We are the robots

[imomus]

Robots After All is the new album from Philippe Katerine. Yes, that title is a cheeky wink in the direction of Daft Punk's disappointing Human After All. But there's nothing disappointing about this record, a comical-conceptual work about robots, social conformity and mechanised, Taylorised lifestyles; think of Tati's satires on modernism, Woody Allen's Sleeper, or imagine a more socio-critical take on Kraftwerk's "we are the robots". To toybox comedy-techno arrangements concocted with the help of a Groovebox and Berlin kitsch-comedian Gonzalez (whose presence builds a bridge from Paris to the Berlin ironists, people like Jamie Lidell, whose electronic neo-funk is echoed—and bettered—here), Katerine offers us funky robotic techno-disco, piss-takes of Le French Touch, Michael Jackson, Plastic Bertrand, Kraftwerk and, yes, Daft Punk, married to a quirky poetic-satirical sensibility he shares with Variétés greats like Brigitte Fontaine and Serge Gainsbourg. Here be schedules, braindead automata, interchangeable cliches, idées recus, withering sarcasm, silly voices, DJs who demonstrate their power over furious crowds by waggling the sliders at whim. Listen to the clips here, read a review (in French magazine Chronic'art) here and cast an eye over an interview with Katerine here.

In an age of conformity, Katerine is becoming more magnificently himself; a plaster-haired lush and a gentleman poet. I knew him, Horatio, back in the mid-90s, when he was a fellow Kahimi Karie collaborator, a familiar face at parties at my apartment on the Place Du Tertre. I wonder if his "robots" concept isn't a very French critique of "the anglo-saxon model", a Thatcherite-Blairite mix of "painful labour market reforms" and competitive efficiency currently battling, across Europe, with a more civilised, Slow Life-friendly, social model? The sleeve, in which Katerine and fellow robots wear a uniform consisting of white panties and pink polo neck sweaters, shows the absurdity of conformity and its coding of difference: why this particular combination rather than that one? Why do wigs seem to determine the precise degree of inclusion or exclusion from the pink panty tribe, whereas gender doesn't? As in Sleeper, Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 we see a world where a strange sci-fi conformity—which nevertheless matches our own—seems toxic and arbitrary, and only literature can save us.

"Robots après tout is almost a work of contemporary art," says Wilfried Paris in Chronic'art, "provoking ceaseless reflection, totally ludic in its procedures, totally free in its realisation..." It's interesting to see conceptual pop records straying into the realm of art at just the moment when contemporary art seems to want to embrace rock'n'roll; in today's Guardian there's an interview with Sarah Lucas, "the most rock'n'roll of the YBAs... still living the life." Whereas Katerine has the name and often the nature of a woman in his work, and seems to be veering from rock to art, Lucas has the name and nature of a hard-partying, street-fighting, football-and-community loving, balls-out man; "'I'm a better bloke than most blokes," she boasts. Art and rock, male and female, seem to be switching places. The only question is, are they switching places so that everything can change, or so that everything stays the same?

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, I want to say a bit more about this record. Personally, I wouldn't make a record like this, which adds electroclash sheen to French Touch and loungecore 90s references and is all about pastiche. But Katerine does it with such panache, and above all the literary quality of his lyrics is so high, that I think he gets away with it. And I think that's because of the specific tradition of French Variétés that he's working in, which has always been about comedy and literature and social commentary, and in which people like Brassens and Brel delegated the music to others, or scratched out chord sequences on guitars in fairly basic ways, and everything depended on the words. Kitschmeisters like Gonzalez and Jamie Lidell don't have this French tradition to draw on; there really is no English-language Brassens or Brigitte Fontaine, just as there's never been a major label British or American A&R man like Jacques Canetti, brother of Nobel prize-winner Elias Canetti, and sharing some of his brother's concerns (crowds and power, Kafkaesque social critique) in his selection of chansonniers. It's this literary quality that makes all the pastiche totally forgiveable and even wondeful, just as it is in The Threepenny Opera.

[(Anonymous)]

Personally, I wouldn't make a record like this
Oh but you *would*! What about Ping Pong - or Folktronic for that matter?
It's a fair point that these are not "all" about pastiche, but what else were they if not Francophile, comic, literary and full of social commentary? One of the things that first drew me to you(r work) was that you were clearly aware of the great French tradition of 'chanson'; you were absurd and witty, and could switch between tunefulness and mumble-rap at whim in fine Gainsbourgian style.
Is there any remnant of Frenchness in the Momus melting-pot? Not that I hanker only after a backwards step to those halcyon mid-late 90s (compare Katerine with Benjamin Biolay to see the difference between being aware of one's antecedents and aping them almost to the letter).
But is there space for Paris in Momus's "Disque d'amitié"?

-Mark-