Once heralded as the messiahs of electronic music, the French group Justice has set its sights on the US – out to prove they’re not just another pop band that’s « big in France ».
It’s a brisk San Fran night at Outside Lands music festival where Justice are about to start their set. With a mist swirling off the bay and settling in Golden Gate Park’s wooded Hellman Hollow, everything onstage is dark except for a few glowing LEDs and someone’s cold hand playing on a synthesizer a shrill, hiccupy rendition of the « Star Spangled Banner. »
The crowd, visible from the wing only in silhouette against the trees behind, starts to make some real noise when the kick drum on Justice’s first track, « Genesis », begins. When the hook come in like an evil emperor’s theme song and the overhead lights snap on, revealing Xavier de Rosnay with is hand above him in a peace sign and Gaspard Augé with his forearms making a cross and his long hair blowing in the wind, the crowd surges forward into the metal barriers between them and the stage, making the two Frenchmen more like zoo keepers tossing out meat.
Over the next hour Justice play fantastic, earsplitting, funky medley of songs from their first two albums. Behind them a curtain of bulbs flashes in patterns like stars passing during lightspeed space, and closest to the crowd, like a frontman, a large illuminated cross pulsates between two giant stacks of Marshall amps. During the song « Stress », both the bulbs and the fronts of the amps themselves flash red at a rate and luminosity intense enough to drive one to rage. In a relatively slow moment during their hit « D.A.N.C.E. », the front panel of their setup opens to reveal a keyboard from which organ pipes rise, and Augé, tall and skinny, lopes out and plays the instrument like an organist in a cathedral. He then turns around and salutes the crowd with deer-like shyness while de Rosnay ratchets the beat back up to a comfortably frenetic tempo.
If you’re over 30 an live in the States, there’s a chance you might not even know who Justice are. And on paper, why should you ? They’re two French guys with thick accent s who are kind of shy and who make music that even their fans sometimes at first find unlistenable. And yet they’ve sold millions of albums, pack outdoor stadiums and venues like Madison Square Garden as if they were tiny pubs, and have a Facebook following that would rival the populations of small countries. Justice are a group who’s discovered a recipe fr flourishing in the post-record-sales era of music, and yet they’re not a household name, at least not in the States – and maybe they’re totally fine with that.
ENTER THE GODFATHER, PEDRO WINTER
A couple hours before the show, Augé and de Rosnay have stepped quietly onto the porch of their grey portable dressing room to meet with me. De 
Rosnay pushes his hands into the pockets of his black Surface to Air track jacket with the word « Justice » embroidered in while on the left breast – it’s cold outside. Fifty-five degrees cold, with a sharp wind coming off the bay. De Rosnay has his usual dark mustache, and his hair, which had grown unruly during the recording of Justice’s second album, Audio, Video, Disco., is once again cut so that it neatly frames his face both accross his slight unibrow and along the sides, where it lines up with his thin sideburns? Augé, a few inches taller, wears a black rocker tee under a faded blue Levi’s jacket on which a pin above the left pocket reads « Spoiled Rotten ». He’s recently ditched his trademark handlebar mustache and permet curls in favor of something more Jesus-y – his hair, brown and wavy, rolls down to his shoulders, and a beard that has claimed the lower half of his face threatens to cover his mouth entirely.
Augé and de Rosnay are exceptionnally polite. They look me in the eyes as we shake hands and immediately suggest that we go to their roomy tour bus to escape the cold and noise. We sit on the couch and Augé sets an ashtray – a clear plastic cup in which half a dozen cigarette butts float in a gulp of white wine – on the cushion between them.
One thing I know from watching interviews with Justice is that de Rosnay does most of the talking, and that he does so articulately, intelligently, and with wit and humor. Augé spends much of his on-camera time smoking, sipping wine, and looking away with what appears shyness, boredom, or indifference. I try to get him talking by mentioning his new beard. I tell him I’ve been trying to grow one myself for the last month but that all I have to show for it is a naturally-formed goatee.
