Daft Punk: Artist Spotlight
So, Daft Punk is no more. After 28 years in the spotlight as one of the most influential electronic artists of this century, they have split up. With this demise, came reflection on my part. I’m more of a rock guy, but Daft Punk was accessible like that. They were rock guys too. Their debut album, 1997’s Homework, was basically 2 French hard rock types trying their hand at house music. As they released more albums and songs, they quickly deviated from that house music style, incorporating elements of rock, 80s pop music and disco. This all culminated in them releasing what was, in my estimation, the best album of the 2010s decade, Random Access Memories. But that’s for later, let’s get to the analysis!
1997’s Homework was recorded over a period of 2 years, after the duo was trying to record singles, and decided they had enough material for an album. I’m not a house or EDM guy at all, so this album being very straightforward dance music, it’s not my cup of tea. There are some standouts here, don’t get me wrong:
This is a great walking beat. Everything from the bassline, to the really clean drum sample to the infectious riff that’s sure to get stuck in your head sets the tone for the rest of the record, if it was all like this, I would probably like it much better than I do. But the rest of the album is marked by deep house and techno. Rave music basically, and like I said at the beginning, not my cup of tea. But, like with most debuts, there was building to do. And build they did!
From 1998 to 2000, Daft Punk recorded Discovery, their sophomore effort. This is a much better record than their previous because it’s still house and electronic music, but built upon the style of the late 1970s and early 80s disco and pop. The duo recorded on the same equipment as their first album; analogue samplers, drum machines and synths, as well as electric pianos and guitars, giving it a more human sounding warmth that I feel is absent from most modern dance music, and it is a welcome change! The big hit was “One More Time” a song that’s as catchy as it is simple in the sampling. That’s not a dig at Daft Punk at all, but I’ve found that the better songs are buried deeper in the bedrock of this album:
This is still a great song, but it’s not my favorite from this album, that honor would go to Crescendolls, a classic sounding dance number complete with a really catchy sample:
Something interesting happens at the back half of the album though. It abandons
the dance music and turns to electronica instrumentals and the pop tracks “Face to Face” and “Too Long”
Take this one, “Voyager”:
The funky guitars, ringing synths, and yes, an addictive and punchy bassline all add up to make a fantastic piece of robo disco. This synthesized disco makes another appearance on the second half of the record, in the form of Veridis Quo:
Upon retrospective listening, this is probably my second favorite Daft Punk album. The album is covered in style, and there isn’t one skippable track here. It is here that Daft Punk cultivated their robot mythos, and they made that a key part of their identity, and their sound. To this day, I don’t know what the duo actually looks like, and finding that out would make their myth less magical. Their follow-up album represented a rare misstep in their career, but they would eventually turn that around and add it to their growing legend.
Recorded over a period of just 6 weeks in late 2004, Human After All was released in March 2005 and received a mixed critical reception. Critics didn’t like the repetitive nature of the album, or its production time, and I would tend to agree. It is rather repetitive and while there are some great songs here, it is rather forgettable. The title track is a standout though, for the guitar riffs and for the warm sounding vocoded vocals:
”Robot Rock” is another standout, but I echo the sentiments of other critics, in saying that it is repetitive. However, in 2006 and extending into 2007, Daft Punk went on tour.
The “Alive 2006/7” tour was a flashpoint in their career. With this series of concerts, they went fully mainstream. Beginning with a set at Coachella in 2006, this tour proved instrumental in the rise of EDM built on computers, and was a big part of the genre breaking through to the popular mainstream. Playing on a giant pyramid surrounded by laptops and equipment, Daft Punk mashed up their hits with their earlier stuff and did so almost seamlessly, remixing and putting a new spin on their hits, and introducing a new generation to EDM, and leading a lot of people to reappraise Human After All as an album.
This set is awesome, and I listen to it regularly. I mourn the demise of the group because we’ll never get an Alive 2022, or 2027 or whatever, but we’ll always have the records as a way of experiencing the energy of their live sets. Daft Punk was always high on the list of groups I wanted to see in concert because they proved a suitable entry point for me into EDM, as a rock guy. They always included elements of rock in their music and I think it served them incredibly well.
In 2008, Daft Punk recorded a series of demos that they said they were satisfied with, but they did not want to make another album like Human After All on their laptops, they wanted to go bigger. And go bigger they did.
In 2010 however, they worked on the soundtrack for Tron: Legacy, the sequel to 1982’s cult classic Tron. The film was met with a mixed reception, the soundtrack, however was well received. I actually want to go back and watch this movie, just to see how the soundtrack fits. I saw it once about 10 years ago and I watched the original about a year and a half ago. It was but another facet of Daft Punk’s career being touched by their aesthetic that they were picked to do this. They always gave off an 80s “retro-future” vibe with their sound, and the original Tron was “retro-future” seen through the lens of the golden age of arcade games. This score pays tribute to the great synthesized film scores of the 1980s, and that comes through in this track “The Grid”, featuring dialogue from Jeff Bridges:
But there are moments throughout the score where Daft Punk are allowed to be themselves, and the one hit single from the soundtrack, “Derezzed” illustrates that:
Tron: Legacy’s soundtrack was a home run for Daft Punk, but absolutely nobody could have foreseen what they were going to do next.
