. That moment, much like America, was quarantined but willing itself towards a future; now that the future is here and fugly, its detritus—much like America—has devolved towards hyperactive stasis. With the democratic dream of hyperpop now dead and dying, its debris is all distortion pedals and deep-bass plugins, scattered across SoundCloud like street-fights on a sadist’s TikTok feed. It’s crazy, and it sells. Crazy always has. But now that the world is senselessly crazy, too, the spectacle—and sound—of violence feels more and more like a prophecy fulfilled. Midway through pom pom, Pink’s 2014 magnum opus, there is a vindictive track titled “Not Enough Violence,” in which he laments what Pitchfork called “a culture too cowardly to face the world’s brutalities.” In an interview with the publication, that year, he offered some clarification:
We have to mix our violence up. Once a day we get some bad news—ISIS, or something like that—and then we get some nudie celebrity leaks, just to keep us attentive so we don’t get bogged down. It’s like, ‘Just one beheading a day, please!’
There is a reading of this spiel as disingenuous, but then again, there is also a reading of Ariel Pink as disingenuous. What gives? Ten years ago, when Jihadi John waged war against Kim Kardashian’s ass cheeks for the screen-time of America, culture was a caricature, and Pink’s music, in turn, was caricaturish, too. The troubling thing, especially now, is that caricature doesn’t always mean comedy—and in a uniquely caricaturish political regime, Pink’s cancelled-guy schtick doesn’t really feel like a schtick anymore. Pink has long been aware, more so than most has-beens, that his time in our good graces was temporary. His attitude about his irrelevance has shifted. In 2017, years before January 6th and its fallout, he told Red Bull Music Academy that he was “about as famous as I’d like to get, because I’m not very into the fame thing or the attention thing anymore.” Five years later, in a lengthy cancelled-guy-speaks-out profile, he told Tablet that he was “being erased from history.”
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“The American people don’t feel responsible for murders that happen elsewhere in the world by the US army, or that for every $2 box of chocolates they buy their grandmother, someone dies.”
In the summer of 2019, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney estimated, at the request of Donald Trump, a predictive figure for the President’s newest idea: a military parade in Washington D.C. Two years prior, when Trump visited Paris for Bastille Day, he was moved by its own show of force, which he called “one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen.” Before long, he was briefing executives on an attempt to “try and top it,” which led to quite the disappointment—Mulvaney, it turns out, was wrong, and the $3 million figure he floated was actually closer to $100 million. Tail between his legs, a humiliated Trump took to Twitter, where he lamented the “ridiculous” price tag on a patriotic act, then declared an IDGAF war: “Maybe we will do something next year in D.C. when the cost comes WAY DOWN. Now we can buy some more jet fighters!” Months into his second term, when he finally got his wish, this IDGAF war was looking more like a World War, and the $300 million “jet fighters” in question were soaring over Iran, targeting nuclear facilities. Meanwhile on Twitter, Pink was ragebaiting his earnest followers, who, unlike him, did not believe planet Earth to be under Jewish control. “If we let Iran defeat Israel,” he retorted, days before the bombing, “we look weak, not just to our enemies—but the ENTIRE world.”
“When I was born / Something went wrong […] I wanna be a girl / Don’t wanna be a boy / Put my dress on / Dress how I want.”
Pink himself has mastered the art of looking weak, which, to some, might complicate his love for a strong-man candidate. Somewhere beneath his performative weakness—the colorful wigs, the murky mixes, the jilted incel philosophy—there lurks, also, a rhetorical weakness, the slackness of principle that permits him to tout “nonviolence” while espousing a genocide. It is funny, but not surprising, that his desired political climate would also be oxymoronic: bombing Iran to broker a peace deal, and sending billions of dollars to Israel to achieve world peace, too. And still, “peace,” like violence, is a semantic construction, much more complex than harm or the absence thereof. In a 2014 interview, a defensive Pink was asked whether he disliked celebrity culture, which led him to clarify: “No, I disagree with the masses, who see themselves as very passive. The American people don’t feel responsible for murders that happen elsewhere in the world by the US army, or that for every $2 box of chocolates they buy their grandmother, someone dies.” In denouncing a form of “passive” violence, Pink might have denounced, a decade early, our apathetic America, whose concept of “peace” depends not only on its own comfort, but whoever must be killed to preserve it. It’s a familiar grievance, and, increasingly, a correct one: the most spoiled country also happens to be the most powerful. But from his mouth, this particular complaint—convenience for us, consequences for the world—feels funnier than most, considering his first real cash-grab since being dropped from his label. Last July, Pink announced a limited-edition reissue of his complete discography, available for 48 hours via his website: a 10 CD “MAGA-set,” fully remastered with 500-plus minutes of AI vocals from Donald Trump.
