fuck it, i'm making a Daft Punk thread

I just want to talk about how great they were but not to do the "Daft Punk are GODS" thing.

I shouldn't care but it bothers me that there's a generation that will remember them as contemporaries and equals of Skrillex and Deadmaus and they will never know

But once you actually start saying shit like "they will never know" then you might as well pack it in because you're not just old, you're a dismissive Boomer

Agreed 100%. The mainstream lionization of DP as "the good funky electronic group" is lame as hell.

Discovery was this massive pop culture thing that slowly built over years and years, but it's so much more than that. The second half run from High Life to Too Long is a masterpiece by itself, even without the support of all the massive songs on the first half of the record.

The first half of Discovery gets me one type of emotional, nostalgic, amped, etc. But the second half is an even nicer and more intimate place. It is absolutely just as good as the first half with so much less weight of the cultural associations. Voyager to Short Circuit would be career defining for other groups. For DP, it was an afterthought.

I want "Something About Us" played at my wedding.

undo wrote:
Yesterday I was listening to Alive 2007 in the car. It's a good mix. The bad songs sound great. The crowd is really excited to be there and you wonder what it might have been like to experience something so visceral and communal and familiar but also so transformative that was happening in a moment that wasn't tainted by all the sleaze and bullshit that would soon define that kind of experience from that point on forever.

Undo, beneath the nostalgia (which I don't mind at all), I think you are a really perceptive and organic social theorist. I really liked this post. It made me listen to the mix, which I really loved. I am a younger millennial so I have a slightly different perspective on the culture than some of you. I cared about music enough as a teenager to understand Daft Punk's cultural importance beyond just a few pop singles but it is always impossible to understand the impact a musical artist has on the culture without really witnessing their emergence and rise within it.

I've been trying to think about the cultural effect of 2007-8. We tend to think about it is as an economic event that has deep political resonance without really considering its broader social impact. There was something really particular about the music of the early aughts. I'm thinking about bands like Portishead, Radiohead, PJ Harvey, early Hyperdub. They all expressed this sort of weird existential anguish and social discomfort. It seems like those sorts of feelings aren't really articulated in the same way today. There is a a sort of moral urgency to everything these days, which is justified considering the extent of our collective crises and the ineptitude of our existing institutions to manage them. But there are other forces at work as well, which I can't really figure out. Sincerity is actually very difficult to express and we are all irony poisoned, which I think partially explains the demise of indie rock. To feel alienated is somehow embarrassing and speaks to a kind of personal failure rather than a platform for a broader social critique.

I don't really know where I am going with this post. Listening to this mix though just made me feel like people must have felt much more positive about the future back then than they do today. They were enjoying themselves watching these weird robots use technology to kind of expand the horizons of popular music and it must have all felt very novel and exciting. Fourteen years later and that technology has basically just anesthetized us to reality and is controlled by a bunch of oligopolistic rentier interests who are coordinating with the state to develop a fucking dystopian techno-surveillance network. And so much of popular music just feels incredibly stale and boring. Not too mention the fact that we can't even experience live music anymore...

chrondog wrote:Agreed 100%. The mainstream lionization of DP as "the good funky electronic group" is lame as hell.

I remember Some Girl sorta shitting on them for basically exposing bros to dance music and helping to take it out of its queer roots

Discovery was this massive pop culture thing that slowly built over years and years, but it's so much more than that. The second half run from High Life to Too Long is a masterpiece by itself, even without the support of all the massive songs on the first half of the record.

The first half of Discovery gets me one type of emotional, nostalgic, amped, etc. But the second half is an even nicer and more intimate place. It is absolutely just as good as the first half with so much less weight of the cultural associations. Voyager to Short Circuit would be career defining for other groups. For DP, it was an afterthought.

I want "Something About Us" played at my wedding.

Yeah man, it’s weird right? You got the GAP commercials with Juliette Lewis, which I loved aesthetically, and then you have the second half. Face to face, Voyager, man, all of them. Although, I must admit, not a fan of short circuit.

This retrospective on Daft Punk is really good. It also has this great quote:

They provide the emotionally moist sweep of rock without rock, the thrill of victory without the burden of a self, and the plush comforts of nostalgia without the indignity of aging. Daft Punk are a psychological car bomb that drives into your garage on a silver disco E-ZPass.

The author used to write for the New Yorker. He published an article, "A Paler Shade of White," that caused a huge controversy about fifteen years ago. Some people here will probably remember it.

Interesting quote. I think one thing about DP is they are very "rock". A lot of their most popular songs are basically lifting a classic rock riff and flipping it. They fit nicely alongside 70s prog/funk experimenters who were using talkboxes and other funky elements in their rock-adjacent music. Their connection and appreciation for rock music was always quite explicit.