The music video for Justice’s “Stress” is out:
“Stress” is directed by Romain Gavras, co-founder of the French art collective Kourtrajmé. Gavras also directed the music video for Simian Mobile Disco’s “I Believe”, and the music video for DJ Mehdi’s “Signatune (Thomas Bangalter edit)” (my Eastern European dad is a fan of the video; view it below).
Call me ignorant, but I didn’t really get the “Stress” video at first. I love anything that has to do with teenagers rioting, but I didn’t get the overall message, and more specifically why you could see the camera crew in the video. According to my French roomie Ndeur, the video is a flashback and commentary on the outburst of riots by French suburban youth in the fall of 2005. The riots were initially triggered by the accidentally deaths of two teenagers from a poor commune in the Eastern suburbs of France when they were chased by police and hid in an electrical power station where they were electrocuted. Over the course of three months, the unrest spread to 274 cities in France, with 2,888 arrests, 8,973 cars damaged, 1 death, and 126 police and firefighters injured. Damage was estimated at 200 million euros.
Ndeur told me that the significance of the camera crew in the video for “Stress” is the influence the French and international media had in sensationalizing and thus further triggering the youth riots. The lack of white racial representation of the delinquents in the video likely refers to international media coverage of the riots as acts of violence by the French Muslim youth, despite the fact that it was determined by the French Intelligence that there was no Islamic factor in the riots.
Source: click here for an English Wikipedia article on the riots.
The music video for DJ Mehdi’s “Signatune (Thomas Bangalter edit)”:
DJ Vaneska 