Trickster god of Silver Lake Father John Misty might spend his days hanging out with double-jointed yogis and crystal juicers, but he’s still in touch with what’s going on outside of East L.A.—and he thinks it’s all pretty crazy. That’s the overwhelming impression left by Misty’s (a.k.a. Josh Tillman’s) new song “Pure Comedy,” a sprawling six-and-a-half minute reflection of how absurd it is to live and die inside a sentient bag of meat on a watery dot hurtling through space.
The point is further driven home by the music video accompanying the song from designer Matthew Daniel Siskin “and everyone in America,” which combines some very prescient imagery—Trump’s inauguration, natural disasters, WWE superstars, a sexy Pepe—from the real world with a black-and-white cartoon world full of grinning, naked men and women engaged in all manner of debauchery and despair. Think of it as a postmodern Hieronymus Bosch, with a beat you can sway to.
