The Jon Mud Interview
Mastermind Josh Clancy On The Alamo, AI And Folk Art
At the end of a dirt road in between cornfields, there’s an apartment that looks like a factory. It’s basically Pee-wee’s Playhouse, except all of the furniture is from IKEA, and in the corner of your eye, at all times, a small entity is peeking from around the corner. Everything is alive. Suddenly, you realize that the ceiling has a face. It’s moving down the wall, and now it’s holding out its hand. There’s a bird perched on its finger. It has the same human face as the wall, and a fried egg on its head. Hooray! It’s beatboxing for you.
Splat!
The sound effect interrupts your trance and the apartment melts around you. You scroll on to the next video; you’re curled up in bed, now watching a Kai Cenat clip with a gambling website’s logo on top. That apartment at the end of the dirt road calls to you. Luckily, its coordinates are easily accessible.
Jon Mud, its gracious host, opens the door for you.
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It’s supposed to sound silly. Jon Mud is the name of a TikTok and Instagram account meant to confuse. But the viewer is also supposed to bore into it, get lost in it, and accept its rules at face value.
Walking propane tanks, “chopped” rotating potatoes, a sweatshirt-headed bunny-man going on about his “brand new ripped jeans”… These all converge in the Jon Mud realm as a onesie-skinned tetrapod backs away from the intruder.
Technically speaking, Jon Mud videos are a mix of AI generation, 3D animation and homemade recorded clips filmed by the man behind the Mud persona, Josh Clancy. He uses personal AI systems to bind his likeness into a playable medium.
He’s admittedly been on social media since its earliest for(u)ms, all the way up to the “bloated and floated” mega-sites of today that more and more young people join every hour, slowly becoming one-to-one with the general population. He has his qualms with it, and with AI tech in general—his opinions on the matter flip-flop from doomed to idealist—but the current internet landscape is where he grew Jon Mud, his favorite project out of everything he’s ever worked on (and there are many). It’s folk art through and through, and Clancy is hypnotized by the journey his face is taking.
We got on a call with him the other week to find out if he was real.
At one point, early on, he thought someone was at the door. “Never mind,” he said.
“Do you remember the Alamo?”
“I mean, I never forget,” he replied.
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The question poked at Jon Mud’s most viral video (arguably). It’s twenty-eight seconds long but compiles seven vignettes from different “entities” (as they’re called on the Jon Mud wiki): anthropomorphic creatures, all donning the same face as their creator.
The second character is a Humpty Dumpty freakazoid who’s ringing a bell on a sidewalk (like the Salvation Army) and beckoning, “Does anybody remember the Alamo?” The dummy became a fan favorite, as he inspired fan art and memes.
“What’s weird about that one is, the idea for it came from a vivid, specific memory of mine,” Clancy said. “There’s this kid, about 14 years old. He is sticking his head out a bus window. We were detasseling corn. That was my job when I was younger. It was on a lunch break or something, and we were just sitting around at lunch, and this kid just pokes his head out the window and starts screaming, ‘Remember the Alamo? Remember the Alamo?’
“It just was one of those things, like, ‘Who are you? Who is this kid? And why is this stuck in my head?’”
I, personally, always thought that the character’s line was a Pee-wee Herman reference.
“Well, right!” Clancy said. “That’s it. The Alamo’s just one of those things. It wasn’t a Pee-wee reference, specifically. I just reached into my past and grabbed one of those things that rings in your head, quite literally.
“There’s this kind of historic bell that rings whenever you hear ‘Remember the Alamo.’ I’m trying to test those cultural soft spots with the stuff that I do. History, cultural appropriation, advertising… A lot of these themes I like to explore are twofold or lateral.
“And it seems that the more true I am to those bells and chimes and voices that stick—that are in my head, from my life—the more it resonates with people as art.”
When Clancy and I began speaking, he rambled about “weird time binding exercises” that he was doing in his free time, “where you take memories and then you just attach ‘em to art.”
For example, he told me that Jon Mud, the nickname, was something that his grandpa called him when he was a kid.
“It’s got an Alamo quality to it,” he said. “I grew up with all that old-timey shit, ‘cause I’m from the Midwest. It’s such an old world still despite it being modernized in my lifetime. There are still remnants of those potatoes.”
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The visuals and dreams of Clancy’s past fuel the Jon Mud project. Clancy told me that it all started when he wanted to rebuild one of his memories. It went like this: he was sitting in a basement, with the family dog, and he was looking at a clock blinking 12. “I realized that time didn’t actually exist or whatever, you know what I mean?”
I tried to understand.
“Are you familiar with the memory palace?” He asked.
It sounded magical.
