Welcome to Throwback Tunesday, where Mashable amplifies the echoes of music past. With genre trends and throwbacks, we synthesize music and nostalgia.
Explaining Chromeo to someone unfamiliar with the band is a tall order. The electro-funk duo’s newest album is titled White Women. Chromeo’s live performance is aesthetically enhanced by keyboards propped up with plastic, high-heeled women’s legs. Dave 1 and P-Thugg pen songs with names like “Bonafide Lovin’ (Tough Guys),†containing lyrics such as, “Never mind an SMS/What you need is a sweet caress.†Think you’ve got it?
Think again. The title White Women is a nod to prolific photographer Helmut Newton and his 1976 collection of the same name. Recent single “Jealous (I Ain’t With It)" takes the opposite approach of “Bonafide Lovin'†â€" it’s written from an underdog’s perspective: "Is it really my fault?/I get a shiver when I see her with those other guys/Wearing the jacket I bought."
Dave 1 and P-Thugg (a.k.a. Dave Macklovitch and Patrick Gemayel) are messing with us â€" and they're having fun doing it. In a previous interview, Macklovitch reveals that Chromeo is meant be confusing, that they "purposely cultivate ambiguity." This intriguing meld of highbrow/lowbrow is apparent more than ever on White Women, which includes collaborations with Toro Y Moi and Solange Knowles.
Mashable chatted with Macklovitch on the phone to peek into the duo’s past, to get a feel for how this enigmatic pair of longtime friends came to be â€" starting with a photo of the two as roommates over 10 years ago. Keep your tongues securely fastened in-cheek.
Mashable: What’s going on in this photo?
I am wearing a very, very questionable outfit, that’s the first thing that is going on. We are standing in front of our apartment in Montreal that Pete and I shared when we were roommates. We lived together over there for maybe a year-and-a-half or two years â€" that was in 2000-2001.
Was P a good roommate?
We were both a little schmutzy back in those days. He was okay. I feel like we had a couple of arguments over dishes, but other than that it was good. It was fun â€" the apartment felt really big to us, and right then is when we started Chromeo together. Because we were best friends forever, we were roommates based on the fact that we were buddies, but I clearly remember it was right around the time we moved in together in this apartment that we started Chromeo.
You’ve been friends since you were teens … what was your friend group like, and who did you hang out with?
Well, P was like a year older than me in high school, and in high school it’s like dog years, so one year’s like 20 years, really. I think P was very threatened by me because I was a lot better than him at guitar, so when we were in the band together, I was a lot better than him; he felt threatened and he got demoted to bass. I think he felt some type of way about that and somehow we clicked, we became best buddies like a week later.
And it was always based around humor, our friendship; we would always crack jokes and we would have these skits â€" we’d go to house parties and make everybody laugh by doing our skits. And of course we had our high school band, so we would play together and start playing in local bars in Montreal and people from our high school would come to see us.
P and I were always a nucleus of that sort of thing because we always had that distinct look â€" sort of tall, skinny dude and shorter chubby guy that were always goofing around. People really knew us. They recognized us everywhere so when we went to clubs everybody knew who we were.
We definitely were about collecting records and buying old vinyl, and every weekend we would go digging for old records together. We were also into graffiti. But one time we got caught and P really flipped out in front of the police officer, in an "I am never going out with him again" sort of way. He was too scared I think, so that came and went.
Did you hang out with the ladies?
P had success with the ladies, me definitely not. We are talking decades of goofing around. I remember at one point when I finally got a girlfriend, P said he really didn’t like her, but he was like, "You should hold onto her, because any girl that likes you, you should just be lucky and just hold on to."
And I held on to her for a couple of months, but then I wanted to break up with her, so we coordinated our breakups together, which was really fun. I remember P grew a mullet so his girlfriend would finally get over him.
Did it work?
It really worked. He grew such a long mullet that his girl was like, "Dude, you are either going to cut that or we are going to break up," and he was like, "Sorry, that’s me."
I remember we drove one time from Montreal to Miami to go stay at my grandparents’ old apartment down there, and that was really fun. We would drive down to New York all the time because we had friends down there; I can’t even count the number of times we made that drive.
As you can tell there are a million classic times. Starting Chromeo was really an extension of that. Taking our love for this music we discovered as teenagers, mixed with our sense of humor and our friendship â€" that’s how the band started.
So this love of music â€" what spurred this? What did you guys listen to in the early days that was formative for Chromeo?
We’re obviously from a hip hop generation, so we were way too young to know the music that Chromeo was influenced by. We never listened to Hall and Oates and Rick James when they were out because we were too young. We discovered hip hop music, and through hip hop we discovered all the samples. And we were like, "Oh my god, this Snoop Dogg record is actually a funkadelic record."
You know in high school, you always had to have your secret thing that no one else is up on, but you just know about it and you felt special that way, and so that was our thing: Knowing that kind of music because nobody else really understood it. We would f*ck with people, we would play the Warren G record and then play the Michael McDonald record, and we would be like, "Oh my god, it’s the same thing," and we felt really cool doing that.
And at one point we become so obsessed with those old ‘70s and ‘80s records that eventually we started â€" we wanted to make music like that ourselves using analog synthesizers and vocals and love songs. I guess with Chromeo, we found a way to make it original and to actually make it modern.
I hear you also used a computer from 1995 … is that still around? What’s the story behind that?
After the young high school band days, we started to make hip hop beats, and P is the one who gave me the software that he got on a bootleg CD from his uncle. He put the software on my parents’ computer in the basement, and I bought an old sampler so I could make beats with it.
To this day, we have the same computer with the same software on it. I think it has 15 gigs of memory, and it’s the same software from 1995, or '97 â€" maybe '96, '98 â€" I don’t know, somewhere around there. It’s still the same, I still have it â€" we still use it for all Chromeo songs.
We're seeing more of people looking back on music/nostalgia-driven trends … what do you think is spurring these trend? There’s a lot of ‘80s/’90s-inspired stuff coming out of Brooklyn today …
That was always there. You just got that 20-year cycle of nostalgia, now it’s all about Seinfeld. Seinfeld is like the subject of everyone’s nostalgia .
To be honest, with our music, even though nostalgia was the starting point of it, we make sure our music looks and feels modern because just being a throwback band is not interesting to us. The reason why we collaborate with people like Toro Y Moi and Solange and Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend, and the reason why this new album of ours made a bigger impact than all of our previous stuff is actually because it’s the most modern.
Even though there is this retro thing about it and analog technology â€" and yes, we use an old computer and all that â€" the sensibility, the packaging, the envelope of our music and the dialog that we have with other musicians is actually a modern one. What I always say, is if we were around in the ‘80s, we wouldn’t have a career. How could I compete with Prince? I would be Prince’s roadie if I was lucky, you know what I’m saying?
That would be an experience …
Those guys could really play! I’m really happy we aren’t back in those days.
If you could go back to when Chromeo first started and tell yourself one thing from the vantage you have now â€" anything â€" what would it be?
It’s going to be okay. You’re sluffing in P’s Toyota Rav4 carrying your own amp to play in Pittsburgh in front of four people. I’ll never forget. Perseverance!
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