« No, but you’re etter off wiz, like, summer facial hair, » he says, sensing my insecurity. « You’re fine. Sometimes you’are not mean to – I’m not mean ton so I don’t do eet, » says de Rosnay, pulling a cigarette from a pack the two are sharing. Motioning toward my chin , he says, « But this eez kind of a Johnny Depp-style of facial hair, you know what I mean? »
As I nod in agreement, I Look at Augé, who, catching my glance in his periphery, furrows his brow slightly and starts nodding as well, meeting my eyes. His way I guess of telling me « l’m doing my best here. »
Another thing I know about Justice is that they, like many artists, are repeatedly asked the same questions: What are their influences? What do they feel are the differences between their first album and their second? What is the meaning behind the cross, the symbol of their band since their first EP and the centerpiece of their live shows?
Believing they won’t want to analyze their discography for the next hour (a suspicion de Rosnay confirms later by offhandedly mentioning that discussing their music is something on which they are « not so keen »), l suggest we talk more about their early days, before they were heralded as the messiahs of electronic music, before the endless comparisons to Daft Punk, before the massive shows and festivals and tours, back when they might’ve been- as a friend of mine, the most devout Justice disciple I know, guessed -« just two dorky fuckin’ dudes the internet made into megastars. »
Augé grew up in Vincennes, a smatt, quiet suburb just east of Paris. He describes the town as « random, with not much happening. » His « fah-zer, » (in his accent) was a theater actor and his mother wrote children’s books for the Centre Pompidou. His main source of entertainment as a kid was the huge library near his house where he checked out CDs, taking home and listening to everything he could find. The first album he ever bought was Metallica’s Kill’Em All.
De Rosnay, who’s first purchase was Snoop Dogg’s, Doggystyle, is three years younger, and he too grew up in a middle-class suburb east of Paris,Ozoir-la-Ferrière. But his, which he describes as « neither posh nor dangerous, » was even further out-about 35 kilometers from Paris’s center- and even more boring. The son of a dentist mother and now-retired HR manager father, de Rosnay didn’t have the option of hanging rut in Paris during the weekends, so he spent his free time smoking pot in parking lots and hanging out in the forest on ris BMX and setting fires. (it’s Augé who outs de Rosnay as a pyromaniac; and de Rosnay’s laugh suggests he’d enjoy just as much burning something today as he would’ve as a kid.)
Like many of their high-school peers, both played drums but never took lessons, and de Rosnay, who studied guitar when he was 13, grew up watching MTV and playing in garage bands, « cover bands, » says Augé or as de Rosnay describes « four guitarists playing Guns N’ Roses covers with no drummer, and everyone fighting over who got to play the solo in the middle. »
De Rosnay too was in a disco band, which died before getting a name, and it wasn’t until both met years later at a party, that the two started making music together.
At the time both were working as freelance graphic designers; de Rosnay was finishing his degree and Augé, who had recently graduated, was designing posters.
I ask what they talked about the first time they met.
Probably shit about the people around us. » de Rosney says as he snuffs a cigarette in a plastic cup. « This is always the first thing you do with new people you meet-you just talk shit. »
Their link it turns out was the French rock band Jamaica- Augé was closer with the singer, whose girlfriend was best friends with de Rosnay’s. « Once Gaspard went to pick her up at the school to go for coffee and I got out before the girl. We started to talk and just left, leaving the girl behind. »
It was 2003, and neither had a computer or proper studio. Their main hobby was hanging out in « cash converters » – pawn shops where they bought records and used music-making devices. Both owned a number of machines that together made up a more-or-less complete, if second-rate set of recording equipment. Using a manual Roland sequencer as the main part of their setup, de Rosnay also had an Akai 52000, an Akai piano expander, and a Roland Juno-106 at his apartment near the Buttes Chaumont. At Augé’s flat in Vincennes, they kept a 16-track digital recorder and another synthesizer. Both would do vocal takes at Augé’s using Gameboy headphones then travel to de Rosnay’s to program them. Within a month Justice had stitched together their first song, « Sure You Will, » which they made for a compilation record called Musclorvision: Hit’s Up To You!
