Justice: The Hardest Rockers In Electronica

06/13/08 9:39am

by Erik Leijon (CHARTattack)

The politics of dancing can be considered a tad sketchy when it comes to French electronic duo Justice. On one hand their Grammy Award-nominated 2007 debut album † was a smattering of loud sounds, propulsive beats and rock 'n' roll aesthetics — the precise wake-up call the world's dance floors needed. Then again, Gaspard Auge and Xavier De Rosnay might have created the best pure rock album of the last year without using a single guitar. Precisely 10 years after fellow Frenchmen Daft Punk blurred the lines between dance and non-dance on the house-influenced Homework, Justice have come Marshall amps ablazin' to decree a new Code Napoleon on the division of dance and rock music. ChartAttack recently did the D.A.N.C.E. with Auge.

ChartAttack: What was the main concept behind †? Did you have any specific goals for the album?
Gaspard Auge: In the end, what we wanted to do was to create a disco opera. We created these various bits of ideas and concepts and the goal was for all these concepts to coexist on the same disc, so there would be these pieces that worked together but would represent extremes in their own genres. There are some romantic elements and some more aggressive ones. That's what we like in our music — stuff that isn't middle of the road. We're always looking for the maximum in one direction or another.

When you guys are writing songs, do you make the distinction between the pop or rock songs? For instance, would you tell each other, "This is going to be a rock song, and this one a pop song?"
It isn't necessarily like that. We often get asked about genre and all that, but it's just important for us to start with a very simple idea before going off into the different pieces. Like "D.A.N.C.E." is often misheard as a literal tribute to Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5, but all we did was take a few Michael Jackson lyrics and song titles, like "P.Y.T." and "Black And White," and it's really nothing more than that. The way we work is we start with small ideas and we go about creating songs very traditionally with piano and bass. Once we get the bass we have a solid foundation for starting and we replace all the sounds with computers.

Have your shows, in America especially, become more like rock shows than club shows?
Something that we really like is that in America, a lot like Europe, we get crowds that are really varied. We get as many indie kids as we get people who are into clubs. We even get a lot of young people, teenagers at our shows in Europe where people under 18 are allowed in. Something that we like is to be able to step away from the club circuit and do something a little more pop in a sense of variety. It's a lot more fun to do a show when your crowd is made up of people with different tastes and styles and they all gather for the same reason. It was never our idea to just make electronic music. Because we make our music on computers it can give people the impression it's electronic music. But our idea has always been to make pop music that can touch people instantly, and the music we listen to is more in line with MTV and radio, while our electronic background isn't as prominent. I think that's why our music is connecting with a lot of people. We don't have the attitude of purists. We're electronic musicians who can make rock music and pop music. We just make the kind of music we would want to listen to.

What is the significance of the Marshall amps stacked on stage for your live show?
It's mostly because every electronic live show — take Daft Punk's set, for example — has always been very centred on new technology, and it was interesting for us to bring our set back to the days of rock, closer to the rock shows of the 1970s. It was almost in response to all these electronic groups pushing things forward with technology. We wanted to do the opposite. We wanted something more raw, something that would feed off the rock energy and not so much on the quality of the set-up.

Are all the amps plugged in during your shows?
Yes, they're all connected.

What about the cross you guys use on stage and on the album cover? Not too many groups nowadays are comfortable showing that they're Christians.
Yeah, it was never our plan to spread the good word or something like that. The cross is a symbol that's been with us since the start in 2003. It was interesting to us to make a parallel between club music and church music because they work on the same dynamic. They bring people together who are in a similar state. So that's why we took that direction.