Johann Sebastian Punk - An outrage against tradition

Let's be honest, marketing has never been our strong suit here at OndaRock. Even when we've had young talents with guaranteed futures pass through our hands, we've always ended up last in line. Sometimes because, staying parossistically true to our uncompromising streak, we actually panned them; sometimes because we simply took too long to realize what we had. It happened, for instance, with Lo Stato Sociale, the band fronted by “our own” Alberto/Bebo Guidetti, who, love them or hate them, went on to become a national phenomenon, eventually landing on the podium at the Sanremo Festival. The same thing was about to happen with Johann Sebastian Punk, the ineffable musical creature of Massimiliano Raffa, known to friends from the Syd(dharta) forum. He's one of those artists you could describe, borrowing the words of some slightly overbearing old relative, as someone you “watched grow up.” The fact is that back in the site's early days, I received a few of his reviews, which perhaps weren't exactly a model of critical clarity, but they certainly didn't betray their author's age: 13. Talk about an enfant prodige. Except that in the meantime Massimiliano has crossed over to the other side of the barricade: that of the musicians. And his name has ended up in all the major national magazines, helped along by his innate instinct as a dandy and provocateur. Since we may be useless at marketing, but we're not complete fools, we tracked him down again for a chat about his art and his latest album, “Phoney Music Entertainment”, which, unlike its predecessor, hasn't met with an unfortunate fate here on OndaRock – quite the opposite…

Welcome back Massimiliano, it's a strange feeling interviewing you, thinking back to those early teenage reviews of yours. Some of them, in the end, I must have even published. You were already a real megalomaniac, actually. How did you manage, at 13, to be listening to Can, Residents and Lau Nau? At that age I was lucky if I'd gotten as far as Tom Tom Club… Joking aside, can you tell us how those early listening habits came about: were you sharing them with someone at school, or were you (already) an alien?

It's a pleasure to be here, where a lot of my musical growth got started, beginning with those first, barely legible reviews I sent you back in 2002. I remember those days spent listening to the most thrilling releases of the time – thrilling, at least, for someone like me who'd been let down by late-Nineties mainstream rock: Microphones, Fennesz, Stars of the Lid, Oneida, White Birch, Boards of Canada, GY!BE, Asa Chang, Xiu Xiu, Alan Licht, Nurse with Wound, Keiji Haino, Supersilent. What I miss most about that period is the curiosity that drove my days: I was convinced it was a great moment for the history of music, I could sense a feeling of change in the air that mirrored the natural changes going on in my thirteen-year-old body. Back then I had few friends, I already felt a strong friction with my generation, but shut away in my bedroom I got a thrill out of the emotional possibilities that music was able to offer me. The internet was the real turning point: my friends were in the nerd communities where people like me got into listening habits that were impossible to share with classmates from just about any Italian provincial town.

Then came your career as a musician, also marked by boundless ambition. But we here at OndaRock were merciless and panned your debut album. Look on the bright side: it means we don't play favourites, so the praise for your latest album is sincere too. It's also possible that your style simply wasn't to that particular reviewer's taste. The fact is, understandably, you were hurt by it, even though you were extremely clever at turning the whole thing to your advantage with one of your trademark controversies. What was it about that review that bothered you the most? I bet it was the comparison to Yuppie Flu!

I'm not usually one to whine about bad reviews – not that I've had much chance to, actually: off the top of my head I can only recall yours and Rumore's for this last record, though I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting – if anything, they end up feeding my sense that I've made a good record. With OndaRock it was different though: I felt like it was something of a home, and I knew I had quite a few admirers on the staff. Instead, the review was claimed by someone I'd openly clashed with before over his editorial line, and the piece read more like a personal attack than an objective analysis of the album. I later had the chance to meet that reviewer in person, and actually bought some records from him a while back. We met at a Milan metro station. He probably had bodyguards hidden away at the ticket office, but there was no need to call them in, given the naturally cordial atmosphere the meeting took on. After all, I'm a gentleman.

Now that we've filed away that gripe – hopefully for good – is there anything from your decade-plus involvement with OndaRock and its forum that has found its way into your music or your approach to being a musician?

There's a lot. I've been part of OndaRock for sixteen years, well over half of my life so far, and the site and its community have seen the passage of people of real human and cultural depth, some of whom are now dear friends of mine.

On the subject of your approach, you're not exactly known as a paragon of humility. I once heard someone on the radio doing nothing but trash-talking the Italian scene, certain musicians and their fans. "Who the hell is this asshole?", I thought to myself. Then I found out it was you. Aren't you afraid of making that kind of impression on listeners who don't know your persona and your talent?

