Few would probably think The Age of Surveillance Capitalism could work as the basis of a techno record. Those people don’t know Marie Davidson.
The Québécois musician’s latest album, City of Clowns, is a dance floor-ready exposé of our big tech reality inspired by scholar Shoshanna Zuboff’s epic unpacking of how social platforms commodify our data and digital labor. Utilizing her signature deadpan approach to social critique (made most famous by her class-conscious hit, “Work It”), Davidson skewers digital culture and provides some needed laughs at this time of grim uncertainty.
While the album’s themes are serious, Davidson has an uncanny ability to package them as uproarious satire. On “Fun Times” she winks at time-sucking social media platforms (“Tic, tac, tic, tac/ Time is never coming back”) and on “Sexy Clown,” she takes on the twisted sweetness of lifestyle influencers, whispering “If I really have to choose/ I’d rather be me than be you/ Can you feel the cutting edge/ Of my dying tenderness?” Oftentimes, she lets the music do the talking like on “Contrarian,” a nearly lyric-less acid-soaked slice of hard techno that evokes the chaos of living within the contradictions.
Humor or the titular “clownery” here is not just some sugar to make Davidson’s bitter critique go down. She thinks of the figure of “the clown” as akin to “a joker in a deck of cards, [which] has special abilities [that] can [help the player] step up from the losing position to the winning position,” Davidson shares. This form of “disruptive” clown is able to shift society’s game through critique and questioning — the kind of act the tech platforms discourage. “[The big tech platforms] want you to become a salesperson,” Davidson tells PAPER. “Everything you do should be optimized and properly lit and should be optimized for attention spans, which is very reductive. It’s damaging our capacities to come up with our own ideas.”
And where better to question our daily, tedious reality than on the dance floor? In the sweaty, dark space of a club, the outside world and its ridiculous rituals can fade away. There, the dancer is able to see the outside world anew. Too often, though, dance music’s promise of escapism can morph into something akin to pure retreat (“There is much pain in this world, but not in this room,” as the infamous clip goes). There’s value in that, but also a danger; when does escape merge into hidden defeatism? Davidson’s critically-minded techno — overtly political, but never didactic — in an invitation to bring that pain inside the club’s misty interior, and to alchemize it into action.
PAPER chatted with Davidson, on the heels of her new album’s release, about her relationship to technology, “good clowns,” and being a Canadian artist in the Trump era.
Hi! It’s so great to talk to you. Has anything surprised you about how the record has been received, and how people are taking these ideas of yours?
Well, I’m happily surprised by how much of its political aspect has resonated with people. It was my aspiration, but I thought that maybe people wouldn’t pick up on it. You never know, especially in electronic music. When you write songs some people will pay attention to the lyrics. Some people won’t. And that’s okay. In the end, it’s music. People are allowed to interact with it as they wish, but to know that the themes resonate with a lot of people is really nice.
What was your relationship to technology and social media before you embarked on this artistic journey?
It was always complicated. I’m not the most tech savvy person in general. I got a laptop really late, in 2016, and I was also late to social media. It took me a while to really engage.
The platform I started engaging with the most was, and still is, Instagram. At first I liked it. I got on Instagram in late 2016, when I started touring a lot, and it was still the older algorithm. It was very much based around image. It was pictures of sunsets or what people ate today, which was random, but a bit more spontaneous. Unfortunately, since the pandemic, I think people, and especially artists, began to really rely on these platforms and I saw the drastic change in the way the platform functioned.
I don’t know what your Instagram looks like, but mine has already changed so much since the beginning of the year. My Instagram is now a reality TV show. I have to actively look up people I’m interested in like my friends or colleagues. The algorithm only feeds me shit that it thinks I want, so for me it’s makeup and stuff around the Grammys or the Oscars. I don’t even watch these shows, but because I’m an artist and a woman of a certain age, it shows me that.
I’ve experienced this shift from the algorithm being based on who you follow to recommendations. It’s been really disorientating.
There’s no way out. It’s the way it’s programmed. So you have to fight with the algorithm, but it’s supposed to be curated to your taste, which is a mind fuck. But then everyone’s feeds are the same. People change the way they present themselves. Meta thinks I’m like a business, and they keep sending me these notes, “You’re doing well, but you could do better if you follow these guidelines.” I don’t want to, but sometimes I check what they say, and it’s very infantilizing. They want you to become a salesperson. Everything you do should be optimized and properly lit, and should optimized for attention spans, which is very reductive. It’s damaging our capacities to come up with our own ideas.
