Robots after all: Daft Punk’s best moments under the masks
Image: Photo: Jason Merritt Music Features Daft Punk
This March marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Daft Punk’s breakout album, Discovery—the one that brought us indelible electronic hits like “One More Time” and “Harder, Better Faster, Stronger.” But Discovery was more than the LP that put a couple of French nerds named Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo on the map for people outside of the dance music scene. It was also the first album that saw those two French nerds shed their humanity altogether: Though they started wearing masks to add a layer of theatricality or winking artificiality to their work ahead of the 1997 release of their debut album, Homework, the duo took Discovery as a chance to lean into the general perception of electronic music and establish a gimmick so great—and so actively maintained and endorsed—that it ultimately transcended the idea of a gimmick. In 1999 (specifically September 9, or 9/9/99), Daft Punk didn’t just start dressing like robots. Daft Punk became robots.
Since the release of Discovery, Daft Punk has become a band that is as much about aesthetics as it is about music, no matter how popular and influential and Grammy-winning that music has become over the years. That’s why Daft Punk didn’t just do the soundtrack for Tron: Legacy and leave it at that; Daft Punk is in Tron: Legacy making robot music as robots in a computer. Daft Punk didn’t just collaborate with The Weeknd on a couple of hit songs; Daft Punk physically appears in The Weeknd’s videos as larger-than-life futuristic machines with robot helmets and truly glorious capes.
This morning, in appropriately aesthetic-minded fashion, Daft Punk announced that they’re breaking up. In lieu of a tribute to how Bangalter and Homem-Christo impacted electronic and house music (or even how they then spun their talents into an incredible disco album), here’s a look back at Daft Punk’s best moments—not as artists or musicians, but as robots.
Interstella 5555: The 5tory Of The 5ecret 5tar 5ystem
In 2003, a few years after the release of Discovery, Daft Punk and Toei Animation turned the album into Interstella 5555, a concert film/musical heavily influenced by ’70s anime. The duo aren’t the focal point of its story (which is told with zero dialogue beyond what’s in the songs, none of which were written to be used in a musical), but they do make some cameo appearances as very cute anime robots.
Daft Punk’s Electroma
Released in 2006, Electroma is another musical film (of sorts). In a reverse from Interstella, though, it does not feature Daft Punk music but does feature the two Daft Punk robots—they’re not played by Bangalter and Homem-Christo, which is fun and confusing, though the real guys wrote and directed it. The movie is about a pair of robots who try to become humans—but after being rejected by society, they destroy themselves. The film formed the basis of the “Epilogue” breakup announcement video.
Kanye West, “Stronger”
If the Discovery-era music videos airing on Adult Swim didn’t introduce you to Daft Punk, maybe it was Kanye West’s “Stronger,” which heavily samples “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” The video essentially serves as an adaptation of Akira, but with Daft Punk (played by the actors from Electroma, not the real guys) giving Kanye West superpowers. Say what you will about Kanye West, but he often knows cool shit when he sees it.
Alive 2007
In 2007, hot off its weird movie and Kanye West sample, Daft Punk went on a big world tour that involved them (or, you know, people dressed as them) doing live mash-ups of their most popular songs from inside a giant light-up pyramid. They also released a Grammy-winning live album, Alive 2007, which is funny because they are robots.
Tron: Legacy
Who better to DJ at a club inside a video game than Daft Punk? Not only do they get to cameo in Tron: Legacy, but they do it in extremely slick white versions of their normal robot suits and there’s a great gag where they see a fight scene kicking off and decide to crank up the tunes. Diegetic music has literally never been cooler.
The 2014 Grammys
The live performance of “Get Lucky” (which slips into a bunch of different songs and gives Daft Punk a chance to make a big entrance) rules, but how many times have robots in tuxedos walked the red carpet at an award show? This effortless expression of the band’s aesthetics and the way they forced “normal” things like the Grammy Awards to accept it is what made the robot suits so cool. Like, all big entertainment industry award shows are artificial and meaningless, and not only do these guys show up as robots as an acknowledgment of how artificial everything about the event is, but then they proceed to rock the shit out of it with a great performance of a great song.
The Weeknd’s “I Feel It Coming”
“Starboy” was The Weeknd’s big moment, with Daft Punk serving as backup while he rejected everything about himself from the “Can’t Feel My Face” era. But it’s the “I Feel It Coming” video where the robots show why “ft. Daft Punk” is the best part of any song title. With the song playing like a spin-off of the funky Random Access Memories version of Daft Punk, the video features the duo in the coolest outfits they’ve ever worn—if not the coolest outfits anyone has ever worn ever.
“Epilogue”
Finally, the end. Daft Punk is unsurprisingly a pretty secretive duo, with the “Epilogue” video serving as the only indication that they were splitting up until a publicist confirmed it. This is still really all the information we have…. And yet, despite the fact that it’s decades old, it’s kinda perfect? Daft Punk using their own aesthetic experimentation to reveal that they’re breaking up, the gimmick looping back on itself in a way that acknowledges where they’ve been and conclusively says they’re not coming back, all done in a way that no other musical act could get away with. The only better thing would be, well, another 20 years of Daft Punk albums and cool robot shit.