Nobody wanted to invest in my album, but I'm sure plenty of people would have made me financial offers to convince me not to release it. I know I've closed off certain opportunities for myself because of my lack of diplomacy (and to think I have a degree in International Relations!); a lot of people not only don't want to work with me, they're also incapable of judging the music separately from the persona, which is much "smaller" than the music itself. But that's exactly the point: it is a persona, Johann Sebastian Punk and Massimiliano Raffa only partially overlap. In that sense, the message of Johann Sebastian Punk is: "tear up your Christian Democrat party card, it hasn't been valid since 1994", let's go back to telling each other things to our faces. I miss the days when—I don't remember which of the Gallagher brothers it was—wished Aids on Damon Albarn: it was clearly showmanship, I don't think there was any real malice in it. Enough with the hypocritical political correctness in rock'n'roll, let's not leave it to rappers to be the only ones allowed to insult each other!

I liked your first record, "More Lovely And More Temperate", but I found it a bit overreaching at times. This "Phoney Music Entertainment" strikes me as more cohesive. I find the fusion of progressive and pop particularly successful. For instance, in "Tragedy" – which incidentally is my favourite track – I feel like I'm hearing Claudio Simonetti's keyboards in the service of Sparks. After all, even Battiato – who seems to be a reference point for you – had prog roots. And yet here, the moment you dig out mellotron, dulcimer and the like, people are quick to cry mustiness and pomposity: is this some kind of guilt complex in Italian music (which, incidentally, lived through one of its best eras thanks to prog)?

I think there's a widespread inability, at bottom, to read history in terms of its creative movements, to fully assess the state of the art and relate it to the spirit of its time. Treating artistic trends as genuine expressions of novelty is a very common mistake, typical of my generation. Certain music from the Seventies that you're referring to is only "older" than today's music from a chronological point of view, which is the most obvious standpoint but also a tremendously misleading one. In reality, there's an immense modernism and creative, innovative energy in that music – it was there in prog, it was there in psychedelia, it was there in punk. You don't need to bring in Philip Tagg or Richard Middleton or Franco Fabbri to notice how today's pop – especially, and precisely because it's burdened by "guilt", so-called "alternative" pop – tends to be depressingly conformist and mediocre, a cowardly expression of creative paralysis. It's not just an Italian problem, but in Italy it's particularly pronounced.

If in Italy there isn't (anymore) an ear well-tuned to these sounds, abroad there are plenty of bands putting prog to the service of pop and vice versa. I'm thinking of Gesu No Kiwami Otome, Everything Everything or Mew. Are these reference points for you? And do you think your music might be received differently abroad (in the UK, say)?

You've named three bands I particularly like. I find the Japanese ones extraordinary, they show how complexity, exploration, skill and courage can serve pop music (just look at their sales figures back home). As for my own music: my album was reviewed by around twenty small English blogs, read by relatively few people (to reach the big outlets you need serious promotional investment), so it hasn't exactly changed my life. The reviews were all glowing though: one site called me "The new David Bowie", another called me "The spokesman for an entire generation", and yet another described me as "Somewhere between Adam Ant and William Shakespeare". Now, such descriptions sound funny and over the top, but they show how well the spirit of my music can be grasped by a British observer, perhaps even better than by an Italian one. So I think that in Northern Europe, in Britain or in the United States (where I've sold a fair number of copies of the album), my music could be well received. The problem is getting there: without investment, without heavyweight endorsements, without significant backing, you don't get anywhere.

How does Baroque music factor into your sound? Which devices and techniques from that tradition do you use most in your songs?

Actually, Baroque music isn't as present in my sound as one might think. There are plenty of harmonic-melodic references typical of that era (like the harmonic progression in the chorus of "Tragedy" or the theme in the finale of "Insanity Fair"), but they make up a fairly marginal part of what I'm exploring. Besides, "Baroque music" is a convenient term coined in the 20th century to describe European art music historically situated between the Renaissance and Classicism. If you notice, people talk about "baroque pop" or "baroque rock" whenever certain music alludes to some vague imagery of classical music, or makes use of instruments unconventional for rock, like the harpsichord, without there actually being any real musical reference to the Baroque. What I do is built on interpolating unconventional languages into a pop/rock discourse, hence all the classical references. If another Johann Sebastian Punk album ever comes out, I'd like to push further on the ethnic elements, which are already present, if to a lesser extent. After all, that's exactly what Johann Sebastian Punk is about: taking tradition and treating it outrageously, without fearing you're not up to the task, through the sanctification of the aestheticizing mistake – a process that, in fact, underlies all the music that gave birth to popular music, which often originated in the rough neighbourhoods of Mediterranean port cities.

