We Need To Talk About Giorgio: Why Did the Pioneering Producer's Comeback Go So Wrong?

It's been a month since the release of Giorgio Moroder's 17th studio album, Déjà Vu, and so a month since it was roundly destroyed with more critical fervour than most Adam Sandler movies. Yet, in every review trashing it, there was a strange sense of guilt, as if slamming the album was akin to taking an old family dog out into the garden to be shot. Pitchfork described Moroder's attempts at a return as "agonising to witness", Crack Magazine found it "crushingly bad", while the Guardian opted for "depressing". The mood was unanimous, the record sucked, but more than that, it sucked that it sucked.

The funny thing is, the pressure wasn't on Moroder to produce an absolute classic. The mood surrounding him since he resurfaced into the public consciousness via Daft Punk's "Giorgio by Moroder", has been one of fondness. There was nothing to prove. His reputation already more than acknowledged, the post Random Access Memories resurgence was supposed to be a victory lap. Realistically he could have put out a greatest hits compilation, slapped the words "remastered" and "deluxe" on it, and the world would have had no option but to continue celebrating him.

Moroder didn't do that, and perhaps we should credit him for having the energy and courage to once again enter the studio and create new music, against a hugely changed climate. Yet, Déjà Vu's failings are not the result of a back-firing attempt to exercise ingenuity, rather they are the dull nullifying results of a producer's identity disappearing into the miasma of the mainstream. The most apparent criticism of the record is just devoid of character the entire thing is. Tracks like opener "4 U With Love", or the Charli XCX featuring "Diamonds" sound like the music playing in a club scene during a teatime CBBC drama.

Many critics leveled the accusation that Moroder was attempting to replicate EDM, but in all honesty, he doesn't even get that far. Instead the album is made up of a series of bargain bin bangers, each song carrying all the staying power of an unreleased track on the never listened to album of a now forgotten girl-band. Worse still, tracks like "74 is the New 24" start to become amusing. The face value irony of lyrics centered around the concept that Moroder's age is no object, on a track that literally proves the opposite.

So where did it all go wrong? Well, really and truly the signs were there. In an interview with Pop Justice Moroder made a few statements that with hindsight clearly signal the confused haphazardness that characterised the album's creation. With respect to securing a deal he details how "after Daft Punk I got three major offers to make an album, and I decided to go with Sony." What is striking, is how the conversation about the record began with the mechanisms. Instead of "I had a bunch of ideas I'd been playing around with for while", the album seemed to come into life the moment the offers started rolling in.

This wouldn't necessarily have been the end of the world. An album can be a purely commercial venture and still pull through, in fact this is true in some sense of pretty much every great pop album ever made. Yet, even if the process starts in the boardroom, it has to leave and enter the studio at some point — especially when it comes to collaborations. Again, in his interview with Pop Justice, Moroder talks of Britney Spears feature on the bizarre and muddled cover of Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner". On that subject he said:

"She called me and wanted me to go to the studio to record it, but I was on a plane to Europe so I didn't record those vocals [in person]. But she's coming back, hopefully in the next few days, to record that bridge that I did…That was a song which a lot of musicians worked independently on – I had my version, which I did with Patrick [Jordan-Patrikios] my co-producer, but I was not happy with myself. So I gave it to a group of guys in Germany, then I wasn't sure, so I gave it to another musician I liked, and then finally I got everything together and put it together. It's like a worldwide connected internet song! But I'm going to see her soon, and I hope she finds time to do it! If she can't sing that bridge, I'll have to take it out."

This scattershot process seems to typify the approach to the entire record. Far from being locked in to one place, or even one idea, the culture surrounding it was one of composite ideas and detached influences. Not only were Britney's vocals recorded in a completely different place to Moroder but the song itself, a reworking of the original, had an apparently disposable bridge. What he generously dubs "a worldwide connected internet song" sounds more like a Eurovision song contest entry. Covering a classic with a monumentally well-known pop star was clearly seen as enough to carry the track, leaving the actual production by the wayside.

It is plausible that this is where the whole project fell down; resting on the assumption that if its composite parts sounded impressive enough then the record would be at least salvageable. Instead what resulted was a glut of names, and a complete absence of actual substance.

