MJ OVERMAN: The Knowing Artifice of Friedrich Nietzsche and MJ Lenderman
Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) bears an oft-forgotten, all important subtitle: ‘from the Spirit of Music.’ This full title is slightly mystifying. Both phrases mean nothing on their own, and the way he uses them within the book is often abstract.
To give a brief, contextual TL;DR, the book is Nietzsche (a Wagner tragic) justifying the role of art and music as a metaphysical exercise to a dubiously real, intellectually unenlightened audience who do not see aesthetic matters as of ‘serious’ philosophical concern. In his dedication to Richard Wagner, he states the following:
Perhaps serious people will find it distasteful to see an aesthetic problem taken so
seriously, if they see art as nothing more than an entertaining irrelevance… Let these
serious people know that I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly
metaphysical activity of this life …
The book thereafter appraises this loaded claim. In it, Nietzsche argues that the supreme goal of the world and existence is primarily an aesthetic exercise, and that music—especially ‘Tragic’ music which blends the sophistication of the arts with the chaos of daily life—has a unique ability to endow mundane life with greater meaning.
As exciting as Nietzsche’s ideas are to the music Tragic in me, I confess that I have no love for Wagner. His unique brand of substance without style pomposity is detestable enough on its own, but it takes on a special air of repugnance in light of the composer’s well-known affiliation with German proto-fascism and his afterlife in the mythos of the Nazi Party. Thus, Wagner is somehow both evil and boring, the worst combination. Thus, my own understanding of The Birth of Tragedy is drawn almost entirely from my own tastes and distastes, which are especially exclusive of Wagner. I have gone ‘Beyond Wagner and Nietzsche’ to try and locate an artist who best represents the mundane Tragedies of modern life.
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), a book written after Wagner and Nietzsche’s infamous falling out over gooning/antisemitism/depends-who-you-ask, talks at length about how the masses used their limited means to invert morality, benefiting themselves and demeaning the aristocratic classes. In line with this view, I ask now that we consider a concurrent Genealogy of Music™. With few exceptions, the great Tragedians at the centre of Nietzsche’s aesthetic world were the cultural elite of Germany and Austria, each with a hilariously German name (Bach, Mozart, Handel, Schubert). Today, our Tragedians are multiethnic with names like “Rodrigo”, unheard of in Nietzsche’s time. No longer is Western classical music so culturally salient. It retains its cultural capital, but is kept largely separate from the popular consciousness. We source our tragedy elsewhere, and are each entitled to our own brand of personal meaning. Popular music, the music of the masses, is the truest everyday Tragedy, and its aesthetic qualities are not only valued, but vital to the construction of meaning in everyday activity.
Today, the most successful artists are increasingly those whose image and music are used as a tool to veil vulnerability. I must now commit a slight PULP misnomer and write briefly about Charli XCX’s Brat (2024), as its tasteful indulgence of pop idol simulacra to veil the lyrical sincerity of the performer perfectly typifies this musico-lyrical dissonance. Nietzsche, too, recognises the resonant power of this dissonance, emphasising its Tragedian quality. He states that, in music with lyrics, the lyrics are likewise bestowed with a greater meaning contextually in accordance with the song, and that any associated dissonance does not detract from the aesthetic quality of the song but generates additional nuance.
Even in the indie sphere—ostensibly opposite to mainstream pop music—it is the smirking and sly who are gaining popular interest. Everything is expressed with a wink and a nudge, and the inbuilt sense that the true story of the song is neither what is sung or played, but somewhat greater. Elliott Smith and Radiohead are vestigial holdovers of an era coloured by straightforward sincerity-core which popular artists are now rarely willing to indulge. Even in the seemingly bleak songwriting of artists like Phoebe Bridgers, we see a semi-constant wittiness which grounds the songwriter’s existential angst in something more approachable. The modern person sees the overtly introspective as a dishonest, unrelatable projection, and the contradictory as a more genuine reflection of the irony of everyday life, where the disconnect between the projected and the real has created a conceptual playground where we attempt to control how others perceive us.