The “MAGA” in “MAGA-set” stands for “Make Ariel Gay Again,” a tongue-in-cheek nod to his queerbaiting glory days. Since the Tucker Carlson interview, Pink has garnered an influx of rowdy right-wing supporters, which has led him, in turn, to reframe his sexual ambiguity as trolling—not exploiting a queer aesthetic, but owning the libs. The previous summer, he released the one-off single “I Wanna Be a Girl,” in which he hawked a crude, oversimplified anti-trans bit: “When I was born / Something went wrong […] I wanna be a girl / Don’t wanna be a boy / Put my dress on / Dress how I want.” As with the political regime he champions, the endgame, here, seems less about concrete ideology than gratuitous cruelty. And for Pink, an indecisive man who thrives in gray areas—murky sexuality, murky mixes, murky moral compass—this goal, of no actual goal, is the only goal he aspires to, because it is the only goal he can attain. Hypnagogic pop, historically, is a uniquely apolitical genre, less concerned with addressing reality than escaping it. But in our era, as apathy increasingly amounts to a political position, Pink seems to relish in the neutrality it affords: apolitical politics, nonviolent violence. A few days before he released pom pom, he told a journalist about his coping mechanisms for bad press: “That’s how I deal with all issues – I embrace them as being the case, so I actually face them. I am a misogynist! Yes, I have to deal with that.” On its surface, this might appear direct, and in being so, uncharacteristic of a hypnotic genre. On another level, his blissful ignorance might also amount to violence, which is, in all its silence, all hypnagogic pop has ever been. Dean Blunt’s brooding masculinity, James Ferraro’s apocalyptic irony, John Maus’s troubled Christianity: somewhere beneath the dream, there has always lurked a vicious undercurrent. Now, with the dream dead, the violence is all we have left.
“They don’t wanna work / They just wanna play.”
While Pink and Trump share a politics of punishment, they share, also, a penchant for AI slop—malleable mush, murky as Pink’s mixes and muddled as Trump’s morals. Earlier this summer, when Trump had an ugly falling-out with Elon Musk, conservatives rallied around an age-old clip of the pair: both men, both AI-generated, performing a synchronized dance routine in black business suits. There is a particular dance Trump likes to do, and when I see this dance, I think of an archaic America, where Coke foams in glass bottles and teens drag their prom dates to dingy diners at 1 AM. This America lives on in racist Twitter accounts, and it lives on, also, in Ariel Pink’s music, a sunwashed escape valve for those who claim to miss the old days, but really miss being young. In both cases, the only way to restore lost dreams—an old America, an old time, an old self—is to run them through an AI generator. And across Pink’s costly AI cash-grab, it seems, often, that the restorative language of “Make Ariel Gay Again” is not only vapid, but desperate. In addition to the AI Trump voice, every CD in the box set is accordingly retitled: pom pom is don don; Mature Themes is Presidential Themes; The Doldrums is The Dontrumps. The mixing, of course, is terrible, which means that the much-advertised Trump AI voice is almost always garbled. But in the rare moments where his identity feels crystal-clear, it has nothing to do with sound, and everything to do with rhetoric—a warped determinism, insecurity disguised as masculine meritocracy. “They just wanna play all day,” he croaks in “Rock Play,” a vague track that could just as easily be an anti-immigration tirade. “They don’t wanna work / They just wanna play.”
