Imagine a really famous, incredibly intense,
dramatic actor. Oh, right, yeah. Like the kind
of actor who routinely wins Academy Awards for
playing these brooding, complex characters in
heavy three -hour ethics. You know the exact
type. Yeah, the ones who probably stay in character
between takes. Exactly. They only speak in raspy
whispers the whole nine yards. Right, the kind
of performer where... You, the audience, just
expense a profound, almost exhausting emotional
weight every single time they step on screen.
Yes. So imagine you buy a ticket to see this
actor's highly anticipated new stage project.
Okay. The lights go down, the curtain goes up,
and they are standing in front of a brick wall.
doing avant -garde, absurdist stand -up comedy
involving props. Oh, man. You would be looking
around the theater wondering if you accidentally
walked into the wrong building. Totally. I mean,
the whiplash would just be intense. You'd be
totally lost. Yeah. And that feeling, that exact
friction between what you expect a beloved artist
to do and what they actually deliver when they
decide to just tear up their own rule book, that
is what we are exploring today. It's a fascinating
dynamic. It really is. Welcome to the Deep Dive.
We are thrilled to have you here with us. Today,
we are pulling all of our insights from a single
really fascinating source, which is the Wikipedia
article for Pusfer's 2007 debut studio album,
V is for Vagina. It is quite a title, I mean,
right off the bat. And the story behind it is
an absolute master class in creative disruption.
For sure. So our mission today is to look at
the anatomy of a massive creative pivot. We really
want to understand how an established artist
completely reinvents their sound. And how they
manage a totally bizarre rollout for that new
sound too. Right. and most importantly, how they
treat their music as a living, evolving project
rather than just a static product gathering dust
on a shelf. Okay, let's unpack this. We really
have to start with the context of The Front Man
because that is the baseline expectation we are
subverting here. Yeah, before we can even look
at how this album was put together, we really
need to understand exactly what it sounds like
because the genre shift is the most jarring part
of the narrative. Oh, absolutely. So the album
drops on October 30, 2007. It's released under
Sony, BMG, and and Pussifer Entertainment. And
it is the debut studio album by Maynard James
Keenan's side project, Pussifer. Right, and for
anyone who follows rock music, that name carries
a massive, massive legacy. Huge. I mean, he is
the front man for Tool in a Perfect Circle. Bands
that are globally revered for highly complex,
progressive, alternative metal. Yes. We are talking
about music with shifting time signatures, aggressive
guitars, these deeply layered philosophical lyrics,
and a very specific menacing intensity. Right.
And then you look at how the source categorizes
V is for vagina. The genres listed are alternative
rock, trip hop, and post -industrial. Wait, actually,
before we go further, what actually is trip hop?
Because to me, honestly, that just sounds like
someone falling over. a drum kit. That's a fair
point. Think of trip hop as taking a traditional
hip hop beat, drastically slowing down the tempo,
removing the wrapper entirely, and layering the
empty space with moody cinematic synthesizers.
Oh. Yeah. And maybe some haunting vocal melodies
on top. It emerged in the UK in the 90s. Bands
like Massive Attack. Oh, I know them. Right.
It is very atmospheric and deeply rhythmic. Got
it. Post -industrial, on the other hand, is a
bit different. It's harsh. It takes the abrasive,
mechanical, factory -like sounds of industrial
music, think clanking metal and distorted drum
machines, and gives it a slightly more structured,
song -oriented format. Which is obviously a massive
departure from progressive rock guitars. Huge.
And here's where I kind of have to push back
a little on these labels, or at least point out
a massive contradiction in the source material.
OK, what is it? We have these heavy, somewhat
cold labels, like post -industrial, trip hop.
But then the article includes a direct quote
from Keenan himself about the sound. Right. He
compared it to, quote, driving around in your
car listening to those old Motown hits, James
Brown and cool R &B stuff. Yeah. How do we reconcile
that? I mean, how do you take a heavy metallic
label like Post Industrial and mix it with the
soulful sweat of James Brown and Motown? Well,
what's fascinating here is that the friction
you are sensing is actually the entire point.
Really? Yeah. If you look closely at James Brown's
funk and harsh industrial electronic music, they
actually share one vital piece of musical DNA.
