Bidding farewell
▶ Rare Israeli Bedouin audio archive sheds light on nomadic society
One of the era’s defining dancefloor acts hung up their helmets on Monday, as electronic music stars Daft Punk announced their retirement in typically enigmatic fashion with a video showing one of them exploding in a desert.
The French duo released an eightminute clip titled Epilogue, using footage from their cult 2006 film Electroma in which one of the robots sets other to self- destruct mode.
After the explosion, a cutaway reads “1993- 2021” with two robot hands making a circle around a sunset.
Their publicist, Kathryn Frazier, confirmed the news to AFP by email, without providing a reason for the split.
From “Da Funk” in 1995 to “Get Lucky” in 2013, Daft Punk became the torch- bearers for French house music across the globe, winning six Grammy awards and pioneering the monumental sound- and- light shows that came to characterize the electronic dance movement ( EDM) of recent years.
They did so while almost never revealing their faces – the ubiquitous helmets became another much- copied trope of EDM stars, but also afforded Thomas Bangalter, 46, and Guy- Manuel de Homem- Christo, 47, freedom from the fame that quickly encircled them.
“We have daily lives that are a lot more normal... than the lives of artists
French
danc who have the same level of fame as us, but who might be attached to being physically recognized,” Bangalter said in a 2015 BBC documentary.
‘ A flawless legacy’
Monday’s announcement set off a wave of tributes to Daft Punk’s hitmaking influence.
“They always cultivated a taste for the paradoxical,” electro pioneer JeanMichel Jarre told AFP, praising the duo’s “extremely elegant manner of saying goodbye to their fans.”
“Eternally grateful,” tweeted Christine and the Queens singer Chris.
Star music producer Marc Ronson also hailed the “gorgeous French robots,” writing on Twitter: “Daft Punk left the game with a flawless legacy.”
Despite endless rumors of an imminent new tour or album, Daft Punk had been quiet for several years.
Their last album, 2013’ s Random Access Memories, was a phenomenal success, winning them four Grammies the following year including record of the year for “Get Lucky,” the millions- selling lead single featuring Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers.
But the much hoped- for return to touring never took place.
They showed up one more time for the Grammies in 2017.
Despite the Twittersphere erupting in excitement in January amid rumors that they would appear alongside The Weeknd for the Super Bowl half- time show, that did not materialize.
‘ Daft punky thrash’
Bangalter and Homem- Christo met at school in Paris before an inauspicious start in music with the rock band Darlin,’ which also featured a future member of the French indie
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“Around the World” became club
fixtures, and led to massive sales for their debut album Homework in 1997.
It was in the video for “Around the World” that they first donned the helmets that would become their signature look.
It mirrored the tight control they exercised over every part of their career, which included ownership of their master recordings.
They followed up with the even more successful Discovery in 2001, which spawned the hits “One More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”
There were some distinctively leftfield choices in the years that followed, including producing the 2003 film Interstella 5555 by Japanese anime master Leiji Matsumoto, which featured music from Discovery.
If their next album in 2005, a more somber Human After All, received mixed reviews, these were quickly forgotten amid the euphoria of their live shows over the next two years.
This included a headline appearance at US festival Coachella in 2006, performed inside a giant LED pyramid. EDM fans still speak about it with an almost religious reverence.
In 2010, they released a soundtrack to the Disney reboot of Tron, which picked up a Grammy nomination. s Da ft Pu nk sp
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But no one predicted the massive success of Random Access Memories, for which they gave up their usual makeshift home rig for a full commercial studio – and used entirely live instruments throughout.
The resulting work dominated album- of- the- year lists and helped lift their total worldwide sales to 12 million.
In December 2020, Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas told music website The Needle Drop that he’d been “trying to do something” with Daft Punk after collaborating with them on their 2013 single “Instant Crush.”
But he was told they were “not doing music right now,” with one of the duo “focused on video stuff” and the other “obsessing with ancient aliens or something.”
Leading Bedouin scholar Clinton Bailey has amassed hundreds of hours of recordings about the nomadic society’s poetry, history and legal system, in a career that began while jogging through Israel’s Negev desert.
Bailey’s unique Arabic audio archive is now being transcribed and digitized by Israel’s National Library, a project aimed at enriching Bedouin scholarship in Israel, the Arab world and beyond.
“I find that in understanding Bedouin culture... you understand human nature, how people adjust to living under very difficult circumstances,” Bailey told AFP.
