Image by Erik Adams
Advertising overload can't stop Justice from keeping Austin fans on their toes
March 3, 2008, at Stubb's Bar-B-Q
By Erik Adams
Published: March 5th, 2008 | 5:28pm
Not entirely reliable statistics (erm, Wikipedia) put the number of registered MySpace users at 300 million as of February 2008. Interpolating that figure with data from the slightly more credible (still on the Internet, but with more citations) adherents.com, we find that more people are maintaining a Top 8 right now than practicing Judaism or Sikhism. Thanksfortheadd-ism doesn’t come close to the adherents.com’s estimates of Christians and Muslims (2.1 billion and 1.5 billion, respectively), but lets be frank: Those numbers are inflated by people who are just showing up for the major holidays.
But there are an awful lot of untended-to profiles in that 300 million; for instance, I really haven’t had Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky “in heavy rotation” since May 2007. So is it a tremendous leap to think that MySpace and its owners at News Corporation might have had some missionary-like intentions when they decided to sponsor a tour starring two guys who perform behind a big light-up cross?
It probably is, but there are still fewer than six degrees between a confessional booth and and the mobile MySpace updating kiosks that were stationed in front of the indoor stage at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q last night. Hats off to Tom Anderson for helping to further realize the house-music ideal that anyone can be a star, but seriously, the projected Web site promos playing over DJ Mehdi's head made his set mostly unbearable. Also not helping in the enjoyment department were strong Austin winds that made for some un-Austin-like temperatures, which presented two choices for members of the audience sartorially unprepared for blustery weather: dance or freeze.
Nonetheless, were it not for the inescapable branding — I can’t forget to to indict the night’s other big name, Discover Card — the Kubrickian orchestral bombast that signals the opening of Justice’s “Genesis” wouldn’t have packed such radical umbrage, the musical equivalent of Jesus kicking the merchants out of the temple.
We can go on and on about “the dance floor as a church” and “DJ as savior/demigod/deity,” but we should take Justice’s cue and not think so hard about these things. Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay are Sunday-school cut-ups, playing with religious iconography for the same button-pushing reasons that heavy metal bands do. As if to prove this point, the duo ended its set by making a groove out of the thrashing riffs of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” the title track from a record whose crosses-on-cover count far exceeds that of Justice’s † (Downtown/Ed Banger).
Before they could put their spin on thrash metal history, Augé and de Rosnay took a run through their personal history, covering most of what’s collected on † and devoting a good chunk of time — and a call-and-response singalong — to their breakthrough single “We Are Your Friends.” What started as a live recreation of their debut disc took a delightful detour during “D.A.N.C.E.,” as the best track of 2007 was stripped of its Motown strings and slippery bass and forced to float along solely on the merit of its Michael Jackson-biting kiddie chorus (Nope, there’s definitely no better way to put that). As a record, † is barely awesome, but live it’s an unstoppable monster. “Stress” was redeemed, mostly by the interlude made up of sampled synth nonsense from Devo’s “The Truth About De-Evolution.”
You can find happiness in your millions of Internet friends or fulfillment among your billions of fellow followers, but it takes but two beat-making French dudes to make you forget about the wind whipping in your face and the corporate logos screaming at you from every angle.
Issue #35
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