Which is? They are both entirely built around
a hypnotic, repetitive, mechanical groove. Oh,
wow. Yeah, James Brown is famously all about
being in the pocket. His band operated like a
well -oiled machine playing tight, endless, rhythmic
loops. Yes, exactly. So industrial music is a
cold robotic loop. James Brown is a warm, human,
sweaty loop. What Keenan is doing here is blending
these electronic mechanical frameworks with warm,
rhythmic R &B sensibilities. He is essentially
building a cyborg. It's a robotic musical skeleton
with a human heartbeat. That's a great way to
put it. It's moody, it's electronic, but it has
this undeniable swagger to it. That contrast
is exactly what makes this side project distinct
from the rock he was previously known for. Right,
he wasn't just writing tool songs, but with a
synthesizer. Exactly. He was operating in a completely
different musical language based on groove rather
than aggression. Which means, to speak that new
language, he couldn't just use his normal translation
dictionary, right? No, not at all. To build a
cyborg, you don't use a traditional four -piece
rock band. To execute a sonic shift... this radical,
he needed a highly eclectic cast of collaborators.
And the personnel list for this album reflects
that perfectly. It functions far more like a
collective than a traditional band. Honestly,
it looks like a massive cinematic heist crew,
where everyone has a highly specific niche specialty.
It really does. Let's look at the key players.
You have Matt Mitchell, credited with bass, guitar,
and programming. Tim Herb Alexander, who people
might know from Primus on drums and drum engineering.
Right. Brian Lustmore on programming. Joe Berezi
on guitar. And that is just the core architecture.
Then you layer on the eclectic instrumentation.
Yeah, it gets wild. Alessandro Cortini is bringing
in synthesizer. Alfredo Noguera is playing a
pedal steel guitar. Josh Eustis is on a relitzer,
along with guitar and programming. And Johnny
Polanski is doing piano, sampling, loops, and
a clarinet. A clarinet? Yeah. Actually, Keenan
himself is also credited with playing the clarinet,
along with vocals, acoustic guitar, percussion,
and drums. It's quite the mix. So I have to ask,
with 15 plus different performers coming in and
out, playing everything from analog synths to
a country western pedal steel to a literal clarinet,
how does an album like this not just collapse
into absolute sonic mud? The answer lies entirely
in the production and mixing credits. This wasn't
a bunch of guys standing in a circle in a garage
trying to find a groove together in one room.
It was meticulously assembled. Look at the heavy
emphasis on programming. Mitchell, Lustmore,
and Eustace are all credited with it. That programming
is the digital grid. It's the graph paper everything
else is drawn on. I get it. So if a traditional
rock band is a live painting where everyone is
splashing color on the canvas at the same time,
this album is a digital collage. Yes, that is
a perfect analogy. You cut out a pristine audio
snippet of a clarinet. You cut out a recording
of a pedal steel. And you use the programming
grid to snap them precisely into place. Exactly.
And then, crucially, you have the mixing. The
source specifically calls out Alan Molder and
Andy Savers on mixing and Bob Ludwig on mastering.
Right. Big names. In a producer -driven electronic
project like this, the mix is just as important
as the instruments being played. So walk us through
how that actually works mechanically. Yeah. Because
mixing sounds like a generic studio term. Well,
a clarinet. and a heavy synthetic bassline both
take up sonic space. If you just play them at
the same volume, they clash and turn into the
mud you mentioned earlier. Right. A world -class
mixer like Alan Molder uses EQ. equalization
to literally slice up the audio frequencies.
Oh, interesting. He might apply a filter to the
bass line so it only occupies the lowest rumbling
frequencies and then carve out space in the high
-mid frequencies strictly for the clarinet to
live. They are glued to the same digital timeline,
but they are living in completely different frequency
neighborhoods. They never step on each other's
toes. That's fascinating. They are forced to
cooperate by the engineer. Basically, yeah. And
because the album was assembled in this highly
unconventional piecemeal way, I suppose it makes
total sense that the marketing and the release
strategy in the fall of 2007 was equally bizarre
and fragmented. Oh, the rollout was anything
but traditional. It was chaotic by design. Let's
walk through this timeline because looking at
it from today's perspective, it is wild. It really
is. The album officially drops on October 30th,
but the rollout starts a month earlier on October
2nd. with a single called Country Boner. But
here's the catch. It is a non -album single,
and it is retail only. Meaning you had to actually
leave your house, drive to a physical record
store, and buy a CD single of a song that wouldn't
even be included on the full album you were planning
to buy a month later. Which is just crazy. Then,
exactly a week later on October 9th, an EP drops
called Don't Shoot the Messenger. But this one
is an iTunes exclusive. Right. And it features
four tracks that had previously only been released
on movie soundtracks. So you have a physical
retail exclusive, immediately followed by an
Apple digital exclusive. Then finally, we get
to the actual music from the debut album. The
first radio single, Queen Bee, is posted into
a flash audio player on the official Pussifer
website. Remember flash players. Oh, barely.
