Photo credit: Nadine Fraczkowski
interview by Karly Quadros
In Foucault’s landmark 1975 book Discipline and Punish, he introduced the metaphor of the ‘panopticon,’ a hypothetical prison in which the prisoners are being surveilled at all times while the guards remain unseen in a central tower. Foucault writes, “The panopticon exemplifies the power dynamics present in modern institutions, where individuals are subjected to surveillance and discipline, leading to self-regulation and conformity.” With the advent of smart phones, social media, the sale of personal data, and large language models, the panopticon has endured as a metaphor for our times when it feels as though nothing is ever truly private.
Marie Davidson is throwing a rave in the panopticon’s tower.
With her new record City of Clowns, out today on Soulwax’s Deewee imprint, Davidson shifts her sardonic satire away from the club and towards Big Tech. Inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Davidson brings her signature hypnotic deadpan to ten songs skewering tech’s encroachment into our daily lives.
There’s “Demolition” where she appropriates the voice of tech companies that extract personal data for profit. She sounds like a hungry vampire when she sings, “I’ve got to know you / inside and out” and, more directly, “I don’t want your cash anymore / all I want is you / I want your data, baby.” In “Statistical Modeling,” a robotic drone intones calmly over a cold electro beat. Then there’s “Y.A.A.M.” (that’s short for “your asses are mine” for all those following at home.) Inspired by a condescending email Davidson received regarding the business side of the music industry, she penned the propulsive club track to get it through our thick skulls and stiff bodies that it’s not about a brand or a sponsored post – it’s about the music. “Entrepreneurs and producers and freelancers to managers / the whole wide world of bravados, upset liars, and insiders / Give me passion, give me more, I want your asses on the floor,” she sings.
Picking up where her sweat-it-out anthem and previous Soulwax collaboration “Work It” left off, Davidson’s music is never overwrought or heavy handed. Her writing is terse, the beats tensely coiled. She’s cool headed and funny. The artist, she says, is a “sexy clown,” at once meant to entertain and critique. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that she is ambivalent to technology (Davidson didn’t own a laptop until 2016.) She’s part harbinger, part siren, here to remind us of that most important rule of online life: if you’re getting it for free, you are the product.
KARLY QUADROS: ‘Sexy clown’ is such an evocative concept. I can’t tell if it’s an insult or a compliment. Where did it come from?
MARIE DAVIDSON: You get the vibe. It's an insult and a compliment at the same time. It portrays how I felt when I was writing the song, and it mirrors my experience of being a woman entertainer.
QUADROS: So you're the sexy clown.
DAVIDSON: I'm the sexy clown. But there are other sexy clowns in this world. The clown is the person that stands a bit on the side, on the fringe of society. A person who has the power to question the status quo. The clown is someone that can’t be ridiculed. In Tarot cards, within the position of the clown, you have the trickster. In French, the name of the card is ‘fou,’ It has this double entendre. ‘Are you a fou?’ in French means, ‘Are you crazy?’
QUADROS: It’s like in medieval times the concept of ‘jester’s privilege.’ The jester was the only one who could criticize the king but only because he himself was foolish.
DAVIDSON: And at the risk of getting your head cut off if you were not found funny! It comes back to the role of an artist these days. It’s to entertain people and question, criticize. But if what you do is not well perceived you'll be left out.
QUADROS: So who's the king?
DAVIDSON: The king for me is the structures of power, whether it's in branding or in politics, politicians, spokespeople, influencers. The king is ever evolving, but the king is always the money, right? If you want to know who's the king, you have to follow the money.
QUADROS: That’s often how I see your work. You’re a very funny critic of capitalism, the commercialization of nightlife, and club culture, especially in 2016’s Adieux Au Dancefloor. Do you see this album as a kind of sequel?
DAVIDSON: It’s a continuation, but I wouldn’t say it’s a sequel. It’s in the same journey. With this album, I’m really stepping out of just questioning club culture, and I’m questioning the world we live in, especially technology and politics.
QUADROS: The visuals you have for “Demolition” are fascinating. They incorporate AI, right?
DAVIDSON: They're made by an artist named Christopher King. He’s a really good musician, but he does AI art under the moniker of Total Emotional Awareness.
Pierre [Guerineau, Davidson’s husband], who is a co-producer on the record, and I worked with Chris a few times in our lives before. He's done a music video for our project called Essai Pas back in 2018 for our album, New Path.
This time we asked him to work with AI because the song “Demolition” talks about Big Tech and surveillance capitalism and what happens with the collection of our data and eventually the analysis of our data to predict behavior and tailor our taste and our will and, in the end, our decision-making in general.
We decided to go for AI art because it showed this very well. In the song the voice I am doing is not Marie. It's the voice of tech and surveillance capitalism. I'm voicing the people who own the AI, the AI itself and the algorithm. I'm voicing the culture of data accumulation. Nothing else could have shown this better than AI art.
When you use the term ‘art,’ it means that there's a human interaction to it. AI itself cannot do art on its own. It can produce an image, but to make art, it needs an aesthetic decision-maker, which has to be a human. First I gave Chris some keywords that were based on my lyrics, but also my reflections on the world right now, and he gave that to the AI algorithm. Then it gave back something and we said, “Okay, that's interesting, but it's not quite it.” And then we gave some more directions to Chris, so he would feed his algorithm. So it really questions, what is art? Who did it, the AI or the human? It was a nice reversal of what I'm talking about in “Demolition” in which we took control for this moment with the technology to make visuals for our music.
QUADROS: Did you use AI for the music itself?
DAVIDSON: No, no, not at all. That has to be authentic still.
