VIDEO: Justice, "D.A.N.C.E."
With Grammy nominations, the launch of an extensive North American tour sponsored by MySpace that comes to the Paradise this Saturday, and a bona fide backlash, Ed Banger Records has entered the second phase of its great American takeover. Headed by long-time Daft Punk manager Pedro Winter, the Parisian label is best known for blending techno and rock into a kind of metalitronica, and for the success of the French duo Justice, who embody that sound. Justice’s profile even got an inadvertent boost from Kanye West at the 2006 MTV Europe Music Awards when West jumped on stage and threw a temper tantrum after their video with Simian, “We Are Your Friends,” bested his “Touch the Sky.” He complained that his vid “cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons.”
Since then, however, Justice have exploded worldwide, having released their debut Cross album (Downtown/Ed Banger/Vice) to tremendous critical and popular crossover success, and Winter’s acts have left their musical and æsthetic imprint on US culture. For his recent “Good Life” video, West himself tapped Ed Banger resident artist So Me, and he also used a Daft Punk track for his song “Stronger.” “I think Kanye did an amazing track by sampling Daft Punk,” says Winter over the phone from Paris, in his thick French accent. And West’s Grammy Awards performance with the group? “With all the glowsticks and neon, it really looked like a Daft Punk show.”
Even the French are on board. Winter notes that though the press and the public in his homeland were slower to appreciate his label than were much of the world, they’ve now hopped onto the bandwagon: “They didn’t start it, but they are following it for sure.” He adds that his acts even receive tabloid mentions nowadays for their “trendy parties. . . . Now we are the most famous French label exporting French music.”
Having gotten married last year, Winter — who will be performing under his DJ name Busy P on the leg of the MySpace tour that hits the Paradise this Saturday with Justice playing a DJ set — has barely been able to see his wife, jet-setting from Iceland to Mexico to Coachella and back. (The MySpace line-up at larger venues includes the likes of Parisian boy/girl glam band Fancy, baile funk DJ Diplo, the electro duo Chromeo, and French hip-hop DJ Mehdi.) Winter says his acts have been followed everywhere by rabid fans of the label’s melody-focused electronic music, which borrows liberally from rock’s song structures and hops genres fluidly.
Founded by Winter in 2003, Ed Banger gained steam in 2006 with the release of veteran producer DJ Mehdi’s album Lucky Boy, a single called “Pop the Glock” from foul-mouthed American-born female rapper and singer Uffie, and the Kanye/Justice incident. A compilation of label material, Ed Rec Vol.1, also came out that year. Vol. II followed in early 2007: its short, sampler-and-synth songs encapsulate the label, blending ’80s Top 40, glammy hard rock, edgy hip-hop, and even trashy Europop. Mr. Flash’s “Eagle Eyez” evokes the retro flash of Miami Vice, whereas his “Disco Dynamite” takes its cues from Giorgio Morodor’s Donna Summer productions. DJ Mehdi, meanwhile, delivers sweaty interludes (“Stick It”) and hazy funk jams (“Lucky Girl”), and Justice’s “Phantom” is a slab of hard-driving electro with heavy-metal overtones. (Some have speculated that the cross on Justice’s album cover owes to their reverence for Master of Puppets–era Metallica.)
If there’s a thread running through the Ed Banger roster, it’s Winter’s penchant for sugary pop with a violent undercurrent. The result is electronic music with a rockist bent. And you can expect Ed Rec Vol. 3, which is due later this spring, to broaden the label’s appeal among folks who don’t consider themselves techno fans — much in the way that the big-beat sounds of Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers reached out beyond the club crowd to a more mainstream audience.
That will no doubt further infuriate the label’s detractors. In the Village Voice’s recent Pazz and Jop music poll, for example, Stylus magazine co-founder Todd Burns took to task music critics (that would include this one) who voted for Justice on their 2007 ballots, saying we surely failed to explore the vast landscape of superior electronic acts and should be ashamed of ourselves. “You know the guy that I’m talking about: the one who doesn’t normally like dance music all that much, but heard this one record that transcended all those terrible clichés,” he wrote, describing the Justice sound as “ ‘Daft Punk 2.0’ — i.e., harder, faster, stronger, and rarely better.” Idolator’s Jess Harvell rebutted: “His dance-centric essay . . . is an object lesson in how not to turn people on to the unfamiliar, mostly by spending a few hundred words telling them why they suck for liking records with things like hooks.” He added, “I’m wary of passing judgment on a band’s fans as getting down in the ‘wrong’ way. If they’re dancin,’ they’re dancin.’ ”
