Will the Real Mac DeMarco Please Stand Up?

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK. 

For the last five years, Mac DeMarco has been trying to show his real side. Some artists create a character and run with it, or see themselves splintering off into Medusa-like multiples. But DeMarco's persona—if that's what you want to call it—was mostly created without his doing. "Maybe I painted some kind of weird picture," he'll tell me when we meet later in east London, considering how that persona may have come about. "But it's something you've gotta accept, because it's out of your hands. It's like making music. The songs come out and they aren't yours anymore."

It's hard to tell when the Canadian lo-fi singer-songwriter's reputation left his control in the first place. Like a cartoon character, the DeMarco of side jibes, fart jokes, and general goofiness has been partly exaggerated. Not that he doesn't bring the reputation on himself. For proof that DeMarco really is a pin-up for inane humor, his presenting job for MTV's Weird Vibes is evidence enough—it's all faux British accents, inside jokes, and the sort of awkwardly blunt conversations you might expect from a professional television host. And in the rare case that you're a naturally funny person, people expect you to perform. This is a guy who made a sketch pretending to be a guy called Dave Fuck, spending his life showing cars how to reverse into parking spaces. What's essentially schoolboy humor somehow doesn't come across as crude or stupid—it's hilarious.

But there's a separation between the meme-friendly Mac and the sincere guy you hear on record. Up until now, it's been hard to decipher between the two. Just when he'll look to settle into a groove of honest, no-frills songwriting, he'll throw in healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek satire. Take 2014's "Passing Out The Pieces"—a song about not being every stranger's property, a 24/7 jester, that also happened to be accompanied by a video where he kills his friends and gives birth in a bath of cabbages. It's a style of warped humor he can't seem to resist.

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