Marie Davidson’s 2018 album, Working Class Woman, spoke the language of industrial labor. This year the cheeky Québécois dance producer takes up a new paradigm: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, to borrow the title of scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s 700-page critical survey of how giant tech corporations exploit human experience by mining our data. The book is a primary inspiration for City of Clowns, Davidson’s thundering, itchy, pneumatic new record, co-produced with Soulwax and Pierre Guerineau, her partner in Essaie Pas (who once made an album inspired by Philip K. Dick) and L’Œil Nu. Their proto-electroclash beats and big-squelch synths evoke a swaggering heroine up against cold cement and server banks, a real-life sci-fi dystopia that’s a little bit The Matrix and a little bit The Substance: You’re in the system, and it’s feeding on you.
In the surveillance economy, you and I are neither customers nor products but “the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated,” Zuboff writes (italics hers). That raw material is our data, more valuable to business than any one of us. Davidson quotes a number of Zuboff’s terms and concepts directly, including the lightly modified text of opening track “Validations Weight.” “You learn to sacrifice your freedom to collective knowledge imposed by others and for the sake of their guaranteed outcomes,” Davidson reads through the clipped enunciation of an AI text-to-speech filter. The long-range outcome of surveillance capitalist practices, Zuboff argues, is to enforce certainty and homogenization—to make us less human.
City of Clowns, in effect, takes place on the internet, in a world of data collection, ad targeting, and behavioral prediction. Davidson’s true feelings on supposedly cutting-edge technology are not hard to discern. (“I don’t need a VR headset to feel emotion,” she snarked on Working Class Woman; “Reality is disgusting enough.”) Zuboff’s book, a meticulous investigation of a society where innovation has seemingly shifted entirely to the financialization of the virtual, is similarly heady in its online-ness. Transposing even some of these concepts to dance music is tough, and Davidson probably deserves the most credit for managing to make it not just danceable but actually… pretty funny?
Though Davidson’s style is often described as deadpan, City of Clowns has a pranksterish, almost burlesque quality. “Play this game,” she invites over ultra-basic drum machine and skronked-up Depeche Mode bass on “Push Me Fuckhead”: “Stare at the squares/What do you see?/How many buses?/How many trees?” You likely never explicitly agreed to train future AI platforms by solving visual CAPTCHAs like these—indeed, they’re presented as a necessary security measure. But maybe you like feeling exploited? On the cyborg striptease “Demolition,” tracking software gears up to dom you: “I don’t want your cash/What I want is you… I want your data!” Davidson engages with her ambivalence about the pleasure we experience online, too, pondering whether she’s secretly a “bitch,” a cooperator, ready to “offer you my heart right on a selfie stick.” And are we sure that “Y.A.A.M.”—short for “all your asses are mine”—isn’t somehow related to “All your base are belong to us,” the iconic ur-meme with its own gabber remix? (More like “all your database” amirite?)
