Woodkid’s The Golden Age — An Analysis of an Audiovisual Experience

“The golden age is over…” laments Woodkid in the first track of his debut album, The Golden Age. As the stability of the song’s piano notes are gradually usurped by the distant sound of brass, the hammering of drums, and the swelling of violins, one cannot help but feel overcome by the same sense of wistful nostalgia that inspired Yoann Lemoine, a director and graphic designer, to begin creating music as Woodkid.

Born on March 16, 1983, in Lyon, France, Lemoine looks back on his childhood in the countryside with great fondness. “I grew up part of my life in Poland with my mother,” he states in an interview with Interview Magazine’s Gerry Visco, “We moved to the countryside of France when the Wall of Berlin fell. My memories of childhood are of trees, fields, and the river, not being in the city.” However, he continues, “I’ve always looked for something exotic, so living in the countryside, I wanted to go into the city. Because I grew up as a gay kid, I wanted to find people like me. It was easier to go to the city.”

“Run boy run! This world is not made for you / Run boy run! They’re trying to catch you / Run boy run! Running is a victory / Run boy run! Beauty lays behind the hills!” Woodkid chants in The Golden Age’s frantic and frenzied second track, “Run Boy Run”, which has since become the musician’s highest-charting single, and has appeared everywhere from films, television shows, and trailers, to the 2016 Summer Olympics. Lemoine, an acclaimed director, whose music videography includes Lana Del Rey’s “Born to Die” (2011), Drake and Rihanna’s “Take Care” (2012), and Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” (2017), personally undertook the direction of “Run Boy Run” (2013). Nominated for the Best Short Form Music Video at the 2013 Grammy Awards, the video depicts a young boy, charging towards paradisiacal city of white marble, surrounded by beasts (visually reminiscent of the costumes worn during the Germanic Krampusnacht), who pick him up when he falls, and him a wooden helmet and sword.

“I like to translate sounds into images and images into sounds” Lemoine states in an interview with Normal Fleischer of NBHAP, “I call that system ‘translations’. I often compose a track based on visions that I have, like references that I found in books, or on the internet, and I just work around these feelings that these images create. I can’t see visuals not being linked to sound and sound not being linked to visuals. It has to come together.” Lemoine’s use of ‘translations’ is extremely evident in the next track of The Golden Age — “The Great Escape”. Through the careful manipulation of percussion instruments, Lemoine and his thirty-piece orchestra mimic the sound of hoofbeats, creating a sense of true optimism and excitement, free from the frightful and ominous undertones of “Run Boy Run”. “The Great Escape” is also the album’s first song to contain a romantic element, with the opening line, “Tell me that we’ll always be together / We’ll be riding horses all the way / Cause boy I feel that men are meant to be / More than the shadows of each other”.

However, the romance is short-lived. After “The Great Escape” is “Boat Song”, an agonizingly beautiful and melancholic song that pairs the sorrowful notes of the piano with wind-like electronic elements, eventually transitioning into a balladlike, brassy lamentation. Although Lemoine has stated “I don’t want people to look at my project and feel they’re reading my autobiography” (Fleischer), it becomes clear that The Golden Age contains elements of a narrative. “I Love You” follows, and the album’s central character continues to struggle with the loss of their love, and, despite the song’s powerful opening of unintelligible shouting and heavy drums, the lyrics continue to mourn “Is there anything I could do / Just to get some attention from you? / In the waves I’ve lost every trace of you / Where are you?”

“Boat Song” and “I Love You” both contain numerous references to waves, water, and the ocean, which is furthered in the latter song’s music video, also directed by Lemoine. It begins cruelly, depicting the boy from the “Run Boy Run” music video, apparently deceased or unconscious. However, the story continues, following a priest as he mournfully wanders the frozen landscapes of Iceland, eventually submerging himself in its coastal waters, drowning, and turning into stone. Despite its inherently dark themes, it is a beautiful video, oftentimes drawing upon the Romantic Era’s themes of ‘isolation in nature’, with Lemoine going as far as to recreate the iconic German Romanticist Caspar David Fredrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818). “I’ve been diving for quote some time now so I was very much inspired by my underwater adventures,” Lemoine reveals, “There is something very deep in doing this. Deep in the real sense, but also in the emotional sense… I feel very disconnected when I’m down there. It somehow visually really influenced me. You get very close to something that is somehow death and that’s very fascinating. So I had to pay tribute to that in a song, and visually, it’s the same” (Fleischer).

However, after “Boat Song”, “I Love You”, and the equally melancholic and sentimental “The Shore”, comes “Ghost Lights”. Although it opens with the familiar, funerary sound of an organ, it is quickly transformed by the hollering of brass and energizing drums. “However fast I dance to make the sun shine / I will never fall down! / No matter what it takes, I’ll try to save the ghost lights! / However hard I pray to remake you mind / I will never feel down! / No matter what it takes, I’ll try to save the ghost lights!” Woodkid sings as the song ascends, becoming determined and triumphant, while still maintaining its core feeling of futility, in a way that is beautiful and poignant, if not difficult to describe through language. “Shadows”, the first instrumental track of The Golden Age, follows “Ghost Lights”. It is calm, motherly, and soothing, granting the album’s listeners the necessary respite to prepare for, perhaps, the most powerful, imposing song of The Golden Age.

