The Theater of Father John Misty
Father John Misty’s (born Josh Tillman) Pure Comedy is highbrow camp. The thirteen tunes are a portmanteau of Harry Nilsson and Elton John, with a touch of acid-tinged abstraction for good measure and horn lines plucked from David Bowie’s Young Americans on select tracks. Pure Comedy debuted last Friday and is a gesture of epic theater. At once dramatic and wry, it succeeds because, according to Walter Benjamin in his book Illuminations, “suspense belongs less to the outcome than to the individual events.” And while the outcome is plenty good, the suspense and absurdity of each individual track stands out as much as the whole.
Take the second track, “Total Entertainment Forever.” The song’s opening line is “Bedding Taylor Swift every night inside the Oculus Rift.” The passing reference to Swift is more tasteful than Kanye West’s similar declaration on “Famous,” where he stated “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that bitch famous.” In this biting takedown of mainstream culture, Tillman inhabits the role of West - and the other institutions and people he critiques - in a subtle yet dramatic parody. Of course, Tillman would describe this scenario as occurring in the Oculus Rift, just to play up its absurdity and drollness. That’s the beauty of camp and epic theater - they exaggerate plausible, everyday situations and turn them into something uncommon and unlikely by pushing the concept to the limit.
Pure Comedy's cover depicts life as epic theater.
On “Ballad of the Dying Man,” Tillman’s acerbic poetry captures our current political, social and technological climate from the perspective of someone leaving this world. Tillman’s dramatic musical monologue both pokes fun at and praises the cultural critic, whose need is established through the verse “So says the the dying man once I’m in the box, just think of all the overrated hacks running amok and all the pretentious, ignorant voices that will go unchecked/The homophobes, hipsters and 1%/The false feminists he’d managed to detect/Oh, who will critique them once he’s left?” Tillman finishes up the song with the best reference to FOMO (fear of missing out) in modern music, “Eventually the dying man takes his final breath but first checks his news feed to see what he’s ‘bout to miss,” before segueing into a brief gospel climax. In the final line, Tillman delivers the paradox of how society is at once so engaged, yet more disengaged than ever; we have all the time in the world, yet are unable to be here, right now, with each other because we are too engrossed with what’s happening on our screens. This is why Tillman succeeds as an actor and raconteur - though not impervious to the effects of modern society, he’s able to step outside of it and lead us all to question “Are we all befallen the fate of the dying man one day, or are we the dying man right now because of our failure to engage?”
Even “Birdie” - whose instrumental intro sounds like the setup for a Spotify ad, before its abrupt transition into a John-like piano ballad - captivates, though it doesn’t have the braggadocio and swagger of the tunes preceding it since it sets up Pure Comedy’s melancholy second half. Coupled with the intro, the lyrics are a swipe at the music streaming service that Tillman so relies on to reach his listeners, corroborated by the line “Life as just narrative, metadata in aggregate.” Tillman sees we’re reliant on such services for much of our entertainment, and though it’s crucial to his career he perceives it as flawed, as Benjamin noted in Illuminations, “the art of the epic theater consists in producing astonishment rather than empathy.” Of course “Birdie” takes on a larger meaning as a whole, but Tillman’s prowess is that of any master actor’s, creating subtexts to read between the lines.
Pure Comedy's crowning moment is "The Memo," which brings up questions of cultural agency and capital. Tillman's didactic acting astonishes listeners with this blunt monologue, where he observes "Narcissus would have had a field day if he could have got online." He goes on the offensive with the rhetorical, wondering aloud in the age of selfies, "Just quickly, how would you rate yourself in terms of sex appeal and cultural significance?" On "The Memo," Tillman posits that our society of spectators is complicit in creating the modern celebrity, people who are famous not because of talent, grit and gumption, but because they know how to market themselves and achieve this status through the touch of their phones. Those with cultural capital and agency in this day and age are considered "heroes" and are held to impossible standards of image curation without any depth to back it up. Here, Tillman is the sage and guru trying to open our eyes and lead us to a better way by laying out the lesson first taught by Benjamin, that "Every spectator is enabled to become a participant. And it is indeed easier to play the "teacher" than the "hero.""
In Illuminations, Benjamin wrote that “Brecht wrote: “The actor must show his subject, and he must show himself. Of course, he shows his subject by showing himself, and he shows himself by showing his subject.”” Actors must do that to inhabit their roles and the best of the best reveal their own character through how they play that role. Tillman, by this understanding, is an actor of the highest degree because he understands how to marry the human condition with astonishment. He also has a lot of fun while doing so, set against a series of glorious, overdone songs that, put together, form a modern day rock opera but are best when thought of as singularities. Each singularity is an act in Pure Comedy, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats for a story they know too well, a story they live every day, because they don’t know what will happen next.