There are some 250,000 Bedouins living in Israel, part of the mainly Palestinian- Arab community that stayed in the Jewish state following its creation in 1948.
Impoverished and often living on the margins, Bedouin culture is understudied in Israel, a problem Bailey’s recordings will help address, said Raquel Ukeles, head of collections at the library.
The national library has consistently prioritized material on Islam, but focused less on the culture and history of indigenous Arab communities, she told AFP.
“This collection enables us to preserve and document Bedouin culture, in an area we are trying to fill in gaps and document all aspects of Israeli society,” she said.
‘ Going to disappear’
Bailey was teaching political science at New York’s Columbia University in the late 1960s when he decided to move to Israel to teach English on a southern kibbutz.
An Arabic speaker, he was frequently invited by Bedouins into their tents as he jogged in the surrounding area. Eventually, he bought a jeep to visit Bedouin communities further afield.
Now in his early 80s, he recalled thinking that Bedouin society was at a transition point.
Watching them use radios and plastic containers was a harbinger of encroaching modernity that would inevitably infringe on their traditional ways, he explained, adding he feared Bedouin culture “was going to disappear.”
In order to preserve it, Bailey decided to chronicle the Bedouins orally based culture. The first step was to acquire a tape recorder.
“My senses told me that recording what they remembered and how they lived was the important thing to do.”
His interviews with Bedouin citizens of Israel and in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, which Israel occupied for more than a decade after the 1967 Six- Day War, yielded around 350 hours of recordings.
The content includes Bedouin poetry, legal issues, religion, history and environment.
Bailey, who in 1994 won a human rights award from the Association for
Civil Rights in Israel for his advocacy, has also penned books, including a tome of 113 Bedouin poems.
To complete its three- year digitization project, the library has hired members of Israel’s Bedouin community to help, among other things, transcribe the recordings using their knowledge of the local dialect.
Ukeles said the library would make the archive accessible online, enabling Bedouins in the Sinai to access the rare cultural record by mobile phone.
The library is also seeking collaboration with scholars in the Gulf, a prospect made easier by recent agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to establish ties with Israel.
“It’s a high quality, rare oral history of a culture” that was very important “in the rainbow of cultures here in Israel,” said Ukeles.
Rights advocate
Israel’s Bedouins once laid claim to much of the Negev desert, but the minority community now survives on the margins of Israeli society and often in poverty.
Land ownership is one of main bones of contention between the Bedouins and Israeli authorities.
“We decided not to recognize their claims to any plots or any areas they held in common, because they had no written deeds,” Bailey said, faulting Israeli policymakers for alienating the Bedouins.
Bedouin property rights are codified in their oral legal system, and as a result tensions over land issues have persisted.
Israeli authorities have repeatedly tried to relocate Bedouins from some villages to build new towns and demolished structures they deemed illegal.
If Israel does not address the community’s grievances, it will become “more restive, more belligerent... and it will be more difficult to deal with them,” warned Bailey.
If Israel does not address the community’s grievances, it will become “more restive, more belligerent... and it will be more difficult to deal with them,” warned Bailey.
“Sign him up Florentino,” Real Madrid’s fans wrote on Twitter before Zinedine Zidane was asked if he sent a message to the club’s president Florentino Perez.
Kylian Mbappe had just destroyed Barcelona at Camp Nou and 24 hours later Erling Haaland did the same to Sevilla at the Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan.
By the time Real Sociedad trailed 4- 0 on Thursday evening to Manchester United, the feeling in Spain became clear: La Liga was in freefall.
Later that night, Granada beat Napoli and Villarreal saw off Salzburg in a competition it should be remembered that was only six months ago won by Sevilla, for the fourth time in seven years.
In fact, a Spanish team has won the Europa League seven times out of the last 11.
Three of those titles belong to Atletico Madrid, who take on Chelsea in the Champions
League on Tuesday, after knocking out the English champions Liverpool last season.
Real Madrid face
Atalanta, hoping to prevent a third year without winning the tournament, after winning all of the previous three.
“Spanish teams are still strong, it’s just a moment,” said Barcelona coach Ronald Koeman last week. “You can’t draw conclusions.”
If there is a need for perspective – that the speed of the fall is in part due to the heights previously reached – Spain’s dominance in Europe has also been receding for some time.
It perhaps began when Barcelona lost to Roma in 2018, continued with the departures of Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo, before becoming entrenched, as financial impotence has prevented a revival.