He explained the exercise. Basically, to remember things like a grocery list, one imagines a “palace” (which is a setting from your life that you know inside and out; a home, an office, or a school, etc.). If it’s a grocery list, the person mentally places an apple on the table, a cereal box on the counter, and so forth. Then, when they want to remember the list, they mentally walk through the “palace” to recall everything.
When I asked Clancy to remember his first memory and tell it, he built it outwards like so, starting with “crib stuff,” then his grandma, who he lived with, and his mom, and his grandma’s roommate, Gary, who was also in the picture.
“We grew up pretty humble,” he said, not elaborating on Gary, “but my mom always had a computer, which was kind of rare. A lot of memory is from there. I’m in my late 30s, and most kids from my generation didn’t grow up with a computer their whole lives.
“I think that has an impact on your brain. There are people with brains that were shaped by that technology versus people who weren’t.”
Clancy has seen the internet. Its vines have grown around his body.
“I grew up with people from all over the world,” he said. “I would talk to people from Japan and I would talk to people from London, and it was always a network culture to me, my whole life.
“I think that has an effect. I was always more interested in connecting that way than in the local world that I lived in because I literally lived between cornfields. So, I was like, of course I want to go make abstract, 3D geometry with my homie in the weeds or whatever [laughs].”
Jon Mud animation circa 2017.
Clancy ran through the social internet’s evolution, evolving with it, from “rate yourself” message boards like Hot or Not, to MySpace, Facebook, and then PureVolume, a music sharing website that brought up the “scene” community for emo and pop punk. That’s where Clancy first found work, designing T-shirts for bands on the site when he was 15.
He’d later pivot his passion into making shirts for Skrillex, Drake, and other big acts. But before that, it led to his friendship with Jaime Brooks, a prominent figure in Josh Clancy’s lore. The two formed the Pitchfork-acclaimed, cult classic duo Elite Gymnastics during the blog era.
“We combined like the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack with break beats and ethereal Japanese music,” Clancy said. “It just felt really new. This was before any of that stuff now, like break-beatcore and heavy anime-drenched stuff, like Machine Girl. That bedroom DIY, punk, rough-around-the-edges, really sample-rich and just a collage of mixed media.”
The two went to high school together. “We both moved to this small town, I think because both our moms were with a new man,” Clancy told me, but they didn’t really know each other until they bumped into each other at a club in Minneapolis. Clancy approached Brooks because she was wearing a self-made “Ask-ask Paul McCartney“ “Int’l Players Anthem” shirt.
“That was the first time I ever met somebody who had spent a lot of time in their own mind, figuring out their own solutions to things,” Clancy said about Brooks.
They decided to smash their heads together and form Elite Gymnastics. Old interviews frame Brooks as the musical genius, while Clancy was lauded for the project’s visuals.
One of their 2012 remixes of Korallreven’s “Sa Sa Samoa” has a stand-out video. Early CGI presents don multiple shades, while Sephiroth and Cloud speak, their souls trapped in jellyfish. Languages of all kinds spell out “ecstasy,” leading to my favorite part, when the word is underlined in a brief moment between the nonchalant seizure warnings.
After sharing their stuff on the Pitchfork forums, Elite Gymnastics gained a cult following. They got management, started playing shows, and while their sound resonated with the internet then, its translation to the real world was obtuse.
“Our shows were terrible,” Clancy said, laughing, “because people definitely didn’t know what the fuck we were doing back then. We would just get blackout drunk. We didn’t know how else to handle it.
“We tried, we tried,” Clancy continued, further living the odd nights he spent onstage in 2011. “We were caught in between two worlds. We were in these old rock venues, and we’re playing off a laptop and singing with autotune.
“Now, that doesn’t seem so crazy. But the world at large is still not ready for whatever Elite Gymnastics was. It’s a little bit too internet. That stuff can’t quite cross over yet. It wants to, but it can’t.”
Clancy left Elite Gymnastics in 2012. Disputes with Brooks on tour caused a rift in their friendship. He described it as “standard two crabby people on the road trying to get by.” They didn’t touch base for many years after. Brooks’ relationship with Grimes was one factor.
“Whatever future was created with those decisions—‘We can either do Elite Gymnastics with Josh or you can go this way with Grimes’—whatever was created there was the wrong choice. It’s hard. I think the result of that was not good.”
He wanted intensely to make the music industry work, but he found out that there wasn’t a living to be made. So, in the decade after Elite Gymnastics dissolved, Clancy joined the world of advertising: a move he doesn’t regret but still grapples with.
His portfolio is extensive. He’s worked for major brands and events, like Nike and the Super Bowl, but it’s not what makes him proud…
…Read the rest of this interview on the 65,000 website.
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