Programme notes
Justice Vs Simian - We Are Your Friends
Summary
A remix that outgrew its source: the French duo Justice reworked Simian's "Never Be Alone" into a blown-out electro record, and the remix became the version the world knows. The video, all cheap-looking party footage and hard cuts, matched the music's deliberate crudeness.
The sound — distorted, clipped, unapologetically loud — became one of the signatures of mid-2000s French electronic music, and this record is where a lot of listeners first encountered it.
Why it matters
It is a clean example of the remix culture that the blog era ran on, where a rework could eclipse an original and a track could break internationally without a conventional label push. The aesthetic it helped popularise — deliberately overdriven, closer to rock loudness than club fidelity — shaped a decade of dance production.
Controversy
At the 2006 MTV Europe Music Awards the video won its category, and Kanye West interrupted the ceremony to argue that his own video should have won. The episode was widely covered at the time and is now usually recalled as an early instance of a pattern he repeated on larger stages.