“No Extracurricular Moaning: Diamanda Galás on Suffering, Irony, and the Wily Mind”

Interview by Alex S Johnson

• INTRODUCTION 

In this newly released segment of Alex S. Johnson’s ongoing conversation with avant‑garde vocalist and composer Diamanda Galás, the artist dismantles sentimentalism in contemporary music, critiques the misuse of feminist rhetoric, and explores the philosophical and psychological architectures that shape her work.

Galás rejects the “namby‑pamby, like, crying into the hanky shit” of modern singer‑songwriters, insisting that authentic expressions of suffering must contain irony, perspective, and survival intelligence. As she states in the interview: “If you got nothing else in your deck to show me, then why don’t you just get lost… I want a punchline in there.”

Drawing on country legends like Hank Williams and Johnny Paycheck, she contrasts their sardonic, outlaw‑inflected storytelling with today’s confessional pop, which she finds “revolting” when stripped of humor or self‑awareness. She also critiques certain strains of contemporary feminist performance as “weak,” noting that “what they think is maybe feminist… is not feminist in the original sense of the word.”

The conversation expands into classical philosophy, the Stoics, and the Greek concept of wily intelligence—the survival‑driven cunning embodied by figures like Odysseus. Galás emphasizes that “wily is by no means a negative… it means you are a man who can survive in situations designed to destroy you.”

Finally, she discusses the conceptual roots of her piece Panopticon, drawing from Jack Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast and the psychological violence of total surveillance. She describes the panopticon as “a system of mental destruction… a massive paranoia situation for prisoners,” and critiques the naïveté of releasing institutionalized people into society without support.

This exchange reveals Galás at her sharpest—philosophically incisive, culturally unsparing, and fiercely committed to artistic rigor. It is a portrait of an artist who refuses sentimentality, demands intelligence, and insists on the power of the wily mind

ALEX  07:59

Suffering has never been, and even earlier, I’m going back decades, suffering has never been for you as sort of an abstraction. A lot of artists will, in pop music, for example, they’re suffering in love, and again, I’m going back to you, I’m thinking of, you know, “I Put a Spell on You,” because you take this classic by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins,

Diamanda Galas  08:33

oh yeah,

ALEX  08:34

So this is, I’ll just give you my sort of theatrical interpretation of it…what I felt from it was that it’s there are two voices here, one voice is, is the one who’s genuinely in anguish, who’s genuinely hurt, who’s, you know, wants to be beloved, has been failed in some way, shape, or form. The other is more like the dark goddess manifestation, who is putting a curse on the person, assuming power, and with a lot of pop songs, it’s like, why did you leave me, like country western, it’s like, why’d you leave me, or, a female empowerment song, which is completely valid, but I – go ahead,

Diamanda Galas  09:29

Yeah, well, my take, yeah, actually, a lot of the songs, I think that when Hank Williams sang them, when, Johnny Paycheck was singing them, it was a very different time, and initially, and there was a lot of sardonicism, there was a lot of irony, and there were, they were just singing. Sing the life, life as they knew it, and they would sing about a lot of other things too, besides, you know, unrequited love, but I think that right now there’s a lot of singers who sing a lot of these songs, love songs, and poor me songs, and I really, when I hear a lot of women or men singing these kinds of songs without any irony, without any humor, without any perspective other than poor me, I find it revolting, because it’s just like, look, you know, I really don’t need to know all those details, you know? If you got more, if you got nothing else, in your, in your deck to show me, then why don’t you just get lost, because you know what? We all know what these things feel like, and I want a punchline in there. I want a punch line in there. I want a point of view that will help me survive that, if that, if you know, if that’s what I’m looking for. I don’t want all this namby-pamby, like, crying into the hanky shit. I can’t bear it. I still seriously can’t bear it, you know.

And, and I find, and musically, it’s like the singer songwriter tradition, that kind of thing. I can’t stand it. It’s with, with Hank Williams, or especially with Johnny Paycheck, there would always be this kind of, you know, two feet up on the bar,

ALEX  11:47

Right,

Diamanda Galas  11:48

And getting really drunk, and, and knowing that he was an outlaw, he was going to do the wrong thing every time, and then writing a kind of a sort of imitation poor me song, but always had these punch lines, were just like, like, with ‘Pardon me, I’ve got someone to kill.’ He sings, you know what I mean.

