So it was on my third listen to Peeping Tom that I came to a rather disagreeable realization: Mike Patton isn’t really anywhere as good of a musician as everyone gives him credit for.
For those who either don’t know or don’t remember, Patton was the frontman for Faith No More, a rock act from the 90’s. Now, I do not think it would honestly be at all fair for anyone to denigrate what Patton accomplished while in Faith No More. He is absolutely a talented vocalist and reasonable songwriter, and with some degree of direction, he’d easily be one of the greatest musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries, period.
That said, I completely missed Faith No More when they were popular. My exposure to them came a few years after the fact, through friends who remembered them fondly, and while I appreciate the music, I didn’t “get it” to the same effect everyone else seemed to, mostly because the band had long since broken up and there was nothing to really get excited about anymore.
Which is essentially the problem, I find. See, since I wasn’t a huge dedicated Faith No More fan, I wasn’t jonesing for more Patton goodness, which might explain why I have no appreciation for his later efforts. That said, Patton more or less seems to openly get off on the idea that his fans are dying to listen to something that, for whatever reason, he is unwilling to provide, so he continues to tease them with the same pseudo-artistic bullshit instead of actually, you know, MAKING MUSIC.
I guess if you’re rich, you can do whatever you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good.
But plenty of people whack off to his music like he’s some kind of visionary in the world of aural entertainment. The man has been in FOUR “bands” in the time between Faith No More’s break up and now, each more absurd than the last. Mr. Bungle was a band highlighted by people who were obviously talented trying to make music while Patton stuck thirty second long static effects and sound samples of people having sex dead in the middle of songs. Fantomas was Patton making horror music by substituting synthesizers with mouth effects, for lack of a better way to describe it, FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON. Tomahawk was some sort of a middle-ground between the two, where he simply made weird music for the hell of it. And now, Peeping Tom, which is Patton kind-of sort-of vocalizing over various techno tracks, or convincing Norah Jones to say “motherf*cker”. Patton says of Peeping Tom, “This is my version of pop music. In a way, this is an exercise for me: taking all these things I’ve learned over the years and putting them into a pop format,” a statement that only makes any sort of logical sense if one has not heard the CD.
The man continues to get offers to open for bands like Nine Inch Nails and Tool. He has been offered the role of lead singer by several bands, all of which he outright turned down flat. Fans continue to praise him for his “revolutionary” styles of music and wank off to whatever he makes next, regardless of how absurd or unstructured it might be.
Deal with this: Patton’s a f*cking hack. He makes music that is commercially uninteresting, artistically limited, generally unstructured, and can really only be called “interesting” in the most perverse sense of the word. He has written a very small handful of songs that were enjoyable in the past ten or so years, most of which were recorded under the Mr. Bungle name, and his entire legacy is Faith No More and a bunch of weird bullshit.
Now, one could make the argument (and it would certainly be valid) that Patton is attempting to follow in the footsteps of one John Lennon: part of a wildly successful band, then turned around and did whatever he wanted for years afterward. This is, on its face, a reasonable argument, until one realizes that Lennon, in life:
1.) was part of a HUGELY successful and influential band, a band which is considered amongst the greatest musical acts on Earth,
2.) helped to pioneer the idea of “artsy” music, which opened doors for things like “indy” rock and “progressive” rock,
3.) heavily influenced the development of the modern art movement, and
4.) made music that people hailed as genius, OUTSIDE of the Beatles, that was also commercially successful.
Patton has, at best, touched briefly upon the first one.
Now, if I’m being honest, I can’t stand Lennon, I don’t like “Imagine”, and I hate him for helping modern art become more legitimate, but like him or no, he accomplished a lot and made some influential music. Patton had one really famous musical act, then decided to spend the rest of his career making unstructured music with Daddy Bojangles Pots ‘n Pans band and a keyboard. At BEST, his legacy is Faith No More. He has not released one single song outside of that band that anyone who isn’t a Patton fan gave two squirts of piss about, and I would venture to say he never will.
Here’s something I imagine people don’t really want to hear, but it needs to be said: “Experimental” music can attract fans on its own while still sounding good. Off of the top of my head, Spooky Ruben, Rob Dougan, OSI, Dream Theater, and Emilie Autumn make music that maintains a distinctly experimental and/or progressive bent while still managing to sound something like, you know, MUSIC. If Patton were truly as talented as everyone claims, his music outside of Faith No More would be something that people of all sorts could love and enjoy, not just “fans of Mike Patton”. He is never going to write anything as powerful as “Imagine” in his career, and I sincerely doubt he’ll ever get to a point where he even matches his previous successes. “Mojo” is a good song, but it’s not comparable to his previous works, and certainly isn’t worth buying an entire album of messy, unstructured music and concept projects for.
Of course, no one really wants to accept this. Fantomas opened for a Tool concert a friend of mine attended, and as Patton got going with his music, someone blurts out an objection to the music (something akin to “What the hell is this shit?”), only to be rebuffed with “Shut the f*ck up, that’s Mike Patton”.
So? He wrote “Epic” and “Last Cup of Sorrow”. Congratulations. That doesn’t mean what he is doing now is any good. I’m happy for you if you happen to like it, guess what? I don’t, and I don’t think I should have to just because he was in one really good band once in his life. And it’s not that I don’t get it… rather, I understand perfectly fine: you want to hear one more REALLY awesome song from Patton before he dies or you do, and if you have to wade around through an hour of static and mouth noises and bossanova beats to get to that song, you’ll do it. Hey, I sympathize, I really do, but if you keep buying his weird shit, HE WILL KEEP MAKING IT. He does not care about what you want, and will not attempt to cater to what you might like one final time before he retires. He’s rich, at this point anything he makes is purely for his own amusement. That one last amazing song is not forthcoming, okay? This is it from here on out. Horror tunes, static and Mr. f*cking Bungle, okay?
Faith No More is dead. Get over it. He did. And you can bet your ass he’s never looking back.
