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David Guetta: "Staying Underground Killed Dance Music"
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"Miami! Are you ready? This. Is. The. Biggest. Party. On. Planet. Earth!" David Guetta, the floppy-haired Frenchman in his mid-40s, shouts as he takes to the stage in front of thousands of delirious, bouncing teenagers in various states of fluorescent undress. As Guetta drops his pop ballad "Titanium", Paris Hilton, whose latest career plan is to launch herself as a DJ, gyrates just behind the decks with her Dutch boyfriend Afrojack, one of Guetta's closest collaborators.
After he finishes, his entourage, including his wife Cathy, Afrojack and Paris, and long-time manager Caroline Prothero, are whisked through successive VIP sections, until they reach their own tiny enclosure behind a velvet rope. Waiters scoot past bearing magnums of champagne with fireworks attached to the necks, as the crowds in the neighbouring not-quite-as-VIP section crane their necks to get a glimpse of the group more of Guetta than Paris. He is the major star here.
If you're part of the original acid-house generation, for whom dance music was a genuinely counter-cultural movement born out of dirty raves in basements and warehouses, it couldn't be a more alien world. Dance music went mainstream in the UK in the 90s with the rise of superclubs and festivals, but the likes of Ministry of Sound and Creamfields have nothing on its current commercialisation in the US. All week in Miami, planes fly overhead trailing 40ft banners advertising new gigs in Las Vegas for Guetta, Afrojack, Swedish House Mafia, et al. Vegas has no interest in alternative music only in who sells the most tickets, and the casinos that used to court Elton John and Dolly Parton are now scrambling to offer residencies to DJs.
If one person has personified and largely been responsible for this change it's the 44-year-old Parisian David Guetta. The Frenchman's music combines the populist US urban culture of hip hop and R&B with the poppier end of European house culture. His smash hits polarise opinion among the purists, more in this country than the US, but they sell millions and millions. His collaboration with the Black Eyed Peas, "I Gotta Feeling", was number one in the US for 14 weeks, and a global hit, selling 13m units.
His rise has been unstoppable since, including hits with Kelly Rowland, Akon, LMFAO, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Usher, Sia, Jennifer Hudson, Snoop Dogg and plenty more. He has 31 million friends on Facebook, 4 million followers on Twitter, and is probably the most sought-after producer on the planet, his homogenous four to the floor beats as ubiquitous as the Neptunes were a decade ago.
David Guetta at the Soho Beach House, Miami Photograph: Brian Smith
I meet Guetta for a late lunch the day after his set at the poolside restaurant at Fontainebleau hotel. Sunbathers' heads turn in slight disbelief as he makes his way around the pool. In person, he's amiable and almost as relentlessly upbeat as his pop music. His favourite word is "crazy". Despite his success and age, he still has a boyish enthusi asm and can't quite believe what has happened over the past few years. How "crazy" things have got. "It was really like a war to get the music to where we are," he says, grimacing and miming a tug of war, "because no one would let us through."
The shift in populist tastes in America is such that even the business magazine Forbes recently pontificated about the house music "phenomenon" and ran a series of profiles on the world's biggest DJs. "The vultures are swooping above the industry," says Ben Turner, director of the International Music Summit, Ibiza's answer to WMC, which is now planning to launch in Vegas. "After 20 years people have realised that EDM has matured and become the biggest youth movement in America since hip hop. It feels like everybody suddenly wants a piece of the action."
Guetta started DJing 30 years ago in Paris as a teenager, long before most of his contemporaries were born. He and his wife Cathy ran nightclubs including Le Palace and Les Bains Douches. Balearic legend Alfredo told me that Guetta once booked him and Ibiza club Manumission to play in Paris in the early 90s, which was the night Manumission promoters Mike and Claire first had sex live on stage, later a regular, and infamous, feature at their club.
Guetta's parents originally frowned upon his choice of career. "My parents were extreme left," he says, "so everything was against the system. I was walking barefoot in the streets of Paris when I was eight. When I started to DJ they hated it, because for them, nightclubs, and all of this life, was terrible and fake. But when I stopped doing only this, and became an artist, my mother was like 'OK, now I'm proud of you.' Which is crazy."
Guetta spent years down the bills at clubs and festivals. Now his club brand, F**k Me I'm Famous, masterminded by Cathy, sells out every week over the summer at Pacha in Ibiza, with thousands of clubbers paying 70 to get in. He plays in several countries, often continents, a week. He is a global priority for his record label EMI, a key asset because of his ability to shift millions.
Having come from an underground culture that relentlessly analyses itself, the dance music world often frowns upon mainstream commercial success. There are relatively few acts which have managed to combine huge success while retaining credibility. "In a way, this is what killed dance music for so many years," argues Guetta. "That spirit of wanting to keep this only for ourselves, and anything that's successful is bad. That culture that goes in a cycle where everybody loves someone and they're all talking about him, and then in one second, because he's successful, 'Ah, him, he's bull!' What? But you were saying the same guy was a genius last year, now he's the worst person?"
Guetta is now France's biggest musical export, but the French version of Spitting Image, Les Guignols de l'info, has had a light-hearted dig at him a few times for the simplicity of his poppier tunes. One episode showed a craftsman customising a grand piano for Guetta and when the lid was opened it only had one key. But he laughs off any such criticism. "I thought it was really funny. Honestly, I loved it!" he says. "I showed it myself to a lot of DJs and it became a joke between us. I don't take it wrong. It's crazy because usually they just focus on the president or ministers."
