Chromeo's Dave 1 recommends 7 books that changed his perspective — from hip-hop history to Proust
Chromeo’s concert is now on CBC Music Live
Dave 1, also known as David Macklovitch, is one half of the Canadian electro-funk duo Chromeo.
Before and during the rise of Chromeo, he also spent years as an academic, working towards his PhD in French literature.
"I put the PhD on indefinite pause hiatus 11 years ago. But up until then, I was what you could call a professional reader. It wasn't just my academic journey. It was my job," he told CBC Books.
Reading for academic purposes came with "blind spots" since he was zeroing in on a specific language and literary and critical canon, he said. "So when I stopped being an academic, I tried to really kind of cover all these other pockets that I hadn't explored before and now I'm still doing this."
This trajectory is reflected in the book recommendations he shared ahead of Chromeo's CBC Music Live concert.
Ranging in both language and subject matter, these titles changed how Dave 1 sees the world.
Du côté de chez Swann by Marcel Proust
Du côté de chez Swann, available as Swann's Way in English, is the first of seven volumes that make up Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Exploring themes of time, memory, love and art, it revisits the narrator's childhood while weaving in tales about family friend and neighbour named Swann.
"It's the be all, end all of the written word, not only in French literature, but also, I think, for the modern European or Western tradition. It's with no hesitation that I'll say that if I were to only have one book to read for the rest of my life, I would reread this one," Dave 1 said.
"I was in my mid 20s when I read it for the first time. I read it fairly late, but I think for a book like that, you get a lot from reading it at a later age, and I remember when I read it, what I was shocked by was the humour in it, specifically the Jewish humour. But I think that may get lost a little bit in the English translation.
We don't really have a French Shakespeare. He would be the closest thing.- Dave 1
"I remember the first night I was typing out passages and emailing them to my mom because I was like, this is hilarious. I spent the whole night just typing email after email of excerpts that I thought were so, so hysterical.
"We don't really have a French Shakespeare. He would be the closest thing. And I don't think you can think about modernity without Proust."
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
American Pastoral is the story of Swede Levov and what happens when his American luck runs out. Swede has it all — a former Miss New Jersey wife, a prosperous glove factory and a stone house. But when his daughter, Merry, protests the American involvement in the Vietnam War with a radical act of political terrorism, the life he once knew unravels.
"I didn't read any Philip Roth in school because I was too busy reading French literature from every century and then studying in French. So I had never read Philip Roth until like 10 years ago," Dave 1 said.
"When I read Philip Roth, all I could read was Proust. I was like, 'This guy is like a Proust stan.' It felt like a Proustian sensibility and also style. Roth also plays with like chronology and temporality but transposed into New Jersey academia. So it was cool because it felt like a contemporary American counterpart, with a sensibility that was familiar to me. But it's more depressing and the existential takeaway is a lot darker."
The Big Payback by Dan Charnas
The Big Payback details hip-hop's four-decades-long journey to domination as a genre, from the studios where the first rap records were made to the boardrooms where the big deals were signed.
Dan Charnas' book is one of the greatest books about hip-hop culture.- Dave 1
"Another thing that really shaped who I am other than French literature and French literary criticism is hip-hop culture. I discovered hip-hop culture when I was 14 or 13 and I never touched my guitar again for a decade. I forgot about rock music and classic rock music and I changed the way I dress and I told my brother to start becoming a DJ. It transformed me and transfixed me through and through," Dave 1 said.
"Dan Charnas' book is one of the greatest books about hip-hop culture and it certainly is my favourite because when it came out, much had been written about the history of the music,the cultural resonance of the music, but not much had been written about hip-hop history through the lens of the cultural institutions that helped prop it up.
"The Big Payback is the hip hop history that starts from the very genesis, but told through the lens of all the club promoters, DJs, record label founders, radio programmers, impresarios, managers who took a chance on this music and believed in it and turned it into the cultural juggernaut that we know today. And what's interesting about all these people is that they come from such a variety of backgrounds and it's a further testament to why hip-hop is so universal.
"I changed the way I think about the music industry, how the music business used to be and how the music business is. It was an incredible sort of synergy for me."
Lector in fabula by Umberto Eco
Lector in fabula, which is not available in English, is a work of nonfiction that assesses the role of both the reader and the writer in the act of reading.
Lector in fabula really changed the way I looked at the act of reading.- Dave 1
"Lector in fabula really changed the way I looked at the act of reading — my master's thesis was on the act of reading. It's a book about what happens when you read and the central idea is that when you read a work of fiction, you mobilize in your head every other cliché of every other work of fiction that you've read. And as you read, you use those cliché narratives to project what you think is gonna happen," Dave 1 said.
"This book is a truly eloquent and has a humorous way of defining the act of reading in those terms."
Mythologies by Roland Barthes
Mythologies, available under the same title in English, is a collection of essays that explores the codes and symbols that govern our choices. Barthes argues that these are fabrications of consumerism set to propagate myths of success, well-being and happiness that must be debunked.
"There are two things that to me are still so relevant today. It's seeing the world in terms of sign systems and analyzing pop culture, everything about pop culture, advertisement, propaganda, and the fact that all those cultural discourses use sign systems to communicate things and we, in turn, decode them to interpret things. And in today's chaotic, postmodern world, those things are still as relevant as ever," Dave 1 said.
La Bataille de Pharsale by Claude Simon
La Bataille de Pharsale, which is not available in English, is a novel that explores questions of creation, chronology and observation.
"I used it as the primary text in my master's thesis and it's actually unreadable. There's barely any punctuation. You have to work yourself through the morass of language. That was my first experience with something where the idea of language, grammar and narrative were so deconstructed that then you look at the written word a different way. And also you become aware of what happens when you read, like the desperate need to make sense of things," Dave 1 said.
A Perfect Spy by John le Carré
In A Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym, a high-level intelligence officer, mysteriously disappears after the death of his father. As fellow members of the British Secret Service look for him, they begin to wonder whether the terms of his disappearance are more sinister than they could have imagined.
Definitely one of the best books I've ever read.- Dave 1
"Definitely one of the best books I've ever read. This not only has the density of Proustian prose, but also this one is really, really challenging to read. And it also has weird chronological twists and turns. It's like a paradigmatic case of reading as an intellectual exercise," Dave 1 said.
Dave 1's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