ALEX  12:10

I do.

Diamanda Galas  12:10

I don’t know..I mean, I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to leave you because I got someone to kill. I told her not to do it, and blah blah blah, and I’ve been so miserable, and blah blah blah. At the end of the song, he just says, ‘Okay, pardon me, I got someone to kill, you know?’ They’re on the hill, they’re on there. He talks about them being on the hill, and his wife and her lover, and.. and it’s.. it’s kind of like all in a, all in a day job, in a day’s job

ALEX  12:41

Right. Yeah, that’s…

Diamanda Galas  12:42

Their approach to art is the life that they’re in, that’s just the way it is, you know, and it’s sorrowful, but there’s no extracurricular moaning, and you know, and I think that a lot of women do that, just like what they think is maybe they think it’s feminist, that’s not feminist in the original sense of the word. The expressions that people use a lot of times right now that are supposed to mean feminist are for me just weak.

ALEX  13:18

Okay…

Diamanda Galas  13:19

And I don’t like all that weak shit. I don’t want to be around it. I don’t want to hear it, and too many sweet voices, fine sweet voices. I’m just like Jesus Christ, don’t strangle me to death.

ALEX  13:31

Okay, so examples, please.

Diamanda Galas  13:34

Nope!

ALEX  13:36

That’s fine.

Diamanda Galas  13:38

Examples, no, there’s so many examples, it would just be redundant.

ALEX  13:42

Okay? Because, because I know, I don’t hear a lot of sweetness, I hear a lot of what they call it, sort of selective outrage, or blaming men for shit that’s really structural…

Diamanda Galas  13:58

I think if you get to this point where you’re just sitting blaming men all the time, you know, you should make up your mind, just go out there with the scissors and just kill them,

ALEX  14:06

Okay?

Diamanda Galas  14:07

Or just, you know, do something else, but the same old theme over, over it, it just glorifies these, these people that they’re supposedly got a hate on for, and it’s just like, oh, for Christ’s sakes.

ALEX  14:25

Well, you know, that’s a fascinating because it makes me think of two things. First of all, Hegel, right, the master-slave dialectic, and also Nietzsche, you’ve got, like, fucking. I really, I’m not meek at all, you know, but I’m going to clad myself in the robes of meekness in order to dominate people, right, and try to gaslight them into thinking that they should be meek in order to be dominated by me.

Diamanda Galas  14:57

Well, that’s a stoic that comes from the Stoics. Actually, if you think about it, because the Stoics were the slave, the Greek, at first the Greek slaves of the Romans,

ALEX  15:08

Yeah.

Diamanda Galas  15:08

They were the counselors to the Roman emperors, and because they were slaves, of course, they could never, never express their feelings or any of their, their particular resentments or angers, they, but they were, they were sought after because of their use of logic, and they had to put an emphasis on certain things, logical thinking, and they were valued for that, because they will be able to make constructs that would work for the people they, for the people that employed them, military designs, just mental… how do you put it? How would I say this devious in Greece? There’s an expression in Greek which means wily thinking, [πολύμητις (polýmētis)] and to survive as a slave of the Empire, Roman Empire, with people that were syphilitic emperors and very evil, had to be extremely wily, and that’s a one of the most revered words in Greece, so you have these people, like you know, Zeno Heraclitus, and these others,

ALEX  16:47

Right,

Diamanda Galas  16:48

Helping plot, plot the rule of a Roman government, and that’s what I’m talking about, I think that that’s very interesting.