Long before his own exile, Pink theorized upon the role of an American celebrity: “they have a duty to be people you can break down, because everyone feels ashamed for knowing who they are, and hates themselves for paying so much attention.” Like most canceled musicians, Pink is someone who claims, adamantly, to have made peace with his irrelevance. But lurking beneath this exterior, the same way it lurks beneath every incel, is a wounded victim, foaming at the mouth for his lick back. This vengeful victim is the mastermind of the “MAGA-set,” a fundraiser for not only a broken bank account, but a broken ego. And for the vengeful victim in office, a bruised ego also seemed to be the springboard, months ago, for an extravagant military parade, rejected in 2019 and rolling down Constitution Street in 2025. That day, a costumed crowd gathered at the Ellipse, where, four years prior, Pink had been photographed at a Trump rally, peacefully supporting his peaceful President. There was a sense, in its rainy, half-assed state, that Trump wanted to be a rock-star, and was brooding over the plight of settling for President. His AI voice makes no real difference on don don, but in its strongest moment, it sounds a lot like the parade he might have preferred. Midway through “Jell-O,” an overstimulating fuzzbox anthem, there is a sudden, random guitar solo, too loud for the background gibberish to matter anymore. Where the current administration lacks success, it often chases, instead, hype moments and aura: the only attainable goals for a demented President, whose strength, youth, and wit only exist with the assistance of AI software. He wants the hype, wants the guitar solo, because he wants it to drown out his gibberish. And when the hype inevitably precedes the gibberish, he will speak, and no one will hear him.
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Part II: I Hate Antichrist
In the outdoor seating area of Union Pool, a small Brooklyn venue-slash-bar, there was a young woman, 22, sitting alone, fidgeting. Drunken friend groups chatted over beers; a glass spilled somewhere, she shuddered. She was wearing a frilly Victorian dress, the sole obvious outlier in a sea of business-casual. And tonight, at about 6:50 PM on a May Thursday, she was waiting, impatiently, for the imminent return of John Maus, a cultic musician whose fall from grace, on January 6, catalyzed a prolonged period of isolation. She was nervous, presumably, because this was a spiritual encounter—the fabled comeback of a rugged prophet. She was also nervous because she didn’t have a ticket. “I’ll do whatever I can to get to the front,” she told me, somewhat distantly, while I scanned for a friend. “I just want to scream and shout and dance.”
“I feel like his performance is spiritually hardcore, if that makes sense. Even lyrically, in a way. Pure, simple, punchy, and expressive.”
Screaming and shouting and dancing are not synonymous, historically, with synthpop: the bedrock of Maus’s music, and the vehicle of its oddball simplicity. But somewhere in his sparse studio setup—MIDI, microphone, laptop—there are shades of a rougher ethos, the straightforward sharpness evoked by, then culturally understood as, Punk. When Maus was a teenager in rural Minnesota, he was enamored by hardcore and grunge, his reluctant Catholicism countered by secular self-education. In 1998, he began his undergraduate career at Cal Arts, where he befriended Ariel Pink: a talented wunderkind who exemplified, in Maus’s words, the “truth of pop,” despite the limited means of a “three-stringed guitar” and a “lousy drummer.” As roommates, they shared a praxis of experimental knob-turning; within a few years, Pink was a star, and Maus, a close contemporary—joining him on tour, rubbing shoulders with Animal Collective, playing in his band. His own debut album, Songs, was released via Upset the Rhythm in 2006, after years of rejections from other labels. Their A&Rs approached him because they had seen him open for Ariel Pink.
Two decades later at Union Pool, Maus was headlining, and tickets had sold out within an hour—a dilemma for the 22 year-old, who was in England, fast asleep, when it was announced. Outside of Maus, she is an avid fan of hardcore and death metal. “I feel like his performance is spiritually hardcore, if that makes sense,” she said, noticing my confusion. “Even lyrically, in a way. Pure, simple, punchy, and expressive.” As a Political Science PhD student at the University of Hawaii, Maus wrote a book-length dissertation, “Communication and Control” (2014), in which he praised Punk as a “phonetic assault on meaning.” In “Theses on Punk Rock,” another essay, he theorized upon the politics of the genre: “Punk rock, like every truth, is anarchist,” he wrote, “[and] gives itself as a disordering of the Police.” Though revered as a forefather of hypnagogic pop, Maus has long been ambivalent towards the label, perhaps for good reason. His minimalist output is deeply machinic, and in its machinic-ness, covertly militant. In his best songs, like “Rights for Gays” and “Cop Killer,” he masters the political slogan, but also murders it: evocative dictums, echoed and endlessly repeated until they become gibberish. This is a punk praxis, chewing up commercial culture and spitting it out oversimplified, rough-edged, malformed. The trouble, perhaps, is that in playing with understanding, he himself has become prone to misunderstandings, too.
“How underserved of the name ‘criticism’ is this idiocy? Assuming everything in terms of something else?”