The other disorienting move on "Phoney Music Entertainment" is the use of samba and other Brazilian touches. That doesn't surprise me, since I know how passionate you are about that country's musical history, but amid the Mitteleuropean theatricality that permeates the record, it makes for a strange effect. What do you think keeps it all in balance – is there some elusive fil rouge running through the record?

A certain kind of theatricality always calls to mind Mitteleuropean settings, since that's where cabaret was born and flourished in its many forms, but exotic fascination as a form of escapism from petit-bourgeois everyday life was a key element of many such shows. Brazil breaks into my music in the form of a dream, or rather a nightmare if you consider how I twisted the Brazilian stereotype in my "Samba da Segunda-Feira". It's a song about unemployment that quotes the Hungarian suicidal song "Szomorú Vasárnap", in which Sunday is portrayed as the day of the deepest suicidal depression. I shift the focus to Monday, which for the unemployed is nothing but an even sadder Sunday, marked by the same indolence but with the monstrous sounds of a city coming alive with productivity humming in the background.

In general, you're clearly not afraid to take risks and pile on ingredients, even at the cost of courting contradiction, as your own stage name makes clear. In one track you even quote Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor". But isn't there a risk of saturation in the long run? Will there come a time when even you feel the need to work by subtraction?

Johann Sebastian Punk is a project with the programmatic goal of musically depicting a journey through the languages and musical cultures that have shaped Western music, or at least popular music, even though the name harks back to the Baroque (or rather: to the father of modern harmony). The crisis of musical genres and categories, contrary to what one might expect, hasn't led at all to a climate of greater freedom in recombining elements; on the contrary, it has led to a generalized impoverishment, to a loss of personality. My goal has been to portray this collapse of boundaries in a critical way, trying to creatively show the state of confusion that the history of music is going through in the age of retromania. It's always an operation of reshuffling imageries, an operation that's not just musical but also literary, philosophical, dramaturgical. Beyond this project, though, by nature I tend to work by addition. I've got other musical personae in store, ones marked instead by a certain bareness. You'll just have to wait.

For me, one of the steps forward on "Phoney Music Entertainment" lies in the production, which is more polished and decidedly glossier, and I don't mind that at all. Who did you work with, and with what goals in mind?

I produced my first album in 2012 and the second in 2015. In those three years I improved a lot on the production side, and then on this last one it was decisive to work with an extraordinary professional like Ivan Rossi, who mixed six tracks on the album and basically saved it. Still, I'm not satisfied with the sound, which keeps suffering from my home-recording, amateurish approach; for future records I'd like to step back from that side of things and just focus on composition, arrangement and performance.

Yet you always play the lion's share, playing almost everything yourself: guitars, drums, percussion, bass, piano, keyboards, organ, synthesizers, mellotron, recorder, sitar, harp, glockenspiel, harpsichord, double bass, viola, zither, dulcimer, shakuhachi, vibraphone, live electronics, and whatever else you can think of. What's behind this bulimic self-sufficiency? And who are the musicians who did support you on the second chapter of Johann Sebastian Punk?

Enrico Pasini, a musician with extraordinary taste, played trumpet, mellophone and flugelhorn; Dimitri Sillato, a refined composer who has already worked with Capossela, played violin; Marco Coppi played flute. These are instruments I could never have played myself. Then again, I'm not an instrumentalist — there isn't a single instrument I can really play well, and that's actually one of the defining traits of Johann Sebastian Punk's style. Otherwise I wouldn't have put "Punk" in the name.

Your shows have become something of small events by now, not least for their pronounced theatrical flair. How do you bring this album to the stage?

By reworking the songs quite substantially — they surprisingly end up with more of a rock "drive" live, even though the live show actually leans more heavily on electronics than the album does. That's possible thanks to the extraordinary musicians who play with me: Filippo La Marca, a young pianist, arranger, conductor and Venerable Master of Synthesizers, and Luca Anello, otherwise known as "the John Bonham of the Strait". We're both from the same city, which means we can communicate in archaic Messinese and plan our holidays together. We'd love to play more often though: if it were up to us we'd do it every week, but times are tough, and there's not much curiosity out there.

Your skill as a multi-instrumentalist and frontman is remarkable, while on the strictly vocal side I think you still have plenty of room to grow: have you ever thought about developing further in that respect?

