me: sigh... so true: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1125.html
the voice of reason (vor): jesus
but of course, that assumes that our financial/economic system will still be intact by the time that young man retires
he made the right choice.
me: haha, what a silly assumption!
haha i say, haha!
but how will we pay for our data plans...
sigh.
vor: palms up, shoulders up
me: PUSU
i like that
vor: sneezing or cursing

VOR is busy. You may be interrupting.

FILM MINER: the meaning behind Justice's video for "Stress"

Sorry it's been a while since I last posted. I've been dealing with tying up loose ends here in Boston before moving back to New York in August to attend school. That, in addition to some dear old friends visiting and some pleasant nights out, all of which is a recipe for decreased blog chatter.

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I was reminded of writing a piece on Justice's new video for their single, Stressed, after reading a quick blurb on Arktip about it (peep the link for the video). The video is, at the very least, provocative in the very strictest sense of the word. It's hard to walk away from watching the video without being affected by its apparent senselessness; it is rendered in a style that one hopes is just cinéma vérité and not merely documentary footage of a turbulent group of youth.

I have limited background information on the culture of suburban Parisian youth. To be completely forthright, most of my understanding of the cultural strife that exists between mainstream French culture and the mostly Arab, North African and Jewish residents of the suburbs of Paris comes from Mathieu Kassovitz's excellent film, La Haine (Hate), which I highly recommend. Beyond that, most of what I know about it comes from anecdotal evidence from French friends, and news coverage of the riots that broke out a few years back. That being said, I think La Haine provides fascinating insight into an oft-overlooked subculture, both within France and especially beyond it. Much like City of God or Paradise Now, these movies serve as powerful introductions to tense regional conflicts that remain mostly unknown outside of the players directly involved.



Having seen La Haine before watching the Justice video, I wasn't quite as viscerally shocked as many of my friends I forwarded the video to. There is a fair bit of violent antagonism practiced by the film's main characters, and the film suggests that these outbursts are the result of a feeling of alienation and despair amongst the youth who feel like they are presumed guilty by any and all authorities they encounter. Of course, many of them are amidst the perpetration of crimes even when the film commences, so perhaps the viewpoint that they are guilty isn't completely unfounded. But the crimes are portrayed as crimes of necessity, of survival and maybe lastly of opportunity.

The film, though mildly on the side of the disenfranchised youth, does an excellent job of portraying the impetuses behind their actions. In and of itself, this can be seen as a defense of these acts, but they are portrayed so ruthlessly that in fact I think the movie ends up being a pretty fair rendering of reality. The result is a film that creates a feeling of total hopelessness concerning how to resolve these situations, a feeling that I have to admit having felt in both Brazil and Israel with regards to their regional conflicts. So in many ways, it was as realistic as it possibly could have been to me.

So why add fuel to this fire in a music video? Why would a band like Justice, a band whose lyrics (when they are present) remain mostly innocuous references to dancing, choose to portray these youth in such a seemingly negative light? To a certain degree, the Stress video is merely the most violent parts of La Haine strung together without explanation for the actions, without remorse, without reflection and without reasoning.

Ultimately, I think Justice created the first great protest song/video of 2008 and possibly of this generation. Though nothing in the song Stress really correlates to the images in the videos, it serves as an intense soundtrack for the images they filmed and is never distractingly out of place. In other words, I don't know if that's what they had in mind when they wrote the song, but it certainly works well in the video.

Having just seen Brit-Folk-Revivalist Richard Thompson live, the idea of protest songs was fresh in my head the last month or so. Thompson gave a concert as part of the Lowell Folk Festival, and performed many protest songs about current wars, past wars, society and other usual topics of discussion when a guitar and vox populi are present. I greatly enjoyed the concert, but frankly, the songs seemed, well... antiquated. I think our generation doesn't get the same visceral sensation from a Bob Dylan song that our parents did; for us, Rage Against the Machine is the sound of anger and rebellion, and hip-hop is the poetry of the streets. Dylan is appreciated in a literary sense, for his beauty of structure and his nuanced perspectives, but not as a force to incite change, and certainly not as a societal voice who "tells it like it is." I'm not sure Dylan ever acted in that capacity, but he seems to be revered as a reverend of all peoples who brought attention to issues that seemed altogether ignored, which is an excellent jumping-off point for my defense of the power of the Justice video.

Had you not seen La Haine, this video may have been your first introduction to the suburban youth of Paris. They are young, precocious, "colored", deliberate and angry, if the video is to be believed. But the video really succeeds in making you ask the question "why?" And if it succeeded in getting you to be even somewhat curious about the motives of these youth, then I think it has performed its duty.

Some of the answers to this question can be found in La Haine. Though it is a rendering of this reality, it is nonetheless a valuable tool for understanding why these youth act the way they act. Call me naive or a knee-jerk liberal, but I think that a better and more complete understanding of their world is a good first step to solving a very complicated problem.