When Daft Punk announced his separation earlier this week, they did so through iconography. The duo let the world know that their entire endeavor was ending by sharing a scene from their 2006 film Electroma: Two robots wandering through the desert, one of them destroying itself and one of them wandering around the sunset. Much of this video is silent – or, in any case, silent, except for the sound of the whistling wind and the boom of the robot with light bass. Daft Punk hadn’t made a song in eight years before posting this video. It was not a separation from the band. It was the retirement of a shared person. It was the end of helmets.
Daft Punk did not always wear helmets. Once upon a time, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter were stupid DJs who played records in clubs or even in open-air raves in the Midwest. The duo’s debut album Homework emerged amid the electronics gold rush in 1997, when record labels and critics were convinced that faceless dance music would be the next proverbial grunge. This did not happened. Like everyone else, Daft Punk had a trick. Prodigy made drugged and drugged punk music, and they had a frontman who looked like a villain’s henchman in a post-apocalyptic action movie. The Chemical Brothers specialize in stunning psychedelic odyssey, sometimes with rock stars following. Fatboy Slim was the face of the shameless and repetitive subgenre of the party, known as the big beat. Daft Punk, on the other hand, made house tracks vast, strong and insistent, sculpting big hits with minimal material. Their singles invaded your brain and stayed there. Since Daft Punk had the best videos, nobody cared much about how he looked.
The helmets came later. In a 2001 cover story for The face, the duo debuted their new post-human look and the story’s justification for that. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo insisted that they had suffered some kind of laboratory accident on September 9, 1999 – that a mysterious computer virus and an exploding sampler forced the two to reconstruct themselves like robots. They really didn’t need an explanation. Daft Punk had discovered the dance music equivalent of Kiss – an entirely new evolved Kraftwerk aesthetic that let them be faceless anonymous and grandly theatrical at the same time. In late 2001, Daft Punk was wearing robot helmets in a Gap commercial with Juliette Lewis.
The new makeover mattered because Daft Punk’s second album was a big deal. He had expectations. THE Homework the singles “Da Funk” and “Around The World” were the 10 biggest hits in the UK and France, and the album went platinum in both countries. In the United States, where Daft Punk’s house music form was totally separate from mainstream pop, Daft Punk was still a big cult act whose videos were on MTV’s rotation late at night, and Homework it was gold. Bangalter’s side project, Stardust, made the 1998 robotic voice anthem, “Music Sounds Better With You”, a global hit that caused instant euphoria whenever I heard it in any kind of rave context. Daft Punk helped to catalyze a whole rising wave of house music with disco filter. The hype surrounding Daft Punk had been growing and growing for several years. LP of the duo’s second year Discovery – launched 20 years ago today – made up for all that hype.
For a good solid year and a half after the launch of Discovery, when someone played “One More Time” in any kind of community setting, the shit went wild. I don’t think I can adequately convey the feeling of hearing “One More Time” in a group of people during this stretch. It didn’t really matter where you were. “One More Time” was an instant filler of serotonin in any context. I heard it in big clubs, at weddings, in disgusting DIY punk venues, in someone’s kitchen, while maybe five people were sitting drinking wine. In all of these places, “Again” had the same effect. People lost the shit. It was glorious.
“One More Time” built a whole world with Eddie Johns’ 1979 horn horn fanfare “More Spell On You”. The late New Jersey house producer Romanthony, a Daft Punk hero, sang gospel exhortations based on the same old Auto-Tune filter that Cher had just used in “Believe” while the electronic drums were shaking if watery organs sighed. “One More Time” did not have a pop music structure, but it did have its own type of architecture. It was more of a song than a track, and it compressed the boom / bust wave of classical dance music into five relatively concise minutes. I read hopefully apocryphal stories about soldiers in Vietnam playing acid and then putting Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”, attacking the battle when the ambient section ended and the guitar riff came back again. For baristas, barbacks and security guards in America’s pre-9/11 dormitory lobby, the part where “One More Time” comes running back has served almost the same function. When that shit came back, you went off.
The rest of Discovery it branched out in a million different directions. The sound was rooted in the beat of the primal house of Homework, but it was deeper and more textured, and suddenly it was also full of new hooks. This thing had an emotional resonance; back when they still talked to magazines at times, Daft Punk explained that the album was a tribute to the music they loved in the 70s and 80s. You can hear all kinds of echoes on the album – not just the disco implied in the title, but also the 80s synthesizer funk of shiny plastic, smooth and affected rock, flattering hair-metal, starry-eyed prog, romantic-new shine – smooth. Daft Punk internalized all of this, passed through his own filter and translated into a gleaming future nostalgia. Sampled tracks Tavares, George Duke, Barry Manilow, Sister Sledge, Rose Royce – things that were no in any kind of hipster rotation at the time. It still hit some deep memory chords. Daft Punk took it all and made it all new.
With Discovery, Daft Punk fully embraced the idea of album – a holistic and cohesive listening experience with peaks and valleys. Virtually everything in Discovery it could work in a party context, but the landscape varied. Certain tracks were pure space funk exercises. Others were robots equivalent to power ballads – lost and romantic interludes that cut their euphoria with longing. In “Face To Face,” Todd Edwards, another New Jersey house producer that Daft Punk looked on in awe, sang about distance and hidden desires. In “Something About Us,” the beat slowed down so that Daft Punk himself could sing a vocoderized hymn of devotion. In “Digital Love”, Daft Punk’s real lightest moment, the robots sang the passionate lyrics that Chicago producer DJ Sneak wrote for them: “Why don’t you play the gaaaaaaame? “
Discovery it is an obsessive work of art. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo used vintage equipment whenever possible, taking care of each individual sound to make sure it had the right tone and resonance. But Discovery it is not a product of thinking too much. Each sound, idea and feeling seems to flow naturally to the next. Even the silly conceptual acrobatics on the album – how to end things with a track that lasts exactly 10 minutes and has the title “Too Long” – never look too cute. Instead, the album finds a careful and delicate balance between the journey of internal memory and the catharsis of the dance floor. No one – including Daft Punk – has ever managed to merge these two impulses in the same way.
The first time I played Discovery straight, the song that stood out the most was track four, “Harder Better Faster Stronger”. This was the only time Daft Punk went to the full electro-rumble vocoder effect, bringing the same kind of silly futurism that made “Around The World” so irresistible. On the stifling melody of Edwin Birdsong’s single soul in Philadelphia in 1979, “Cola Bottle Baby”, Daft Punk intoned computerized commands, bringing a dizzying joy with increased productivity. This song already seemed immortal when Kanye West released it and reached it in the first place seven years later.
The ripples of Discovery have continued to ripple for the past two decades – in dance music, indie rock, pop-up, rap, commercial sync and movie soundtracks. In the United States, Daft Punk was still a cult act when Discovery came out, but they were swinging stadiums at the end of the decade. (The 2007 Alive Tour in Brooklyn’s KeySpan Park, the secondary league stadium on Coney Island, remains the biggest stadium rock show I have ever witnessed.) Daft Punk’s later singles became real pop hits American stops people were a little upset when they didn’t show up at the Weeknd’s Super Bowl halftime show a few weeks before announcing their separation. The entire futuristic Daft Punk project now exists in the past. This is sad, but it also allows us to see the contours of the whole history of the duo. Now we definitely know that Discovery it’s the best album Daft Punk has ever made and will make. We know that it is the greatest gift of robots to the world.