Justice + Diplo - Showbox SoDo (Seattle, WA; Mar. 24, 2008)

I suppose I should have cringed when, approaching the recently christened Showbox SoDo, I spied an enormous “MySpace Music Tour” banner plastered to the venue’s exterior. The prospect of partying, as local hipster rag The Stranger put it, “[W]ith 2,000 of your douchiest MySpace ‘friends,’” should by all means have sent me running for the hills covered in shame-propelled vomit. But . . . But! This is Justice we’re talking about! And Diplo! Progenitors of the best dance albums to come out of 2007 and 2005 (respectively)! Certainly, CERtainly I could swallow my elitist pride and risk an eye-poke or two from over-gelled emo hair for the likes of this. The music would be well-worth the price of admission, right?

Right?

In a word: equivocally.

Let’s start by following Johnny Mercer’s immortal advice and accentuating the positive. Justice was an amalgam of gloriously hyperbolic theatrics, from the giant illuminated cross at center stage to the flanking Marshall über-stacks, each comprised of nine glowing 4x12 cabinets. Even putting aside the (admittedly awesome) stage gimmickry, their relentlessly anthemic set, though limited in scope—it was basically an extended reworking of last year’s † (Cross)—was spot-on dance-like-there’s-ass-in-your-pants terrific. Like said album, the show opened to the growling pseudo-horns and funk-drenched synth bassline of “Genesis,” and proceeded to stomp and pogo its way through Ed Banger’s greatest hits catalog, barely pausing for breath between ubiquitous sing-a-long “D.A.N.C.E.,” the sinister Night of the Living Disco Mountain that is “Stress,” and the hopefully tongue-in-cheek “The Party” (which, if I’m not mistaken, was reprised for the compulsory encore). The smiles were many, the fist-pumping rampant, and the earplugs necessary.

As you can tell, I rather enjoyed myself despite the teeming throngs of sweaty MySpacers too busy taking blurry cell phone pictures to comport themselves properly. Shall we therefore expand upon our earlier motif and, ahem, eliminate the negative? Hell naw.

A Recipe for Justice

1. 1) Take a spare Daft Punk you happen to have lying around
2. 2) Remove robots
3. 3) Remove colossal LCD pyramid
4. 4) Remove 10 years of unparallelled success
5. 5) Add scruffiness

So then, is Justice in fact Daft Punk Lite? Do they spend every waking moment trying to follow in those legendary metallic footsteps? Do Gaspard Augé’s favorite wet dreams involve lengthy make-out sessions with Thomas Bangalter? Probably so. Does any of that bother me overly much? Of course not. That’s like castigating a 12-year-old kid learning his first chord because he’s not Jimmy Page. Consider this: Daft Punk has toured only twice, once in 1997 and once in 2007. I was lucky enough to see them the second time around, and in all likelihood will not be so fortunate in 2017. Someone has to fill that French power-chord synth-rock disco-house void in the intervening years, and I for one couldn’t be happier to have Justice playing tofurkey to Daft Punk’s turducken. Maybe they haven’t yet paid their dues, but they definitely know how to pay homage.

Diplo, on the other hand—with his MySpace hoodie and custom neon blue headphones—was something of a disappointment. Once upon a time, I fell in love with his eclectically epic mixtapes, which reminded me of a less frenetic, more reverent Girl Talk. Alas, as so often happens in love and politics, the imperfect human failed to live up to my lofty ideals. Don’t get me wrong: the man’s a competent DJ, and spun a rather solid set that vacillated between retro camp (Prodigy, Pharcyde) and acceptable nepotism (MIA, more MIA), yet wasn’t afraid to dip its toes into pelvis-rattling Miami booty bass and earsplitting screechy sample-wrecking.

If only it weren’t for his apparently massive ego, which couldn’t resist cutting the music entirely every five minutes to shout “Yo Seattle give it up!” or “I wanna see your hands in the air like guns for the chorus!” or the inexplicable “I’m on for another [X number of minutes]!” which I heard at least three times. Now, I don’t have anything particularly against microphones, or their judicious use by a charismatic MC, but after the fourth or fifth interruption I just got annoyed. As a kid who in a former life went to “raves” for the music (no, I can’t type that word with a straight face; and yes, it’s a lot like reading Playboy for the articles), what I generally want to hear from the guy behind the turntables is, well, music. Not mindless patter and uninspired crowd-pumping. Diplo is a talented DJ with excellent taste and a drool-inducing record collection. I just wish he’d stick to what he knows best, and keep his hands off the mic. My advice? Skip the live show and buy yourself a copy of Fabriclive 24.

1 comments thus far ...

Concerts We Recommend

melophobe sponsors

Connect To melophobe

1. melophobe
2. concert reviews
3. fifty-word reviews
4. articles
5. links
6.