In 2006, the very trendy New York group LCD Soundsystem tasted fame with their song "Daft Punk is playing in my house".
A somewhat off-beat ode to the two French geniuses of electro, the singer imagining them playing in a cellar surrounded by kids.
The day after the announcement of their separation, 28 years after their first collaboration, we took the urge, not to check if this dream had come true, but to measure to what extent the duo had "played" in the life of a whole generation of Terrans.
Because beyond their work of genius, their imprint on pop culture will remain indelible.
By slipping into the body of two robots, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have become objects of fascination.
Ahead of their time, on the fringes of promotional circuits, but never absent, far from it.
Ads galore
From the end of the 20th century, and the release of their jewel "Homework" (1997), advertisers were not mistaken.
These two may keep silent, they embody the future.
And it will be "Technologic".
Like this eponymous title, here they are, propelled by the traveling jukeboxes of the biggest high-tech companies.
It starts with Motorola and Nokia cell phones, followed by revolutionary Apple music players (Ipods).
Their music will roll in parallel for major automobile manufacturers (Audi, Citroën, Alfa Romeo, BMW), a shampoo giant (Pantene), an American bank (Virgin Money) or even clothing brands like Gap or Adidas.
Daft Punk, a true icon of pop culture.
Infographics
If, most of the time, it is their hybrid music that attracts marketing directors, the simple presence in the image of the two black headphones is sometimes enough.
The wall of the celebrities, they reached it besides in 2010 by turning in a series of completely cult spots of the German sports equipment manufacturer with the three bands.
In a setting from the Star Wars saga, Daft Punk shares the limelight with Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Snoop Dogg and footballer David Beckham.
Even more confusing, in 2013, we find them escorting the Formula 1 of the Lotus team.
The F1 team is then a partner of their music label Columbia Records.
"Sampler" and "sampled"
"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger".
A title made for motor racing?
Not sure that the duo heard it that way when composing their futuristic hymn in 2001… No more than rapper Kanye West, who will take over the tube in his own way eight years later.
This title symbolizes in any case one of the other facets of the discography of Daft Punk and his time.
That of the "sample", the art of rearranging sound samples created by others.
The two French DJs owe everything to this now democratized method.
The plot of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" is thus based on an unknown treasure of jazzman Edwin Birdsong ("Cola Bottle Baby", 1979).
That of "Digital Love" on the great American keyboardist George Duke and his "I Love You More" (1979).
Note that this use of the sample does not systematically appear in the credit of albums.
In 2017, the specialized site Samples recounted, step by step and in music, the hidden posterity of the piece by Sister Sledge ("Il Macquillage Lady", 1982), the different lines of which have been deeply reorganized to create "Aerodynamic".
This does not prevent the two friends from assuming this practice at the heart of all their albums, except the last (“Random Access Memories” in 2013).
"We composed and recorded the music that Daft Punk could have sampled," Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo then described in Les Inrockuptibles.
And with real musicians: those who played with Michael Jackson or Chic for example, those we sampled when we started.
"
Like Kanye West, many US artists have paid homage to the Frenchies in this way.
Kendrick Lamar, 50 Cent, Kid Cudi, Janet Jackson ... (see above) Closer to Paris, we will note the sample made in 2006 by the late DJ Mehdi, another legendary producer of French electro and rap, or more recently that of the British psychedelic rock band Temples (Paraphernalia, 2020).
Juggling from blockbuster to auteur cinema
To understand the influence of Daft Punk is finally to take a look at the side of the small and big screen.
His hits trumpeted in blockbusters ("Iron Man 2", "The Hangover 2"), in mainstream action films ("Never Back Down", "The Deathly Kiss of the Dragon") but also accompany films by more intimate author like “Boyhood”, or “Oslo August 31”.
Consecration or simple wink, the masked duo also appears in 2015 in The Simpsons.
Here lies one of the other specificities of the French duo, its ease to please both at the box office and in niches.
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An ultra-powerful chameleon therefore, remained at the same time very attached to his freedom of creation. Especially from a graphic point of view. With "Electrorama" and "Interstella 5555: The Story of the Secret Star System", the group has developed its own avant-garde projects. There he digs his passion for the frontier between humans and computers. And, by capillarity, between Earth and space. This Monday, Jean-Michel Jarre, tutelary figure of electro, pushed to the end the metaphor chosen by the group to illustrate his announcement. That of two robots that disappear to become stars. "No, the stars are stars that we see when they are dead, they are very much alive and will continue their career", he found himself dreaming.
