The current political moment has given us a never-ending stream of made-for-TV figures with biographies so absurd, it’s hard to believe they’re real. There’s Steve Bannon, the lab-grown fusion of sofa lint and human cartilage who, prior to running the far-right Breitbart, was a low-level Hollywood producer of not-exactly-blockbusters like In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed. There’s Stephen Miller, the former college pal of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and current White House speechwriter who wasted the phrase “American carnage” on Trump’s inauguration screed and not, like, a black metal band name. (Going by appearances alone, he’s also the world’s only The Matrix cosplayer who thinks that Agent Smith was the hero.) And there’s Anthony Scaramucci, aka the Mooch, a guy who lasted only 10 days as White House Communications Director before Trump shitcanned him, a foul-mouthed, mirror-shaded Ouroboros of unearned hubris and auto-fellatio jokes.

But the Republicans don’t have a monopoly on obnoxious, jerkfaced weirdos who make us collectively pine for the halcyon days of characters like Mark Sanford and Gary Hart. The Democrats have Peter Daou, a Clinton political operative The Outline describes as “the weirdest man alive” and “everything wrong with liberals today”: a pugnacious digital communications adviser who excoriates “haters” on Twitter, brags about his time in a Lebanese Christian militia, and once claimed in a lawsuit to have co-founded The Huffington Post, a claim Arianna Huffington disputed.

If you’ve only just heard of Daou, it’s probably because of his new website, Verrit, a kind of…well, it’s actually tough to say what it is, although POLITICO’s Jack Shafer compared it to “North Korean agitprop.” It’s an information clearinghouse that calls itself “Media for the 65.8 Million”— aka the people who voted for Clinton, to whom it appeals with a grid of cue-card-like factoids about how “The Republican Party Is Harmful to America’s Children” and “Hillary Democrats Are the Heart and Conscience of America.” The site’s name presumably has something to do with truth, and every flash card, or recipe card, or whatever it is comes with a seven-digit “Verrit.com authentication code”—which, if you collect enough of them, could be redeemable for Bitcoin or something?

View More

For our purposes, however, the very weirdest thing about Peter Daou is the fact that way back in the early 1990s, he had a career producing underground house music. And a pretty credible one, too: Among his engineering and production credits, highlighted in the “Music” section of his own website, are David Morales’ “Def Klub Mix” of Björk’s “Big Time Sensuality” and Bobby Konders’ Mutabaruka-sampling “The Poem,” a landmark of New York house. He’s best known for his work in a group called the Daou alongside his then-wife, Vanessa Daou. (Even then, you could hardly accuse him of a crippling humility.) Aided by a 13-and-a-half-minute Danny Tenaglia remix, their 1992 track “Surrender Yourself” went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart. It’s a great track, too—proper, old-school New York house, complete with savage organ stabs, slippery congas, and the kind of stubby bassline that Warp Records’ early signees would adapt for the short-lived Sheffield bleep sound. Frankie Knuckles was a fan, too: You can hear him drop it alongside cuts from Masters at Work, Lil’ Louis, and Ten City in this 1992 set from Hamburg’s Front Club.

The Daou’s 1991 debut album, Head Music, was, like so many products of the era, an overproduced mush of influences: digital synths, strummy guitars, ham-fisted soul jazz over mood-music breakbeats.

But they found more traction with the singles “Give Myself to You” and “Are You Satisfied?,” which benefited from club-ready remixes by Tenaglia and David Morales. Both Tenaglia’s “Grand Ballroom Mix” of the former and Morales’ “Bad Yard Dub Mix” of the latter are stone-faced stomps with attitude and endurance to spare—just the kind of qualities you need as a digital campaign manager, I suppose.

Before embarking upon the Daou, Peter Daou played keyboards on Ralph “DTR” Soler’s 1989 track “Journey Into a Dream,” a limpid deep house tune overlaid with the sounds of orgasm, for New York’s iconic Nu Groove label; Vanessa joined DTR for 1990’s flute-’n’-bleep Nu Groove single “How Many Times? (Unity).” Also in 1990, Peter and Vanessa teamed up with Victor Simonelli and Lenny Didesiderio as Critical Rhythm on two Nu Groove singles: “It Could Not Happen” and “I’m in Love With You.”

Didesiderio is better known as Lenny Dee, the Brooklyn techno pioneer who founded Industrial Strength records in 1991; that label’s first release, Mescalinum United’s “We Have Arrived,” was remixed the following year by Aphex Twin—meaning that in a game of Six Degrees of Separation, thanks to Daou, you can get from Richard D. James to Hillary Clinton in just four steps.

Around the same time, Peter Daou also did a handful of other collaborations, including a set of singles made with Danny Tenaglia—but the strangest thing in Daou’s catalog has to be Vanessa Daou’s 1995 album Zipless, which Peter produced. It’s a concept album based on the poems of Erica Jong, whose 1973 novel Fear of Flying scandalized and titillated with the unvarnished portrayal of its 29-year-old protagonist’s sexual escapades, selling more than 18 million copies in the process. (The title is a reference to Jong’s term “zipless fuck,” shorthand for a sexual encounter entirely free of ulterior motives or power games, in which “zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff.”)

Despite the lascivious look and feel of the “Near the Black Forest” video, many of the Jong poems Vanessa selects have a sharp, bitter edge to them; they speak of the impatience and the disappointment of women sick of the old order, of “cool sex/that speaks to the penis alone/and not the howling chaos/of the heart.”

Here, though, is the truly weird thing: Erica Jong was not just any poet that Vanessa, and presumably Peter, happened to admire: Jong, as The Outline reports, is Peter Daou’s aunt on his mother’s side. Not only that, but in 2008, Daou’s mother, Suzanna Daou—Jong’s sister—told The New Yorker that a passage in Fear of Flying where the narrator seduces a married man in Lebanon is a thinly veiled fictionalization of an encounter between Jong and Suzanna’s husband. “I forgive her for everything,” Suzanna told The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead, after confronting her sister publicly, “except writing that my husband crawled into her bed, which he didn’t, and asked her to perform fellatio, which he didn’t.”

That’s right: Peter and Vanessa Daou’s Zipless is, in part, a tribute to the aunt who wrote about a sexual encounter between herself and Peter Daou’s father. (It’s safe to assume that Suzanna wasn’t a big fan of the album.) What’s the seven-digit Verrit.com authentication code for this?

There’s not much more to Peter Daou’s clubland career; he produced Vanessa’s 1996 album Slow to Burn, but his production credits dry up after that. But those hankering for more musical moonlighting from Beltway types, take heart: Just last week, Anthony Scaramucci went on a following spree on Twitter, adding a slew of music journalists in the process. With any luck, the Mooch’s debut album will drop any day now.