Dombrance
Cain’s Ballroom
Tulsa
March 9, 2024
The character of Dombrance — with his red suit, black tie, distinctive mustache, and high-energy beats — was well-received, and deservingly so, at Cain’s. Dombrance’s persona is a slightly aloof French DJ, a man of few words (“My name is Dom-brahnce! I come from Frahnce!”) who comes to work on the people in need of dance. In this he gives a fascinating physical performance, navigating his cul-de-sac of keyboards like a nuclear plant worker desperately trying to avert a meltdown, holding an arpeggiator with one hand while stretching to reach another keyboard across the way to create his feverishly danceable music. In so doing, he cartoonishly parodies a world in collapse.
Collapse of meaning, collapse of ideas, collapse of community: these have all been hallmarks of the past century, a fact which Dombrance lampoons with little mercy or distinction. As he worked his keyboards and the crowd, the video screens to either side of him played his trademark video content: For every one of his songs using the names of well-known figures (for example, the song “Sarkozy” goes, “Sarkozy/Sarkozy/Nicolas Sarkozy/Sarkozy”), a cartoon video of that famous figure played.
Dombrance skewed his performance towards his American audience, playing songs based on what are surely two of America’s least controversial figures: Barack Obama and Kanye West. (Yes, the lyrics are also just their names.) These are songs from his 2021 EP, Make America Dance Again, which includes songs based on Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Donald Trump as well. As a singer of politics, Dombrance seems to skate the middle line, choosing neither left, nor right, but only dance.
A few days ahead of his show, Tulsa People asked him where his political ideas and his art intersected, and he said this: “A bit like pop art plays with known figures, I use politics to hijack symbols known to everyone. To create a parallel world. It is above all a Trojan horse to convey my music which is intended to be universal and transgenerational.” I wonder if dance music is a strong enough soldier to make the Trojan horse a necessary piece of weaponry in this metaphor. And even if it is, I wonder if the American political landscape is an appropriate container for the weapon. The trick of the Trojan horse depends, after all, on the proffered symbol being benign.
Though Dombrance pushes his art through the lens of politics in many ways, I wasn’t terribly convinced by what we received of his own views. A late-show video montage solidified this for me. In the vein of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” the montage hurled the audience through a litany of world events: the pandemic, floods, earthquakes, politicians, protests, and the like, while Dombrance continued business as usual on the keys, saying nothing about the montage (with the exception of playing a 15-second sample, source unknown, about climate change and the children being in danger). The video had no real aim that I could see other than displaying events which shook the world. If Dombrance has opinions on, say, the COVID-19 vaccine, or Trump’s presidency — events the montage displayed — the audience doesn’t get to know them. It seems to be a part of the character of Dombrance to live above it.
Do you remember that moment, while the George Floyd protests were going on, when David Guetta did a rooftop show in which he said, “Shout out to [Floyd’s] family,” while revving up MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech in an EDM show? Guetta got absolutely crapped on, because it was perceived as cringe. In retrospect, I appreciate Guetta’s attempt, ham-handed as it was, to express an opinion, a mourning, a real human emotion, something the very similar Dombrance video montage deftly avoided.
The montage struck me as closer to a 2015 incident with the post-modernist poet Kenneth Goldsmith at a Brown University conference, wherein the conceptual poet, known for taking existing texts and “remixing” them to create poetry, presented “The Body of Michael Brown”: a tinkered-with but largely-unchanged reading of the autopsy report of the murdered 18-year-old from Ferguson. The act of the reading was shocking not only in the normality with which it was received — taking place in the nearly comatose world of academic poetry — but also in its inability or unwillingness to express an opinion on or even explore the facts which it nonetheless chose to present. “What are we to make of this?”, most poets ask. Some refuse to answer.
Dombrance could be seen as refusing the question entirely, focusing the energy back on his dance performance. (The performance and the music, to be clear, were strong. The music was straightforward, well-mixed, well-paced, and the artist clearly understands how to keep a crowd moving and attentive: each time Dombrance so much as raised his head to look at the audience, they roared.) And yet, the use of popular politicians’ names invites the response: What does Dombrance actually believe? I certainly don’t buy the premise that his music needs a Trojan horse; it’s too good, too well-crafted. I do buy the premise that these political figures are a fun gimmick with which Dombrance can get his music talked about.
If a post-modernist world has taught us anything, it’s that the text has a meaning even if it refuses that meaning. If I hypothetically read to you my hypothetical poem “Hitler,” which was nothing but the word “Hitler” over and over, I could easily say that the word has no meaning, and yet, wouldn’t I be stupid to say it? “Utterance should carry conviction” feels so passé to type out in 2024, but Dombrance’s lack of presented conviction — I have no doubt that he possesses it, I simply don’t believe that it’s being communicated in any way that makes his symbolism necessary — left me feeling empty, even as I danced, pulled forward by the intensity of the music. Maybe Dombrance’s conviction is simply to straddle the American line, sell American records, and, as he says, make America dance again (as if, bafflingly, we’ve forgotten). If nothing matters, Dombrance says without saying — if everything’s collapsing — maybe that’s the best we’ve got.
Next at Cain’s Ballroom: 20th Annual Nude Art Show, March 23