Augé also provided a solo song for an album called « Back ln Your Eyes » under the name Microloisir, in which he wails « Haven’t you played enough with me? / You say you love me / Haven’t you played enough with me / when you say you care? » White the cheese factor in Justice’s first song could be chalked up to the nature of the album (contributors were supposed to record their tracks as if entering them in the Eurovision Song Contest) they demonstrated very early on an aptitude for kitschy pop. And though it’s hard to imagine lyrics as personal and vulnerable in Justice’s music today, the track does have nascent traces of the wobbly bass and synth keyboards that would become critical to their style.
« It was a track we made for a very indie compilation, » de Rosnay concludes. « It couldn’t get more indie than this at the time. I think the compilation sold like 70 copies. » (Pedro Winer, now their manager, told me that when he discovered Justice he « bought 10 CDs, probably the only CDs hey sold. »)
For their next song Justice set about remixing the English electronic rock band Simian’s « Never Be Alone » for a contest sponsored by a college radio station, from whom they’d gotten the song’s stems. Justice’s remix, which shares virtually nothing with the original except for a vocal sample which still features prominently in their live sets, made it to the preselection but didn’t win. « When we lost, we didn’t feel gutted because it was only the second track we’d ever made. »
A month later de Rosnay and Augé’s course changed dramatically when they met Pedro Winter aka Busy P, one of the great champions of French electronic music and the owner of Ed Banger Entertainment, which managed groups like Cassius, Cosmo Vitelli, and Daft Punk.
About a year ago I interviewed Gildas Loaëc, co-founder of the fashion label Kitsuné, for another publication. He told me about how when he was 19 years old, the group Daft Punk had just released their first single at the time and they recruited him, Winter, and a third unidentified person to form their core team. « l learned a lot of things with them in terms of things with in terms of style and marketing, » Loaëc told me. Winter, a natural-born impresario who served as Daft Punk’s manager for over 10 years- virtually all of his 20s- would surely attribute much of his management acumen to those days as well, which to him seemed very well thought out.
« They were two young kids doing graphic design for Paris club, » Winter says, and when he heard them for the first time he admits « I just felt something was happening. I had no idea if it would become a hit, I just knew something was happening … » Justice was signed to Ed Banger the following week.
« lt was amazing to us, » de Rosnay says, « because it was the first time we were actually making music. And even though the label was really small, we felt very lucky because Pedro was already involved with bigger artists like Daft Punk and Cassius. We were like,’Cool, we’re working with the main guy in France.’ »
Winter’s method of record distribution is a good indication of the company’s size at the time. For the first four releases on the label, the artists would make vinyl test pressings of the track themselves, from which Winter would hand press batches of 500 records which he would personally distribute to record shops. Justice’s method of recording was still quite primitive, too. They couldn’t afford a computer, which was about 3000 dollars, so when they were ready to put down a track they would perform it live on their two synthesizers and record it to a borrowed CD burner. « Sometimes during a song we would have to switch from one preset to another, » de Rosnay says, « so usually it would take 15 takes before we’d get it right, and then we’d bring the CD to Pedro and say,’0kay, it’s track number 13 on this CD that’s the good take. ‘ »
When Winter proposed to release « We Are Your Friends » as Justice’s first single on Ed Banger, Augé and de Rosnay told him he coutd use it as a B-side but that they were going to make something even better for the A. Winter, insisting it would be a success, started mixing it into his DJ sets, but it didn’t catch on. In fact, it wasn’t until three years after its 2003 release that it became a club anthem.
« But it’s funny, » de Rosnay says, « because the same thing always happens with our tracks. Even today it takes ages before they actually work when we play them. » I wonder aloud why that is.
In late 2004 Justice’s way of making music changed dramatically – they bought a computer.
This acquisition, de Rosnay says, allowed them to manipulate and distort their audio files to a degree not previously possible.