When Maus rose to cult fame in the mid-2000s, his ascent, like Pink’s, coincided with a referential boom—beloved by blogs, devoured by Derrida readers. Though he was largely inspired by Pink, a consequence, early on, was that he became somewhat inextricable from him. Pink was revered as a master of cultural memory; Maus was miffed by backwards-facing interpretations. (In a 2006 interview, he railed against nostalgic readings of Pink: “How underserved of the name ‘criticism’ is this idiocy? Assuming everything in terms of something else?”) In his own music, he relied heavily on Medieval modal scales, but was dismissed, among journalists, as an ‘80s revivalist, or, worse, “obviously some kind of art-school mindfuckery.” On January 6, 2021, the independent filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer posted a photo to her Instagram account: herself, Maus, and Pink sprawled across a Washington hotel bed, sort of smirking. “The day we almost died but instead had a good time,” the caption read. Word got out, and Pink doubled down. Maus tweeted a 1937 papal encyclical that condemned Nazism. Pink was dropped from his label; Maus was pulled from the Electronicon Festival, and quietly withdrew from the public eye. “The dude who wrote cop killer attended this bullshit,” one fan commented online. “I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
Materially, the song “Cop Killer” is something of a paradox: a dizzying synthpop song about direct political mobilization. There is candor, almost humor, in the sly proposal “Let’s kill the cops tonight,” posed not only as a suggestion, but a thing one casually does. Is it necessarily as cogent as it could be? On one level, the message is fairly straightforward: John Maus would like you to murder the police. But as a meandering piece of music, it could also be interpreted, very easily, as a mockery—performing, deep-voiced and dirgelike, the absurdity some project onto the idea of dismantling corrupt systems. In the press release for his forthcoming album, Later Than You Think, it is noted, in parentheses, that “Cop Killer” is a “challenge to both fight the powers that be and kill the cop in our own heads.” It’s worth interrogating, perhaps, the fact—a crucial one, years after its initial release—that this had to be clarified in the first place. Ambivalent as he may be towards it, Maus has become, begrudgingly, a patron saint of hypnagogic pop, an ambiguous genre aptly named for a groggy, half-present state of being. Everything about him—his politics, his philosophy, his stage presence—seems to reject this. The difficult thing, no less, is that everything about him is also densely intellectual. In its impenetrable depth, his praxis enables the very ignorance it resists: misunderstandings, minimizations, and, as of late, career-altering mischaracterizations. It’s easier to read a tweet than a book-length dissertation.
“What we all really want is to see one another and to be seen.”
When critics first embraced Maus in the early 2000s, they compared him, often, to the likes of Jim Morrisson and Ian Curtis—self-destructive firebrands who burned out, and did so in front of live audiences. Maus, 45, is too old for nihilistic burnout, and too young for geriatric retirement, which leaves him somewhere in the middle: button-down shirt, dad sneakers, crinkled jeans, spasmodic stage presence. There is an endearing cartoonishness to his character, this career-long commitment to a single outfit, a single methodology, a single mode of performance. Yet in all his militaristic sameness, he seems, also, to be self-effacingly earnest—not a “rich kid playing weird,” as some critics argue, but a lost man convulsing under the weight of his demons. For years, he has dubbed his wriggling stage act “The Hysterical Body,” a physical response to collective alienation. (“What we all really want,” he said in 2012, “is to see one another and to be seen.”) And in the teeny ballroom of Union Pool, where body heat pooled between sweaty shoulders, collective alienation seemed no threat, temporarily, to collective effervescence. The opening act, a talented musician named John V. Variety, was visibly disheartened by technical difficulties; after some ineffective tinkering, he announced, breathily, that he would do “What John would do,” then proceeded to perform his entire set acapella. When Maus himself made his grand entrance, 30-ish minutes later, it was awkwardly uneventful, as if he had stumbled on-stage or been pushed. He set down a laptop, opened an Ableton file. Every time a song ended, he would scurry back to it, kneel down, and manually queue the next one.