The raw, unpolished use of the voice in this project is central to my aesthetic intent, it's the whole point. More generally, I agree with you: I'm not a particularly gifted singer, I rely a lot on interpretation. I never studied, and I've always used my voice quite recklessly. Over time I've even lost range. But a number of singing teachers have told me I have a tenor-worthy delivery and that with proper training I could become a decent singer. Taking singing lessons is one of my plans for the future.

Alongside your work as a musician, over the years you've also worked as a music critic: after all, that's basically what you were already doing at 13. Don't tell me you've now become one of those people who argue that reviews are pointless...

My relationship with music criticism has been pretty inconsistent. Right now I'm an adjunct lecturer in Popular Music, teaching at IULM in Milan, and this year I also gave a seminar at the University of Lecce. The last things I wrote were academic papers, which only circulate within scholarly circles. Every now and then I publish something in Classic Rock. I'd like to go back to music criticism and take it more seriously, even though I'm deeply disappointed by the average quality of criticism in Italy, which increasingly cares more about "newsworthiness" than about the things that, to me, make an album review actually "useful". What scares me is the conformism of reviewers and their limited knowledge of music. Not just music history, which is pure erudition, but also music theory. I don't fully agree with those who believe that writing about popular music exempts you from musical knowledge on the grounds that the main components of musical analysis are historical, social or technological in nature (which do remain fundamental). You can't critically judge a book by the quality of its paper, the readability of its font, its commercial success and its influence on society and manners; you need to actually know the language it's written in.

In some interviews you've argued for an elitist conception of art, and some people have even seen a whiff of "fascism" in that. Can you set the record straight, once and for all?

That accusation, which could only make me laugh, shows just how carelessly certain words get thrown around and how distractedly people read music journalism. My argument actually goes in the opposite direction. All the great theorists who argued for the need to educate the masses in culture came from a Marxist background — look at the Frankfurt School. What I've observed is that with Web 2.0 and its democratization, the masses have taken the place of the cultural industry's elites in selecting which products reach the market, allowing that industry to outsource its research, development and, to some extent, promotion costs. Just look at the latest artists signed by the major labels: little talent-show singers, YouTube phenomena, cases that blew up on the user-friendly web. This kind of mechanism inevitably lowers the quality of the music that ends up on the mainstream market, which is now even more rarely selected by experts capable of weighing artistic quality against commercial potential, and instead ends up being chosen by a mass of dimwits. I'm elitist in the sense that, utopian as it sounds, I'd like everyone to belong to the elite, but right now we're dealing with the children of commercial TV, which has also debased the "national-popular", something I consider noble in many of its expressions. It's a broad, complex argument, one you're free to disagree with, as long as you're then willing to accept the likes of Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini, Nigel Farage, Milos Zeman. As for the most contemptible forms of conservatism, I don't just reject them — I despise them and fight them. Fascism has nothing to do with it.

Despite that, you've made no secret of the fact that you'd like to go to Sanremo and make the most of that mainstream national showcase. Aren't you afraid of looking inconsistent?

I think inconsistency is one of the greatest virtues a person can have. It ranks just one notch below generosity.

You're also known for your distaste for a certain strand of Italian indie music. What, in your view, is the deep root of the conformism that has been plaguing that scene for years, one that automatically makes anyone who tries to break away from it look like an "alien"? And is there anyone in that scene you're still able to save?

I'll try to keep this brief, not least because it's music that neither I nor any genuine music lover actually listens to. And that's exactly the point: music labeled "alternative" should, tautologically, represent an alternative to the conformism of the mainstream market, whereas today the paradoxical tendency among the successful artists of what you call the "indie" scene — thirty-somethings singing for twenty-somethings, not coincidentally the same generations as the players of the Italian national team that failed to qualify for the World Cup — is to assimilate the immediacy and creative poverty of the mainstream. I'm no sociologist, but I think I can say that the generations involved in this process represent something unprecedented: there's no form of rebellion, no form of exploration. If anything, exploration and rebellion are the constant targets of their (post-?)irony, the same kind of irony as those who used to crack jokes about the Italian marines case or the foibe massacres without anyone actually being an expert in international law or the history of Dalmatia. A young listener of "alternative" music shouldn't be this tame, this drawn to whatever is reassuring, this indifferent to innovation and exploration. And by this I'm not calling for the return of the autoriduttori, nor am I suggesting we need Stormy Six-style political music (that would be ridiculous) or naively politicized shows like the big free concerts in Piazza San Giovanni, if only because glorifying past generations — who are chiefly responsible for the current disaster — would be idiotic; what I mean is approaching aesthetic life with an attitude of challenge, of rupture. Rebellion is sexy — the Italian indie scene, first and foremost, doesn't stir any hormones, isn't exciting, has no eroticism to it.