The first song Justice made on their new machine, « Water of Nazareth, » has noises so distorted you can hardly tell where the original sound comes from and with a church organ arriving over a hellish din midway through. Justice first played a rough cut of the track for Winter on a train ride to London, telling him it would be the single on their first EP for Ed Banger. After listening, de Rosnay says, Winter haltingly told them, « Yeah… no… I think it’s not very good. Try something else. » So they pressed on, making new tracks for their EP.
Meanwhile Justice had quickly bonded with Mehdi Favéris-Essadi aka DJ Mehdi. Favéris-Essadi who de Rosnay was helping finish an album. As a break from their work, de Rosnay played « Waters of Nazareth » for Favéris-Essadi, who excitedly told him it was their best song yet- and that it had to be their next single. So that Sunday night, de Rosnay and Augé (who was on vacation) made their new edit of « Waters, » communicating via iChat – « I was sending him beats and was saying, like,’Yeah, let’s do it like this, »‘de Rosnay says- and on Monday they played it for Winter again, who loved it.
« We added ‘Let There Be Light’ to the EP and I am now proud and glad they convinced me, » Winter told me. « But it’s not that I didn’t like it; I said we needed a bigger A-side, and I was wrong. If those bastards of Justice are saying I didn’t like it, ask them who is the DJ was who played it the most on planet Earth ? Me! »
THE FACE OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC WITHOUT EVEN TRYING
Justice didn’t mean to end up in the electronic music world, and when they first started they had no clue what was going on within it. « We didn’t know, » de Rosnay says, « because we never got really interested in that. Finally we ended up in it because of ‘We Are Four Friends’ and because of Pedro, and because when we released this track we started to get proposals to DJ. But this wasn’t something we really cared about. We knew the bigger things – « (Augé, who’s been silent for quite some time, says « ouais » while taking a drag on his cigarette) » – like Daft and Cassius, but all the rest, we had no idea what it was. »
« But something we witnessed by playing clubs was that between 2003 and 2006, the crowd itself completely changed. When we started there were no kids, nobody younger than 30 years old, and the parties were quite boring. But just before we released our first album we saw a change – like it really quickly changed – and we started to see very young people coming to clubs. We’ve been very lucky to start at a moment when electronic music was something made by 30-year-old or 40-year-old people. »
« I’m sure there are other things to it, » de Rosnay says, « but if we tried to rationalize it, I think a part of why we got attention is because we were very young, and at this time all the electronic music was very lounge-y, very pop, very neat. There was electroclash, but at the end of the day it’s really clean and there’s not much happening. We were 20 years old and making stuff that was just a bit more rough and dirty. »
To say their music was only a bit more rough is, I believe, an understatement. When I ask if they think there was anything like them before they released « Waters of Nazareth, » de Rosnay says yes: they were inspired by people Iike Zongamin and Vitalic, who were making « very rough electronic music » that was « very violent. » But when you listen to Zongamin and Vitalic, their distorted bass still sounds like a bass. « Waters » sounds like pure distortion is wrecking the speakers. Which, it turns out, is what many people thought was happening when they first heard it.
When Justice started playing the song at festivals and clubs « We emptied so many festivals with this track. It was terrible, » says de Rosnay earnestly, shaking his head. It happened so many times that we would clear e tent with 3000 or 4000 people in one or two minutes. There were always 10 or 20 people who would stay because they were so fucked up they couldn’t move to the exit door, but it was a bit scary because this track was a disaster on the dance floor and when we played it to friends, they were a bit like – » and he makes a face like an American first realizing that the blue stuff in blue cheese is mold.
RENAISSANCE POST « GENESIS »
The beginning of « Genesis, » the ominous introduction to Justice’s debut album, Cross, sounds a lot like the theme from Jaws, and it, too, announced a hulking presence lurking beneath the surface. When the drums and bass come in, there’s an overwhelming sense that something is happening that you can’t control. Something terrible has arrived, and you can’t stop it.
The album, at turns fun, funky, disco-y, loud, noisy, and eardrum-piercingly shrill, was the most anticipated electro debut since Daft Punk’s. Cross was nominated for a Grammy, and Justice were hailed as the era-defining saviors of electronic music, the next Daft Punk, the new rock and roll. They backed up these declarations with live shows that were bigger, louder, and flashier than anything most people had ever seen (perhaps then rivaled only -ironically, it seems – by Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 tour).
