There's no shame in being a little overwhelmed with Father John Misty. The guy is a great songwriter, but by the time his new album came out, his whole persona had gotten a little exhausting. Take for example this meta-quote from his New York Times interview: "I love the exhilaration of feeling a pull quote come out of your mouth. The words just taste better," which of course he said right after this gem: "When the ledgers of history are drawn up, I'll be on the side of the smokers and the masturbators. Those are my people." Then his album came out, a pretty, well-crafted 74 minutes of mansplaining about everything bad about humanity.

It's entirely too much, but that's kind of what we've come to expect from Father John Misty. The best approach to his music and personality is to find the humor in it. Sometimes he's a better comedian than folk hero. Take, for example, his new video for "Total Entertainment Forever," which stars Macaulay Culkin as Kurt Cobain, who gets "crucified by corporate fascists." George Washington is also there, "donning a virtual reality helmet and experiencing a simulation," as a press release notes. It's absurdist anti-culture, which is perfectly fitting of Father John Misty and Culkin, the latter of which co-directed the clip with Adam Green.

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If you'll recall one of Culkin's recent performances, he played Home Alone's Kevin McCallister as an adult who grew up to be pretty unhinged. It's a meta take on celebrity and culture, which is something Father John Misty loves to sing about. Consider the line from "Total Entertainment Forever," in which he sings, "Bedding Taylor Swift every night inside the Oculus Rift / After mister and the missus finish dinner and the dishes."

He later defended the lyric, saying:

I don't want that to happen to Taylor Swift. That is the worst thing I can think of; that is so horrible ...the internet was supposed to be this new democracy, a utopia of information where everyone had a voice and we were all interconnected, and we would experience true democracy—and it turned into pornography, followed only by outrage. If you don't think that this virtual reality thing isn't going to turn into sex with celebrities, then you're kidding yourself.

It's exhausting, for sure, but at least all this fits in with the larger themes of his latest video, which—like everything else Father John Misty does—is a silly, cynical look at a reality we can hate but never escape. Kind of like Father John Misty himself.

From: Esquire US