Certainly for Barcelona and Real Madrid, hesitation in refreshing their squads has been punished to the full, the coronavirus pandemic enforcing a year without spending when they arguably needed to spend most.
Real Madrid’s youngsters are yet to blossom, while Barcelona have watched an historic era grow old, leave or retire. Atletico Madrid continue to rebuild after their own cluster of iconic departures. Sevilla have endured but Valencia are in a mess.
For most of this century, it has been a question of when not if a generational talent moves to Spain but now there are no guarantees.
Mbappe has long been linked with Zidane but, as Lionel Messi has shown, the best players define themselves by Champions League victories and who could say confidently Paris Saint- Germain and Manchester City will not own more of those over the coming years than Barcelona and Real Madrid?
Ronaldo and Neymar left, before Messi tried to and still might. Last summer, City pinched Spain’s most exciting young talent, Ferran Torres, while Atletico were powerless to prevent Thomas Partey even joining Arsenal.
And while Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho fronted La Liga’s peak at the end of the last decade, the most charismatic, modern coaches – Jurgen Klopp, Mauricio Pochettino, Thomas Tuchel, Julian Nagelsmann – have plied their trade almost entirely elsewhere ever since.
Along with Guardiola, they have driven the shift toward a more physical, vertical, high- pressing style, that seems to have left Spanish teams behind.
“Barca always has been a team that has gone for lots of players for their technical qualities and not many for their physical qualities,” said Koeman on Saturday.
“You have to have both, to have balance we want the ball, to play from the back and create chances.
“This team has played very well in that way this season but we need a balanced team, that can be physical, defend and do everything else. To defend you have to have legs.”
Financial reality
Beneath it all lies a financial reality, that Spain’s clubs, including the top two, are no longer among the most generous payers of transfer fees or wages.
Despite La Liga’s attempts to internationalize, foreign investors have still flocked not to Spain but to England, lured by the most lucrative television contracts and biggest audiences across the globe.
As Barcelona and Real Madrid shut up shop last summer, Chelsea and Manchester City spent freely, their billionaire owners offering protection from a pandemic that was paralysing clubs almost everywhere else.
La Liga President Javier Tebas said the Premier League’s transfer activity was “excessive” yet while Spain’s more stringent controls on spending may pay dividends in the future, in the present they are also restrictive. “Financial solvency is very important,” said Tebas. “When the crisis is over, our clubs will be as strong as before.”
If an economic revival is swift, rebuilding will take longer. Mbappe and Haaland would not be joining Europe’s best, they would be catalysts for a recovery.
Cristiano Ronaldo scored twice as Juventus strolled to a 3- 0 home win over bottom side Crotone in Serie A on Monday, with the victory taking the champions up to third in the standings.
Juve were slow to get going, but their ever- reliable talisman arrived to meet an Alex Sandro cross in the 38th minute to give Andrea Pirlo’s side the lead.
The Portugal forward looked hungry for more and another bullet header in first- half stoppage time doubled the lead, taking him back to the top of the league’s scoring charts on 18 goals, one ahead of Inter Milan’s Romelu Lukaku.
The 36- year- old Ronaldo had chances to complete a hat trick but it was Weston McKennie who added the third, hammering home his fourth Serie A goal of the season in the 66th minute.
A first win in four matches in all competitions ensured Juventus climbed from sixth to third in the table and onto 45 points, eight behind leaders Inter with a game in hand.
“The desire we have to return to the top makes me feel comfortable,” Pirlo said. “The attitude of the players also pleases me.
“When we have more players free from injury I will have more choice and this also makes me feel comfortable. We know that Inter are a great team and we know we have to fight [ to win the title].”
Crotone remain rooted to the foot of the table with 12 points from 23 games, eight points from the safety zone.
Aaron Ramsey thought he had given Juve the lead with a looping header only to see the ball hit the bar before Ronaldo showed him how it is done with two expertly taken headers.
Ronaldo’s goals mean Crotone are the 78th different team he has scored against in Europe’s top five leagues – only Zlatan Ibrahimovic has scored against more sides since 2000.
A glaring miss at the end of the half showed Ronaldo is only human, before two fine saves by Crotone keeper Alex Cordaz after the break denied the Portuguese another hat trick.
McKennie’s close- range finish put the game beyond doubt, but league- leading scorer Ronaldo tried everything he could until the last minute to add more to his tally.