Daft Punk were masters of their robot disguise
Daft Punk’s break-up may have been unexpected, but the enigmatic nature of how the public were notified was predictable. It was announced through a Youtube upload titled Epilogue, which turned out to be a scene lifted from their 2006 Electroma film, alongside a vocal borrowed from a track on 2013’s Random Access Memories.
The desert scene features a prolonged trek by the duo in their trademark helmets and culminates in one self-destructing while the other walks away. Continuing with the pair’s preference for ambiguity, it indicates a finale, while refraining from disclosing the explicit details.
Over the past 28 years, Thomas
Bangalter and Guy-manuel de Homem-christo (the men behind the helmets) developed a complex and counterintuitive communication strategy. It was an approach that saw them hiding behind their alter-egos but going on to conquer the world of electronic music at the same time.
Bangalter has said this method was fundamental to Daft Punk’s selfpreservation. “If you can stay protected and get noticed then it’s all good”, he told journalist Suzanne Ely in 2006. What began with Bangalter and de Homem-christo using masks to hide their discomfort in photoshoots was resolved when they reinvented themselves as androids.
Robot rock
These cyborgs celebrated the electronic, automated characteristics of their music, while at the same time orchestrating a mythology in conjunction with technology’s all-pervasive influence.
Bangalter even presented an origins story in which he claimed the duo’s appearance was the result of an accident; specifically, that the explosion of an electronic music sampler in 1999 had transformed them into their robot alter egos. Yet alongside this superhero version, Daft Punk also cited the conversion as being their response to fame.
Anti-celebrity superstars
In this sense, Daft Punk have become an “anti-celebrity celebrity”. Yet despite what they might have claimed, with arena tours and cameos in Disney movies, Bangalter and de Homem-christo were far from being “anonymous”.
Theirs was a stance fraught with contradiction — one perhaps familiar to many working in arts and culture who find their rejection of consumer culture operating within the same market-driven constraints. In Daft Punk’s case, it resulted in often uneasy relationships, such as the robots’ involvement in advertising campaigns, and many Daft Punk media interviews, despite their professed reclusiveness.
The pair’s press engagement has been particularly cultivated to maintain this “media reluctance” narrative. For an audience that may similarly be suspicious of media saturation — and what it can indicate in terms of “selling out” — this notion of Daft Punk’s interaction being rare, intimate and indifferent to the supposed demands of industry may also have been attractive.
Perhaps French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had it right when he said that profits can be derived from “disinterestedness”. Daft Punk’s marketing succeeded because of its rejection of the most obvious, unromantic mechanisms of commerce.
The Epilogue video message is then a fitting end, highlighting remoteness and attachment, anonymity and familiarity, and all delivered by a self-destructing robot with no accompanying press release. It aptly concludes Daft Punk’s legacy of technology-assisted public engagement. Over and out.
This article was first published in The Conversation