Faithless |
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Tue. July 20.2004 12:00 AM EDT |
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Faithless: Mass AppealBritish groove ensemble takes politics to the dance floor. They explain their provocative new video for "Mass Destruction." by C. Bottomley |
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(BMG UK) |
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Faithless want to bring something different to dance music. "We try to make it thought-provoking as well as a jacking groove" says blonde DJ Sister Bliss. If it's stimulation you want, they've certainly got it. The U.K. group arrives in the United
There's a suitably intense video to match. While the emaciated Maxi intones lines like "Fear is a weapon of mass destruction" to a brick wall, a playground group of children savagely turn on each other. Soon, in stark black and white, the kids are torturing each other in a series of images that could have come from the Chinese Cultural Revolution or Abu Ghraib. It's uncompromising stuff, and it's getting airplay, too. Faithless have long been stadium stars back home, and other member Rollo has helped out with his sister Dido's hit albums. (She appears on No Roots' dreamy title track). But now they're facing their biggest challenge - proving that music can save the world. Maxi Jazz and Sister Bliss explained both their philosophy and crazy nicknames to VH1. VH1: How did you get your names? Maxi Jazz: Didn't The New York Times say that [we have] probably the worst pseudonyms in pop? Sister Bliss: Well, they don't know much about DJ culture. MJ: I started hip-hop DJ-ing - scratching, mixing, blending, all that stuff - back in 1983. My favorite hip-hop DJ was a guy called Jazzy J, who did a lot of stuff for Def Jam records back in the day. There was already a Jazzy B and Jazzy N, so I decided I would put my "Jazzy" on the end rather than at the beginning. So I was Kool DJ Maxi Jazz. VH1: Where did Sister Bliss come from? SB: A lot of very strong weed! [laughs] I was with my friends and I had a gig coming up and [I was like] "What the f*ck am I gonna call myself?" I didn't want to use my real name. I just wanted to have something that stood out and I thought "Sister," because the Sister gave it slightly feminist connotation, and Miss Bliss sounded a bit ... [makes a disgusted face.] VH1: Are you surprised that a provocative song such as "Mass Destruction" is a hit over here? MJ: It's a total shock. In Europe we were asked, "What do you think is going to happen with this record in America?" I said, "I think that it's too sensitive an issue for American radio or MTV to even start to look at." Then two or three weeks later I'm getting a call: "Oh, MTV are playing your record now!" I said "I don't believe it." Of all the records I've ever made, this is the one that I would like to have been a hit. I'm not married to the idea of being a pop star. We make the records we like. But for this record to be on the lips of American teenagers, that a real achievement. VH1: What is the response to the record? MJ: Almost universally the reaction that I've been getting is people saying "Thank you, well done, somebody needs to say this." VH1: Do people underestimate dance music's ability to deal with those topics? SB: [Dance music songs] have been much more about love, connection and the spiritual feeling you get when you're at a dance. But I think that's quite political and poignant itself. People who go to clubs are all different - racially, sexually, and from different classes. It's quite a unifying thing. MJ: Those five or ten thousand people at a dance come in as strangers and go home as good mates. That happens because they all have come with a shared value, [whether it's] the DJ or that band they're coming to see. Respecting a person different from you is one of the most difficult things you can do, but taking that on board and practicing it every day is how you become a human being. VH1: It feels like a lot of electronica giants have fallen by the wayside. Is there life left in the genre? SB: Like everything, it's very cyclical. At the moment everybody says the music industry is shrinking, but people still want to dance. Also technology is getting cheaper, so more people are taking it into their own houses in this kind of punky DIY way, [which] I love because that's how we started, making music in a garden shed and putting it out on an independent label. Also, the scene itself has imploded a little bit, reached out and taken other influences, so you get DJs dropping in bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Rapture. To me it's in a really interesting place. There is a lot of f*cking jacking music out there. VH1: What was the original idea behind the "Mass Destruction" video? MJ: The concept was two parts, really. The first was me rapping to a brick wall. In England when you say something to someone and they don't hear you, you go, "I might as well be talking to a brick wall." The second was the idea of the kids ganging up on each other, and doing the sort of stuff that big nations do to little nations all the time. By using kids, it makes it more powerful. It's really easy to hate adults in this world of ours, but it's really difficult to hate children - even if they are doing dreadful things. SB: All the time it's a learned behavior. You are taught to hate or be distrustful of anything that's different to you right from very young. But when kids play, they just play; they don't see someone as being different from the others. It's the adults around them [saying], "Don't play with him. He's not from a good neighborhood." They're a blank page until the values of society have been absorbed. If the values of society are greed and racism and fear, what the fat chance is there for your kids? MJ: For me, the key to "Mass Destruction" is the line "We need to find courage, overcome." After the war had started, a friend of mine sent me an email with a quote. It said, "It's very easy for a government to bring their population to war now. The simple answer is to prepare a threat, present it to a country and declare all people opposed to that threat as traitors. It works no matter what system you have, whether it's a dictatorship or a parliamentary government." And that quote is by [the Nazi] Hermann Goering. SB: What's horrible about what's happening right now is that the threat was real and there was the most terrible atrocity committed on 9/11. But the government used it and linked to situations ... MJ: ... that were utterly un-linkable. SB: The headlines in our paper [said] there was no link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein is an evil man that should have been removed a long time ago, but the grounds for the war were wrong. People in this country were misled. And as ever, it wasn't the senators' kids that went off to fight. VH1: It's worth mentioning that No Roots is actually a very uplifting listen. MJ: [We're] talking about dark subjects, but from the position of hope. In our stage set we follow "Mass Destruction" with [the No Roots song] "What About Love" It's like, "Well, this is the situation we're in. How do we deal with it? What about love?" SB: Try a little bit of that. It sounds simplistic, but it's really deep. MJ: People forget how love can motivate people to do the most amazing acts of heroism. Like I said before, the act of respecting other people is an act of love. It's a beautiful way to live, and it burns me that nobody's doing it. |
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