MEOW MIX
Apr 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Simona Rabinovitch
Miss Kittin's manager is opening a bottle of champagne in the Montreal's Neon party VIP area. This is not surprising when you consider the lyrics to Miss Kittin & The Hacker's electro hit, “Frank Sinatra”: “Every night with my star friends/We eat caviar and drink champagne/Sniffing in the VIP area/We talk about Frank Sinatra/You know Frank Sinatra?/He's dead. Dead. Ha ha ha ha.”
The French twosome Miss Kittin & The Hacker are performing at Montreal's Neon party in support of their first release — appropriately titled First Album (2001) — put out on DJ Hell's Munich-based International DJ Gigolos label. “I needed something to rhyme with ‘VIP area,’” explains Miss Kittin, who writes most of her song lyrics in 20-minute sessions in the studio with beat-maker Michel Amato, aka The Hacker. “‘Sinatra’ rhymes with ‘area.’ And I say, ‘He's dead,’ but he wasn't dead when I wrote it. I was like, ‘Everybody will think I'm stupid; I don't know my classics.’” Most of First Album's lyrics are dripping with such accidental sarcasm. To those who fantasize about living (and dying) on the dark side, this irony is what makes electro so up-your-nose appealing.
To virgin ears, electro is the perfect pick-me-up. It's just a little cooler, a little more underground, a little more chic than your standard four-on-the-floor. However, what might seem new is already old news. Although it's only in the past year that electro has made its way out of dark corners, the scene has been festering for decades in dirty clubs from New York to Munich. Built on production that is minimal without being simple, synth-pop melodies that are catchy without being contrived, beats that are techno without being boring, the genre has roots in punk, industrial, techno, acid house and new wave. Now, even the trendsetters are sick of the trendiness.
“I'm so bored of the hype,” says, with a sigh, Miss Kittin, who has been a professional club DJ for eight years. “The last few gigs we played in London and New York, the DJs were playing only electro. If you play only '80s stuff, the tracks lose their impact. Damn it, there's an overdose on the music, an overdose on the look. For us, it's already over. We hear this since five years now! When we go places, and they tell us it's the first time they've heard this music, I don't want to tell them, ‘Come on!’ But I don't want to be trapped in this '80s ghetto.”
As she and Amato are both dedicated clubbers, Kittin never imagined that they would go from being DJs to celebrities. “To be thrown in this thing is very bizarre,” she says. “I never thought, ‘I want to be a star.’ As with any style of music before, people need icons. Suddenly, you are in front of people. Suddenly, you have to learn how to entertain people: how I'm dressed, how I move, what I say. Every weapon to catch your attention. I'm more self-confident now, but I still prefer to DJ. I'm looking forward to going home and playing some fat techno beats! As a DJ, you are more free.”
Sporting a deadpan camp attitude and a black vinyl catsuit (no rubber nurse's outfit tonight), Miss Kittin seems pretty free as she drives the crowd into a Eurotrash frenzy, parading around reciting the lyrics to “Frank Sinatra”: “To be famous is so nice/Suck my dick. Lick my ass/In limousines, we have sex/Every night with my famous friends.”
So warped, so trash, so glam, you've got to dig it. Because you can't live it — unless you're Miss Kittin. Or The Hacker. Ha ha ha ha …
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