Philosophers don’t usually make good rock ’n rollers. Philosophers write dense, convoluted, esoteric arguments about highly theoretical concepts; a prospect that typically doesn’t elicit much wild abandon out on the dance floor.

So you have to tip your scholar’s cap to Tonio K. The 70s rocker was as deeply indebted to twentieth-century existentialist art and philosophy as the most arcane academic. And he could whip up a righteous wall of noise that owed far more to The Sex Pistols than Jean Paul Sartre. His brand of punk existentialism was bracing, raw, insightful, and—quite remarkably for dour philosophy types—hilariously funny.

Tonio, who took his nom de rock from a Thomas Mann novella, released his debut album Life in the Foodchain in 1978, in the midst of the punk/New Wave explosion. It was the perfect time for a smartass who couldn’t really sing to make his mark in the wider musical world, and Life in the Foodchain delivered in ways that no other punk album had even attempted.

Where The Sex Pistols and The Clash frequently funneled their anger in political directions, Tonio took on nothing less than the meaning of life and the measure of human worth. Oh, and ex-girlfriends.

The title track was a blistering take on alienation and personal insignificance in the face of an indifferent universe; Albert Camus transformed as Johnny Rotten and spoiling for a fight. “The Funky Western Civilization” was a litany of inhumanity and heartlessness, an anguished and bitter recapitulation of historical horrors that featured some mid-song commentary from someone who claimed to be Joan of Arc and who sounded like sexy chanteuse Francoise Hardy. “The Ballad of the Night the Clocks All Quit (and the Government Failed)” was a surrealistic nightmare worthy of mid-60s Dylan.

Finally, there was “H-A-T-R-E-D.,” the best breakup song I’ve ever heard, the serio-comic capper to the whole conflicted mess, with Tonio trying his best to take the moral high road, failing miserably, and ultimately giving vent to a hilariously profane rant that skewered everyone from psychotherapists to Jackson Browne. It was the perfect ending to a near-perfect album. It sounded that way in 1978, and it still sounds like that to me today.

But it was the philosophical underpinnings of Foodchain, and its 1980 followup Amerika, that ultimately won me over. I knew better than to major in philosophy. I wanted to be employed at some point. But I took enough classes to qualify for a philosophy minor, and in Tonio’s music I heard echoes of the same themes that I had studied in Sartre and Kierkegaard. This was existential nausea and fear and loathing made palatable for the masses, and it rocked absurdly well. If Tonio was staring into the abyss—and he was—he was doing so with three chords, a backbeat, and a wicked sense of humor. It may not have had the depth of the weightiest philosophical tomes, but it was surely a lot more fun.

On Amerika, his second album, Tonio pushed the relentless nihilism to its logical conclusions. Beginning with “One Big Happy Family,” a typically venomous, blistering litany of man’s inhumanity to man, he detonates forty minutes of furious punk rock dedicated to the end of all hope, the absence of meaning, and the senselessness of the human condition. He ends with the seven-minute Dadaist tribute “Merzuite,” whose three sections incorporate equal parts utter despair and hilarity, and which both sums up the unrelenting existential nausea and finds a way to point the way forward, however agonizingly:

This one has no doubt confused you
You are maybe hurt?
Do not let this life abuse you
You are not so worthless:
A: You’re an integral and valuable part of some master plan, or
B: Clearly as important as a dirtclod or that can

It is supremely uncomfortable listening, suffused with the blackest of black humor. But in the end there is a glimmer of what looks suspiciously like hope. The man was either going to commit suicide or emerge with some answers.

Life went on. I graduated with my philosophy minor. Tonio resolved his philosophical conundrums and perhaps his relational woes, and eventually recorded a handful of always witty but comparatively sedate albums for the Christian music market. But he was never better than as that conflicted, rage-filled philosopher-punk, whip smart and sick of the easy answers and ready to show off his vocabulary and his sneering disregard for a world that cloaked the shabbiest indignities with saccharine platitudes.

Listening to this music a few decades down the line, in a very different emotional frame of mind from when I first heard it, that is what stays with me. Beneath the blustering exterior was and is a compassionate idealist, someone whose nihilistic veneer could not cover up the great, wounded scream at the heart of perceived indifference and meaninglessness. I will always love him for that. And for that scabrous rant in “H-A-T-R-E-D.”

I suspect that Tonio has recovered. I’m not sure if his ex-girlfriend ever has.