The DJ Tent of Dr. Moreau
Dr. Moreau’s island was more fearful than any haunted house, especially considering the time in which it arrived with the world on the brink of an unmapped Industrial Revolution. Anyone who’s read or seen the work will be familiar with the particular heebie-jeebies that are set in motion by the titular madman’s creations, even though the idea of gene-based sciences were barely a twinkle in anyone’s eye upon The Island of Doctor Moreau’s publication in 1896. As a parable for the dangers of humankind going too far too fast with the ability to meld DNA and create new forms of life (GMO’s and cloning serve as scarily applicable analogs for today), the book was effective; as a sci-fi trip through a body horror funhouse that featured seeming abominations against Nature it was even more so, and each film iteration has offered fresh terrors for new generations.
But what makes Dr. Moreau’s beastly “family” different than something like the wolfman? Any werewolf is by definition half-person and half-wolf (or some other percentage, but the idea is the same). Of course, the lycanthropy only takes effect during a full moon - ninety percent of the time the person is normal for all intents and purposes, minus their anxiety about their condition and what they may do when unleashed. What about Frankenstein’s monster? Terrifying in its own way, sure, but there is no cross-species grafting there. For all the monster’s bluster and unpredictability, at the end of the day the big lug is just parts of different humans stitched together like a decaying homo sapiens quilt.
In the culture of horror, most monsters live fully ensconced within human forms (until the moment they’re not), or they are alien enough from humanity that we, as humans, can avoid any compulsion to contemplate their lives outside the narrative.
What does any of this have to do with Richard Fearless’ first single as Death In Vegas?
“Dirt” begins with a wavering drone that becomes growing crowd noise, and when a sample from Woodstock tells the audience that “the man next to you is your brother” the simulated crowd eats it up. Dubby bass comes in with a trashy drum part that sounds like it was recorded with shoddy equipment in the confines of a junkyard (in the best of ways). A Roxanne Shanté vocal sample arrives a bit later to add some pitched-up edge to what has become by that point an unforgivingly hard-line track.
Even with all these elements present the backbone of the sound field comes in the form of a dingy, abused guitar lick. The riff is gnarly and sounds like pure punk rock, but slowed down so we can almost taste the menace. There is nothing “electronica” about it, and it isn’t forced inside the lines of EDM as DJ’s sometimes do by default when creating a piece of music. The guitar retains every bit of its rock n’ roll DNA and it doesn’t mind if that pisses you off while you’re trying to roll on your cousin’s expired ecstasy.
To be fair, this is a magic trick that Fearless and co-producer Steve Hellier accomplish many times throughout Dead Elvis, the act’s debut LP. Each piece of the collage is allowed its time and space, allowed to fully breathe inside the tracks even when they seem ill-suited to be included alongside machined loops and beat-matched transitions. The influences range from Eastern music (the plucked-string magic of “I Spy”) to Caribbean (the dance hall effervescence of highlight “Twist and Crawl”) and back again to Western European and American (see the motorik-leaning shuffle of “Rekkit”). The album constitutes a limited but high-gloss travelogue of alleyways and speakeasies, should one be inclined to hear it as such.
The link between Dead Elvis and H.G. Wells’ good doctor’s experiments is driven by the idea that some of the album’s elements don’t really fit in the songs in the way they do in other electronic music of the era. Electronic music of that time often manages to annex the characteristics of the elements brought over from other genres. Instead of the mummy who comes wrapped in bandages with his arms flailing almost comically, Fearless, like Moreau, gives us a person who has a name and an idea of human life…but they also happen to be part sloth. These are not monsters who are ignorant to their condition and their humanity gives them the curse of knowing their ultimate fate. They are not only grotesque after a combination of circumstances or a chain of mistakes for which they’re accountable - they are always living this way, and they were actively created by a man who wanted to take a turn at being a god. Any one of us could be one of these unholy combinations of human and animal.
The guitar in “Dirt” is the Hyena-Swine. It retains its ability to be agile and destructive, it lurks on the edge of the lowlight and waits for just the right time to pounce. The riff isn’t hidden inside or underneath or behind other elements, it is fully forward in the mix, a proud badge of honor won on a floor soaked in the sticky coolness of beer and colored the molasses hue of dried blood.
Electronic music tended toward assimilation in the late 90s. Chemical Brothers co-opted Noel Gallagher’s vocal to create a song that vaguely sounded like a tripped-out revisitation of psych-rock. The Prodigy pulled from punk and rap as much as they did from the rave culture they’d evolved from but they always had their eyes on the dancefloor. Norman Cook was equally at home putting the Fatboy Slim signature sound behind Bollywood snippets and tasteful bites of MoTown soul. Along with plenty other examples, these illustrate how electronic music got its sea legs: by using familiar elements and folding them into contexts that were new. Along the way, the familiarity of the disparate elements would spread to the new setting and breed even more familiarity with the shiny new packaging.
The “Dirt” riff doesn’t get assimilated into its surroundings. It is the unmistakably human set of eyes on the animalistic robot body that is created before our ears. Or perhaps it is the wide, sinister, inhuman grin on a face that retains only a vestige of the humanity it once had. It does not recede into the dark and it does not falter from its purpose. The riff allows “Dirt” to hover just over the three-way intersection between “big beat”, “trip-hop” and “rock n roll.” Such an emphatic reminder of life outside electronica allows the song citizenship in multiple worlds, but the same disqualifies from being a full participant in any of the worlds in which it could be said to belong. Gift, meet curse.
Many of Dr. Moreau’s Beast-Folk were never humans, to hear him tell it. They were animals who had been given human attributes through the twisted application of science and the sheer neglect (rejection?) of natural law. Regardless, the idea that we as people can see so much of ourselves in these beings who’ve been effectively condemned by the hubris of one man makes them scarier than every vampire who ever lived, fictionally or otherwise. These half-animals represent us; they show what could happen in a world where our conscience became trapped in a body that is a betrayal of everything we know as people.
The raucously infectious guitar in “Dirt” reminds us that the nascent electronic music scene growing in 1990s Europe was one that largely depended on other music and sounds to fuel it. Not every act could be an Aphex Twin, pushing the envelope by smuggling revelations about music theory in the pure euphoria rushes of skittering drum shapes and propulsive, glorious melodies that were almost wholly original. “Dirt”’s guitar line is not an homage to “rawk”, it’s not some statue in a plaza meant to glorify one thing while being used to legitimize something else; it is instead the thing itself, warts and all, parading around like it owns the place and implicitly threatening in every moment to use its ruinous energy to burn down the whole joint.
Sometimes genres define us, sometimes we define them. Death In Vegas showed how to keep rock n roll’s building blocks alive and fully visible within the scope of electronically-produced music.
Speaking through an amount of glib narcissism that would choke a mere mortal, Moreau says in the novel, “You forget all that a skilled vivisector can do with living things.” In much the same way as the misguided doctor and without the self-congratulation, Richard Fearless and his cohorts gave us all a stark reminder of terrible, turbulent beauty for the modern age.