Sticking with the theme of Italian artists worth saving, you're among the guests on our current Album of the Month, “Maledette Rockstar” by Maisie. Can you tell us something about this collaboration? And have you stayed in touch with Enrico Ruggeri?

No contact with Ruggeri at all — we live in the same city and we've never even bumped into each other by chance; if I had his number I'd call him, if only to give him the new album. As for the Maisie record, I'm glad I worked on it, not just out of respect for them — they're anarchic and surreal like me — but also because of how the collaboration came together. I worked in total autonomy, doing whatever I felt like, with no guidelines whatsoever. I'd received the tracks of a song I was supposed to rework, but of that song I kept only the vocals — by Alvaro Fella, a legend of Italian prog with Jumbo — turning the rest completely upside down, harmonically as well. Besides composing the music, I wrote the arrangements and played almost all the instruments myself (guitar, piano, bass, drums, synthesizers). I like working this way, I like having a blank slate — teamwork just isn't for me.

Your glam heritage seems obvious to me, along with all its trappings of artifice. Pessoa, after all, argued that “sincerity is a great obstacle the artist must overcome.” How do you experience the relationship between autobiographical experience and fiction in your songs?

The musical fact is made up of several layers. Let's say the input, which is essentially inspiration, has to answer to the demon. The “poietic” phase therefore needs spontaneity, otherwise we end up with music written by committee, like the kind that writers of easy-listening songs churn out for publishers, who then place the songs with performers. Naturally, when someone has an uncomplicated or insufficiently tormented human nature, the result tends (though not always — there are brilliant exceptions) to be rather uninteresting. The output, on the other hand, comes through in the interpretation. My use of glam, which is really more a matter of intent than of actual sound, lies entirely in my wish to offer a caricature of the processes of outward-facing hypertrophy that current musical output goes through, of the pervasiveness of images at the expense of the word. In Johann Sebastian Punk, fiction is central: both albums present themselves as pop works, but in reality they are “representations” of pop works, staged theatrically with the intent of celebrating the most authentically artistic values within an immaterial society in which human relationships are hopelessly mediated by images — the values of fiction, of artifice. Today, Art needs fiction more than ever; the hic and the nunc are eating us alive.

What comes through in your songs, in any case, is what you define as “my inability to live in this world.” What feeds your frustration?

Claiming that art is born from suffering is a tremendously banal thing to say. But also tremendously true. I've been a tormented, melancholy soul since birth, even though I'm also quite the jester who loves revelry and buffoonery. If it weren't like that, I probably wouldn't be making music — I'd be doing an MBA at Bocconi.

You also claim that “Phoney Music Entertainment,” starting with the title itself, is a “political” record — a term, let's be honest, that's dangerously overused these days. Want to try to convince us it really is?

It's political because it tries to reflect the contradictions of the “polis,” albeit from a strongly individualist point of view. It's political because it isn't afraid to take risks, to challenge the cowardice of the present and the everyday, because it exposes the blindness of the music industry. That said, when I say “political,” I don't mean “politicized.” Take the Rock In Opposition movement of the late Seventies: they made politicized music and despised disco music, which nonetheless had a “political” energy far more powerful than their own.

But since everything you do is always rooted in a certain (self-)irony, let me ask: what's your most unreasonable goal for the coming years?

Without fear of slipping into self-pity or cliché, and setting aside irony for once, I'll tell you that my goal is to live a life according to my natural inclinations. I have so many projects in mind: I'm writing a symphony, an album of shamelessly pop songs, I've got a novel and an essay in my head, I'd like to devote myself to composing film scores, I'd like to start my own bamboo-growing business, I'd like to keep working at the university. But I can't do all these things because, to make a living, I'm forced to take on odd jobs I'm not remotely suited for. What I can contribute to this world is artistic or intellectual. I'm a terrible employee and utterly inept at most other kinds of work. Unhappiness is woven into my very nature and I'll carry it with me forever, but the thought of being condemned to a hateful everyday routine — like the one I've been living for a few years now — made up of bosses, schedules and tasks that atrophy my brain, gives me a lump in my throat. I don't aspire to material wealth, I aspire to life. I think I deserve one, however much of a jerk I might be.

(February 11, 2018)

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