For me I'm very reluctant to use AI for my music, but I understand why people do it and I'm really not against it. I'm just not interested because we have so much technology everywhere right now. If, in my music making, I can rely only on human decisions, I'm happy.
QUADROS: As much as you write about technology, you seem to still really hold close to authenticity as an ideal.
DAVIDSON: I'm not a big tech person in general. Even in my music, I make most of my music on hardware, and then I work with co-producers in Ableton, with Pierre, and then at Deewee with David and Steph working in ProTools.
QUADROS: Is it true that you didn’t get a laptop until 2016?
DAVIDSON: Yeah, it’s true. I’m just a bit old school when it comes to that.
I’m not old school in all spheres of my life, but I’m just not naturally attracted to new technologies. I use Instagram for my career. I dislike it, but I think I use it well.
In 2024, I started a newsletter to come back to the medium of writing long form because I was frustrated with the short form, fast, instant gratification models of social media, especially Meta. I don’t use TikTok, so I don’t really know how it works. I’ve seen it on some friends’ phones. It looks too fast for me. It’s very short, and I’m a long form person.
QUADROS: How’s the newsletter been? Has it changed the way that you write or connect with your audience?
DAVIDSON: It’s improving my writing. I do it because I love writing. And I write in English, which is my second language. There’s an extra challenge there, but it helps me improve my vocabulary. I love language, and it’s really pushing me to look at words in a new way.
QUADROS: Can you tell me about the beginnings of City of Clowns? What is your writing process like?
DAVIDSON: For me, it was not an intent to return to club music, but an intent to return to making electronic music on my own and with other people. There’s only two tracks that can truly be called club tracks: “Contrarian” and “Statistical Modeling,” which is my take on electro. I’d say “Fun Times” and “Sexy Clown” are electronic pop music. They have verses and choruses. The opening [“Validations Weight”] and the closer [“Unknowing”] are much more album-oriented.
QUADROS: When you’re writing, do you start with the music or the words?
DAVIDSON: It goes both ways. When I started, I was reading this book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. I was going back slowly to making my own music. I had a few tracks but no straight direction. I was reading the book on a trip to Europe, vacation not work, and I read a lot on the plane coming back to Montreal. I was like, this is really inspiring. It’s really alarming. It’s a really juicy subject. It’s important that people get more awareness about this. It’s really when I got into reading this book that I had the drive to make an album.
QUADROS: That book is interesting because it’s not just about what these Big Tech companies and the government do to us, but also how people internalize surveillance and start to surveil each other. That’s something that really comes across in your music – people that are clout chasers or who make art that’s more generic because they want it to be more appealing on social media.
DAVIDSON: “Y.A.A.M.” talks a bit about this. Not only have people internalized this, but a lot of people have not internalized it – it’s just become a part of their lives and they have integrated it without acknowledging it. And it dictates the way they evolve and their decision making, but they’re not even aware.
We are artists. You’re a writer. You’re probably an artist yourself or in touch with art. We’re in a portion of society still used to generating our own thinking and being critical. I think there’s a lot of people who aren’t even aware that this has reshaped our society. They’re partaking, like “it’s great! It’s convenient. Google, tell me where to go. Siri, answer my question.”
And it just makes us lazier. There’s this obsession with convenience and progress. Everything’s always justified with progress. And if you’re not partaking, you’re an idiot because you’re just staying backwards. You’re stuck in the past. Well, says who? What is actual progress? It frees us from some specific tasks, but what’s the trade off? If the trade off is actually more expensive than the satisfaction of not doing the task, is it really progress? Are we really progressing as a species or are we getting lazier and losing our ability to reflect and act on our own will?
QUADROS: We get lazier, but we also lose the satisfying parts of our lives and our jobs too. It’s obviously a problem with journalism but with creative fields as well.
DAVIDSON: To be a musician now, you have to be an influencer. You have to be a model, an actress, a comedian, a spokesperson for this cause. Just being a musician nowadays doesn’t work. You’re doing music, so what? What’s your brand? What’s your angle?
QUADROS: How do you deal with that?
DAVIDSON: I’m a creative person, so I don’t mind being a lot of things, but I really hate the branding around it. I hate the feeling that I have to be a content provider. All the entities in the music industry, they will ask you for content, like the music itself is not content anymore. You have to create content if you want your music to be heard.
QUADROS: I think one of the reasons why people continue to pay for Spotify or scroll through TikTok is because they feel trapped by their pleasures. And that seems to be a cycle of modern life that you write into a lot: binge and purge, work and then burnout.
DAVIDSON: They’re trapped by their need for things to be convenient. The culture is promoting a very paternalizing thing, that you need to be taken charge of. People feel very vulnerable to make up their own minds, to be creative and come up with their own ideas of how to entertain themselves and how to fill time.
QUADROS: Do you think you’ve found a way out of this problem?
DAVIDSON: I read a lot and write. After dinner, I don’t look at screens. I still love watching movies, but I’ll watch it before I eat. I might reply to a text message, especially if it’s not about work, like to a friend or my parents or loved ones, but I don’t work after dinner. I don’t partake in screen interactions, so no movies, no scrolling, social media, no emails. If I listen to music, I make the screen black.
We don’t all have the same needs and the same urgencies, but I think as humankind, we need to decide for ourselves what we want and what we don’t want and cultivate critical thinking. The biggest dangers of social media and the Internet is the polarization and the increasing erasure of facts. Nobody knows what the truth is anymore, which creates a climate of fear, angst, and violence, in which a very small number of powerful people are benefiting and starting to rewrite what democracy is. That’s extremely alarming. So whether you’re into club culture or not, whether you use AI or not, the bottom line is, as humankind, we need to keep nurturing critical thinking.
City of Clowns is out today on Deewee Records.
