AEM091 Lozninger

The French are undoubt­edly the most self-effacing of pop per­fec­tion­ists. Like a case of asymp­to­matic her­pes, French­ness has a ten­dency to lurk in records, unreg­is­tered, unap­par­ent, some­how spread­ing its geno­type through­out the host until it’s too late to do any­thing about it. Other kinds of cat­e­gor­i­cally for­eign rock don’t have this invis­i­bil­ity prob­lem: NME buzz bands swear by the Digidesign Cock­ney Box (now a pre­set in Pro­Tools 8), Japan­ese groups trade com­pul­sively in Ori­en­tal­ist kitsch, and Scan­di­na­vian singers can’t help but sound awk­ward as balls. But how are we to know we’ve been French’ed? The answer here isn’t that much dif­fer­ent than the method­ol­ogy used by Base­ball cyn­ics to iden­tify steroid abuse: the play­ers are too good not to be doped. French musi­cians, sim­i­larly, are too good not to be French. Lozninger, a French producer/songwriter whose style lands some­where between Serge Gains­bourg, the Sil­ver Apples, and Karl­heinz Stock­hausen, is very, very good.

It’s cru­cial here not to equate the French propen­sity for craft­ing immac­u­late pop songs with a racist a pri­ori like black peo­ple are good rap­pers, or even some­thing log­i­cal, yet reduc­tive, like Indone­sians make the nicest game­lans. It’s not enough, in other words, to write these things off as nat­ural. Instead, we need to work back­wards from the who to the why. Lozninger him­self sets us in the right direc­tion with this price­less quote about his artis­tic out­put: “LØZNINGER’s music extremely sucks though some peo­ple say it sounds nice.” The closer you look at this state­ment, the more you real­ize how tran­scen­den­tally apt it is in describ­ing that elu­sive, quasi-nonexistent French aes­thetic we’ve been grop­ing for. I don’t want to be dismissive—and believe me, I’m MySpace bud­dies with more than one French band—but how often when a group is cat­e­go­rized as French Pop is that an indi­ca­tor that the music they’re mak­ing is, in at least one or two obvi­ous ways, really ter­ri­ble? Let’s look at some out­dated, but trendy, exam­ples: Justice’s music, with its obese mid-range blast­synths, its pseudo-glitchy mal­func­tions, its wink­ing homages to hair metal, is essen­tially a coun­ter­in­tu­itively awe­some cul­mi­na­tion of hor­ri­ble influ­ences and cre­ative choices. Air and Daft Punk, too, seem to occupy a sim­i­lar state of qual­i­ta­tive ambi­gu­ity: Barry Manilow in a space suit is objec­tively still Barry Manilow. In a space suit. Undoubt­edly bad ideas, in all these cases, mirac­u­lously add up not nec­es­sar­ily to more than their con­stituent parts, but some­thing so effort­lessly cool, so autis­ti­cally con­trolled, that their con­stituent parts cease to exist. Can you think of any Amer­i­can band where influ­ence is sub­verted in such a holis­tic way? Imag­ine some­thing as innocu­ously unbear­able as Smash­mouth, osten­si­bly a revamp of 50’s doo-wop music with a big-room house twist, and you get the idea of how strange and impos­si­ble to dupli­cate the French model of sonic suc­cess really is.

To get a sense of how Lozninger fig­ures into this con­text, it might be best to take a look at the B-side, a cover of Brit­ney Spears’s “Toxic.” Ironic indie-rock cov­ers of mul­ti­plat­inum mega-hits is a prac­ti­cally ante­dilu­vian prac­tice at this point, so over­played that you might expect to find one buried near the cave paint­ings at Las­caux pack­aged along with a pro­mo­tional coupon for a pair of Reeboks. God­dammit, this shit is so ter­ri­ble most of the time! But Lozninger, with a practiced—or, I sup­pose, ancestral—nonchalance towards this kind of thing (“Ew, that song by Brit­tneey Speeaars,” I imag­ine some dude wear­ing APC jeans and avi­a­tor shades, pulling on a Gauloise and down­ing a 5 Euro bot­tle of fan­tas­tic wine, say­ing com­pletely unself­con­sciously, “Eet is tres cool, no?”) man­ages to make the tune, already per­fect in its orig­i­nal incar­na­tion, not only worth­while but worth your time to check out. By drop­ping the Night on Bald Moun­tain string hook that 100% made the Brit­ney jam and replac­ing it with acoustic gui­tars, hushed vocals, some suffocatingly-dense atmos­pheric synths, the effect of the cover is less one of laffs than of a guilty plea­sure, like the urge to eat not one but two orders of moz­zarella sticks, slowly graft­ing itself to your insides. What can I say about this ver­sion other than it seems sin­cere, so sin­cere that it makes you appre­ci­ate the song pla­ton­i­cally rather than dis­cretely, a mas­ter­piece of celes­tial tune­smithing in search of the ideal ves­sel. Of course, if Dyna­mite Hack decides to come out of retire­ment, this no longer applies.

Lozninger’s more, I don’t know, artis­tic side, comes out in “Mov­ing Tar­gets,” a beau­ti­fully con­structed bit of noise-pop, all found sound and melan­cholic piano that seems to fall into playlist for­mat almost by acci­dent. Orig­i­nally when I down­loaded these tracks, only the first twenty sec­onds of this song came through, and I was forced, tem­porar­ily, to con­tem­plate what it might mean to pack­age “Toxic” along­side the inchoate blips and fuzz of the A-side’s open­ing bars. I guess it’s kind of like a 4-minute Pet Sounds. Which, come to think of it, is about as French a maneu­ver as going on vaca­tion on a Wednes­day, or eat­ing pizza with a fork.

Ben Las­man

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