Bangalter and Homem-Christo are still alive, obviously, and they might come back someday as two regular French guys, but it just won’t be the same. They’re just human after all.
53 Comments
My people have a saying: “Never turn your back on a Breen.”
Sad to see them split.I’d just been thinking the other day that it had been nearly eight years since their last album and had been keen to give Random Access Memory another listen.I’ve always loved the track Contact.
RAM is their magnum opus. Touch is heartbreaking beauty. And it’s the lushest production to ever have been put onto wax.
Each track has its moments that I could listen to forever. The real winner for me is Horizon, as a Japanese bonus track. Perfect ending for the album.
Was just thinking the other day “I hope Daft Punk are working on something soon” but I guess RAM is a good high note to go out on
To your brain’s credit, they were working on something.
Oh, FFS! You’re supposed to be better, 2021!What’s next? Method Man breaking a hip from falling out of bed?
Tom Hanks arrested for sexually assaulting Mr Rodgers great grandaughter in a Tesla Model X that he nought with bitcoin before it careered off a bridge killing The Rock and Betty White while they prepared for Middle East Peace negotiations
This is a retirement of Daft Punk, a concept, placed carefully in the no-space where concepts like this go, to be preserved but never again made real. A dream preserved in magic, under the all-flattering spot-halo of nostalgia.Until 2031 when they get a new idea for an album, and when it drops everyone agrees Daft Punk 2.0 isn’t as good as Daft Punk 1.0, because, let’s be honest here, it’s newer. And the very serious music journalists will be angry that the two guys who made Daft Punk and then retired Daft Punk have now ruined Daft Punk by reviving Daft Punk. Etc.
Newer can sometimes mean better! Sometimes it’s not as good. Opinions can sometimes be taken at face value!
Better perhaps, but will it also be harder? Faster? Stronger? More than ever, now I think their work is over.
Cant wait to hear Daft’s new solo album. Punk is going to be so jealous of his success
No way, Punk totally carried Daft for decades.
Buying tickets for the New Kids on the Punk super tour
Oh by the way, which one’s Daft?
A++ reference.
but how many times have robots in tuxedos walked the red carpet at an award show? This effortless expression of the band’s aesthetics and the way they forced “normal” things like the Grammy Awards to accept it is what made the robot suits so cool. Like, all big entertainment industry award shows are artificial and meaningless, and not only do these guys show up as robots as an acknowledgment of how artificial everything about the event is, but then they proceed to rock the shit out of it with a great performance of a great song.Was this paragraph written by a robot? Perhaps a young, impressionable robot a little too fresh from robot college with his ideas about smashing the system and walking on the grass dude? A robot doing an unpaid internship at a music review blog, even though now I think about it, he’s got no chance, I mean why would they put him on staff? Hell, a robot could do this job!
We are robot after all.
Kinja has a habit of eating links lately.
As a young teenager growing up in rural Colorado we had no internet but we did have satellite TV. My best avenue for discovering new music was the morning new music block on MTV2. The video for ‘One More Time’ absolutely enthralled me. The next time I was able to make the trek to the mall 15 miles away I purchased ‘Discovery’ and it was always in rotation in my car (via walkman to cassette adapter is this story sounding old enough yet).My further forays into popular electronic music (Crystal Method, Chemical Brothers, several techno style DJ’s) never clicked like Daft Punk did. Maybe it was their understanding of the history of the genre, or just their superior musicianship, but they were simply the best.In the present where all music is a click away and ever more geared to the high stream count single, RAM’s release in 2013 feels like it was the last time I anticipated a complete album so feverishly. An absolute killer single you digested a hundred times as you impatiently waited for the full meal. And when it finally arrived you knew it’d be a classic on the first spin (wait there’s TWO amazing Pharrell singles on this thing?????). It’s recency bias for sure but off the top of my head I can’t remember an album that completely lived up to the hype I had created in my head like RAM, even though it managed to subvert what I was expecting. To this day it blows my mind that being the visual artists they are they didn’t spend some insane amount of (someones) money to tour RAM and show the new kids like Deadmau5 that they’d always be the top dogs of the medium.
Lets hope they’re crying wolf like LCD Soundsystem and so many other acts that ‘retired’ early. But if not, I’ll miss you robots.
Deadmau5 is like, 5 years younger than them and started music about 5 years after Daft Punk ^^
But yeah I would’ve loved seeing them tour one last time … Hell I was hoping they were working on some new stuff during the pandemic.
Oh well, they did more than their fair share of awesome stuff 🙂
Yeah I won’t pretend to be an expert on the genre, but it seemed like after Daft Punk’s pyramid in ‘07 every electronic artist or DJ got a big ass lcd thing to stand on during live shows with Deadmou5’s cube being the first one that came to mind.
