Absrdst is the stage name of Jack Vanoudenaren - singer-songwriter and visual artist, as well as producer for the likes of Dorian Electra. Originally from Massachusetts, he now lives in New York - where he also collaborates with lyrical pop genius and singer Bonnie McKee. Having been coined as ‘dance music’s best kept secret’, the pop enthusiast also worked with Diveo in 2015 on a track called We’re Beautiful, which ended up resurfacing when it went viral on TikTok years later. With a new-er 7-song EP called Yemen & Glycerine that came out this summer 2019, following his last 2018 release Imaginary Friend, we caught up with Absrdst about his tweets (you should follow him on Twitter), a slice of life animated comedy he developed with one of his friends, and learning how to write music thanks to ‘fuckboys’.

Thanks for doing this. I’m really excited about it.
Me too, I love interviews. It makes me feel like I matter. [Laughs]

Are you originally from New York? I know you’re based there now.
I’m based in New York, but I’m originally from Massachusetts.

How do you think New York informs your work?
I don’t know. Most of my work is informed by my past and my relationships. I spend most of my New York time in my house - I’m not super social. I guess… it’s probably more the reason I’m here that informs my work - which is that I was kicked out for being queer. I just drove to New York as the first place I could think of.

I saw you tweeted: ‘Y’all why tf do these big Hollywood movie directors keep making straight sub plots like gay ppl exist for god’s sake’, and I saw another one that said: ‘I should have my own tv show so I can prove to these idiots that ppl can and will enjoy stories that aren’t 100% about straight people.’ Can we talk more about this, and what sparked these tweets?
I was kind of going off because I read an update on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and they’re giving the character who’s literally a talking raccoon a girlfriend… and it’s like… seriously? I mean, in fiction monsters are always really great allegories for queerness. And even though it’s not supposed to be, it feels like a betrayal everytime a character that the queer community really connects to gets straightwashed like that. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room with five people and not one of them were queer. So, you get a world with forty superheros, and none of them are queer? Like, okay. That sounds kind of far fetched.

I saw your other tweet that said: ‘I’d love to work with DIsney one day to help create content and shows with queer people but that won’t make me stop calling out their hypocrytical support of the LGBT community.’ If you could say one thing to Disney, what would it be?
If Disney was a person, I’d say please greenlight my show because I actually have a TV show - I’ve got a whole season planned and concept art and scripts.

Are you able to say anything more about it?
I developed it with my friend. It’s called Bird Friends - it’s a high school slice of life comedy about these two ducks and everyone on the show is a duck, or some other kind of bird. And one of them is nerdy, but really smart, and he lives in this town and he’s really lonely, but then he meets this guy and they’re hanging out, but they’re bad influences on each other. They’re both kind of troublemakers, but then eventually fall in love and go to the dance together as a joke, but both secretly want to be there together. It’s really cute.

I also saw another tweet that said: ‘Honestly the world needs fuckboys because otherwise we wouldn’t have half of these bops.’ Is this kind of like the food chain - do you think fuckboys play an integral role in pop culture’s food chain, if you will?
It’s kind of funny because I’m working with Bonnie McKee on her new album, and I mean I’m working on my album, and I know a lot of people who write music on heartbreak and heartache. Like, my friend Briana Wolf, who’s also writing about exes on her music. I was supposed to go see one of these people that I’ve written really sad music about. And Briana was like, ‘don’t be. He helped your career a lot - you’ve made a lot of money off of the pain he caused you.’ And I was like, ‘oh, I kind of did.’ It’s weird. And I don’t even use fuckboy in a negative sense - it’s just when you’re young and stupid, you make mistakes and hurt eachother. That’s kind of where a lot of us learn to write music from.

At what point does it ever hit you when you’re producing a song where you’re like, ‘oh this is going to be a big hit’? For example, I recently heard Daddy Like, and I was blown away - was there a point where you knew it’d be big?
Yeah, actually - that was kind of a funny story. We wrote that in Vegas. Basically Dorian Electra rented this big Airbnb, and had a bunch of producers and writers come to it to make music. And they made Daddy Like with Dylan Brady as kind of a joke. And they were planning on throwing it away, but I was just like, ‘Dorian this is a fucking bop and if you don’t finish this song I’m going to be so upset with you.’ So, that song actually came because I told them that it needed to be a real song. Because it was literally just Dorian on the mic kind of freestyling and getting their nerves out before we started for the day.

