on working it harder, etc.

Reflections on my Daft Punk obsession and a decade of 'Random Access Memories'

I was in sixth grade when I first knowingly heard a Kanye West song. It was his new single “Stronger,” a sleek, synthy banger with a beat that would rattle the floors of homecoming dances until his next album cycle. I wasn’t really into hip-hop yet – my mom didn’t let me listen to music with cuss words, so that rendered a lot of the hits less impactful to me – but I’ve always been a sucker for a solid melody, and I loved the melody that drove “Stronger.” It was a robotic voice Auto-Tuned to oblivion that sang declarations of tenacity and stamina lifted straight from a SoulCycle instructor’s script. The chord progression satisfied my ear like a crisp Sprite satisfies a sweaty 12-year-old at a school soiree. I couldn’t get enough of it.

I’d already worn “Stronger” out on my iPod Nano before I learned that Kanye Omari West, Yeezy, Ye, Louis Vuitton Don himself had in fact not been its sole writer. (You mean people record songs they didn’t necessarily write?) Its other credited writers were some old guy named Edwin Birdsong and two other less old guys named Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, whose names when Googled only conjured photos of robot helmets. I felt like I’d opened Pandora’s Box when I found out Tom and Guy were in a band together called Daft Punk who had a song called “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” Eureka! I’d found the birthplace of the “Stronger” melody that made tween Abby feel like she was rolling on MDMA.

In one of the less nefarious cultural repercussions we can attribute to Kanye, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” was having a huge moment on this newer website called YouTube. It had a sick anime music video. (You mean I could watch music videos without waiting for VH1’s Top 20 Countdown each Saturday?) YouTube was only a couple years old and didn’t care about copyright yet, so civilians were using the song left and right in home videos. People made their own music videos. These two girls in sports bras painted the song’s simplistic lyrics on their limbs and presented them with tinfoiled boxes on their heads. But the song’s most notorious YouTube byproduct was “Daft Hands,” a one-take clip featuring an anonymous pair of hands cosplaying a Chipotle bag of Daft Punkisms, seemingly dancing along to the song. One time, I’d been teaching myself the routine, and I nearly got in trouble at school because a teacher thought the scribbles on my fingertips were a rather conspicuous attempt to cheat on a test. It was hard to explain.

I think Daft Punk fascinated me because, at least at the time, they felt really singular. They were a bit more house than bloghouse but they weren’t, like, Ultra Miami house. They had an incredible live album called Alive 2007 where they mashed together a ton of their songs into a seamless 84-minute dance fest; just listening to it on basic Apple headphones was exhilarating. They maintained a pretty broad appeal even though their shit could get dark – the music video for “Prime Time of Your Life” centers around a girl who peels off all her skin because she wants to be a skeleton, and the music video for “Technologic” stars an animatronic doll that’d make Chucky squirm. And yet, Busta Rhymes turned a sample of the latter track into a song about his dick that ended up going viral on TikTok almost two decades later.

Daft Punk took a break after 2005’s Human After All, the album that had “Prime Time of Your Life” and “Technologic” and was probably my favorite studio album of theirs. In their absence, I started listen to more blog-approved indie rock bands like TV on the Radio and The National and lots and lots of Radiohead. Among my peers, the EDM subgenre du jour was dubstep, which was a little bit like if Human After All had taken a 50-milligram edible. (Remember Bassnectar?) I, admittedly, fell off the Daft Punk train, but when I was a senior in high school, they put out a new song called “Get Lucky.” It didn’t sound like a vacuum had a baby with a dial-up modem. It had vocals – verses, a chorus, the whole shebang – that didn’t sound like a proto-Siri. Those vocals came from a guy named Pharrell Williams who, at that point, I mostly just recognized as the guy who also sang on “Blurred Lines” and wore goofy hats. 

Because you, reader, have internet access, you probably know “Get Lucky” absolutely blew up. Much to my chagrin, it hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won Grammys. Stevie fucking Wonder sang it with them at the aforementioned Grammys show. Never mind the fact that I’d fallen off the bandwagon; this was supposed to be my thing! I had never heard the word “gatekeeping” before, but I wished I could gatekeep Daft Punk. My frustration was all a wash though, because after Random Access Memories – the album that brought us “Get Lucky” – they never put out another album again.

Alas, none of us could’ve foretold that RAM would be Daft Punk’s final album, but I think it was a fitting way to go out. In retrospect, it helps contextualize how the duo fit into my otherwise more indie rock-focused taste in the early 2010s; Julian Casablancas and the guy from Animal Collective sang on it! And, at least to me, it also kind of explains why Bushwick kids love Jai Paul so much and how Jamie xx was able to produce the xx’s first album (small rock music) but also write “I Know There’s Gonna Be Good Times” (big electronic booty-dropping music). 

Nowadays, I wouldn’t necessarily consider Daft Punk one of my favorite artists. It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to Alive 2007 in the back of my parents’ car on a road trip daydreaming that I was at a European arena instead of inside a Subaru Forester. And yet, when they broke up in February 2021, I was bummed. Not, like, crying bummed, but I immediately listened to their entire discography on nice headphones for the first time. Ten years out from Random Access Memories makes me feel a little weird, but it also makes me thankful for the time I spent in Daft Punk’s little humanoid universe. It was a cool place.

Your friend from online,
Abby