The music is all that matters and love is everything
Momus

The music's all that matters.
Love is everything.
No, wait, those can't both be true.
The music about love is all that matters, because love is everything.
That's better.
I love you.
I love the music that reminds me of you.
It's all that matters to me, really.
The rest of my life is just bollocks, really.
The art about the music about the love I feel for you is all that matters.
If you left me, I don't know what I'd do.
The art about the music about the love would go too.
The catalogue essay about the art about the music about the love I feel for you would vanish.
And in the middle of investigations you break down.
I've really put all my eggs in one basket, haven't I?
I'm projecting spidery little lines out to infinity.
It's just a crappy pop song, yet it means everything to me.
We're more than the sum of our parts.
It's bigger than both of us.

Page from Anyone Else isn't you catalogue

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
Oh Amanda!
Nobody else is you. Everyone knows that feeling.
I can hear the patter of tiny feet, and inside that sound, the patter of even tinier feet.
There's an iPod, and inside the iPod an even tinier iPod.
Oh Ray!
Eternal, transcendental, timeless, trendy.
So melancholy and yet so uplifting.
Spending £57.28 on eternity at HMV Oxford Street.
The foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
I'll never forget you. Like the music, you're all that matters.
Like the art about the music about the love, you're all that matters.
A pink and grey plastic bag and a receipt.
A bus trip.
Do you believe me? Am I getting my feelings across?
Can I come and visit you?
Could I play you a record instead of trying to explain with a catalogue about art about music about love?

Page from Anyone Else isn't you catalogue

He's my favourite singing millionaire, the patron saint of envy and the grocer of despair.
There's definitely definitely definitely no logic to human behaviour.
I listed the bands I liked on my Friendster profile.
I met him on the Sinister list.
This is a song I really, really love. Just listen!
We met at a Primal Scream gig.
I don't think I could love anyone forever who didn't love this forever.
It's like he read my mind without me having to say a word.
She says what I feel deep down better than I ever could.
The unconscious is structured with pop lyrics.
Where my feelings should be, there's a song.
Where a song should be, there are my feelings.
Parkinson's Law of love songs: the love you feel fills to the exact dimensions of the songs you place at its disposal.
Nick Drake, Nick Drake, Nick Drake.
I was walking in a shitty grey industrial landscape, but you took me away, up above the clouds.
I'm making art about the music about the love I feel for you and always will.
Kill all hippies.
It's okay to love Moby, but it's okay to hate Moby too.
Who doesn't love love?
He wanted to write a hundred love songs, but could only muster 69.
It's all you need, over and over.
It's need you love, over and over.
I need to love you, I love to need you.
I want you, but I don't need you.
Over and over.
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you.
Transcendental, timeless, like rock and roll, 1956 to two thousand and never.
Anyone else isn't you.

Page from Anyone Else isn't you catalogue

You walked into my life out of my dreams.
If you didn't exist it would be necessary to invent you.
Machiavelli with his tongue is his cheek.
Rhetoric is a means to power.
Schmaltz and Hallmark.
Central casting. Rent-a-lover. Data date.
Whenever I hear Warm Leatherette I think of you.
Quick, let's make love before we die!
The love songs waft up from the flat below.
Prolefeed.
We're none of us so different.
Production and reproduction.
Breeders! Plastics! Normals!
The gap between your slick patter and the way you're puppeted by your DNA.
The intentional fallacy.
Norm serenaded me with a ukelele.
I met Betsy at a Lyons tea room on the esplanade.
The radio played a piece of dumb 80s crap and it became our song.
And before Chaucer, there was a chorus of frogs.
My love is total, what's more I'm all love.
I'm as round and happy as a Toby jug.
The music's all that matters and love is everything.
That bloke at the end of Sartre's Nausea, he hears a jazz record and it all falls into place.
Am I getting through to you?
Will you give me what I want?
Is it bedtime?
Are we nearly there yet?
Press play.
Fuck me.
Reality is very important, and elsewhere.
I'm in you, you're in me.
Gimme your hands!
The boundary between me and music dissolved.
The boundary between me and you got fuzzy.
The boundary between the catalogue and the show and the music and the love got warm and melted.
Do you want a puff on my spliff?
Do you want to touch me there?
You can, you know.
The catalogue essay about the film about the music about the love got a tingly tummy.
I love you.
Now and forever.
But especially now.

Momus

Momus was born in Scotland and currently lives in Berlin. Since 1986 he's made sixteen albums of electronic folk music. He writes for American style and design publications like Vice, Index, Design Observer and AIGA Voice. He's currently working on a book about photoblogging to be published later this year by Thames and Hudson.

Cover of catalogue

Excerpt: "Could I play you a record instead of trying to explain with a catalogue about art about music about love?"

Related works
Anyone Else isn't you
Everybody else is wrong
Fucked up lover

Related shows
Anyone Else isn't you

Related essays
'Anonymous Lovers'
JJ Charlesworth, 2005
'Tape Me I'm Yours'
Steve Lamacq, 2005
'Love letter, love letter'
Dan Howard-Birt, 2001

Related sites
Momus