Many artists have been forced into obsolescence by the advent of the irony pill, while others have resisted and become its antidote. Still more have tried to take the pill and died from the side effects. Few have been able to successfully synthesise the aching sincerity endemic to their prior work with this new mode of expression, and of those few, only one has perfected the synthesis. It is He who best carries the torch of the Nietzschean Tragedians by selecting the most appropriate aesthetic qualities to compliment modern sensibilities, and by highlighting the role of projected emotion in shaping what we perceive to be “real”.
I am, of course, talking about MJ Lenderman. No artist better exemplifies this gradual shift in tendency toward modern Tragedy. The mood of Lenderman’s early work is almost gratingly morose. Though the Songs: Ohia-esque Alternative Country of his self-titled LP frequently shows remarkable songwriting wit for a then-20-year-old, the maturity required to even want to hold back is clearly not present. There’s certainly something admirable about this level of vulnerability, but the record in its totality comes across as more of a wallow than anything transcendentally incisive about human emotion.
It wasn’t until 2021’s ‘Knockin’ EP that Lenderman would truly come into his own as a songwriter. Herein, the artist shows a remarkable ability to knowingly invoke certain tropes and clichés as a means of making his personal melodrama more approachable. Still, the EP shows a certain lack of polish. While some songs benefit from the lo-fi production and outsider aesthetic (namely, ‘TV Dinners’), it is clear that others would necessitate a more appropriate musical aesthetic.
In this sense, ‘Boat Songs’ is a huge stride forward. Though released only a year later, it is on this album that one finally feels as though they’re listening to a fully developed songwriter—one who has a complete grasp on how their lyrics and music in part can synthesise to create a more meaningful whole. Both this album and 2024’s ‘Manning Fireworks’ show a sophisticated interface with a long tradition of country music Tragedians who have used their songs to similar effect. Rather than the early comparisons to the likes of Neil Young and Jason Molina, these later LPs show traces of John Prine, Blaze Foley, David Berman, Roger Miller, amongst other ironic songsmiths who frequently weaponised humour and inconsistency to mask their own sincerity. Lenderman seems to understand, better than most of his contemporaries, that the cheesy, overly earnest sentiments of country music have always been used in conjunction with humour to subtly expose the inherent longing to laugh at our own misfortune. It is as though the proclivity to make light of Tragedy is a tacit recognition that the Tragic, on its own, is only a signifier of what we already know to be Tragic, and that to shift the way it is perceived through musical choices changes the emotional centre of the song. In Lenderman’s recent work, we see a highly developed awareness of how the compositional tropes of country music are thus fundamental in exposing the Tragedian dissonances of modern songwriting.
Even Lenderman’s music itself seems to be inherently conscious of the disconnect between the projected and the real. Though the song ‘TLC Cage Match’ (2022) is superficially about the performance art of professional wrestling, it uses this frame to highlight Lenderman’s proclivity toward the artificial and the unreal:
It’s hard to see you fall like that, though I know how much of it's an act.
These lines can be read as analogous to the relationship between the music and the audience, and equally, the projected and the real. The music, the acted ‘fall’, intends to express a desired emotion, and the audience is conscious of the fact that the song is only a projection, or affectation of the true emotion. Yet the emotion resonates nonetheless; that it is only an act is irrelevant to how the music achieves its desired effect. Thus, the medium of song does not necessitate thorough authenticity, and is actually elevated by a subtle awareness of its own artifice. The more the artist is aware that a song is designed to inspire a certain emotion, the more this can be explicitly addressed within the piece. Other songs by Lenderman (‘Wristwatch,’ ‘Joker Lips,’ ‘Hangover Game’) show a similar interest in how people use extrinsic modes of expression to construct an aesthetic world which best expresses an intended emotion.
In Lenderman, unlike Wagner, is the inherent admission of falsity; rather than a pompous declaration of self-importance, we see a persistent self-awareness of the narrator’s own emotions, and how these emotions have been constructed in service of an intended effect. In this sense, Lenderman is certainly the truer Tragedian: he acknowledges the primarily aesthetic nature of the world, and his role in constructing it. In the songs of MJ Lenderman, we find that music is no longer limited by the artifice of the real, but has been elevated by the knowing invocation of the false; that which projects and which intends to affect.