Daft Punk discovered a way to connect technology with humans
PARIS — They were humans after all. As the helmet-wearing electronic duo formed by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de HomemChristo announced they were splitting after 28 years, many people's thoughts will have turned not to an image of the faceless pair but to one of themselves and their friends in a club, at a festival or a wedding, dancing to One More Time or Get Lucky or Da Funk, sweaty and happy. A very physical memory that's anything but synthesized.
Bangalter and HomemChristo met at secondary school in Paris in 1987, and later formed an indie rock trio called Darlin' before becoming entranced by electronic dance music in 1992 and forming Daft Punk. Their debut single, The New Wave, in 1994, was a stripped-down drum-machine workout that sounded like house music played by strict ascetics. This was the form that synthesizers were supposed to force people into, ever since the early days of Kraftwerk and Gary Numan, an exiling of the human, robotization.
Even when electronic music took over dance floors in the late 1980s, there was a suggestion that its pleasures were synthetic: repetitive beats that wouldn't release the body from their grip, euphoria concocted in a lab. Daft Punk revelled in repetition, as proven by Around the World, the hit single from their 1997 debut album, Homework. And they were ready to embrace robotization, as showed on Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger from their followup album Discovery in 2001.
Yet as far back as their second single, Da Funk, in 1995, Daft Punk was experimenting with the ecstatic effects of disco. It surely can't be a coincidence that Bangalter grew up listening to the music of his father, Daniel, who co-wrote disco hits such as D.I.S.C.O. by Ottawan.
On Sept 9, 1999, Daft Punk was reborn as robots, completing a process that had begun with them wearing masks in interviews and photo shoots to escape the glare of fame. But their music had already started
to move in the opposite direction. Their first U.K. top hit, One More Time, arrived in 2000, and it is eight minutes of
pure joy. Of course, even its title is a hymn to repetition (“One more time/ Music's got me feeling so free/ We're gonna celebrate/ Celebrate and dance so free ... One more time ...”). Daft Punk proved that great pop tunes can take their place alongside hardedged synthetic sounds.
By their final album, Random Access Memories, in 2013, the struggle was over. Daft Punk had assimilated the rhythms of the machine without being absorbed by it. A collaboration with the godfather of disco, Nile Rodgers, and Pharrell Williams resulted in Get Lucky, a global hit. Daft Punk announced their split with a video of the silver-helmeted Bangalter blowing up. The robot is no more. Daft Punk discovered a way to make technology reconnect with the human.