Air

THE REVENGE OF ELECTRONIC POP

by Veronica Rosi

Grunge = The Dark Ages

It's time to confess. The '90s were a dark period, a very dark one. After the collapse of the empire of masks, the accomplished post-imperial decadence of vain, hedonistic teased hair, the undeniable obscenity of fluorescent eyeshadow, the disgust for a way of consuming music by then akin to senile dementia, we found ourselves in a kind of musical Dark Ages. There was one myth, one idol, one ideal that the teenagers of that era were ready to die for: Authenticity. Enough with silicone, enough with fake smiles, enough with strobe lights, burn everything gay, burn the fake smiles of commercial pop. You pathetic '80s bastards, damnatio memoriae upon you.

All this while Tommy Mottola, CEO of Sony Music, lived like a little lord, screwing Mariah Carey and making dizzying profits partly off the diabolical idea of the boy band, true, but above all off the backs of us suckers rebuying our favorite albums on CD. That was the sad, black-and-white bipolarism of the time: either Tommy Mottola, or Nirvana. If you wanted pop, the best the (deeply distorted) market of the time had to offer was the earnest, saccharine songwriting of "Seven Seconds" (Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry, ed., and if you don't remember it, lucky you). The bar was so low that Britpop passed for a cool genre.

The French

And then, there they were. A duo. And the last decent pop duo anyone could remember, aside from Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, Wham!, Eurythmics and everyone else from that unmentionable decade, was Simon & Garfunkel. A duo of two losers, and French to boot! The last Frenchman to crack the British charts must have been Gainsbourg (obviously excluding Vanessa Paradis's "Joe Le Taxi," but as we said, the '80s had been wiped out by a mechanism of collective psychological repression). So, two snooty Parisians who couldn't care less about the sacred gospel of the electric guitar (electronic music, in those dark '90s, was either for pill-poppers or for terminally ill AIDS-stricken queers, and I'm not exaggerating), who had never set foot in a recording studio, who did everything at home in front of the TV with Paleolithic-era instruments, old junk scavenged from retired, ball-breaking kosmische-avant-garde bands.

Two guys so naturally untalented that they filtered their voices through a vocoder, and even then couldn't hide their snobbish Francophone accent, what a pity. But they were never going anywhere, it was obvious that even the newest intern at greedy old EMI would have binned their promo without even opening the envelope. The French stamp alone would have been enough. At best, only in the filthy underbelly of the music world could that record have found two or three listeners, losers just like them. Down there in the underground of independent labels, back when being indie didn't mean being in a TV show's theme song, it meant eating shit and not giving a damn about success. Actually, not even not giving a damn about it, but actively fleeing from it, shunning it like the plague, beyond Authenticity, playing into the void. And in that little world, now, in hindsight, it can be said that no pop album has ever survived. Let alone one that was deliberately snobbish and retro, if not conceptual, with its stylish evocation of the adolescent dreams of the very early '70s: cosmonauts, Amiga, geometric furniture, girls with fringes. "Moon Safari," a name straight out of a bygone TV ad.

The Anomaly of a Success

We will never know the secret behind the success of "Moon Safari." Maybe it luckily rode the birth of home internet, the new, hugely powerful weapon for spreading music that would go on to become the nemesis of the various Tommy Mottolas of the world. Or maybe that electro single (the first electro single ever seen in the charts, bringing a tear to every DJ's eye), as Teutonic and sugary as a cyber-lolita, bombarded the young audience of a young MTV with a mysterious subliminal message hidden inside a little chimp-astronaut, "Sexy Boy." It was a song that made you fall in love the moment you heard it, and you had to, as if it were a physical need, you had to buy the album (also because not everyone had a CD burner yet).

The CD was colored blue, like a starry sky, so that we naive, romantic teenagers, spinning it in the player, could witness the big bang of our own personal cosmos. It was a timeless, chameleonic record: if you were happy it sounded like happy music, if you were sad it sounded like sad music. It always worked, and it was addictive. Hours and hours of that stuff, back to back.

Therapy

A therapy, a lesson. "Moon Safari" taught us that instrumental tracks weren't a leaden weight like dad's prog, taught us that you could make electronic pop without sounding like the '80s, that pop isn't a jingle, but is dream, is art chasing the idea of love, taught us that arrangements matter, that the vocoder is sexy, that indie, once it goes mainstream, sells like crazy, and that selling well doesn't turn the same music from indie into commercial, that it's the songs that matter and not the band, that you could make new music at home, between one video game and the next, without even spending much on drugs and alcohol, that rock wasn't the one true Catholic and apostolic faith, that it's an unforgivable mistake to accuse pop of not being authentic, that pop is simply a pretender, one who pretends so completely that it ends up pretending the pain it truly feels is pain.