Being such a relentlessly upbeat character makes him easy to caricature, but he shrugs off any jibes as an inevitable backlash to his success. There isn't a huge difference between his public and private personas, a man whose cup is not so much half-full as overflowing. The only time he seems a little tired is when approached by a fan for a picture during our interview. He patiently explains not now, but he'll happily do it afterwards.
Over the past couple of years he has been rumoured to be producing everyone from U2 to Madonna, but he explains that he has no desire to tie himself down to a studio for months on end to produce a whole album for anyone. He makes most of his records on the road. "My studio is a laptop. Everybody I work with is the same. We make computer music, we're the laptop generation. I have studios in the different places where I live in Ibiza, Paris and London but they're not crazy studios, they're just rooms with good monitors, and all I do is plug my laptop in. It's a different way to make music, but for me, I love it, because it's more connected to the world."
As much as he is unapologetic about his poppier anthems, Guetta is keen that people, especially those fresh-faced teenagers new to dance music, know there's another side to his music. Last year's Nothing But The Beat was a double album, the first disc containing the radio hits and the second disc purely instrumental tracks. If you heard its closing track, "The Alphabeat" blind, you would be more likely to think it was Daft Punk than Guetta.
"Listen, let me tell you," he smiles. "This story is so funny. Xavier [de Rosnay of Justice, another French outfit] told me: 'Man, I love "The Alphabeat", it's so crazy
Jackson [Fourgeaud, of Jackson and his Computer Band] sent me the album, saying: 'I. Can. Not. ing. Believe. That David Guetta did this.' That put a smile on my face, because people like to put a stamp on what you do."
Guetta's latest project is a new record label, which he wants to showcase more of this side of his music. "I'm starting a label called Jackback Records, which is kind of back to my roots. It's going to be only electronic music." His first signing is Dutch DJ Nicky Romero and the first release, "Metropolis", an instrumental collaboration between Guetta and Romero, is out now. "I don't do this for the money, I don't do it for record sales, I don't really care about that, I just want to make beats."
Guetta doesn't think it matters that many of the young American kids experiencing an epiphany with dance music don't appreciate its history. "It's just different now," he says. "To us it was underground, it was a subculture, it was a lifestyle, it was all of these things. But these days, it's not really working like this any more. It took me 20 years to do what I did. Avicii, last year, no one knew who he was. Now he's the biggest thing on the planet. You understand? It's totally different."
For Guetta, dance music's newfound popularity can only be a good thing. He won't convince everyone, but few in the industry would deny his phenomenal success in the US has given the industry as a whole a healthy financial boost. "Listen, some people take themselves very, very seriously," Guetta says. "I'm not a politician, you know what I mean? You remember in the old days you had people like Underground Resistance?" [a late 80s militant dance collective from Detroit]. He pauses and smiles. "I never took myself so seriously." |
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discuss. |
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| geroin |
| the only thing to discuss here is why the whole interview is about him producing music and having studios yet he doesn't produce anything himself.. |
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| LightsOut |
| I think the underground is doing just fine without him :haha: |
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| GGM |
| Dunno. All I ask for from DJs is good sets and good tunes. Personally don't really care what they have to say specially when it's coming from this dude (or even DT's emo wall of text that I could read maybe 10-15% of). |
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| Adam420 |
| quote: | Originally posted by GGM
All I ask for from DJs is good sets and good tunes. |
Neither of which he delivers. |
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| PivotTechno |
| Yesterday, Claude Young went ballistic on FB over the shot at Underground Resistance at the end of the interview. I can sort of see why he'd get his back up, but at the same time, Guetta's a pop music producer and is about as much a House maven or DJ as Kenny G is a Jazz artist - listening to the former's opinion on UR is the equivalent of having the latter weigh in on someone like John Coltrane. |
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| LightsOut |
| lol it feels like UR is always getting on someone for something :haha: |
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| jester |
| I had to stop reading the article, I thought I was going to have a brain aneurism. |
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| Endlesswave |
"After 20 years people have realised that EDM has matured and become the biggest youth movement in America since hip hop. It feels like everybody suddenly wants a piece of the action."
LOL, as if Edm has to 'mature' and become huge for it to be worthy. Psht. That's the COMPLETE opposite of the culture/scene...
also "huge success while retaining credibility", he still has cred? Naw... |
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| Adam420 |
He's so delusional, thinking that people hate on him because of his success. People hate on him because he's a fake and releases crap, appealing-to-the-lowest-common-denominator, made-to-profit "music" and he plays ty DJ sets. I saw him play in 2007 and even back then I thought it was crap.
Whatever. French people...lol. (and I mean the ones from France) |
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| Endlesswave |
| Let's see if his new record label delivers something good like what he used to produce. |
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| kotsy |
| quote: | Originally posted by Adam420
He's so delusional, thinking that people hate on him because of his success. People hate on him because he's a fake and releases crap, appealing-to-the-lowest-common-denominator, made-to-profit "music" and he plays ty DJ sets. |
Couldn't agree more. The same exact argument could be used for deadmau5. Everyone thinks all the hate stems from his success but it's from cheesy e he releases now. |
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