“Stabat Mater” derives its name from a 13th Century Catholic hymn, depicting the suffering of Mary as she witnessed the torture and crucifixion of Jesus. “I’m not religious, not in a dogmatic way, I mean,” States Lemoine, “I was raised in a Catholic institution and had to pray every night. But this was bullshit. I’m very spiritual and I pray in my own way, because I do believe in something bigger. I just don’t like to think that this very intimate and crucial metaphysical question — the meaning of life — has to be answered the same way for every human on this planet” (Electronic Beats). “Stabat Mater” is imperial and warlike. In a narrative sense, the song is reminiscent of a historical story, with lyrics such as “The train whistles and blows all sounds away / Hey, how could we be close again?” and “Comes the sound of boots and metal chains / Hey, will the perfume of the daisies remain?” According to Lemoine, the association between religion and war runs as deep as his blood, “I actually went back to Poland, that’s where my roots are, with my cousin. She is a writer in literature and a teacher at the Princeton University in the U.S. We came back to the family house and start to dig up a little bit of the past and understand about the Jewish and the past of our family. How the religion got forgotten by my grandmother when the war happened, and how the scars were so deep in my family that it had to be a part of me today, even two generations afterwards” (Fleischer).

Lemoine and his cousin, Katarzyna Jerzak, eventually created a book to accompany The Golden Age. In an interview with Cedar Pasori of Complex, he stated, “There’s a whole religious thing with the record, so I wanted to make a book that would look like a Bible.” Woodkid’s symbol, two crossed, antique keys, reminiscent of the Keys of Heaven on the Vatican City’s coat of arms and flag, is indicative of this aesthetic. They appear frequently in merchandise and music videos, and the musician himself has the keys tattooed onto his forearms. However, instead of a symbol of papal righteousness and supremacy, Lemoine subverts the symbol, stating “when put together, [they] represent my family” (Electronic Beats). In an interview with Nicole Lopez of Trendland, Lemoine reveals some of his reasonings for the subversion; “When you’re an artist, you need to have a Trojan Horse in your music: it looks beautiful, people love it, but inside you can have something that is even more insidious, indicating, and a sense of death, that’s how you change things. I have an audience of kids who love video games, they like my music, because it has that aesthetic. In the middle of it, I try to give the message that it’s okay to be gay, or a sense of tolerance. They don’t even think about these questions in these communities. Lady Gaga defending gays to an audience that are just gays doesn’t change anything, of course they are going to agree with her. If you do Catholic music and have a massive Catholic audience and bring the message there, that’s how you bomb the system.”

“Conquest of Spaces” is a far cry from the oppressive and imposing aesthetic, lyrics, and sound of “Stabat Mater”. It is a flighty, optimistic song, reminiscent of the Byron Haskin’s 1955 science-fiction film of the same name, perhaps indicative of Lemoine’s interest in “[translating] sounds into images and images into sounds” (Fleischer). “Falling”, The Golden Age’s ominous and grim final instrumental track, leading directly into “Where I Live”. “I’ve never seen the northern lights”, laments the musician, implying the impending death of the central character of the album’s narrative, “I’ve never seen the snow / I never walked across the ice / I ignore the ocean’s flow / Where I’m born is where I’ll die / Where I live is where I cry / My children left on a cold night / My husband said it’s how things go” It is a profoundly personal piece, containing relatively simple violin, piano, and brass arrangements, allowing Woodkid’s vocals — quaking, pained, and distinctly human — to stand on their own. Accentuating the humanity of the song is its violins. During the chorus of “Where I Live”, they repeatedly fluctuate, descend, and ascended in a manner strikingly similar to the iconic, famous compositions of Philip Glass for Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982). According to Lemoine in an interview with Zing Tsjeng of Wonderland, “When I was younger, I’d listen to a lot of soundtracks and I randomly fell on Philip Glass’ soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi. The first time I listened to his music, I could feel emotions that were indescribable — it wasn’t pain, it wasn’t nostalgia, it wasn’t uplifting — the emotion that came out was very alien, in a way.”

At the climax of the album’s narrative, comes “Iron”. According to Lemoine himself, “Thematically, it’s like a final sense of destruction that comes after you’ve been building up your character towards adulthood. It’s about when you end up walking by yourself. It’s a journey [you] make where memories become vague and you start developing your own personality” (Electronic Beats). Apocalyptic lyrics, such as “The sound of iron shots is stuck in my head / The thunder of the drums, dictates / The rhythm of the falls, the number of deaths / The rising of the horns, ahead”, accompanied by the ominous sounds of organs and drums, greatly reflect this theme. Lemoine additionally filmed a music video for “Iron”, depicting a group of warriors, adorned in the crossed keys, being attacked by some sort of miasmic darkness. Returning is the young boy of “Run Boy Run”, lying motionless on a marble slate, and the priest of “I Love You”, giving a sermon, dressed in a marble-pattern suit. It is an aesthetically remarkable video, representing the final step in the journey to adulthood, or… “The Other Side”.

“The Other Side”, The Golden Age’s final track, begins with the sound of marching drums and church bells. As they are accompanied by lyrics such as “Boy I was shaped for the fury / Now I pay the price / Of the human race’s vice / And I was promised / The glorious ending of a knight / But the crown is out of sight”, and a chant somehow simultaneously reminiscent of soldiers and monks, it becomes clear that the central character of the album’s narrative has been hardened by their experiences in this world. Lemoine confirms this, stating “[Woodkid] is about the transition from childhood to adulthood. I decided to make the show very visual, and to create that transition through all kinds of materials in a symbolic way. I created an environment in the songs and the production that was very organic, emotional, that would be childhood — it was very wooden, because I come from the countryside. I made this slowly radiant transition within the songs, within the lyrics, towards something more mineral, something more digital with more heart. So it’s the story of a kid who slowly turns to marble… he petrifies himself” (Visco).

Woodkid’s The Golden Age is baroque and grandiose, yet natural and romantic. It is imperial and imposing, yet personal and relatable. It is an ambitious work, and the only one in recent memory that so effortlessly weaves image into sound, telling the story of a human though the atmosphere and aesthetic of a religion. It is unique, profound, and certainly not to be missed.