The ChemBase

Hi I was at your concert on Friday in Birmingham which I enjoyed until the final part of the night. To be more specific it was until the visuals of patriarchal and religious stained glass windows. I thought them a strange choice and im really confused as to why they were shown and what relevance they had to the evening or to the tune they accompanied. Please could you enlighten me. I feel they were a poor choice as many of your audience were of different cultures and religions and some may have been euphoric and  influenced by them.I was feeling euphoric and I found them offensive because the church has been instrumental in making women secondary citizens and also in making nature  inferior to humans. I look forward to hearing back from you. Love and light Kazzer

Quote from: kazzer on Dec 02, 2019, 18:29

Hi I was at your concert on Friday in Birmingham which I enjoyed until the final part of the night. To be more specific it was until the visuals of patriarchal and religious stained glass windows. I thought them a strange choice and im really confused as to why they were shown and what relevance they had to the evening or to the tune they accompanied. Please could you enlighten me. I feel they were a poor choice as many of your audience were of different cultures and religions and some may have been euphoric and  influenced by them.I was feeling euphoric and I found them offensive because the church has been instrumental in making women secondary citizens and also in making nature  inferior to humans. I look forward to hearing back from you. Love and light Kazzer

These are the visuals for The Private Psychedlic Reel since (correct me when i'm wrong, whitenoise) they played that tune live (1997?)

the reel had always had cathedral panes for their visuals (since 97 though in 2011 they replaced them with the vortex lights from Burst generator) they play a much significant role with the demons for the vocals that played (sympathy for the devil by the rolling stones)

The Chemical Brothers have always been patriarchal misogynists from the start of their career, as evidenced by their early 1994 song "His Jazz", the order of genders in the title "Hey Boy Hey Girl", and most evidently in their 1997 hit "Smack My Bitch Up".

These beliefs continue - female members of The Chemical Brothers are paid a staggering 100% less than male members of The Chemical Brothers, and in February the band released the single "Got To Keep On (Making Me Sandwiches)".

Hey there, this is a fan forum, so nobody here will be able to give you a definite answer for why this specific visuals were chosen for the song The Private Psychedelic Reel.

I agree that the patriarchal societies were and still are horrible, and that we need to look very critically at most of our history and present structures of power.
There appears to be a Christian theme at the live performance of the Reel, with the stained glass windows and, in the middle of the song, a vocal sample of the Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil" along with images of demonic creatures.
However, I can not imagine that those visuals were chosen to promote any part of a patriarchy, or to proselytize in any way. If it were the case, the band would probably be open and outspoken about it (as is often the case when artists want to promote a worldview). I'm sure somebody here would remember if the Chems ever made a remark in that direction.

People read too much into everything these days and get too easily offended, methinks.

Quote from: WhiteNoise on Dec 02, 2019, 22:40

The Chemical Brothers have always been patriarchal misogynists from the start of their career, as evidenced by their early 1994 song "His Jazz", the order of genders in the title "Hey Boy Hey Girl", and most evidently in their 1997 hit "Smack My Bitch Up".

These beliefs continue - female members of The Chemical Brothers are paid a staggering 100% less than male members of The Chemical Brothers, and in February the band released the single "Got To Keep On (Making Me Sandwiches)".

:D Bwah!

Don't think, just let it flow...

Hah! I always thought Smack My Bitch Up was a track by Moby from his 1996 album Woman Rights  ???

Quote from: ThePumisher on Dec 03, 2019, 12:35

Smack My Bitch Up was a track by Moby

I thought Moby is from The Chemical Brothers

Quote from: Explud on Dec 03, 2019, 13:34

I thought Moby is from The Chemical Brothers

You mix things up with their b-side Power Moby

© => @raybaseley.raw

https://www.instagram.com/raybaseley.raw

Wow, I'm not even religous at all, but that shot is divine! Great timing!

