Justice’s ‘Cross,’ Ten Years Later

This article originally appeared on Noisey France.

In 2007, I was coming off of several years spent listening to—and being involved in—new Parisian electronic music. In concept, this kind of music aims to set the dance floor on fire, rejecting (consciously or otherwise) the rules of the house and techno of the previous decade. These I had revered at the time, until I began to find them pompous and uptight around the time of Y2K and the arrival of the euro. The “French Touch 2.0” style—compressed, disturbed, glitchy—had enchanted me for ages, but I had finally reached my saturation point. Its systematic saturation, its hyperactive structure, no longer worked for me. All it evoked now was someone high on coke and vodka-Red Bull, holding you captive his meandering monologues in the smoking lounge of the now-closed Social Club—while making sure out of one eye that his target chick of the evening isn’t escaping and is still going to come get high with him in the restroom.

On the night of Christmas 2006, I returned home not quite tipsy enough to fall asleep right away. I had searched all evening for something good to listen to, without much success. Then, completely by chance, I tried an edit of “Gladys Knight” by Walter Gibbons, which had been languishing in my files. My senses heightened by weed, I realized that this intense, benevolent manipulation of elements—this momentous, doubt-laden narrative—spoke to me more than anything I had heard in the year prior. Soon after, I stumbled upon “Who’s Afraid of Detroit” by Claude VonStroke. Unexpectedly, its so-called “minimalism” also had a far greater effect on me than before. So then in June 2007, when Justice released Cross following fairly intense hype—more intense, as I recall, than the hype for Daft Punk’s Human After All two years earlier, nor small compared with 2013’s blockbuster Random Access Memory—the thing bore down on me like an unavoidable enemy ship. And I couldn’t simply say I had moved on to other things and didn’t want to engage.

Prior to that, Justice’s rather deceptive “D.A.N.C.E” had a childlike, disco-funk sound I had liked very much—at least until the sixtieth listen, given that the rest of the disc grated on my ears, clawed at my nerves like a plow attacking too-dry earth. Ultimately, I felt disgusted by the disc. I felt almost betrayed by its “rockism,” or rather, its neo-rockism full of references to metal and California rock—two genres I had never really succeeded in welcoming into my heart. I felt betrayed by its obvious, revisionist aim of making “manly” electronic rock, which in my mind was the province of a post-gendered world, or at least a post-masculine one. Naturally, at that point I didn’t feel like giving the new album a chance—but then I heard it all too often over the months, the years, that followed. This was in particular due to one of my open-space colleagues, a charismatic designer (François Chaperon, not to name names). When he would listen to Cross on the stereo he had installed in the office, it seemed to send him into incredible trances while he worked steadily at cropping images of celebrities’ faces.

When discussing the disc with him, I became aware of something simple I had never perceived before in Justice’s music: Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay were themselves designers, so their music could not help but be excessively visual. It was full of images, composed in the same way one thinks of “compositing” in animation. There was almost an element of puppetry in the way they viewed their work. But what bothered me—quite aside from the rock references—was just that. Their music seemed designed to contemplate itself or suffer itself, rather than simply be experienced. I couldn’t understand the riots the group elicited at its concerts; for me, their performance was like an S&M session led by an automaton never truly invested in the process. It reminded me of the scene with the “learning machine” in The Under-Gifted . I didn’t see what the “kids” were getting out of this interaction; as far as I was concerned, they weren’t being given much of substance.

When Justice’s third album Woman came out at the end of last year, Mehdi Maizi invited me to discuss it on his podcast NoFun. There, I had occasion once again to hear Cross. This time, I was transported by the disc’s cleverly-measured energy, its manic architecture. I remembered having read somewhere that, while in the studio, the duo eschewed any trace of spontaneity. Instead they polished every glint of sound, every structural detail, for days upon weeks—just as Steely Dan’s Fagen and Becker had done for Aja and Gaucho. The music was, by definition, posers’ work—but as much in the sense of “striking a pose” as in the sense of “let’s ‘pose’ our favorite acoustic elements right next to each other, then mash them up in the most exciting way possible.” Augé and de Rosnay spent an incredible amount of time preparing and streamlining this savagery, putting into place their acoustic atmosphere. This required enormous patience of them en route to the result—which was then devoured immediately by their eager fans.

Now, after ten years, this calculated perfection all became apparent to me, especially once detached from the media chaos of 2007. The material unfolded before me seamlessly, like a wonderful animated carousel, its contrasts and tensions matching the auditory and energetic pulses within me. The disc’s luminous and childlike side—which had escaped me in 2007 due to the overwhelming pseudo-leather-coke-motorcycle-macho ambience of the time—was now obvious. I’m thinking of the tender keyboard strains at the end of “Let There Be Light”; of the romantic-Supertramp vibe of “Valentine”; of the divided vocals in “Newjack,” and of the hysterical joy à la MMM (via Oizo) that permeates so much of the album. On the whole, today I find the disc very serviceabl in the more-or-less-noble sense of the word. It includes nearly no dead time, despite its morbid, Frankenstein-esque aim of breathing artificial life back into an imagined 70s rock.

Finally—just as Aja and Gaucho succeeded in taking the most interesting elements of jazz and crooners, in order to evoke a California sterilized by East Coast negativity—Cross constructed, in obsessive fashion, its vision of an American rock. This rock was fatty and a bit ramshackle, reformed by technology, and optimized to be exciting every moment.

So, a decade later, I realize that Cross made it clear to lots of people (let’s not forget it sold two million copies) that a good piece of music is—among other things—a series of micro-events which, if put to good use, can produce overflowing and exponential pleasure. The album marked the end of the couplet-refrain form in the mainstream. And, as mentioned, the language of EDM/brostep (the movement which ensured the victory of virility over my ideal of gender-fluid electronic music)—and the language of the current chart-pop—owes a great deal to the structures of Justice. Something has to happen every seven seconds, or else the listener will tune out. But for “posers’ work,” Cross has proven to be particularly open and generous. It has given thousands the desire to make music in which a taste for detail and a blend of references are crucial and exciting elements. They may be poserly, yet they are made lively by the underlying practice of a creative gift—music made explicitly for others, motivated above all by the desire to share.

Meanwhile, the house and techno that I loved so much as a teen, and that I had begun to listen to again toward 2007, returned with force to France at the beginning of the 2010s. This was notably in response to the French Touch 2.0, to its clubs, its practitioners. Perhaps this wave should have excited me. But alas—if not surprisingly—it didn’t reactivate my past. This was for reasons that I don’t want to enumerate here, but I’d say they’re positive, reassuring even. It’s good that I haven’t been somehow stunted by my high-school ardor for Robert Hood, Moodymann and Romanthony. And in any case, I’d say that compared to the new young dudes of Lyonnais deep house, the guys from Justice at least had the decency to draw anew and freely, right overtop their models. Even if, at one time, I hated them for it.

Etienne Menu is co-editor-in-chief of the magazine Audimat. You can follow him on Twitter .