MISS KITTIN AND THE HACKER — ‘Frank Sinatra’
DJ ASSAULT — ‘Big Booty Hoes And Sluts Too’
Motor and muse for nu-electro she might be, but you could easily mistake Miss Kittin’s autocue blankness for genuine vacuity, mood-setting and nothing more. Yes her vocals do set a mood, but they carry content too, and ‘Frank Sinatra’ is her manifesto: the best nu-electro track yet. Kittin’s in a limousine (of course she is), with her ‘famous friends’, taking drugs, talking about Frank, sucking and fucking endlessly — celebrity in Kittinworld is a perpetual orgy. But an orgy with no arousal, no climax — it’s just what celebrities do, because they can. ‘Being famous is so nice.’ says Kittin (she turns ‘nice’ into a perfect glassy sigh), ‘Suck my dick, lick my ass.’
The debauchery on offer to the famous isn’t the point; for Kittin, being famous is the point. But Kittin’s amoral paradise is also what people want fame to secretly be like — when you read the endless coke’n’sodomy stories on Popbitch, you want to believe them all, not just because of the schadenfreude you’d feel if they went public, but because you want celebrities to live a life as distant from yours, as abstracted, as their image promises.
What ‘Frank Sinatra’ shares with DJ Assault is a sense of need. Assault’s crude, nonstop beats and monotone rhymes come off like a kind of techno Tourette’s, a pleasureless compulsion to talk dirty. He raps too quickly, with no finesse, just trying to cram in as much sex, as many hoes as possible. On ‘Big Booty Hoes And Sluts Too’ the chorus is a cry of ‘Big booty hoes!’, and then a second voice gabbles ‘andslutstoo!!’ like it’s crucial there’s both, like the sluts can’t be left out. And for Assault they can’t be — he wants to fuck the whole world.
Assault’s records are terrific, a cold and total (but highly rumpshaking) dead-end for booty bass. Kittin is just as good, and a lot more subtle — and their strategies are similar: a sex-power equation and deliberately inorganic music. This isn’t new pop territory, but Assault is more danceable than say Whitehouse and Kittin is much funnier than Swans. Do danceability and jokes matter? Yes they do, because they widen the appeal — this music impacts more if Kittin is famous and if Assault does get women. Next to Miss Kittin, Michael Gira looks like a theoretician, a cop-out. (Also danceable, funny music is better to listen to, I think). If we are living in a hypermediated and hypersexualised society, at least we’ve got the right soundtracks.