I didn't know Lord Byron's breakthrough work was 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' either. Image: Sweded

In the second part of our head-spinning interview with high- and low-culture polymath Craig Schuftan, we get a crash course in Nietzsche’s morality of lightning, challenge the idea that culture died in 1952, examine the sincerity of My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, and speculate on how anti-depressants might destroy the creative urge of future generations.

And remember, to get an even more involved and dizzying view of Romanticism, art, and Way’s meeting of minds with Liza Minnelli, pick up Schuftan’s new book, Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! (Part One of the interview is here).

The Enthusiast: Punks and goths, even if indeed they were opposing forces in the late ’70s, they were both about existential escapism. Punks were dismissing everything in society as ‘boring’ and the goths weren’t even engaging.

Craig Schuftan: “The interesting thing about punk, as many writers have observed, is that it was a clearing of the decks. It began with a great big voice saying, ‘Everything is shit. [Laughs] None of this is any good and it’s not how I want to live.’ Once you do that there’s an opportunity to create new forms and relationships between people. That’s why punk was so exciting.”

“But then, and I’m simplifying a little bit, punk took two directions and they’re the exact same two directions that post-war art in Germany took. After the First World War there was a great sense of disgust at the world and what it had brought us to. There was an opportunity to do something new. They went in one of two directions. They wanted, as many punk groups did and do today, an art of social protest that would be constructive in the world, which would point fingers and name names and actually suggest solutions. Or they’d go into some sort of mystical escapism; whether that mysticism takes the form of an obsession with your own emotions, or an obsession with God and the ineffable or some imaginary version of the Middle Ages.”

“They are two courses that early 20th-century art took and that post-punk took. Where you had Gang Of Four, who are a wonderful group and I don’t mean to criticise them because I love their music, but they represent one extreme. Their songs were extremely analytical and took nothing for granted, especially not love, which was the bread and butter of songwriters. Love is pulled to pieces in a very Enlightenment sort of way. Whereas for goths it’s about the ineffable; vague but great and powerful stirrings in your heart.”

If we’re talking about the two ways in which art split, they’re still throwing their hands up. But I was of the idea that when Nietzsche had an epiphany that existence was futile, it was a hugely liberating thing for him.

“One of my favourite stories about Nietzsche was him discovering the works of Arthur Schopenhauer. He tells the story of buying a little book called The World As Will And Representation and this book was a flop when Schopenhauer wrote it, but it had become a little more popular when Nietzsche discovered it. He took it home and had this epiphany. What you said before, the idea that life is fucked, that’s Schopenhauer in a nutshell. Schopenhauer is an amazing philosopher because he realised that in his early twenties and never wavered from it for the rest of his life. He maintained that vision that life is struggle with no reward and tried to evolve a philosophy to help us try to cope with it.”

Wasn’t one of his solutions suicide, but then he decided that the world would still be fucked regardless?

“No, that was Wagner’s misinterpretation of him. Schopenhauer didn’t have particularly good things to say about suicide either. He said the world is will, whether you kill yourself or not. His idea was of renunciation and compassion. But Nietzsche was incredibly excited by this philosophy of Schopenhauer’s. It really spoke to him as a young man because he felt that perhaps life was brutal and meaningless and continuous and had no point. And he was prepared to admit it. So the young Nietzsche is Schopenhauer-ish when he observes the thunderstorm and lightning and says, ‘This is how the world really is: violence and struggle and destruction’, but Nietzsche enjoys those things in a way that Schopenhauer never did. Schopenhauer advocated renouncing the world as much as possible, but Nietzsche – and when you talk about Nietzsche you have to talk about one of several Nietzsches, he changed his tune over the years – but the project, broadly speaking, was to say yes to all of that, yes to violence and ecstasy and death. Take all that life throws at you and take it on. That was his vision of the superman.”

That’s why I got so excited about him. It’s the lemons/lemonade thing. If there really is no hope, we may as well rejoice.

“That’s why reading Nietzsche is so exciting. I had a lot of moments reading him when you just go, ‘Yes!’ But it’s also been frequently claimed that his philosophy is evil. Or if not evil, then very, very selfish. Nietzsche’s whole thing is that we should not deny life. He really turns his back on conventional morality. He doesn’t think we should deny the things that have been given to us and that we are capable of. The conclusions of that are pretty frightening, when you think about it. A lot of evil could be justified in that name of Nietzsche’s philosophy.”

Okay, I was rather startled to see that lyrics from bands like Weezer and AFI aren’t so stylistically different from things from Byron; modern lyrics are more poetic than I gave them credit for.

“Again, a lot of the process of putting this book together was comparing things, pulling out lyrics and bits of poetry and trying to see if they spoke to each other. And I think I went through the same thing as you, I was really amazed. And I almost felt guilty for being amazed, because I love rock’n'roll and pop music and the words and the sound. I hate the idea that there’s that thing where rock’n'roll can’t be poetry because when you print it on the page without the music it doesn’t sound as good.”