In his feature with SPIN the idea is floated that Moroder's initial run of hits, that fizzled out around 1986, was largely down to him being "derailed" by hip-hop. In the interview he states, "I had no idea about it. None at all. I could hear it was new, but I could never have produced it well. I didn't understand a word they were saying. I'm not a street guy; I'm not urban. I had no feel for it. I don't know if I would say I was out of step, because I recognized this music was exciting, but I was not willing or able to make it myself."

There are two interesting things to be taken from this statement. The first requires a consideration of Sia, and chiefly two of her features. In what is almost certainly just a strange accident, the verses on "Déjà Vu" carry an almost identical melody to her section on Kanye West's as yet unreleased "Wolves", produced by West, Cashmere Cat and Sinjin Hawke. Yet, while the first is a forgettable-upon-impact serving of post-Blurred Lines fluffery, the second takes the same tune and places it amongst production that is both unnerving and compelling. Where "Déjà Vu" bears no discerningly Moroder-esque characteristics, "Wolves" is sexy, haunting, perverse, and (like him or not) completely Kanye.

Yet spooky and sexy were completely Moroder's territory. "I Feel Love" is one of the strangest pieces of music ever to fill clubs. It winds and spins out into the stratosphere, marrying super-charged intimacy with completely cosmic decoration. So the argument could therefore follow that Moroder had it, but has now lost it. Well, this brings us to the second interesting dimension of his comments about hip-hop. In addition to saying that rap left him behind, his comments in the Spin interview also include a reference to popular music having curved back to his sensibilities, "it's all European disco on the radio now."

Quite likely, it is upon this shaky foundation that the whole project rested and was doomed to jar. It is true that disco-informed production has again become a staple of modern pop music, and it is also true that many of the big EDM producers are Europeans making large synth-based productions. However, it would be a colossal mistake to assume that this means music has gone "full circle" and doubled back on itself. While yes, there are shades of the past in popular music, the development to this point has still been linear. We aren't literally rehashing the past — as much as people like to criticise modern pop music for that, current sounds are a hybrid far larger than "nu-disco". For a producer like Moroder who has been ostensibly out-of-action for thirty years, the shift has been monumental.

The challenge facing him was to plug this thirty year gap, yet rather than pulling through with his distinct identity, Moroder fell into the most obvious modes of current production possible. He did manage to make his album sound vaguely 2015, but completely lost himself in the process.

As a final way of demonstrating this, let's consider one of Moroder's earlier hits, the fantastic Philip Oakley collaboration "Together in Electric Dreams", alongside the Kylie Minogue featuring "Right Here, Right Now" from Déjà Vu. The songs aren't obviously similar, but at their core both are slices of danceable Euro-pop. Both reaching for that big emotion-soaked chorus, but only one of them getting there. There's nothing atrocious about the Minogue collaboration. In fact, in the grand schemes of the album it is one of the stronger tracks. But across "Together in Electric Dreams" Philip Oakley is given the space to breathe. Moroder's singular production is channeled into details and idiosyncrasies. Guitar licks and ethereal synth glissandos make the track inimitably Moroder. Yes it is cheesy as fuck, but when the tune is that good — who honestly cares?

"Right Here, Right Now" on the other hand relies on everything and nothing. The tune is okay, and if you were drunk enough it might elicit a few arms in the air, but the way the tracks sounds, the texture of it, is completely faceless. It's a bit David Guetta, a bit Mark Ronson, and in the process, a lot of nobody. The only element that feels remotely Moroderish is the vocoder, which tellingly probably makes most people think of Daft Punk now anyway.

So we are essentially left with a question of genius, and more importantly the endurance of genius. Giorgio Moroder is absolutely one of the most important, influential, and prolific producers in the history of dance music. Yet it is difficult to imagine some of the tracks on Déjà Vu making it onto the OST of a live action Disney movie. Perhaps this record is ultimately proof that genius is not something that exists in isolation. Talent is a quality that responds and interacts with a myriad of influences, social, cultural, political and technological. Between 1976 and 1986 the world around Moroder was married perfectly to his skills. 2015 might have felt like somewhere he'd been before, but in reality, it was changed beyond all recognition.

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