Momus

Nick Currie (born February 11, 1960 in Paisley, Scotland), more popularly known under the artist name Momus (after the Greek god of mockery), is a songwriter, blogger and a journalist for Wired. Most of his songs are self-referential or postmodern.

For more than twenty years he has been releasing, to only marginal commercial and critical success, playful and transgressive albums on labels in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan. In his lyrics and his other writing he makes seemingly random use of decontextualized pieces of continental (mostly French) philosophy, and has built up a personal world he says is "dominated by values like diversity, orientalism, and a respect for otherness." He is also known in certain circles outside the U.S. as a producer. He is fascinated by identity, Japan, the avant-garde, time travel and sex.

He wears a patch over his right eye because he lost use of it from contracting acanthamoeba keratitis from a contact lens case washed with Greek tap water.

Career

He began by recording post-punk material with various ex-members of Josef K in a group called The Happy Family in the early '80s, and was associated with the musicians around Postcard Records (although he never recorded for that label). His debut solo album "Circus Maximus" explored biblical themes in dark, almost gothic acoustic style, and his debt to the influence of Gallic pop was clear from a subsequent, sardonically self-referencing cover of Jacques Brel's "Jackie" and portraits of himself in the style of early 60s Serge Gainsbourg. In 1987, by which time he lived in London, he signed to Creation Records, and began to record the hyper-literate, quirky pop songs for which he is best known. A trio of albums, "The Poison Boyfriend", "Tender Pervert" and "Don't Stop The Night" blended accessible dance-pop with such heavy lyrical themes as paedophilia, necrophilia and adultery. The latter album almost yielded a hit in the UK with "The Hairstyle of the Devil". Subsequent albums on Creation included "Hippopotamomus", a scatological tribute to Gainsbourg, as Momus continued to push boundaries of acceptability within accessible pop structures. By 1994, however, when Creation signed Oasis, his music started to sound out of place on the newer, more 'laddish' and commercial sounds Creation then started to produce, and he moved to Paris and signed to Cherry Red records. Since then he has lived in various countries and, whilst less popular in Britain, has had a reasonable level of commercial success in a number of countries, especially Japan, where he wrote and produced records for successful singer Kahimi Karie, including the hit single "Good Morning World".

He has been sued by Michelin UK, for the song "Michelin Man", which compared the mascot to a blow-up doll, on Hippopotamomus (1991); and by Wendy Carlos for the song "Walter Carlos" (which postulated that the post-sexual reassignment surgery Wendy could travel back in time to marry her pre-surgery self, Walter) on The Little Red Songbook (1998). In response to the debt incurred from Carlos's lawsuit, which was settled by withdrawal of the song, agreement not to use Carlos's name for any purpose whatsoever and payment of damages and attorney's fees to Carlos, Momus wrote thirty songs about every person or group who commissioned a song at the price of $1,000, compiling Stars Forever (1999). Patrons include artist Jeff Koons, Japanese musician Cornelius, and three-year-old animator/superhero Noah Brill. Stars Forever also features the winners of a karaoke contest started on The Little Red Songbook (1998).

Other Momus activities include writing for Wired.com [1], Vice Magazine [2], Index Magazine [3], AIGA Voice [4], and Design Observer [5]. Momus has also been a kind of guest instructor working on sound-art projects with students first at Future University [6] in Hakodate, Hokkaidō, Japan during the early months of 2005, and then again in September at Fabrica [7], the Benetton "research centre" near Venice, Italy. In 2006 he was a featured artist in the Whitney Biennial [8] in New York City, serving as an "unreliable tour guide" to visitors of the exhibition.

The Fotolog.Book [9] with texts by Momus on photoblogging published in April 2006 by British publishers Thames & Hudson [10].

He is a cousin of musician Justin Currie, the lead singer and songwriter of Del Amitri, although Momus has been critical of his musical output at times.

Quotes

"I was at a party last year and a little girl drew a picture of all the guests round the table except me. I pretended to be offended and drew myself into her picture, but she ran away screaming and bawling. I had to erase my self-portrait before she'd calm down. That says it all. Our little pictures and our little songs are more important to us than the life they occasionally portray. The world in the end is beyond our control and doesn't care about us. But in our pictures we have the illusion of making sense of the world, improving the world, taking control of it. And suddenly it's no longer either the world or our vision of it, it's a new world, a thing in itself. The drawing comes to mean more to us than the scene it depicts."

"I've always been accused of being the most literary of songwriters. In fact I started off doing lots of experiments with guitars, bottles, tissue paper, smashed pianos and tape distortion which, eventually, out of sheer laziness, I stuck some words on top of. They were out of a book of Brecht poetry, usually, or a hasty pastiche of Brian Eno. For years I searched my guitar for the 'missing chord' that would stop time or make the whole world weep. Now I scroll through a thousand types of digital delay to find the one that will switch the world into slow motion. It's music that really fascinates me. Words come easy, I have a facility with them, I can 'do' words."

"Ultraconformist, voyager, timelord, tennis and ping pong champion, tender pervert, poison boyfriend, hippopotamus, philosopher, folk singer, star forever." —Momus' self-description from his LiveJournal

Albums

• Circus Maximus (1986)
• The Poison Boyfriend (1987)
• Tender Pervert (1988)
• Don’t Stop The Night (1989)
• Monsters Of Love (1990)
• Hippopotamomus (1991)
• The Ultraconformist (Live Whilst Out Of Fashion) (1992)
• Voyager (1992)
• Timelord (1993)
• Slender Sherbert (1995)
• The Philosophy of Momus (1995)
• Twenty Vodka Jellies (1996)
• Ping Pong (1997)
• The Little Red Songbook (1998)
• Stars Forever (1999)
• Folktronic (2001)
• Oskar Tennis Champion (2003)
• Summerisle, a collaboration with Anne Laplantine (2004)
• Otto Spooky (2005)
• Ocky Milk (2006)

External links

• Momus's Official Site
• Click Opera (Momus's LiveJournal blog)
• Whitney Biennial 2006: Day For Night
• A MySpace page falsely claiming to be Momus's, and his Wired article explaining it
• Interview (2003)
• Interview (04/2003)
• Interview (2002)
• Interview (1998)
• Ocky Milk Review at Pitchfork Media

Listening

• UbuWeb: Momus and Anne Laplantine featuring the song Summerisle Horspiel