“I don’t think that’s true at all. Especially with Weezer, because in some ways Rivers Cuomo’s stuff is so unpoetic. He doesn’t use a lot of poetic language, he’s certainly not flowery. But it is really lyrical, it speaks from the heart. It uses very simple language and specific sets of circumstances and images and creates some really powerful stuff from it, which is all you’d want from a poet! [Laughs] That’s what we like about Keats and Wordsworth.”

If you speak to so-called intellectuals, do they dismiss all of your pop culture analysis?

“I don’t spend a lot of time hanging out with those guys. But I do have a one friend in particular who was a teacher of mine, who taught me a lot about classical art and the early Romantics, and I’m incredibly indebted to him, but he infuriates me because he will not recognise the greatness of pop music. He just won’t. He’s not of that generation, he can’t hear it as anything but noise.”

“I went to see a lecture by a great Australian writer called Robert Spillane at the Art Gallery Of New South Wales where he talked about late Romanticism, about Wagner and Nietzsche, and I was sitting there the whole time learning stuff but also these lyrics kept popping into my head, from Smashing Pumpkins and Depeche Mode songs that I haven’t heard for years. And I’d love for someone to do a talk like this, to speak about this stuff in that way, to include these things as part of the same continuum. But he was not going to do that because I talked to him later and he was pretty sure nothing really significant has happened in culture since about 1952. He actually said that.

“In some ways that’s what I tried to do with this book: build a bit of a bridge and get those things talking to each other. I was reading Matthew Arnold’s criticism, he was a Victorian critic and writer, and he never hesitates to compare Homer with Keats, even though they lived hundreds and hundreds of years apart. So it shouldn’t be that much of a stretch for us to compare Lord Byron and Davey Havok from AFI.”

I have a problem with bands like My Chemical Romance taking advantage of the market for emo, creating the Black Parade artifice, and then decrying the genre. I thought the point was, in part, to unify all these lovers and losers.

Schuftan as he appears on the triple j website.

“That’s what’s so interesting about My Chemical Romance to me. That thing where you attract a lot of loners because the imagery you put out and the songs you write and the ideas you express. That will happen and Gerard Way knew that it would happen. He set out to do it because he believed that those people didn’t deserve to feel lonely any more like he did when he was a kid. You could call it calculating but Gerard Way is a very ambitious artist and he believes that art can change the world and that’s how it needed to be done. Having said that, I believe that all that imagery and all those things come from a very sincere place. As a writer, I don’t think anyone could accuse him of being insincere because those are great songs that seem to speak to him in a very specific and personal way.”

“But yes, he had to look at the consequences of what happens when you do that. One of the most interesting things to me, not just about emo but about rock’n'roll, is the way that it amplifies Romanticism on a mass scale. You can speak to people with the same images and the same voice as Keats or Byron used, but the consequences are so different because you’re saying it through MySpace and in concerts in stadiums, this mass form of Romanticism. And the contradictions are clear. It’s so old that it’s become cliché, but how can you have a mass of individuals? How can you have all these people unifying under a banner that says, ‘We’re all alone’?”

“It’s a tricky thing to try to resolve. It frightened the band because they saw that they had created a mass movement. Their audience had become generalised in a way that they knew people should never be. It was almost the roots of fascism, where you turn people into an abstract mass, and it really frightened them. So they had to abandon it. They’re still in the process of finding a way to resolve that problem in their work.”

How do you think Romanticism will manifest in future generations who have been doped up on anti-depressants since they were children?

[Laughs] “That’s interesting, because the argument about anti-depressants goes back a long way. In the book I have identified Keats as an example of that in his poem Ode On Melancholy, about melancholy as a poetic resource. He suffers from melancholy, he’s depressed, but he doesn’t feel it should be blotted out with remedies because he recognises that those intense feelings are very, very important to his poetry. That’s where his poetry comes from. That’s what the Romantics believed and that’s what modern songwriters believe. Again, I’m not just talking about emo, I’m talking about everybody.”

“If there’s one mantra you hear in rock’n'roll, whether you’re a punk or a hip-hop artist or whatever, is that authentic self-expression makes good art. Real stories about you and your experience of the world is where good art comes from. It’s always going to be a problem for artists, because they have to live in the world, and they can’t be going crazy all the time, but in a lot of ways, in order to be an artist, you have to be hyper-sensitive and pick up on things that other people don’t pick up on. And that means you’re very sensitive to joy but also pain.”

“I guess we’ll just have to see. I don’t know whether I can really speculate on how that will pan out in the future.”

Maybe every song will be an anthem to soma.

“Maybe all our music will chug along on an even keel, like mid-period Kraftwerk.”

There’s a dystopian future we can all look forward to!

“But Kraftwerk are so funny. They popped into my head as an example of the most unemotional music ever, but they’re not unemotional at all, they’re deeply ironic and all their work is full of this weird, wistful melancholy. They’re actually very Romantic even while they position themselves as enemies of the Romantic. I guess that’s one of the things I found in this book. I feel like I could’ve written this book six times using 40 different musicians, picked at random out of the world — whether it was Kraftwerk or Meat Loaf or Mariah Carey or Pink Floyd or whoever — because everyone’s a Romantic.”