Maus makes synthpop music, which means, for headphones users, that the “synth” is much more apparent than the “pop.” In many ways, his chosen musical languages—synthpop, hypnagogic pop, hauntology—are tailored for easy listening, wafting between binaries like bubblegum for your brain. A synthesizer, paired with echo, delay, and reverb, becomes an agent of escapism, the good-vibes conveyor belt lugging harsh realities slowly towards oblivion. But a synthesizer, as with synthpop, is ineffective without its diametric opposite, the physical “pop” of rhythm—pulsing basslines, crackle-pop percussion, cymbal crashes that feel stark in their sharpness. “Material Girl” doesn’t work without its boom-clap bass stabs; “Someone for Me” doesn’t work without the mechanical march of a drum machine. For Maus, a staunch leftist betrayed by his airy music, this physicality is crucial, but not as visible through Airpods—or the algorithm—as open air. Not long before his Union Pool show, he released “I Hate Antichrist,” the rhythm-driven lead single of his forthcoming album. It’s a simple song, structured around a four-note bassline and a swelling organ. Nonetheless, in its denouncement of an unnamed “Antichrist,” it is also fairly complex—a covertly militant statement, not unlike the papal encyclical he posted before his disappearance:
I hate antichrist
I hate the antichrist
I hate son of a bitch
I hate antichrist (FBI, open up!)
“I Hate Antichrist” shares a premise with an erstwhile, vaguely cynical MS Paint meme. Seated at a desk, à la “Are Ya Winning Son,” is a shotgun-wielding trollface, denouncing “The Antichrist” whilst bombarded by blue-helmet UN troops, who bark orders: “We’ve got you surrounded! Come drink your corn syrup!” While corn syrup has long been the butt of doomer jokes, an “Antichrist,” a false savior, is particularly durable, a grand cultural metaphor for corruption or ignoble glory. Meme-wise, the false hero in question, presumably, is the United Nations, an entity that christens itself an arbiter of global justice, but cowers in the face of unprecedented bloodshed. What is a powerless Christ, an effortless Christ, but an Antichrist? “Corn syrup,” in this universe, is a crude version of Soma, a dystopian happiness-drug that “solves” depression by enabling apathy. And while the lyric “I hate Antichrist,” context considered, might sound forwardly Anti-Trump, its rhetorical devices are much deeper, much more complex, than our shallow contexts can accomodate. In its violent simplicity, the song harbors a trancelike hollowness, bludgeoning a blunt mantra—“I hate Antichrist / I hate son of a bitch”—until it withers, senselessly, to death. While the Son of God watches wearily, the “son of a bitch” wreaks havoc; the collapse of man is preceded by the collapse of meaning. Midway through, when a brash “FBI, open up” cues a spaced-out guitar solo, it is funny: we now interrupt your anti-establishment tirade with musical corn syrup. Yet in all its syrupy bliss, the solo also creates, crucially, a congealment of clatter: shattered glass, hoarse voices, drum breakdowns, amplifier distortion. Not only is this synthpop song physical, but it is falling apart.
When Maus played “I Hate Antichrist” at Union Pool, the crowd was falling apart, too—due, largely, to a sudden, surging jolt, darting between dancing bodies and barrelling towards the front. On-stage, Maus was a sweaty mess, waddling in pools of his own perspiration, punching himself in the face. At his feet, the ticketless 22 year-old was screaming and shouting and dancing.
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“She’s the one who took the photos. She’s the one who invited us. She’s the one who posted it online. And now he’s the arsonist?”
The evening after his Union Pool show, Maus was fidgeting in the New York headquarters of Young Recordings, grappling with why, or how, a longtime fan might have misunderstood him on January 6th. “All the music that I’d done, inasmuch as it did overlap with the political—the maxims, the slogans—would’ve been on the side of the oppressed… not the state, not the forces of reaction, not any of that,” he mused, bouncing his leg. “I’m not on the side of the pigs. I’m on the side of Ice-T when he says, I would like to take a pig out here in this parking lot and shoot him in his fucking face!” Across the room, someone interjected: “Can I just say one simple thing?” It was his wife, the Hungarian artist Kika Karadi, and she was seated at a hulking conference table, peering out from underneath a black baseball cap. Hunched over a leather couch, Maus, visibly weary, was in full uniform: rumpled blue button-down, blue jeans, dad shoes. His bone-crushing handshake belied his nervous energy. “You’re so humble,” Karadi started, while Maus attempted, profusely, to tell her it was okay. “We were just hanging at the hotel with Ariel. Someone knocks at the door. [Moyer]’s like, Oh my God! The whole shit is on fire! Come with me, guys! Ariel’s like, No, I’m not gonna go. We’re like, What’s going on? Is it dangerous? I’m so oblivious, I’m literally asking if we need tickets.”
Karadi laughed, then quickly sobered up. “She’s like, No, I have a press pass—you guys come with me,” she continued. “She’s the one who took the photos. She’s the one who invited us. She’s the one who posted it online. And now he’s the arsonist? God damn!”
