Marie Davidson is a techno trickster. Electronic-music lovers have been grooving to the Quebecois artist for a minute, especially after Pitchfork chose her third album, Adieux au Dancefloor, as one of the 20 best electronic records of 2016. But Davidson really connected with wider audiences two years later, with the release of the propulsive single “Work It,” from 2018’s Working Class Woman. “You wanna know how I get away with everything?” she speak-sings with her signature acerbic delivery, which comes across sharp and chic in her French-Canadian accent. “I work / All the fucking time.” The track has all the single-minded attitude of Britney Spears’s 2013 classic “Work Bitch,” but very little warmth and no candy. While Spears depicts the daily grind as a means of achieving a luxury lifestyle, Davidson emphasizes something intrinsic about her hunger to work. When she ends the track insisting that to maintain your stamina you have to “Love yourself / Feed yourself,” she stamps it as an anthem for process-oriented perfectionists throughout the world.
On February’s City of Clowns (Deewee), Davidson takes on surveillance capitalism as a woman who recognizes her star power and privilege (she’s beautiful, thin, and white, and she’s benefitted from Canadian arts funding) as well as her limitations. She’s simply one dot in a constellation that shines for dance-floor demons who think critically about labor and wealth. The record opens with something of an airy sound poem about the “third modernity”—an economic and existential shift caused by the rise of artificial intelligence. On “Demolition,” Davidson growls and sings from the perspective of a data miner, delivering her lines (“I don’t want your cash, no / All I want is you / I want your data”) in a psychosexual crescendo. “Sexy Clown” laughs at the necessity and futility of individualism in the face of big tech, while the old-school techno masterpiece “Contarian” revels in the tension between the refusal to bow down to authority and the ubiquity of algorithm-fueling digital contrarianism. City of Clowns is as intellectually provocative as it is danceable. Britney could never.
Marie Davidson Fri 4/18, 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $25, $22 in advance, 21+
