The internet has changed the way we consume music to the point where everything feels like a sample of an edit of a remix of a cover and thousands of bloggers, DJs and fellow artists are combing over your music as soon as it is released, looking to find the original source material. Your first actual listen to Random Access Memories tells you that this is a very different Daft Punk and you will either relish in that or be befuddled by it. It's almost like Daft Punk actually want you to hear their music. The latest Vampire Weekend album still isn't on Spotify, weeks after release. This isn't how big bands (or more likely their labels) act with hotly anticipated albums. The same thing happened with the full album, available to stream in full via iTunes in the week running up to its release and then available pretty much instantly on Spotify on release day. But just when it seemed like we couldn't take any more waiting Daft Punk just let it drop, releasing the full track (well, an edit) as a single. Edits of the snippet circled as the internet whipped itself into a furore. ![]() Having teased the Pharrell Williams featuring Get Lucky at Coachella they created a storm that appeared to be almost getting out of hand. The first thing they did was avoid the temptation to shutter it off - something the label would no doubt have wanted. It kept them in control, something Bangalter recently explained the importance of to The Observer. In doing so Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo guaranteed this would be a record that would be marketed, sold and celebrated. They obsessed over the ridiculous detail of this record for years and incorporated a plethora of recent and classic musicians, and then one day they then just carried it into Columbia Records. It wasn't funded by a label, but it wasn't recorded on the cheap or via Kickstarter - it was entirely self-funded and Thomas Bangalter proclaims it cost "more than a million dollars easily".ĭaft Punk's last album, Human After All, took two months. It remains the last time humans have been on the moon.Unlike the French robotic duo's previous 'studio' albums, Random Access Memories wasn't recorded in their bedrooms on computers - it was recorded using analogue equipment in studios across the world (Paris, New York and Los Angeles to be precise). But there's somethin’ out there.” This was the Apollo 17 mission, December 1972. “As we look back at the Earth, it’s, uh, up at about 11 o’clock, about, uh, well, maybe 10 or 12 diameters,” the sampled voice of astronaut Eugene Cernan says on “Contact.” “I don't know whether that does you any good. There was joy in it, but there was melancholy, too: Here was a world seen through the rearview, beautiful in part because you couldn’t quite go back to it. “Get Lucky” and “Lose Yourself to Dance”-spotlights both for Pharrell and the pioneering work of Chic’s Nile Rodgers-recaptured the innocence of early disco and invited their audience to do the same. “Touch” was “All You Need Is Love” for the alienation of a post- Space Odyssey universe “Give Life Back to Music” wasn’t just there to set the scene, it was a command-just think of all the joy music has brought you. The concept, as much as the album had one, was to suggest that as great as our frictionless digital world may be, there was a sense of adventurousness and connection to the spirit of the ’70s that, if not lost, had at least been subdued. The theatricality that had always been part of their stage show and presentation found its musical outlet (“Giorgio by Moroder,” the Paul Williams feature “Touch”), and the soft-rock panache they started playing with on 2001’s Discovery got a fuller, more earnest treatment (“Within,” the Julian Casablancas feature “Instant Crush,” the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-The-Doobie-Brothers moves of “Fragments of Time”). So while the live-band-driven sound of 2013’s Random Access Memories was a curveball, it was also a logical next step. But it also marked Daft Punk as a group with a strong, dynamic relationship to the past whose music served an almost dialogic function: They weren’t just expressing themselves, they were talking to their inspirations-a conversation that spanned countries, decades, styles and technological revolutions. ![]() Within the context of 1997’s Homework, “Teachers” presented the group as bright kids ready to absorb the lessons of those who came before them. ![]() There is an early Daft Punk track named “Teachers” that, effectively, served as a roll call for the French duo’s influences: Paul Johnson, DJ Funk, DJ Sneak.
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