And the music video for Queen Bee is uploaded
to YouTube. The source notes that this video
features, and I am reading this verbatim, several
fully CGI manners as pawns in a chess game between
two women. It is just an incredible amount of
disjointed media to throw at an audience all
at once. I really have to push back on this strategy,
though. Okay, why? As a fan, or just as a consumer
trying to discover a new band, this timeline
seems completely baffling. Why release a retail
-only single that isn't even on the record just
weeks before the debut? It seems weird, sure.
Right. Why scatter your music across physical
stores, iTunes, Flash players, and YouTube with
CGI chess pawns? Isn't that totally counterintuitive
to actually selling the album? I mean, why make
the listener work so incredibly hard just to
hear the songs? Well, if we connect this to the
bigger picture of what was happening in 2007,
it starts to make a lot more sense. OK, set the
scene. Imagine you are standing in a record store
in the fall of 2007. You might be holding the
original first -generation iPhone in one hand,
which had literally just launched that summer.
Wow, yeah, that long ago. You are trying to figure
out if you should buy a physical CD jewel case
or go home and download a 99 -cent track on iTunes.
YouTube exists, but it is mostly for low -resolution
cat videos, not official, high -budget music
premieres. The entire industry was terrified,
honestly. They were. Napster and Limewire had
already blown up the traditional CD model, but
Spotify streaming didn't exist yet. People were
caught in this weird digital purgatory. Exactly.
The major labels were panicking about piracy
while desperately trying to monetize digital
delivery. Right. By utilizing iTunes exclusives,
retail -only physical tracks, website flash players,
and surreal YouTube video drops, Pussifer wasn't
just being weird for the sake of being weird.
They weren't. No. They were testing multiple
different distribution models at once. It was
a controlled experiment in digital -era audience
engagement. Oh. They essentially gamified the
release. Yes, they forced the audience to hunt
for the art across different mediums. It perfectly
mirrored the chaotic piecemeal way the album
itself was recorded, snapping digital pieces
together, the medium was part of the message.
So they essentially forced their audience to
go on a digital scavenger hunt across iTunes,
physical stores, and flash websites. Pretty much.
But did that experiment actually pay off? I mean,
did forcing the consumer to work for the music
result in actual impact? We have this strange
rollout. We have an entirely new cyborg sound
blending post -industrial and James Brown. And
we have a high screw of musicians playing clarinets
and synthesizers. Right. Well, an experiment
doesn't end when you publish the results. You
have to measure how the world receives it. Let's
look at the commercial performance then. In its
first week, it debuted at number 25 on the US
Billboard 200 chart, selling about 27 ,000 copies.
Not bad. Eventually. It hit total sales of 112
,000 copies and it had global reach too. It charted
in Australia, France, and New Zealand. Those
are undeniably solid numbers for an experimental
genre shifting side project. They are, but the
critical reception was decidedly mixed. The source
notes that while places like All Music and Rolling
Stone reviewed it, Billboard actually gave it
an unfavorable review. Which goes right back
to the dramatic actor doing stand -up comedy
analogy we started with. Yeah, exactly. If music
critics were impatiently waiting for the next
heavy rock masterpiece from the front men of
Tool, and instead they got an electronic trip
hop album featuring a song called Vagina Mine,
There was bound to be some severe critical whiplash.
For sure. The context of expectation overshadowed
the music itself for some reviewers. Whiplash
is the perfect word. But here is the most fascinating
part of the source material to me. Let them know.
This album did not just live and die in 2007.
It refused to be a static release. It birthed
this relentless constant cycle of reinvention.
Oh, the remixes. Yes. By April of 2008, just
months after the release, they dropped a remix
album called V is for Viagra. the remixes. Right.
