Daft Punk used to be good,'" Pedro Winter said in People even apologized, like, 'How could we have misjudged Daft Punk? Even if I'm part of it, I like to step back and admire it. Me, I cried. In , Daft Punk made history when Coachella paid them a ton of money to play the festival, and prove to everyone just how ahead of the game they really were. No one could have imagined that the duo would arrive in a glowing pyramid -- flanked by brilliant geometric colors, backed by a giant LED screen -- to blow everyone's minds.
This was before the rise of YouTube, so it wasn't even like people knew it happened after it happened. I had no idea what I was in for when I saw them a few months later in Miami at now defunct-festival called Bang!
Like that Coachella crowd several months prior, I have never again experienced one crowd dancing in utter awe, everyone on the same page of love, astonishment and exuberance. I bought a t-shirt that I won't even wear anymore because I'm afraid it'll become too faded. Daft Punk expertly mixed their three-album catalog into a mega mash-up of perfection.
The sum was greater than its parts. It was an audio-visual revelation, and it was the high point of a concept that will likely never be repeated. But the concept was to be copied, many times over. Before the pyramid, an electronic act had never appeared onstage with such a massive stage production. After they did it, everyone else wanted one, with the duo essentially and literally setting the stage for the oversized and increasingly complex stage productions seen during the EDM explosion in the states in the s and beyond.
Skrillex built a spaceship. Deadmau5 erected a glowing cube. Avicii played from atop a giant head. Pyro and confetti blasts became standard operating procedure for every electronic mainstage. The Sahara tent at Coachella where Daft Punk first unveiled the pyramid became ground zero for dance music's surging popularity in the new decade, with the area growing from a reasonably large tent to a superstructure the size of an airport hangar during the s. And henceforth came the generation of Daft Punk-inspired dance acts.
With their explosive debut album, that pair went on to capitalize on the ravenous hunger for more of the high-octane electro dance Daft Punk's tour left in its wake. Electronic music started playing in American house parties and then clubs, and eventually, the stage was set for a the genre to be acceptable and, from to , dominant.
Have they done it? All the while, Daft Punk faded into the background, but never left front of mind. They appeared briefly in to conjure the Tron: Legacy soundtrack. Then they started working on a new and apparently final album.
The product of those sessions, Random Access Memories, is cinematic and grandiose -- and by their standards, organic-sounding, a major departure from the heavy synth sounds of Human After All and Alive It took people by surprise, but it should not have: Daft Punk gave birth to the trend, but they were never enslaved to it. Others were not so circumspect. In truth, Daft Punk always seemed apart from any scene, a step ahead of the music they inspired: at the commercial height of EDM, they began protesting that technological advances had made making music too easy and formulaic, and released Random Access Memories, an album immersed in the late 70s and early 80s.
No explanation was given for the split. It was a very Daft Punk way to go out, preserving their enigma right to the end. This article is more than 8 months old. Playing in bands and then evolving into something else was a familiar narrative for many of the dance acts that experienced mainstream success in the mid-nineties, like the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, or Underworld.
They glammed up samples of old disco and boogie records until they were drippy and majestic, ripping through synth arpeggios as though they were letting off some wicked, over-the-top guitar solos. Daft Punk usually wore helmets when they appeared in public, to keep things focussed on the music. I never felt too curious about their inner lives, given how open they were about their influences, whether it was their samples, their remixes, or collaborations that centered lesser-known DJs and idols like Romanthony or Todd Terry.
It was filled with names I had never heard of, all these local legends from Chicago, Detroit, New York, and beyond, as well as names I never would have associated with electronic dance music, like Brian Wilson. It was like a door that opened onto more doors. Daft Punk lay at the center of their own universe, popularizing dance music to audiences who may not have cared, while still maintaining their roots in underground dance scenes that scorned outside approval.
In the two-thousands, their manager, Pedro Winter, branched off to found the Paris label Ed Banger Records, which expanded the Daft Punk diaspora, pushing dance music toward a kind of head-banging excess. The film and the soundtrack were both underwhelming, and it suggested to me that Daft Punk were never as futuristic as they were deeply, earnestly nostalgic. Maybe the fact that they aspired to make albums at all, rather than transcendent singles, like most dance producers, spoke to their age.
Are they actually retired?
0コメント