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Photo: Matt Sayles / Invision / AP / dpa / picture alliance
At the end of the YouTube video titled »Epilogue«, with which Daft Punk surprisingly said goodbye on Monday, the two musicians once again stylize themselves as robots.
One of them shatters into a thousand pieces, the other wanders into the sunset.
It's a fitting farewell - calculated and technical on the shiny surface, but permeated with deeply human feelings.
Daft punk is history, but these songs - at least - will be remembered.
»Da Funk«
Daft Punk has long been a cinematic monument: in her film »Eden« from 2014, the French director Mia Hansen-Love immortalized the moment when the screeching guitar and then the slow beat of »Da Funk «sound.
"Eden" actually revolves around Hansen-Love's brother, who hung up in the orbit of Daft Punk, but never had the breakthrough.
But when "Da Funk" sounds, he is immediately there for a moment as music history is being written.
"Pass it," says a young woman disguised as "Wonder Woman" in the film about the track.
Indeed, not bad.
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hpi
"Around The World"
This piece sneaks up like Daft Punk sneaked up back then.
That great house music came from Paris had been clear since the mid-1990s.
But that Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo would actually keep the promise that drove dance music in the nineties, namely to build star-free, dancing underground happiness zones all over the world - you had to see this video first: in the Bangalter and Homen-Christo with their helmets on their heads stand so inconspicuously on the edge that you don't even notice them and otherwise men and women dance in beautiful choreography.
To music that transformed the aesthetics of the Chicago House into a catchy tune: "Around the world, around the world!" -
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"Burnin '"
It is well known that anticipation is the greatest joy, and nowhere else Daft Punk works with it as skillfully as in "Burnin '".
Everything seems to amount to a dance floor bang: the wiped scratches that structure the track quickly become shrillier, the plucked guitar strings more pointed, and the bassline, which joins them with a little delay, immediately comes to the fore.
But the actual track never materializes, it's still a few bars further away.
After "Burnin '" you just want more of what you haven't got.
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hpi
"One More Time"
In the song “Losing My Edge”, which is about an aging hipster who tells the Internet kids that he was there where legendary things happened in pop history, singer James Murphy at one point exclaims: “I was the first guy playing Daft punk to the rock kids!
I played it at CBGBs!
Everybody thought I was crazy! «.
And it's really a funny punch line in daft punk history that on their first album they sounded like house from Chicago, but that didn't interest many people in the USA.
It was only with “One More Time” that they became stars there, with “One More Time” being a kind of swan song for European dance culture of the nineties.
Come on, there's one more! Shouted Daft Punk in the late autumn of 2000, when this music was actually over.
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"Digital Love"
Pop history is full of songs that take place in the field of tension between computer voices and romantic feelings.
With “Clouds Across the Moon” by the Rah Band or Kraftwerk's “Computer Liebe”, Daft Punk easily keep up with this: The wonderful keyboard chord progression full of longing, the middle section reminiscent of Supertramp, the vocoder part, which can only say about this joy of playing: “ Why don't you play the game ”.
It was at that point in Daft Punk's career that they proved that they could write a classically structured song.
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feb
"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"
The fourth single from the "Discovery" album is one of the most influential dance tracks of the noughties.
In the vocoder singing of the title he not only sums up the performance pressure of the youth in the performance society of this era, but bridged the gap between electronic music - not least through the sample in Kanye West's "Stronger", which was released in the same year European-style pop and American hip-hop mainstream.
Classic.
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bor
"Robot Rock"
A guitar riff for the ages - from a band that had nothing to do with rock music.
The fat sound was therefore also created on a Moog synthesizer with guitar pedals.
“Robot Rock”, a single from the album “Human After All”, bows repetitively and with the same crossover impetus to genre models like Kraftwerk (“We are the robots”) and Herbie Hancock (“Rockit”).
A look into the machine DNA of Daft Punk.
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bor
"Get Lucky"
There are a couple of songs that are so good that you can't blame them.
"Get Lucky" is one of them ("Groove is in the Heart" is another).
Songs that stick as catchy tunes, that run at every company party, on every radio station, until the end of time.
And still always good.
The fact that Daft Punk teamed up with producer Nile Rodgers of all people for “Get Lucky” was probably the greatest stroke of genius of their career: With the band Chic, Rodgers finally invented this irresistible, elegant groove in the seventies, on which Daft Punk all theirs Building a career.
A circle was closed.
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"Giorgio by Moroder"
In general, the album "Random Access Memories", on which "Get Lucky" appeared, was an impressive homage to the disco roots of the 1970s - carefully put together like a musicological seminar on the subject, but of course much more entertaining.
It is the time when Thomas Bangalter's father was heavily involved in the French scene as a producer.
One of the greatest among his colleagues is Giorgio Moroder - here he tells the story of his life, leading to classics like »I Feel Love«.
A bow to bow to.
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feb
"Starboy"
The US singer The Weeknd (“I Can't Feel My Face”) and the stage-anonymous French Daft Punk: For the French, this collaboration turned out to be their most commercially successful, at least in the USA: “Starboy”, the pulsating one Electropop single from the Weeknd album of the same name gave Daft Punk what neither “Get Lucky” nor “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” had: their first number one on the “Billboard” charts.
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bor
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feb / bor / hpi / rap