I know that The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff was a guiding text for you on this album. What about that book sparked these ideas for you?
Pre-pandemic, I was feeling uneasy [about technology], but I was clueless. I was looking at some of my colleagues online and I was like, “People seem to be getting along well [with these platforms]. Maybe I’m extra sensitive. Maybe it’s me. I’m a bit old school.” But then I started talking with colleagues and friends, and everyone’s like. “No, no, I’m depressed. I’m anxious. We all feel meaningless. This platform makes you feel meaningless.”
In 2022, I randomly picked up Age Of Surveillance Capitalism, not really knowing what it was about, but the title intrigued me. I thought I’d read a part of it. It’s a very thick book. And then I was like, Oh, no, this is exactly what I need to be reading. It put words and provided the science behind these very uneasy feelings I was having regarding social media. The book gave me the will and the inspiration to make a new album, and then it really informed all the songs and the words I decided to use in them. Most of the songs were, in one way or another, influenced by the book.
Music is a really hard medium to talk about ideas, because it’s often more interpretive. How did you begin to approach expressing these big political ideas musically?
The first draft of the album was similar, but a bit too serious. I realized I had to integrate more humor to get my message through. We live in such a dark and stressful era. It’s hard for people to grasp that if you just present your work so heavily. Some people do it well, but that is not the path I wanted to go down. I wanted to do something informative and I wanted to question the status quo and cultivate critical thinking. But I wanted the record to be fun and pleasant to listen to. I didn’t want it to be a bad trip.
I mean it’s called the City of Clowns, so humor is very much here.
“Sexy Clown” was not on the first draft. There was another song that was more heavy and serious, and I swapped it off. And then I was like, “Okay, great [let’s call it] City of Clowns, because we live in a world of clowns. And it’s with this extra touch of humor that it all came together.
Who are the clowns in this world?
I like to say, there are many clowns. There’s the bad clowns and the disruptive clowns. The bad clowns are, of course, all the rotten politicians and their friends. We have a lot of them right now. And it’s all the people who own the power and want to keep the knowledge for themselves: so all the tech bros. To me those are the bad clowns, and then there’s other clowns that I wouldn’t say are good, because I don’t want to be binary, but their archetype is like the movie Joker, a misfit who cannot find their place in society and out of despair flips the table and and makes a mess. I’m not saying I want to encourage violence, but we live in a violent society. Violence is coming from every angle, so it pushes people to be violent. I understand this position of feeling like a leftover in society, a misfit, someone who doesn’t fit in, who doesn’t check a box. A joker in a deck of cards has special abilities and can step up from the losing position to the winning position. So my interpretation of [this kind of] clown is someone who questions the status quo.
Something else I found really funny in the record is how you position the relationship between humans and technology as almost this sexual, domme-sub-dynamic. How did that come about for you?
I believe in technology, right? I use it. And I also believe in science and progress. But I hate all this numbness that comes with a lot of our digital interactions. In the song “Push Me Fuckhead,” I made a collection of all my deceitful experiences with digitized services. The ultimate one is the one where you have to identify yourself and prove that you’re not a robot to a robot, which is completely absurd. I recently failed that [CAPTCHA] test for the first time because the image was so blurry and I was like, “This is Push Me Fuckhead.” My life is my music. All these automated digital services are failing us in so many ways.
I realize you’re the first Canadian artist I’ve talked to since the election, and this crazy, random beef between America and Canada. I’m curious as a Canadian who tours a lot in America, and has an American audience, what your experience has been like touring this album so far, and how you’re thinking about sharing these ideas in America?
It feels good. These ideas speak to my audience and they feel included. For instance, a song like “Work It” has this famous breakdown when I say “When I say work I mean you’ve got to work for yourself/ Love yourself, feed yourself, so you can be a winner.”
My live version of it is longer and I always take time to talk to people, considering who they are and where we are in the world. I’ve noticed that when I do it in the States, it speaks to people. My audience is very diverse and they feel included and seen. I was just opening for Justice, which was interesting because I was playing for a more mainstream audience. But the message came through. It felt right on another level. It was more alien for them, but some people were really reactive. A lot of people feel like the system is failing them. They just want to be seen. And that’s what I try to do with my music: connect.
Photography: Aytekin Yalcin
Creative direction: Gabriele Papi
Hair Stylist: Pier Paolo Lai
MUA: Simone Piacenti