By Marke B.
Justice, “DVNO”
Bonjour, Fifi! In this week’s Guardian I go after French hardcore electro sensation Justice (Kim Chun wonderfully defends them), and share a few personal thoughts on the explosively glitzy banger scene that’s grown up around their sound. Some people have written me to call me “old” and “a scold” — that rhymes! Others have lauded me as an “old-school defender” and for “finally taking a hard look at today’s materialistic youth.”
I don’t know about all that. I am old-school — I’ve been around a while — but that doesn’t mean I want to divide stuff up and take sides. Move on dot org!
I can see good things and bad things about most kinds of nightlife. And I surely feel a positive energy and musical innovation at certain banger clubs like Blow Up, even as I worry over some of the materialistic and surface aspects of the hardcore electro scene. Nightlife is an art, and like any art critic, I retain a moralistic vision — but I know that the wonderful purpose of art is to blow up (get it?) any moralistic vision to smithereens and go beyond mere words. But I’ll always totally be down with, as fabulous DJ Richie Panic says below, “going out at night, doing drugs, having sex in bathrooms, and listening to DANCE music.”
It’s difficult to try to objectively critique an underground scene I love and support! BUT at least it’s not this, roight:
And here, for comparison’s sake, is Blow Up:
Besides the hipster quotient and economic differences (the banger audience is def not $200 bottle service — yet speaks better french!), and also A LOT more comfort with the gays and female empowerment, plus far less douchebags in dimestore cornrows laughing about rape — HAHAHA — I think I root the difference mostly in the music. I get chills when the change comes in on the lovely Empire of the Sun track above. (With mashups of “Obsession” …. not so much.) And that’s a fundamental of underground nightlife right there — better music and hair than the douchebags. See? We’re still all one.
Anyway, back to Justice. They’re weird! they can fill giant venues, which kind of forfeits underground cred, yet they still somehow retain underground cred. For illumination, I turn to Richie Panic, one of my favorite DJs, the king of the Cali banger scene, and a real sweetheart. Plus a genius. Oh, and he’ll be playing a monster show at Mezzanine with Too Many DJs and Soulwax on Oct. 30 — so catch that! His take below: