Redeem the Wretched: Father John Misty - Pure Comedy
On this series debut, Rose speaks about the polarizing third LP from Josh Tillman's Father John Misty project.
Redeem the Wretched was/is a podcast series idea we’ve been throwing around for almost a year now, talking about critically and/or fan maligned albums and why they were good, actually. While this podcast series still isn’t off the books, we’ve decided to adapt it to writing form in the time being. So, for the series debut of Redeem the Wretched on Soft Sounds, our very own Rose takes a look at the polarizing third album from Josh Tillman’s Father John Misty project, Pure Comedy.
by Rose/@ratcastlequeen
“What I recommend is this: we return to the Vedic cycle and submit ourselves to the likelihood that many of us will end up getting eaten by bears. It’s only natural. What if instead of imbuing our expectations for the quality of our lives to include perpetual happiness, dream fulfillment, excessive painlessness, existential certitude, material wealth, and all variety of romantic stimulation, we were just grateful for every day that didn’t involve getting eaten by a bear? What if progress only meant literally progressing from one day to the next without getting violently dismembered by a 9-foot tall, 500-pound grizzly?....Bears, man.” - Josh Tillman
Father John Misty was really good at Twitter. I’m not here to defend his social media skills, but it feels like a notable prerequisite I have to include to discuss Pure Comedy, an album whose reputation was only bolstered or hurt (depending on your point of view) by the overwhelming grandiosity of its rollout and the general attitude of its creator at the time, something which feels all the more ridiculous in retrospect considering the duress he seemed to be making it under that he later documented on the followup, God’s Favorite Customer. In short, you had to be there to really get the kind of polarization this thing generates, least of all when I try to casually defend it against my, let’s say, “less enthusiastic” friends on the podcast.
Many folks of late have complained about the rollout for Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher being interminable, but consider this: the first single for Pure Comedy was technically released in September of 2015. The notable festival rant that somewhat marked the true beginning of his attitudes in the album cycle was July 2016. The album itself was announced in January 2017. He’d been preparing this thing for nearly two years and it was the start of the rollout cycle. That in itself, if you’re not onboard with Josh Tillman’s specific brand of bullshit, is a kind of otherworldly torture and/or fun ride constructed perfectly as bait for the music journo hype machine that was willing to take any and all scraps from him after the soaring success of I Love You, Honeybear. There was a twenty-five minute film showing the making of the album (I watched it), a music video with Macaulay Culkin (also watched that I think?), a nearly two thousand word essay explaining the concept and ideas within the album (I read it), and tweets. God, so many fucking good tweets. In that sense, I was kind of dying for the sort of hollow entertainment that Josh is specifically trying to decry on this album, and falling for it all the way. In truth, I used that entertainment as a means to obfuscate some real problems in my life, something which was obviously not very sustainable! But wasn’t it fun?
Still, better to dispense of the entertainment and focus on the work itself. The album is a lofty 75 minutes, not something I can really stomach all at once anymore (though that’s less a slight against the album itself and more an increasing desire for albums to not go longer than 45 minutes if they can help it). It’s musically the kind of fare you’d expect from Tillman’s previous work, but there’s little wrinkles everywhere that start to raise eyebrows a bit. Synthesizers float in to create off kilter soundscapes, Tillman’s voice distorts in places, and everything starts to feel a little bit too ominous for any sort of comfort. He doesn’t want you to feel any enjoyment from this, and rightfully so. The album works overtime lyrically to throw the listener into some of the bleakest examinations of our own human nature and its fallibility.
Take, for instance, “When the God of Love Returns…”. With this particular song, Tillman imagines being the one to have to argue to God in his final judgement against mankind. The most compelling argument he can make for our own salvation is simply: “It’s just human nature.” He posits that the depravity and failures of our own were in some way built into us with our creation, and if God doesn’t like it, then he shouldn’t have made those mistakes in the first place. To put it more simply, “we’re the Earth’s most soulful predator.” This isn’t a fun album by any means, and it certainly is very determined to drive away audiences by being a sort of antithesis to the “entertainment” at the heart of it all.
All throughout, Tillman tries to revisit these same failures of civilization from different angles, be it the distanced character portraits of something like “Ballad of the Dying Man”, a nice Elton John-ish tune for doomers that investigates the neurotic tendencies that start to emerge when one is perhaps too plugged in to mainstream discourse, or the self-absorbed but self-aware narcissist in “A Bigger Paper Bag”. Again and again these failures are investigated on micro and macro levels, and it can be easy to read Tillman as simply just talking trash from a high-up removed distance of irony, a la late period Steely Dan or any other artist that chooses to view all their songs’ subjects with an equal feeling of contempt. The problem with that argument though, is that Tillman is arguably the most prominent subject of his own takedowns.
“Leaving LA”, in all 12 of its minutes, is a full on deconstruction of the lines between Tillman and the persona he created for himself as an artist, the success that persona granted him compared to just being himself. Josh desperately seems to want to claw his way out of the success he’s built for himself, and seems willing to tear down his ego however he can, even going so far as lambasting the very song he’s playing as a “ten verse chorusless diatribe”. He recognizes the indulgence of it all, but continues on hoping to get anyone to just stop listening to him and pay attention to something of actual importance. Even beyond the meta aspects of it, it does seem like something quite revealing into his own personality, telling stories in his relationships with his parents and the art of music itself, associating his very practice mainly with the trauma of coming close to his own death as a child in a department store, innocently choking to near death as a completely unrelated pop song soundtracks his mother’s panic. It’s unrelentingly bleak, and yet it’s still pretty funny somehow. Even when Josh is trying to scare you away, he naturally maintains that charm.
At this point I’m gonna briefly address the most complained about song on the album, “Two Wildly Different Perspectives”, and try to mount my own flimsy defense of this. No, Josh Tillman is not a fucking centrist. Dude had the DSA table at his shows, I’d like to think he has at least some level of self-awareness and is slightly better than the fucking ghouls that will proudly call themselves that. In total, that particular song seems to be a nice case study on the othering of opposing ideologies, not necessarily limited to just political beliefs, but all those who we see as different from us. It’s much easier at times to simply just label your enemy as an unrepentant villain without any sort of nuance than to maybe ask why they have those beliefs in the first place to understand how they got that way. (Despite this, Republicans should always be noted as supporting a fucking ghoulish bunch of monsters and I’m sure Josh doesn’t think we need a healthy balance of their kind of bullshit.)
Beyond political commentary or self-interrogation, there’s at least some emotional center and heart to Pure Comedy, primarily residing in the final two tracks on the album. Within both of these, he tries to capture particular moments in time, portraits of idealized joy and longing for a more youthful time without any sort of knowing irony or critique that could spoil such things. It’s the most wholly normal that things ever manage to feel on the record, and somehow, the most tragic, knowing it all could just be ripped away easily. Instead of focusing on that, however, we find Josh just sitting in a bar with a loved one, focusing on the moment, without any commentary on the moment beyond what’s immediately happening. His final words are simply “there’s nothing to fear.” We can get ourselves mired in the absolute madness of thinking about these things, the self-awareness of knowing we’re just distracting ourselves and constantly interrogating why we do that. Alternatively, we can just say “fuck it” and let the dumb entertainment and simplicity of our lives give us joy. It’s a hell of a lot easier than the whole mortifying ordeal, at least.