In 2013, Edward Snowden rocked the world of government surveillance when he dropped bombshell revelations about the National Surveillance Agency.
On Thursday it was the music world Snowden rocked, when he dropped a red-hot techno track co-recorded with French music icon Jean-Michel Jarre.
The song, called Exit, mixes clips of Snowden warning of the dangers of privacy interference with what a colleague here at the Guardian described as “haunting, discordant synths”.
Exit was posted to Jarre’s YouTube channel on Thursday afternoon. The collaboration came about after Jarre gave an interview to the Guardian last year, and asked our music critic Alexis Petridis to put him in touch with Snowden. Jarre described his music, over which Snowden performs, as a “hectic, obsessive techno track, trying to illustrate the idea of this crazy quest for big data on one side and the manhunt for this one young guy by the CIA, NSA and FBI on the other”.
Continuing this theme, the music video has been contrived as a Matrix/Bourne Identity/Wikileaks drone footage mash-up. There’s video of green numbers scrolling down a black screen, interspersed with quick-zoom aerial reconnaissance images. There’s a disorientating car-chase, cutting to a fairly shoddy special effect of a satellite circling the Earth. This is a interspersed with shots of Jarre hopping around a studio playing the keyboard.
The rave-style track represents a different type of whistle-blowing for Snowden, who appears in the middle of the video, discussing privacy in front of a grey curtain. His contribution sits firmly in the spoken-word category, having been taken from an old interview about the dangers of a government spying on its citizens.
“Technology can actually increase privacy,” Snowden says. “The question is: ‘Why are our private details that are transmitted online... why are private details that are stored on our personal devices, any different than the details and private records of our lives that are stored in our private journals?’” And now it’s an inquiry you can dance to.
