Steve Jobs once said, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do,†but this is a crap quote: a sickeningly warm, oversimplified, and disrespectful perspective on how one must achieve something of value. It’s passion that is required to reach greatness. Love certainly can be a catalyst for brilliance, but this is just one form of passion: one of many potential motivators that can incite the obsession necessary for creation. Spite is undervalued in this regard. Many cool things have arisen from seething hatred, from bloody revolutions to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting of a donkey-eared Biagio de Cesena burning in Hell as a snake nibbles on his penis. One of the coolest is The Dark Ages, released in 2014 by French multi-instrumentalist Emilien Villeroy, aka Le Aids.
While we could consider the actions of Michelangelo and the late 18th century French proletariat as ones of love, born of the desire to be free of oppression—it is not so for Le Aids. Villeroy describes the project on his Bandcamp page thus: “pop music as a disease.†This implies that the creative drive is not necessarily attached to therapeutic expression; instead, Villeroy views it as self-destructive. Even his comparatively light debut album I Like Major Chords… Very Much saw Villeroy revel in morose optimism: see “The Happiest Song Ever,†where, in the wake of being dumped by his girlfriend and the death of his best friend, he finds the silver lining in meeting new people to grow attached to and inevitably lose. By the time he plugged in his ukulele for 2009’s Cum to Get Her, Villeroy had begun to mercilessly hack away any dangling threads of hope with rusty-dagger chords, chopped-up dance-punk drum rhythms, and cutting lyrics about dissociation, isolation, and detestation. This started a loose trilogy of albums centered around the loss of innocence as one transitions into young adulthood, a cautionary meta-commentary on how giving yourself to art can break your spirit.
While The Lost Opportunities to Keep Quiet would come quickly, it wasn’t until after founding micro-label L’Œil Sourd and forming electroclash duo Les Jolies Choses that Villeroy would complete the trilogy with The Dark Ages several years later. A collection of bitter, noise-damaged gremlin pop, “U.P.†leads with chunky strums of uke before morphing into an of Montreal-esque glam jam. It’s the opening cut but the final party. Villeroy sings “I’m just coming back for you,†as if addressing music itself: enraptured by the euphoria of the first hit before nausea kicks in. It does: and in short order. “All My Friends†maintains the veneer of an upbeat groove, but bliss gives way to bile as he refers to said friends as “little rats,†“pigs,†and “bad puns you don’t get in time.†The harsh millstone grind of “Vulgar†is as if The Holy Bible-era Manic Street Preachers fully leaned into rave rock. Three tracks in, Villeroy has pivoted to “Fuck art, I wanna be bland†before snarkily cribbing Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.â€
When The Dark Ages isn’t vicious, it’s weary. With “Middle Ages,†Villeroy acknowledges that his life is “played on easy†with Konami cheat codes, and yet he still manages to hurt himself. And “The Cage†likens music to a birdcage he’s placed himself in. While “Frank Leaves the Band†on Cum to Get Her saw Villeroy express skepticism about the inherent value of music, he still framed abandoning it as a minor tragedy. Now, the true tragedy is that he keeps coming back (“At the end of this record, I’ll go back to being a happy manâ€). Towards the close, he’s narrating his death while musing on the pointlessness of his life (“À Vau​-​L’Eauâ€) before the apocalypse comes and wipes out the entirety of human achievement (“The End of the Worldâ€). It’s strychnine-level doomerism: barbed, hideous, and exhausting, but also uniquely cathartic, darkly funny, and charmingly earnest.
It would be another eight years before Villeroy would have his next—and supposedly last—Le Aids relapse with 2022’s Gagner la sortie. It closes with “Goodbye Le Aids Goodbye,†a self-indulgent farewell song well-earned. He sings about disappointing his mother after spending a decade and a half fiddling around with sounds hardly anyone listened to and how doing his own backing vocals makes him feel lonely and pathetic. Le Aids is the story of many talented artists we’ll never find our way to, put directly to record. As frustrated musicians continued to persevere through their own Dark Ages, Le Aids gave them a voice, however quiet. And in this, there is value.