To really understand Justice you have to see them live, because as artists whose formal backgrounds are even more graphical than musical, a live setting is where their talents most naturally and thoroughly intersect. Their excellent de Tocqueville-ian tour documentary, A Cross the Universe, provides a glimpse of the hysteria their live shows incite. The film, directed by Romain Gavras and graphic designer Bertand de Langeron, aka So Me, documents Justice’s three-week voyage through North America while headlining the 2008 Myspace Music Tour. They play Madison Square Garden, shoot guns, marry groupies in Vegas, and in the end get arrested for smashing a glass bottle over a harasser’s head.
It seems significant that the tour documented for the film was sponsored by Myspace, because Justice are one of the early groups to understand the true promotional power of the internet in a post-record-sales era. When I ask what role the internet has played in their career, de Rosnay admits a 
major one. « But at the peak of when we were every day on Myspace I think we had like 13,000 friends, which seemed to be a lot at the time and when we would see people with 20,000 friends or whatever it seemed to be absurd, and this was at a time when the internet felt really useful to us. Then in 2009 or so we were doing a Facebook page and we had 1.5 million followers or whatever, so the proportions changed dramatically. But even today it’s very important to us because we sell probably less records than we would have in the 90s or the 2000s but our music is in more homes, which allowed us to play big venues and stages very early on. We’ve always been very happy with the internet and with downloading because we never knew what it was to sell like 3 million records. »
« You’ve been happy with illegal downloading? » I say. « Yeah, » de Rosnay says. « l think for one record we sell there are like 20 people who have it at their place, and at the end of the day this is what’s important to us- we make music for it to be heard. So while of course it’s very satisfactory to sell thousands of records or more than this, the best gratification finally is to know that your music touches people. »
It’s probably difficult to measure, but if you can count on multitudes of fans too cheap to buy your record but ready to plop down 40 dollars for a concert ticket, it’s easy to see how one could make a living. Rather than fighting the idea of people getting their music for free, Justice immediately accepted the idea, embraced it, and learned to live-and thrive-within it.
JUMPING THE ELECTRONIC BAND WAGON BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE
In the years between the release of Justice’s first album and now, the metaphorical electronic music ship has grown into something that might be described more precisely as a mega cruise liner; one with all-night ecstasy-fueled raves, legions of sweaty teens in neon American Apparel clothing, and thousands of bottles of Swedish House Mafia-endorsed vodka. In September of last year Details magazine published an article about electronic dance music (EDM) DJs in Las Vegas in which they reported that the biggest names pull in up to $300,000 an hour to DJ at Sin City clubs, and that many of them are signing year-long residencies. The scene, according to sources within the article, appears to be at its zenith. « To some, » the article says, « the Vegas DJ market in mid-2012 looks a lot like the Internet bubble of 2000 and the housing bubble of 2006. »
In July of this year Rolling Stone published a special issue about EDM. Deadmau5’s masked face filled the cover with a wide smile, enormous yellow ears, and X’ed out eyes. The cover lines read « DANCE MADNESS! THE CLUBS! THE FESTIVALS! THE DRUGS! AND THE DJS WHO RULE THE WORLD! » The three artists listed on the cover were Deadmau5, Skrillex, and Swedish House Mafia (who, coincidentally, announced in June that they were breaking up). Inside the issue were eleven features about EDM. Names mentioned repeatedly included the three on the cover, Tiesto, David Guetta, and, as godfathers, Daft Punk. There were sidebars and infographics titled « THE NEW SUPERSTAR CLASS, » « NINETIES SUPERSTARS RAVE ON, » and « EDM’S NEXT WAVE: FOUR HOT ACTS. » One name was mysteriously missing from the 11-page package : Justice. Their prog-rock and medieval-inspired second album, Audio, Video, Disco., had, it seemed, caused Justice, once the heralded captains of the ship to be swiftly dumped overboard in the middle of the night while the ravers raved on.
