| Ism schism >>
The sexy totalitarian electro-kitsch
by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
Keller Blues, a trilingual twelve-pack of raunchy, vaguely cabaret-style electro-punk tchotchkes, bears the graven image of Monette sporting a Soviet general’s cap. “It’s basically Soviet decadence,” Monette explains, “the whole thing of the warrior getting off the battlefield and marching off to a brothel and having a great time-I guess that’s the sound I’m trying to make happen. There’s a whole Las Vegas thing in there too. I guess it falls in with the brothel-kitsch-sleaze thing. If there’s fromage, I’m there.” Sleaze, cheese and unease are the three operative words in Monette’s manifesto of totalitarian chic. The opening intro track on Keller Blues, the album’s only sample, sets the tone. “It’s from this Czech movie from ’72, an artsy little Communist propaganda flick called WR: Mysteries of the Organism. It doesn’t make much sense-a bunch of people having sex in fields and talking about Lenin, and then singing ‘All You Need Is Love,’ oddly enough. It was based on Wilhelm Reich’s orgone theory about sexual liberation being good for the mind, body and soul, how 4,000 life-preserving orgasms in a man’s life are 4,000 parts of happiness, so everybody fuck freely-it just kinda speaks to me.” Then there’s “Terroriste de l’amour,” Monette’s signature tune. “It’s just this great little love story, told from the point of view of a terrorist. I wrote it back in November ’99, when they were talking about the possibility of millennium bombings. I thought ‘Ooh, great, terrorists-what do they do?’ They must have wives and girlfriends and shit like that. What does a terrorist do when he falls in love? He’s off on a mission to blow up some people in India or something, then lets it all go because he wants to be with his honey.” The waters get choppy with the final track. A title like “Fascist Spells Fun” sounds like a gold-embossed invitation to an ass-kicking, so Monette clarifies-sort of. “If you just look at the title and don’t actually pay too much attention, it sounds like that, but all I say is, ‘Fascist spells fun/Sinner, suck on the barrel of my gun.’ That can be taken any which way you want. It’s about saying something and people going along with it. It could be the dumbest thing and people will do it, because it’s mass-produced.”
Pivotal in the genesis of Jett Monette (who some may recognize as the far geekier Wilhelm from local oompah-punks the Subumlauts) was a visit to the most high-profile collision point between fascism, communism and capitalism. “When I went to Berlin, in October 2000, Alexanderplatz was the first thing I saw. Here’s this fountain with all these Greek gods with a huge Coca-Cola logo behind it. Then you’ve got all these statues of heroic workers-they’re just so funny because they don’t mean anything anymore, and it was supposed to last forever. “I actually went there with the hopes of meeting Atari Teenage Riot’s Alec Empire, and I did within two days. Nothing planned. The first day I got there, I’m looking through the papers, and I saw that the next night, he was DJing at the Maria am Ostbahnhof. He was on at 4 in the morning, spinning R&B records. There were like two people left by that time. It was just me and this other girl dancing. I actually gave him a copy of “Terroriste de l’amour”-he was one of the first people I gave one of my tracks.” Largely a boy and his playback on disc, live, Monette’s got a full band behind him now, including folks from the Subumlauts and Discocide, a guy named Jason from New Brunswick on key-tar and a Taiwanese rock-fusion drummer named Mako (“He hardly speaks English but he totally rocks”). “I guess what I’m doing on stage is a reaction to that whole laptop culture. I espouse more the whole rock thing. I find I’m too pop for the heavy people and vice versa, so what I do live is going in the middle of that, going completely over the top and not giving a shit. When I did my first show at Petit Campus, exactly a week after I left Berlin, I was really by myself. Stef Caron from Metha Mean was sequencing the songs off by the side of the stage, but I was up there with nothing, no instrument, doing my whole go-go dancer routine. It worked, though, because when you just give it off, people really respond. You’re only gonna get what you give. I’d feel silly, standing up there doing nothing while I’ve got all this rock ’n’ roll energy flowing through me.” : CD launch at Petit Campus on Saturday, Aug.10, 9pm, $6 >> Music Listings |
