Civilization

Album: Audio, Video, Disco (2011)
Charted: 53
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the first single from the French electronic duo Justice's sophomore album. It was released on Ed Banger/Because Records on April 4, 2011.
  • The song featured as the soundtrack to an Adidas advertising campaign spearheaded by French director Romain Gavras (M.I.A.'s "Born Free" video), with whom Justice has worked in the past. The ad featured various sports stars, including soccer player David Beckham and Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls. B.o.B and Katy Perry, who have appeared in past Adidas commercials, also made brief cameos.
  • The song features vocals from Ali Love (real name Alexander Williams), who is a British singer. Williams' first claim to fame was providing vocals for The Chemical Brothers' 2007 hit, "Do It Again." Justice's Xavier De Rosnay told NME they weren't aware of Love's contribution to the Chemical Brothers track. "It's funny, we didn't know he was the guy singing on the track until he told us," he said. "We discovered him when we listened to the demo of his album, Love Harder, and we hadn't made the connection."
  • Gaspard Auge told NME: "We wanted to have a track with loads of accidents, like loads of tempo changes." As for the Dungeons & Dragons-esque lyrics, he likens them to something like "a fourteen-year-old kid could have written in the back of class," an actual criticism the band received for the song but, De Rosnay chimes in, they took it as a compliment because, "this person understood everything about this song."
  • De Rosnay on the simplicity of idea behind the apocalyptic music video: "I guess it was so simple that people couldn't believe it was that simple, and they started to find an explanation to it. But we just wanted to make a world as in the Medieval times when people thought that the earth was flat and when you arrived at the edge of the earth, you would fall into the void."

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