The much-anticipated Audio, Video, Disco. has a new sound that Justice describe as daytime music for the country., in contrast to Cross’s nighttime music for the city. Listening to it, they say, should feel like seeing an old friend with a new haircut. There are surprising elements of the record that were not present on Cross an simply do not fit in with the general EDM movement today; the album might appear at first to be Justice’s attempt to distance themselves from the bloated monster they unwittingly helped create, but somehow in retrospect they seem to have never quite fit in the EDM category to begin with.
When I bring up critics who appear to have taken as premise the idea that Justice’s goal with Audio, Video, Disco. was to make prog rock for today’s electro listener, de Rosnay says, « We never tried to make anything other than just powerful music – and sometimes you can make powerful music by making very smooth music; powerful doesn’t mean agressive – but without any stylistic considerations. Anyway, electronic music is not really a genre of music, it’s just a process of producing music. Home studios are mainly electronic-based, so that’s the reason it ends up sounding electronic. »
« We still can’t believe that the type of music we make brings us to play big festivals and venues, » de Rosnay continues. « We have always made radical choices and we are amazed that they are still people liking it more and more. Both times we’ve recorded albums we’ve listened to every new song and thought, ‘Fuck, who’s going to listen to that? ‘When we were doing the medieval stuff on the second album we were loving it, but at the same time we were like, ‘Damn, it’s gonna be tough!’
£One can imagine them having similar thoughts seven years ago while clearing festival tents with Waters of Nazareth, a song that came to represent what so many fans of Justice most love.
I ask Winter if he thinks Audio, Video, Disco. will catch on to the extent that Cross did, and this time he has no doubt. « I am sure this second album will hit people’s face soon or later, » he says. « Immediate music is not our thing. We are not in a rush, and I’m glad we can take our time. It’s a luxury life I’ll say. »
WHO EVER SAID TWO FRENCH GUYS CAN’T FILL AMERICAN STADIUMS ?
It’s almost time for Justice to close out the first day of Outside Lands. None of us are too eager to get off the bus, though, because, as de Rosnay observes after pivoting toward the window, « it looks like it’s freezing outside. »
As we gather our courage to go back into the cold, I ask what will come next – another live album maybe? De Rosnay tells me they’ve recorded the material for one and are just waiting for a good idea to come to release it (the first one, he says, was an extra to the documentary, and they’re not going to release a second one just to release it). They won’t, however, be recording themselves acting up across America again. « Right now we’re just focused on the tour, and after that we’ll see what happens, » de Rosnay says. « But we like to focus on one thing at a time, because to be far away from the studio for a long period of time creates excitement to go back, and when we’re in studio, generally, we don’t tour at all, so when we finish making an album we can’t wait to go back onstage and do it. We alternate things very clearly, and we don’t intertwine anything. And we still have a lot of work to do on the live show, because there are still ways of making it better than it is. We’ll focus on that, and when it will be done it will be done. »
That’s one thing Justice are undeniably good at – knowing when it’s time to move on.
If you would have told me 15 years ago that two French guys could fill American stadiums with English speaking music I would have laughed in your face. But here we are, throngs of American kids screaming for two guys named Gaspard and Xavier to come on stage.
Electronic music has not only allowed artists to win over audiences they never before would have had access to, to make music we haven’t really heard before, to blur genres and literally expand sound, it’s also allowed them to change their style on a dime. And with the implosion of the labels, with less 
pressure to repeat one’s previous successes, perhaps one’s less inclined now to make that follow up album which usually sucks and sells out. How long Justice can ride the wave is anyone’s guess, and who knows if they evern really want to? What’s clear though is that technology both in the way their music is made and the savviness in which they’ve used it to market themselves and get it heard by people has given Justice the power an earlier generation of rock and roll artists didn’t have.
Whether that means there’s more pressure or less is a subjective guess, but for two young shy French geeks who just wanted to make beats on a make shift computer with Gameboy headphones, what else could one ask for?
By Ren McKnight
Photos by Paul Heartfield and Perou