Random Access Memories, Daft Punk’s final album, was released in May of 2013, and I remember very fondly my brother being incredibly excited that it was about to release. Spurred on by the tremendous success of the single “Get Lucky”, RAM embodies a forgotten era in music, 70s and 80s disco and pop. This is seen in their collaborations with the musicians who shaped that era of music, but it sounds quintessentially like something Daft Punk would make. They stated from the beginning that they wanted to make a more organic sounding album than Human After All, and from the moment you start up this album, the guitars, drums and keyboards hit you in the face.
Stating officially that they wanted to do what they have always done with samples but with real people instead, I think they accomplished that. And who else should be on guitar but Chic’s own Nile Rodgers, one of my favorite guitarists, who plays guitar on this and 2 other tracks. This legend isn’t the only legend in their stable of musicians however, as there is one song that introduced me to a forgotten legend in popular music.
You might not know his name, but Giorgio Moroder has had his influence on popular music for over 40 years. He made his name in the 1970s as the man behind almost all of Donna Summer’s hits, and then in the 1980s as the producer of the soundtracks of such movies as Flashdance and Scarface. Daft Punk have cited him as an influence, and included a cover of “The Chase” mashed up with “Around The World” in their early live performances.
It was a complete surprise to me then, when I first heard this song, “Giorgio by Moroder” that the subject of this song had such an impact on popular music, as I found out later.
Once you free your mind about the concept of harmony, of music being correct, you can do whatever you want. Nobody told me what to do and there was no preconception of what to do.
This is probably the greatest advocate for the concept of experimentation in any artistic endeavor and it blew me away when I first heard it and it still does now. With this track, Daft Punk are making the album that they want to, and not something to do with EDM, because they’ve risen beyond that. Critics of the sound on this record point to the lack of the classic Daft Punk sound, and the fact that it’s not EDM but I offer this as a rebuttal. Sonic innovation, regardless of genre, is something the great acts should and can do. The Beatles did it, Simon and Garfunkel did it, Queen did it, Led Zeppelin did it, all the great pioneers of popular music have changed and molded pop music with changes in how pop music sounds. They ran out of avenues to conquer electronically, so they ascended beyond that by looking back. This album is a love letter, much like how Discovery was, to the music that they grew up with, specifically funk, dance rock and disco. Sonically, and in terms of how the album is set up, they differ, but the driving pathos at the heart of both albums remains the same.
This album released on May 17th, 2013, to widespread critical acclaim and eventually won the Grammy for album of the year, with the hit “Get Lucky” winning record of the year. I first had a phase with this album in high school and it blew me away, and now, with retrospective listening along with their entire discography as a reference, I have the words to say why.
It’s easy for artists to get boxed in, to only play to their strengths, and what got them popular. But for the truly great artists, they evolve because they choose to. Daft Punk, like David Bowie, were never satisfied with being boxed in. They could’ve repeated Homework, but instead they made Discovery, an album about their experiences growing up, and an evolution in terms of how they crafted their songs. Random Access Memories represents a similar step forward, in my opinion. They could’ve made another Human After All, but they didn’t want to do that, they wanted to get to the root of why they used their samples to great effect. The answer: according to Thomas Bangalter, the silver helmet of the duo, “It occurred to us it’s probably a collection of so many different parameters; of amazing performances, the studio, the place it was recorded, the performers, the craft, the hardware, recording engineers, mixing engineers, the whole production process of these records that took a lot of effort and time to make back then. It was not an easy task, but took a certain craftsmanship somehow cultivated at the time.”
It’s true what he says about recreating those circumstances, as it is a contemporary record that wouldn’t sound out of place in, say, 1979. The collaborations between the group and Nile Rodgers, Giorgio Moroder, and songwriter Paul Williams can attest to that! But, there’s still a robotic soul at the crux of this album, that comes through in the vocoded vocals and synthesized keyboards and electric pianos and all this other stuff. This is something that still mystifies me: that the Daft Punk sound can be carried over and communicated with acoustic drums and electric guitars, and a minimal amount of synthesized material. It is fitting then, that this is their final album, because it is something that you cannot follow up, they didn’t tour off of it, they just let the music speak for itself. In fact, their only releases since were two collaborations with The Weeknd. This is their Abbey Road, their Bridge Over Troubled Water. This is the essence of Daft Punk’s final evolution and it is a sight to behold!
This post in itself was a work that took time, as it was started right after the duo’s split was announced in a video posted on February 22nd.
I have been super busy with school but seeing as how the semester is at an end, I will have more time to review games. This was just an opportunity for me to use this space to grieve for what was, and articulate exactly why this duo is so special to me. I like doing these every so often, gives me space to experiment, like Daft Punk themselves! These robots have been my work soundtrack for this past semester, and will likely remain my work soundtrack, and their legacy will live on forever as one of the greatest musical duos of all time!
If you’d like to listen to more Daft Punk than what is here, I have made a chronological “sampler” on Spotify, that you can listen to here: