I’ve been listening to Daft Punk for a while. I don’t remember the first time I heard their songs, but it was either “Da Funk” or “Around the World,” but it was certainly on MTV’s late-night show Amp1. I never went to raves, not even in college. It’s rural West Tennessee, and I’m a homebody—what can I say? I loved their music, I suppose, because the melodies, beats, and repetition were closest to the video game music I grew up on. So perhaps my first awareness was through those videos: the surreality and playfulness of Spike Jonze’s “Da Funk” or Michel Gondry’s “Around the World.” (My apologies, Mr. Jonze, but Gondry’s video is the masterpiece.) Whichever came first, after the second I bought the CD, Homework. I can’t tell how many times I listened to it. Hundreds, probably. The edge, the groove, the pauses. The illicit escape of “Revolution 909,” the brightness of “Phoenix” the sharpness of “Rollin' & Scratchin'” and “Indo Silver Club,” the glimpses into the larger world I saw on TV through “WDPK 83.7 FM” and “Teachers.” “Alive,” which is what it is. For crying out loud, ending with a fade-out inversion of their big hit “Da Funk” as “Funk Ad.” It endures because it has that glitzy roar of mid-90s electronic music.
(I remember also loving Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better with You” and its playfully surreal Gondry video, though I didn’t realize Stardust’s connection to Daft Punk, which is obvious in retrospect.)
I remember ripping the CD to MP3 and listening to it on Winamp. I remember thudding it with maximum bass in my parents' '88 Camry on the way home from school. I remember learning, on the turn-of-the century web, that they had an online fanclub, “Daft Club,” but somehow—it feels like the pre-Napster days—I got a copy of their song “Musique.” A new Daft Punk track, not on any album. Bear with me, folks, it took me a long while to realize that singles had B-sides. I remember working at my college radio station and having just enough persuation to start a late-night electronic music show in the summers before new management shut it down in the fall. I was able to luck out when Alive 1997 was shipped to the radio station. When my program was canceled, what happened the the promos? Nobody told me what to do with anything, and I had no listeners, so, well, I still have the copy. For whatever reason, it took me longer to get to Discovery.
I can’t say anything about Discovery that hasn’t been said a thousand times. Here they became robots. How often is a first album as good as Homework, makes such a lasting impact on the world, only to be so utterly eclipsed by the second album that people even forget the first existed? It’s a bad metaphor for multiple reasons, but imagine if Thriller was so big that people forgot about the existence of the Jackson 5. It’s so light and airy, so deep and intense, so effervescent. It’s a complete concept. It’s Discovery.
And of course the videos. I confess I still haven’t seen Interstella 5555, though. Always something more to do. At this time, I don’t know, I got distracted. I didn’t listen to Human After All until after Alive 2007. Human After All is Daft Punk at their least commercial, even with “Technologic” taking over the internet. It’s more like Homework than Discovery. But, man, “Human After All” and “Robot Rock” and “Steam Machine” and “Television Rules the Nation” are all good tracks! It’s like what appeared as a return to form was a sophomore slump. It’s not Discovery. The moon can’t hope to be the sun. I’ll tell you what, though, Alive 2007 really is something else—mixing three albums together, a great quilt. DJs at their height, to be sure.
Can you believe they did the soundtrack to Tron: Legacy? I mean, that’s not a bad movie, but it’s a little forgettable, let’s face it. But I still remember being blown away by the trailer let alone the movie. I saw it in the theater, for them. I remember the miserable conundrum of getting it on either iTunes or Amazon because each came with extra tracks. In those days, the bonus tracks were album-only purchases for iTunes but not Amazon, so today I have “Sea of Simulation” in my Amazon purchase history. And I’m so glad that they rereleased the complete album just a few months ago.2 I’m sure this entire album has been played by humans more than any of their other albums, because it’s perfect background music for working.
It felt like forever before Random Access Memories. Looking back today, someone on Twitter said that it’s been eight years since then. It was only three years after Tron; it was eight years after Human After All, but with the collective amnesia around it, it just felt like forever between RAM and Discovery. I liked it, but, well, it’s not my thing. Slick, collaborative, fun, but (Zoomers beware) I’ve listened to to maybe five times—less than Human After All. I know “Get Lucky” was the sound of the summer that year. It just to me sounds more like a Pharrell or Nile Rodgers song than theirs. I like their collaborations with The Weeknd, too—but too much “f. ⸻.” But of course at this point they were pop-culture legends. The album cover, eschewing their logo trend of the first three albums. In retrospect, it feels like a swan-song, the completion of “Teachers”—“Giorgio by Moroder” is that, transitioning from callouts to storytelling (with that click!). But if I say “It doesn’t feel enough like Daft Punk,” what does that mean? Discovery? Homework? Human After All? Alive 20073?
Any artist chafes against being put in a box. We all want to grow and change. We want to look backwards and we want to look forwards. I know that Bangalter and Homem-Christo have been doing different things for a while. And it doesn’t seem as if they like Lennon and McCartney can’t stand each other. They were here, and now they aren’t. For a while, it was great, and when they didn’t want to do it any more, they didn’t. They left us some really great albums. Thanks, Daft Punk.
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This is also what first introduced me to, in increasing magnitude of personal import, Moby, the Chemical Brothers, Air, [large gap] Kraftwerk, and [larger gap still] Aphex Twin. ↩
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Where would soundtracks be today without this and Reznor/Ross's The Social Network, both in 2010? ↩
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And what happened to Alive 2017 ↩