Quote from: WhiteNoise on Dec 02, 2019, 22:40

The Chemical Brothers have always been patriarchal misogynists from the start of their career, as evidenced by their early 1994 song "His Jazz", the order of genders in the title "Hey Boy Hey Girl", and most evidently in their 1997 hit "Smack My Bitch Up".

These beliefs continue - female members of The Chemical Brothers are paid a staggering 100% less than male members of The Chemical Brothers, and in February the band released the single "Got To Keep On (Making Me Sandwiches)".

This is horrible, especially that pay discrepancy. Now that I think about it... they're Chemical Brothers, not Chemical Brothers and Sisters, or Chemical Family. I must be an idiot to have not realised the misogyny playing out in front of me.
Guess 'Eve of Destruction' is about how Eve tempted Adam and therefore what a lesser being women are too.

To treat this with some measure of seriousness:
a) The Chemical Brothers are not affiliated with this website in any official capacity, and therefore aren't likely to see this, although every couple of promo cycles they decide it's a good idea to do a fan q&a on here so you could bring it up there if you're willing to wait around.
b) The people to ask about this would, regardless, probably be Adam Smith and Marcus Lyall, who've been responsible for the group's live visuals since their inception and are given considerable creative freedom w/r/t what sort of imagery and themes appear in them.
c) As a devoted enthusiast of Smith and Lyall's work, my decidedly non-authoritative opinion would be that the use of medieval Christian imagery is a deliberate subversion of the lineage that "The Private Psychedelic Reel" traces back to traditional Eastern and specifically Indian musical styles, by way of the exoticized and mystical uses those sounds were put towards in the 60's psychedelic music that "Reel" is more deliberately trying to evoke (and, even more narrowly, the use of sitar in Beatles tracks like "Norwegian Wood" and "Love You To"). Part of the considerable trust the Chems place in their visual team stems from a shared desire to avoid the obvious aesthetic tropes of the 90's electronica scene they came up in - the sort of instincts that led them to use an archival photo of hitchhikers for the cover of their first album instead of some spiffy CGI rave-flyer imagery. So when the obvious new encore number for their live shows was a transcendent 9-minute piece drenched in sitar, with a snake-charmer clarinet solo dominating the back half, Smith+Lyall's first creative priority was probably to avoid going full Astralasia (https://www.discogs.com/Astralasia-Axis-Mundi/master/3125), and to, if possible, find the exact aesthetic opposite of going full Astralasia while still capturing the euphoric, transportive feel those evocations of Indian mysticism in 90's rave culture were typically meant to elicit. What they decided on, in accordance with their within-technical-limitations approach of rapidly flashing still images, was to swap out Westerners' appeal to an Eastern higher power with a direct appeal to the archetypical Western higher power, by way of a rapidfire montage of medieval Christian artwork. Even back in 1997, though, they seem to have had some reservations about the message that would send - even if not the exact ones you identify - and so gradually interspersed with those mosaic figures they included multiple stills (https://youtube.com/watch?v=yclUNGDLozI&t=1h32m08s) of a laughing clown, another visual signifier they'd return to often (both of them, in real life, coming from a lineage of practicing clowns). It's an attempt, I think, to construct that psychedelic sensibility of images euphorically colliding and some greater voice arising out of the nonsense, but with elements exclusive to their own culture instead of passing the responsibility for transcendence off to some external cultural force. When they revived that version of the visuals from 2016 onward there was a more consistent thematic focus on the religious imagery, but some subversion still creeps in with the "Sympathy For The Devil" interlude where the hallowed images of saints and martyrs are replaced with grinning demons in the exact same crisp, colorful stained-glass style. This didn't abruptly become a Hillsong (https://youtube.com/watch?v=PY0mo8GFfGo) concert.
(Again, though, if you'd like to make an effort at taking this up with Smith or Lyall I doubt they'd take your concerns entirely unseriously. If nothing else they've clearly stepped into these aesthetic choices with some measure of deliberateness and could therefore make an effort at explaining them.)

Great: Response.