Editor's Note: Jason Louv is Webmaster of the excellent site King Mob. Check out his Grant Morrison interview "Flick The Switch."

J: In your on-site essays, you seem to be charting out whatever it's going to mean to be "bohemian" in the 21st century. Clearly techno-fetishism, Japanophilia and classicist aesthetics seem to play large parts in your model. What will the bohemian life look like as you see it?

M: A lot of people say that the days of clear differences between 'straights' and 'bohemians' are gone, that that was only a meaningful demarcation in the 60s, and that now the mainstream is 'tuned in and turned on' (extending youth culture all the way to middle age, wearing jeans, believing in 'free love', watching an MTV as groovy as any 'happening') whereas artists no longer 'drop out' but sell out . . .

All this means, though, is that yesterday's bohemian is today's conformist. 'Bohemianism' is no longer what it meant to the Beats and Timothy Leary, just as David Byrne's 80s ruminations on the creativity of business, or the struggle around 'political correctness' in the 90s, are no longer relevant models.

You're right that it's a question that preoccupies me. Some 'bohemian' positions I might now take are:

I want freedom to live wherever I choose in the world.

I believe we need ethnic and national identities, but we need to emphasise their fakeness.

Music is no longer what we call 'music'. Its ubiquity has made music almost impossible to listen to. We need a radically new definition of music.

Conformity, and the threat of a global monoculture eradicating all difference, are the world's biggest cultural problems. We need to encourage true diversity of thought and texture. This will involve tolerating things that seem unpleasant or wrong-headed or even fascist. But it's the things that seem self-evident and 'right' which will always pose the bigger threat, ie the threat of conformity.

We will need the help of the past in constructing a new world of diversity. The past, seen as a huge storeroom of other ways of thinking of life, is the richest source of 'difference' we have. For instance, what would Plato have thought about the idea that art needs to be sold as packaged media? What would he have said about sex between adults and children, or men and men? Probably very different things than what most people now would say. Plato may be, in this sense, more 'bohemian' than Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.

Is Javanese shadow theater 'worse' than the shopping channel because it's more abstract and has fewer colours? And so on. I guess I'm taking the idea of 'think different' to extremes. But I think we need to. And that's one thing art can do really well.

J: But I would argue that, in the current media environment, "think different" is not necessarily a force against conformity. I think that, in a monoculture which ruthlessly unites all culture into one de-clawed, mass-produced whole, what happens with people on the fringe, the cultural creatives or bohemians or whatever, is we have seen that even the most extreme and radical examples of "thinking different" are always sanitized and recapitulated into the monoculture. So that even the Kelleys and McCarthys of the world have become something like the R&D wing of global corporate cool. In this case, though, how can an artist still go against the conformist grain–and get away with it?

M: I think the extent to which any and all radical, experimental or bohemian ideas are accommodated is vastly exaggerated, as is the extent to which these ideas are all powerless and discarded.

The last Paul McCarthy show I saw was videos of him excreting floods of chocolate. Will this shortly be seen in a chocolate commercial? I think not, although it may conceivably spawn a new genre of choco-porno. Artists have enormously changed the way we live: the image games played by people like David Bowie are undoubtedly present in the self-presentation strategies of Tony Blair, for instance (who is known to dine with Bowie from time to time). It usually takes a decade or two for 'bohemian' attitudes to filter through to the mainstream. British rock stars have made no secret of their drug habits, but now you have ex-cabinet ministers like Mo Mowlam advocating the legalisation of all drugs, and shortly the UK will legalise Dutch-style cannabis coffee houses. What, yesterday, was bohemian, today becomes conformist.

I don't see artists and bohemians as preparing a totally new world. In fact I'm quite happy with this role as 'R&D wing of global corporate cool', as long as some kind of diversity is preserved. In other words, I'm happy for a 'bohemian' corporation like Apple computer (started by 'phone phreaks') to become a global brand, less happy if it's a staid and shoddy corporation like Microsoft which dominates and stifles diversity by establishing a monopoly. The toxicity of the global monoculture is not in the fact that it exists, it's in the combination of power and lack of adventure, lack of creativity, lack of diversity that the threat lies. Artists and designers (like Apple's Jonathan Ive) can use the global networks to make the world a richer and more beautiful place.

On a bigger scale, to go back to my example of Plato as someone who 'thought different', I don't think sex between adults and children will come off the taboo list any time soon. We are still prudish and shockable, and still designate some things as 'too backward' or 'too advanced' for us.

My conception of the role of the artist is that it's someone who is at a crisis point, a battlefield, where things are not at all certain and values are being, in the Nietzschean phrase, 'transvalued'. S/he should disturb me and make me ponder. I don't want to see yesterday's battles being re-fought (hello Oasis!) fruitlessly and reassuringly, especially when The Beatles or whoever 'won' and those values became conformist. I want to have mixed feelings provoked. Attraction and repulsion, charisma and alienation.

J: Unlike most musicians, you come from an academic background; what was it that compelled you to move from university studies in literature to the pop music arena? What was that process like, and what fuelled it?

M: I just felt that what happened in the right side of my brain was so much more interesting than what happened in the left side. Imagination, strangeness, fear, excitement, intuition, dreams were obviously more powerful to me than concepts, theories, examination, excavation. There is obviously a lot of overlap. It's important to make the effort to understand, if only to misunderstand more richly!