Does that hit you a lot when you’re making music - to know when something will be popular?
No, because honestly I’m pretty new to this. Flamboyant and Daddy Like are two songs I produced as the producer, and not the artist, but I’ve only been doing this for about a year now.

What about with your own music?
I honestly assume that nothing I put out will ever go far. What usually happens is I’ll put out a song and think that no one will care about it, and then two years later it’ll go viral, and suddenly people care about it.

Can you tell me about the first time something of yours went viral?
Yeah. It’s a little weird. Me and my friend Max made a song called We’ve Beautiful in 2015, and that had its own kind of moment of virality on Soundcloud back then because it had a really fresh sound, and it felt really good. But then this year it went viral again on TikTok. It’s weird because you weigh the public profile of your work versus yourself. You can be a nobody, but have something everybody knows. I guess that’s what it feels like: it feels like your ideas are bigger than you are.

I also saw that you said you wanted to be the greatest. It feels like so many people want to experience feeling the greatest, or the hottest, or the coolest. How did you let go of those expectations?
Well, I guess I got rid of that by forcing myself to abandon that value set - because it’s not healthy being overly competitive with the people around you. When I was coming up in Soundcloud days, everyone thought they were friends, and we didn’t realize we were actually networking. We were all young, so we didn’t realize we were doing career stuff - we just thought we were having fun. But then years later those friendships go away, or you feel competitive with those people, and you start feeling like you weren’t making friends, but making rivals. But you just kind of learn. A lot of my problems with being competitive and having low self esteem stemmed from years of psychological abuse at the hands of my family. So, the longer I’ve been away from that, and the more people I add to my found family that really care about me, the more I’m able to watch other people succeed - without having to feel like I hate them for not having what they have.

A lot of people go through similar kinds of experiences with being rejected by their own family for being queer. For people still going through situations like that, what advice would you give them?
I would say, if you have the Internet, find people who understand. Find people who are older that you can stay with if you need to escape. I’m lucky that I kind of have my music to carry me through my life. All of my opportunities have come from people liking my music, and then liking me after they meet me, because they met me through my music. That’s how I got my first job out here. You don’t necessarily need to be an artist to make that kind of network happen for yourself. This is the hardest advice I can give, but you kind of have to learn to be nice in spite of what you’ve experience because nothing can put you in bigger trouble than your own traumatic past causing you to mistreat other people, and losing opportunities because of it.

I saw that you’ve talked previously about how you’ve always aimed to sing about your life with the same comfort as any straight person. Did you have to go through a process of getting comfortable with that, or have you always been confident in it because that’s just how it should be?
Well, I haven’t always sang on my music. I only started singing on my music in 2016. I started singing on my music after I left my parents house. So, I was already comfortable by then because the people in my network knew that about me. But, even in high school, I was pretty flaming. I didn’t give a shit. To me, there’s almost a comedy and an absurdity in being a confident queer person because so many people who are queer in any sort of representative space are very vocal about the pain of that and how difficult it is. And there’s definitely a place for that, and it’s definitely really important, but it’s almost more rebellious to be like ‘the world wants me dead, but I’m the coolest motherfucker in the whole world’ - and talk about getting fucked by big dicks with the same kind of confidence and swagger of Kanye West, you know?

I also read you’ve been described as ‘dance music’s best kept secret’. What do you think about that?
I think that blogs have to say whatever they can to get clicks. I feel like everytime that blog writes about someone a blog writes about someone they have to pretend like the world is saving the world from itself just for existing. And that’s kind of my issue with queerness as a brand because the relationship the establishment media has with queerness right now is somehow objectifying us while acting like they’re not.

Is there anything you wish I’d ask you right now?
Do you hate the people you write angry songs about or sad songs about?

And what would your response to that be?
I would say no, I love them. That's why I write music about them.