ALEX  17:04

It is, it is very, very interesting. I almost.. I lost my, my thought. It was.. oh, yes. There’s a word.. I don’t know Greece. I don’t know Greek. I don’t know anything about it, except, you know, my poem, which is translated into Greek, which I don’t understand my own poem, but anyway, I’ve been assured that it’s really good Greek, and it’s called “Alchemist of Sorrows,” anyway, after Baudelaire, actually, but so, so in in the original Greek of the of the Odyssey, when, when, and I was wondered about this, you know, when Odysseus, they’re one of the epithets, is always used is, you know, you know, man, in many ways, or I guess it’s polytropos, probably mispronouncing it, but I, you know, and, and you know what’s, what’s her name, the she’s a professor at Columbia, Gayatri Spivak, right, translates it says basically sardonically big liar, so I’ve always, I’ve always been curious about that, and now you’re kind of filling something in for me, where that the mentality of being wily is not necessarily wrong, it’s just so Odysseus. What’s your, what’s your take on Odysseus and his ways?

Diamanda Galas  18:35

I, I, I don’t think I’m qualified to discuss.

ALEX  18:39

Okay, okay…

Diamanda Galas  18:40

Wily is by no means a negative, it’s a positive, it means you are a man who can survive right in situations that are designed to destroy you.

ALEX  19:03

Yes.

Diamanda Galas  19:04

And that means you must be extremely clever. You must be able to to see paradigms, and you must be able to recognize patterns before one is exacted upon you, and that is why they’re, we’re hired and revered,

ALEX  19:30

Right?

Diamanda Galas  19:32

So much as revered,

ALEX  19:34

Right? Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s that’s brilliant, and I think that, you know, pattern recognition is the, you know, skill set of our era in so many, so many ways, right? Yeah, so also I just wanted to kind of pivot to Panopticon. So you did a piece called Panopticon, immediately think, obviously, Jeremy Bentham, but famously Michel Foucault, and right, and could you, could you talk about the origins of that piece, and your, your, your use of vocal language to express the concept of the panopticon?

Diamanda Galas  20:16

One of the texts that I was reading at the time was was a, oh my god, in the morning I’m, I tend to forget it, a Jack Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast.

ALEX  20:34

Yes.

Diamanda Galas  20:35

That was promoted naively by Norman Mailer, who fought very, very hard to get the guy out of prison, and as soon as the guy got out of prison, he killed somebody, you know, that was just it. It’s like that’s where you look at Norman Mailer, and you know, I remember that Truman Capote used to laugh all the time, he called him “the most vicious bitch in the world.” And my favorite things were to read in Gay Sunshine, they’re casting aspersions upon each other, and I would just fall out laughing…Norman Mailer was very protected.

So, anyway, when you talk about Panopticon, it’s really a system of many eyes, in, in, in the sense that the guards, the guards, and the warden are in the center, they’re in the center, they have the center seat, and they can see every cell in the prison, they so that there, there is a, there’s, it’s a massive paranoia, paranoia situation for prisoners. There’s no privacy, there’s no privacy at all…a system of mental destruction.

So you have a guy like, like Jack Abbott, and all these liberals are thinking about, ‘oh, poor guy,’ you know? Like, well, you could say poor guy all you want, but I mean, you don’t want to just hatch him out of prison, like, and give him 50 bucks and say have a good life, you know. It doesn’t work that way in your life. Doesn’t work that way.

It’s like when a person becomes institutionalized, that person becomes terrified of the outside world. That person does not know how to interpret gestures from the outside world. A gesture, I believe it was a gesture by a bartender or a situation like that that got killing him because he thought the gesture meant that it was he was threatening Jack Abbot and it wasn’t that…The thing is, is, is that the person to leave is, is a, is a second execution, is a second punishment, because, where do you go, where do you go, where do you go to learn the skills of, of, of a normative? It’s not a normative society, is it? But it’s called normative society. Where do you go to learn how to communicate and how to interpret signals after you’ve been in a place for eight years, and always have 24 eyes in the back of your head.

Alex S. Johnson — American author, editor, and cultural interviewer. Known for over 100 works in horror, bizarro, surrealism, and the dark fantastique, and for conducting a major interview with avant‑garde vocalist Diamanda Galás. His projects include Black Diadem: Magazine of the Fantastique and the Axes of Evil metal‑horror anthologies. Johnson’s work aligns with underground, mythic‑punk, and transgressive traditions; he has been praised by cyberpunk pioneer John Shirley, who called him “the Baudelaire of our time.” His interview with Galás situates him within the lineage of writers engaging with radical performance, political art, and the aesthetics of extremity.