Maus and Karadi are somewhat unlucky. On October 7th, 2023, when Hamas militants descended upon the Nova Music Festival, the couple were scheduled for a road-trip from Lebanon to Jerusalem. Before they could go, they got a call from their booking agent: “I’ve got a really weird feeling about this festival that you’re booked for. Can you just kill this one?” This past May, while Maus performed in Paris, PSG defeated Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League Final, which led to a long night of rioting, police standoffs, and smashed objects—a sleepless gauntlet for Maus, who might have appreciated the Cop-killing sentiments, but maybe, also, a much-needed rest. His forthcoming album, Later Than You Think, is titled for an ancient memento mori: “It’s later than you think. Therefore hasten to do the work of God.” The imposing dilemma, as he readies his comeback, is that perhaps, it’s a bit late for apologies, too.
“They want you to say Yes or No. And I don’t think that’s something you would ever do.”
“They fucking think I’m a Nazi,” Maus sighed. “A Nazi who wants to put people in cages, make shit-eating ASMR memes… did you see that shit on Twitter? The Homeland Security ASMR? The Studio Ghibli shit? I see shit like that, and I want to say something. But then people will just think I’m trying to virtue signal. He’s trying to save face because he has a new record coming out.”
Once again, a voice interjected from across the room, and Maus looked up, abruptly. At the other side of the conference table, his publicist, a friendly young woman, was holding up a finger, apologizing for chiming in. “I think the crux of what is happening, across your career and the philosophy you’ve studied, is that people want a one-sentence answer,” she said. “They want you to say Yes or No. And I don’t think that’s something you would ever do. There isn’t a one-word answer to certain things, and they don’t like that.”
Maus has long sought answers, and oftentimes, the ones he finds are difficult to put into language. A year before the pandemic, he lost his brother, uncle, and aunt in rapid succession; come January 6th, a hefty chunk of his fanbase was gone, too. The answers he relied on weren’t working anymore. “I did my twenties and thirties with philosophy,” he told me, in August. “You can live your life according to that, but for me, it just ended in dereliction and ruin and torments and demons crawling up the wall.” One Sunday morning in mid-COVID Minnesota, he pulled into the parking lot of a nearby church, desperate for the faith he shrugged off as a teenager. Service was being held outdoors, and he showed up, cluelessly, not knowing what to expect, but sensing, vaguely, that he was doing something right. “I didn’t know what was going on, but I just had a strong suspicion that it was much better than being in a snot cocoon, being up for five days in a row, or whatever other filthy shit I was into.”
“You’ll have to ask him why he says that stuff.”
In 2011, when Maus was a disheveled PhD candidate, he released We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, an opus whose title originates from the Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou. (“All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.”) Fourteen years and one dissertation later, Maus has embraced, begrudgingly, a different kind of self-censorship—not protecting his art from a capitalist machine, but protecting himself from the one-dimensional world it enables. This September, when he releases Later Than You Think, it will represent a sort of comeback, which, in some ways, it will be. But to another extent, it also begs the question of why, his own history considered, Maus would be in any particular rush to return—let alone justify himself—to a culture incompatible with his way of being. In the coming months, hypnagogic pop, more broadly, will face an apotheosis: not only is Maus returning, but also Pink, whose forthcoming album, With You Every Night, is slated for a September release as well. Both records will be born into a violent America, and both, foreseeably, will be violent in their own prophetic ways. In the pair’s strange friendship, you might see shades of our strained moment, a bloody postscript to a decade that felt—and, in many ways, was—too good to be true. How much truer was that Heaven than this Hell? In the direct aftermath of January 6th, Pink alleged, on a podcast, that Maus was “a thousand and one percent on Team Trump.” When I asked Maus about this, he looked tired. “You’ll have to ask him why he says that stuff,” he said. “You’ll have to ask him.”
Maus maintains that he is still friends with Pink. Depending on who you are, this might seem immensely forgiving, or, conversely, immensely enabling. The difficult truth is that it’s complicated. There isn’t a one-word answer. And somewhere in that muck, for us and for our country, reality, whatever it may look like, is waiting for us to wake up from our simplistic, escapist, apathetic fever dream. “Something is happening,” Maus said, leaning forward on the sofa. “Something ridiculous, something absurd, but something hopefully real.”
SW.
Samuel Hyland is a writer looking for a job.