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By Andrew Medina   Photography by N/A

05/14/08 :: URB web

Puscifer!? The inner-nose-picker in all of us is going nuts, contorting the pronunciation of this band/project. One of which, might just spark the laughter of pre-pubescent kids nation-wide. Perhaps the only ones not laughing are the die-hard fans of Tool and A Perfect Circle. To them, Maynard James Keenan is some what of a demigod. And Puscifer project is near blasphemy. Amid a strong backlash from Tool-heads, Maynard remains steadfast in pursuing his radically different direction, in which he experiments with an assorted rotation of musicians, acoustic guitars and hip-hop. That’s right kids…hip-hop! Brilliant or blasphemous? The dude doesn’t seem to care. He recently sat down with URB.com do discuss hip-hop, jiu-jitsu and the method to the Puscifer madness.   

What exactly is a Puscifer?
Puscifer is kind of a new world order of music for me. There are a lot of people that have come before me and taken similar approaches to what I’m trying to do here. And I’m just trying to take the best parts of those and coming up with new ones. Basically collaborative efforts not just in necessarily in the music, but also in the visual forum. Fashion, music, film, visual art, performance, comedy, you know just basically trying to get together with different people and basic creative process’. This project for is summed up with creative force, creative energy.

For anyone who’s familiar with Tool and A Perfect Circle, it becomes very clear, right from the beginning, that Puscifer is some thing very different. Is it liberating to just kind of say "fuck it?"
I think it completely works as an individual exploring collaborative efforts with other people, exploring different avenues within yourself. Discovering limitations within yourself, discovering strengths. I think it's just a wonderful thing I’ve been doing all my life anyway. But I think the problem you run into is when you go and present that to other people. That’s when you screw yourself because the public is so used to a perfectly packaged product, slick manufacturing and a kind of cardboard-boxed presentation. And whenever you step out of that, it forces them—the public—to step out of their boxes and a lot of people just don’t have the tools to do that. Or they’ve been robbed of those skills.

Agreed. There seems to be a bit of a change in your personality. You’re more relaxed. Do you feel like this project is indicative of a change?
Well, this will be a long way around a relatively simple answer. I think a lot of artists, when they show up on the scene, it’s generally them exploring some damage. They kind of need to express themselves on some level, because something is missing or because they’re trying to heal something. And I think, for me, it’s a misconception that as an artist you require friction to create. I believe you need friction, but I don’t think that it needs to be negative friction. I don’t think that it needs to be agony or pain, right now. I think as a human you can re-call those memories, you can call on other stuff. But when you’re in that vulnerable space, creating something from that negative friction, you become very vulnerable and volatile. A lot of artists that are in that space tend to recede a little bit and protect themselves. Because they don’t really have the tools or the armor to protect themselves. So as you grow up, I think you tend to find another space to kind of find that armor.

One of the most interesting things about your new material is your collaborations with several artists. You have a woman singing in Spanish on one song and you even dabble in hop-hop. Can you elaborate on hip-hop, do you have a favorite MC or group?
As a young child I was pretty much weaned on the Jacskon 5. And I remember having my very conservative, terrified, Christian, white family try to shove the Osmond brothers down my throat. It just didn’t have the heart. Basically, rhythm has always been the foundation for how I write, words generally come secondary. Even the flow of my previous work, there’s melodies but they’re more structured around the rhythm of the vocal, melody comes second. I think with this project it makes sense for me to reach out to somebody that is more obviously grounded in the rhythms. I think you’re probably speaking of the collaboration with BLESTeNATION? [A hip-hop group from NYC.]  

Exactly.
I’ve always just been a big fan of rhythms in general. To me, that’s music. It drives along with your heartbeat. It’s just something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I just wish that the public and fans and the music industry in general were more tolerant of experiment. Very few people have been afforded that license to do that. I mean a band like Ween. They started off from there, so they’re allowed to do that. It’s where they started. If they had tried to start off with something then tried to move on to what Ween did, people would freak out on them for a while. This is what they're going to do: You’re either going to like it or you don’t. But somebody like Bowie, for instance, just completely reinvented himself. And constantly does, he says, "Now I’m an actor, now I’m a painter, and now I’m a musician again." And he’s one of the few people, you know Peter Gabriel, Bowie, Mos Def, even Ice Cube. I like his work. And I think it’s fantastic for people to be able to spread their wings. But it seems, at times, for artists to do that is such a difficult chore. And people or fans don’t really want them to

You come from this golden generation of music, Nirvana, Rage, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins. Yet it doesn’t seem like you feel any pressure to live up to that. There seems to be a big problem with people feeding their egos and becoming bigger than the music itself.
Absolutely, I think there’s a weird thing that comes with that. And it really doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s just so many places to go with the rhythms and styles, well, right now I think there’s a lot of really interesting things coming out that are crossing over those rhythms and crossing over those genres of rock and world music and hip-hop. And there’s people that are figuring out how to blend all those things where it’s almost like folk songs that sound like hip-hop songs, so it’s really interesting. But I think we all kind of went through our stage. With rock in the '70s it was this raw, interesting, heart-beat, blues-based music. Then it kind of went into a more technical, I don’t know, I guess the cocaine was flowing in the '80s. Then we went through that whole hair band stage. With the exact same songs, with the exact same poses, with the exact same videos and all that stuff. Then with N.W.A’s stuff, it almost felt like all the hip-hop that came after fell in the same line with that stuff. And it was just the same crap, it didn’t feel like anyone was exploring. But then you got someone like Mos Def. Don’t mean to keep putting him on some pedestal. But you listen to some of his albums and it’s like, "OK, this makes sense. It has poetry, and rhythm, passion and experimenting with production." That stuffis just so much more interesting, and so much more artistic. It resonates on a global level, but not necessarily on a mass level or a Wal-Mart level. It appeals to a lot of people. But there are so many people that are use to the Happy Meal packaging   
 
We heard you train in Brazilian jiu-jitsu under the legendary  Rickson Gracie. How is that?
Well, there’s Michael Jordan and basketball…

Then there’s Rickson and jiu-jitsu…right?
Yeah, exactly.

Do you find any parallels between practicing jiu-jitsu and your music?
Absolutely, because in that setting you’re learning everything about your weaknesses. You can’t hide behind anything. It really is about what you can and can’t do. With jiu-jitsu, of course, it’s a very physical sport. As you get older you don’t necessarily have the ability to be that young buck that can bounce bullets of his chest. But I find that there’s a parallel in that forum. To kind of go off on a tangent. I was watching this couple in LA at this beautiful furniture shop. They have performances every now and then. They had this couple come in and they were doing flamenco. So you had the husband playing guitar and his wife was dancing. At some point she had her daughter and her daughter’s daughter dance with them. And you start to understand that the granddaughter’s roughly eighteen. The daughter’s probably in her mid to late 30s. Then the grandmother’s in her 60s. And you’re watching them perform and going, Wow! You have this youth, which in the United States we all gravitate towards, but in this setting you see the young woman and she might be more talented than anyone doing it. But she’s not nearly as good as her mother. And she’s nowhere near as good as her grandmother. Her daughter has schooled both her daughter and her granddaughter. And it’s this community expression of rhythm and talent. And there’s no way that the younger generation can know what the grandmother knows. It instills this sense of mastership and respect for your elders. So to go back and relate that to jiu-jitsu, as Rickson gets older he becomes a master and there are very few people in the world that can compete with him in the jiu-jitsu realm, he’s like a Bobby Fisher.