But above all, all praise to Dunckel and Godin, "Moon Safari" gave us a good reason to burn the flannel shirt. A punk gesture, liberating, orgasmic. So beautiful that people are still looking for it: in the new Air albums, in the first Goldfrapp record, in the many pale imitators. But it's a fruitless search. The emotion is unrepeatable. Almost ten years have passed, we've grown up. They don't even sell flannel shirts anymore.

Man On The Moon (Safari)

In the analog tremor of the Korg MS-20 (a wonderful, priceless gun-like name for a song as aching and liquid as "Le Voyage De Penelope") lives again the cosmic thrill of noticing, for the first time, the texture of your own tongue: only then, only at that first, damp, warm contact with someone else's. In an instant, then, from the myth of Authenticity to true Self-Awareness. One small step for a teenager, one giant leap for music.

***

THE WORLD THROUGH A GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE

by Stefania T. D'Alterio*

Here it is, the "Nouvel Beat". Let's rewind for all those who missed the previous episodes of a soap opera whose settings might closely recall those old late-'60s TV dramas that imagined a distant future made of white rooms, armchairs shaped like cognac glasses on soft layers of carpet, with sinuous lady hostesses, icy protagonists dressed in Courrèges with expertly teased hair, impossibly long false lashes and features unmistakably reminiscent of Margaret Lee.

This review is for you, latecomers... For you who today, in the light of "Kelly Watch The Stars" (a tribute to the most stylish of Charlie's Angels, backed by a video that is nothing short of perfect), let yourselves be seduced by the two ironic Gallic spacemen, in a heady free fall that drags you further out, to the shores of the New Nostalgic Sound, far from the heavy-handed hysterics of Italo hip-hop, "punk" for pilled-up teenagers, and Doktor Frankenstein experiments with clots of village-fair accordion courtesy of crafty pseudo-freaks, and cringe-inducing echoes of Sonic Youth alla amatriciana.

"Moon Safari" is the lethargic trip of those who won't resign themselves to the chart hordes; in its soft coils you could lose yourself, in a game of citations and knowing references: as if Burt Bacharach were redoing his make-up ahead of a comeback at some trendy club in Albion, and Jean Michel Jarre shed his intellectual clothes to slip into a nice tonic suit and throw himself into a lounge party with Francis Lai. 

Sunny, with splashes of seltzer-vocoder in an astro-cocktail for the swingers of the new millennium, it's the perfect soundtrack for endless retro-glamour nights: space-funk pastorals, Kraftwerk drowned in strawberry syrup, breathy verses that go to your head and leave you euphoric, the world seen through the glass of a champagne coupe fizzing with bubbles... Adjectives and labels abound: post-dub, synth-vintage, new-exotica: Jean Benoit and Nicholas turn their pacifist dreams of better futures, their meditations on a planet of tranquility, into perfect, sophisticated spiritual harmonies for an artfully crafted cocktail, shaking up moog and sequencer for a retro-futuristic sound in which classic structures (the post-surf Wilson brothers, John Barry, Piero Umiliani...) give rise to electric, hypnotic neon flashes like a lava lamp.

You can call it easy listening if you like, but Air know how to be cultured and ironic for those who can read between the lines... Like the Velvets in their most dawn-lit facets, they turn out sweet yet intoxicating as a dose of morphine, embodying the most à-la-mode kitsch like a pink plastic Eiffel Tower. They lull us with their fake-cheap melodies, stuff us with decadent, sticky electronic bonbons, caress us like a beautiful blonde with long, statuesque legs sheathed in black stockings and pastel-colored playsuits in some old reportage on the shady little clubs of the Latin Quarter...

Immerse yourself in the camp magic of "Sexy Boy", "Ce Matin Là" or "La Femme D'Argent" and you'll come back completely renewed... You'll step off the spaceship of messieurs Godin et Dunckel dazed and happy. And, sidestepping a pile of minimoogs, synths d'antan and mellotrons, you'll whisper ecstatically as your feet touch ground: "Paris, j'arrive...".

* © Scanner

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24/04/2007