And even the E. Deluxe edition of the original
album was packed with bonus tracks like the Spanish
Fly mix of The Undertaker and two Blestination
mixes. And they kept iterating on the physical
media too. They released a limited edition double
vinyl in 2008 and then re -released the vinyl
edition again in August 2016. And amazingly the
source notes that in 2022 they release yet another
remix album based on this original material titled
V is for versatile. Yeah. 15 years later. It's
like releasing a piece of software in 2007 and
then constantly dropping patches, updates, and
mods for it over a decade and a half. This brings
up the concept of audio stems, which is fundamental
to understanding electronic music culture. OK,
give us the ELI -5 on stems. I hear that word
thrown around by DJs all the time. Remember how
we talked about slicing up the frequencies in
the mix earlier? Yeah, with the EQ. Right. Stems
are the isolated individual audio files for a
track. You have a stem just for the drums, a
stem just for the pedal steel, a stem just for
the lead vocal. When a rock band records to tape,
it is often baked together. But in a digital
programmed project, those stems remain perfectly
separated. Ah, I see where this is going. Pusifer
could take the isolated vocal stem from 2007
and hand it to an entirely new producer in 2022
to build a completely different musical world
underneath it. So my question is why? Why return
to the exact same vocal takes and synthesizer
loops in 2008 and 2016 and 2022 instead of just
letting the 2007 debut album stand as a time
capsule? Why not just write new songs? Well this
raises an important question about how we view
recorded music. For this project, the songs are
treated as living organisms rather than finished
products. Interesting. That is the fundamental
difference between a traditional rock album and
an electronic producer -driven project. In a
rock band, you write the song, you record the
definitive version, and then you try to recreate
that definitive version live on tour. But for
Pussifer, the 2007 album was just the raw data.
It was the foundation. Starting line, not a finish
line. Exactly. The fact that Billboard gave it
an unfavorable review didn't matter because the
2007 release was never meant to be the final
word anyway. Wow. The remixes prove that the
core value of Pussifer was endless experimentation.
If you have these pristine digital stems, these
amazing vocal loops and pedal steel recordings,
why lock them in amber? Yeah, why not play with
them? Right. Why not give them to different club
DJs? Why not reimagine them as orchestral pieces
15 years later? The album was an open invitation
to play. not a museum exhibit you aren't allowed
to touch. It really redefines what an album even
is. It's a living ecosystem. And when you look
at the whole picture, it is quite a journey.
It really is. You start with an artist famous
for one very specific, intense style of progressive
rock. They decide to take a massive creative
left turn into electronic trip hop, inspired
by the groove of James Brown. They assemble a
high screw of 15 musicians to play everything
under the sun, chop it all up, and glue it together
on a digital grid with frequency slicing. Then
they release it through a fragmented maze of
iTunes exclusives and flash players, testing
the absolute limits of 2007 digital media. Complete
with CGI chess pawns. Naturally. And instead
of just letting it sit there and taking the mixed
reviews to heart, they just keep remixing it,
ripping the stems apart, and re -releasing it
for the next 15 years. It takes an incredible
amount of creative to abandon a successful formula
and confidently say, we are doing this now. It
is the ultimate rejection of playing it safe.
It requires a total willingness to alienate people
in the short term to build something enduring
in the long term. So what does this all mean
for you? When you are looking at the artists
you love, or even looking at your own creative
output in your career or hobbies, there's a profound
lesson here about the value of the pivot. But
it leaves us with an interesting tension to think
about. We started this deep dive by talking about
that serious dramatic actor suddenly trying to
do absurd stand -up comedy. The whiplash. Right,
the whiplash. When an artist is globally beloved
for one very specific, highly successful style,
do fans actually want them to experiment and
grow? Or... Are side projects like this ultimately
just a playground? A way to keep the artist sane
and creatively fulfilled while the audience quietly
and patiently waits for the real music to return?
That's the million dollar question. It is. It
is a question of who the artist is actually for,
the creator needing to evolve, or the consumer
wanting what they already know. Something to
ponder the next time one of your favorite creators
takes a hard left turn. Thank you so much for
joining us on this exploration. Keep questioning
the media around you, keep digging into your
own sources, and we'll catch you on the next
deep dive.