I agree with you that they were definitely the toppest of dogs, but they didn’t really invent anything, especially when it comes to shows.
People like Jean Michel Jarre were already outdoing what they did in 07 all the way back in the 80s 🙂
Yeah, but LED displays didn’t exist during Jean-Michel Jarre era. Lasers on the other hand.
“I would’ve loved seeing them tour one last time”Don’t you mean One More Time?… I’ll get my coat.
>Lets hope they’re crying wolf like LCD Soundsystem and so many other acts that ‘retired’ early. I think the most disappointing thing about LCD Soundsystem coming back from retirement so suddenly is how uninspired the music on American Dream is (outside of one or two tracks). I think now that a bit of time has passed and we can discuss the album a bit more objectively (ie we’re not throwing 10’s at it before we’ve even heard it) it’s clear that James had a lot on his mind – and most of the lyrics on that album are far more emotional than anything he’s written in the past – but man does the actual music ever feel really phoned in.
“My further forays into popular electronic music (Crystal Method,
Chemical Brothers, several techno style DJ’s) never clicked like Daft
Punk did. Maybe it was their understanding of the history of the genre,
or just their superior musicianship, but they were simply the best.”
Absolutely. Some of it may be due to some of their influences (as RAM shows with its tribute/cameos to people as disparate as Giorgio Moroder and Paul Williams) but in general I think it’s also that they did find a way to adapt their sound to include more traditional song formats (especially starting with Discovery and probably most apparent on that and RAM—no wonder those are their most popular albums).
in parts- I never quite understood why Daft Punk got into the mainstream so successfully, way more than say Chemical Brothers or Underworld. However I like Discovery very much and the popularity of that album was always a bright light in my mediocre nights out with my Previous group of friends: after so many boring pop songs, “One more time” was the one that got me smiling, and in the radio it was “Digital Love” the one that made me also sing along in the car.- They were not even the first ones at doing that kind of “filtered” house, but they were great at popularising this. What they mastered is the hooks I think.- THey are also inherently tied to the explosion of the music festivals, to your friend staying a bit longer after idk Interpol just to drink and for the lulz and ending having their first pill or mdma bomb while Daft Punk were playing and having an ilumination with electronic music… which only would extend to 2 am context and drugs in festivals. I have seen so many people ask for Daft Punk as their favourite electronic band in every festival. I did not see them live but I don’t believe their show was more than any of their contemporaries.- You people know that these guys were doing music on their own before, during and after daft punk, right? Bangalter was head of Roulé and Homem-Christo was the one of Crydamoure. Just to highlight, Bangalter and Dj Falcon have this enormous never ending loop of a tune- Will I miss them? I miss that people would have taken the opportunity of liking Daft Punk to look for similar sounds, references, or at least to know the names of the guys and what they worked on if they are such fans. Electronic music is seen in a way that any interest in depth is seen as nerdy. But hey, there is music, that you would even like.
And someone has to mention the huge influence that all the French filtered house had in the synthwave foundation.
to keep with the video vibe, I was youtubing Daft Punk vids and this one came up by french artists 113, it features guest appearance of 1 half of Daft Punk (Bangalter) but never seen just 1 of the robots make a cameo. but this song is pretty bad ass though.
As somebody who remembers when “electronica” was pointed to be the next big thing, I totally agree. I would have placed my money on the Chemical Brothers or Underworld back in ‘97, and pegged Daft Punk as also-rans. And I would have lost that money big-time.It’s the robot helmets. And LCD Soundsystem’s house party.
I thought The Crystal Method would break bigger than they did, myself. Their big miami breaks sound was commercializable in just the right way if you wanted to put it in movie trailers.
Or Propellerheads!
Ooh, good point. I thought when they were on The Matrix soundtracks their ticket was as good as punched and they were going to break huge (no pun intended).
One thing I hated about The Matrix is that the music was old: a year in the 90s is like 10 years in the 00s and 1999 was full of scifi drum n bass, microhouse and things that were way more futuristic sounding than the very mainstream and very classic Propellerheads -the album is very cool but it’s not even as cinematic as the Hybrid one. I never understood that about the Matrix trilogy. The score sounds more future than the songs.
Folks might have forgotten, though I recall a large part of their (mainstream) success/staying power was attributed at the time to how frequently MTV used tracks from Discovery as background/ambient music for their reality programming at the time. Not to promote the artist, it just worked well.Interesting juxtaposition (vapid/artistic), its likely for that reason that they became a gateway
I think it was “One More Time” that did it, honestly. As inevitable, unstoppable pop earworms go, it’s up there with “MMMBop” or “Who Let The Dogs Out”. If Chemical Brothers had ever released a radio juggernaut on that scale they’d be headlining festivals to this day.
“I never quite understood why Daft Punk got into the mainstream so
successfully, way more than say Chemical Brothers or Underworld.”
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, with Discovery especially, they did move into more traditional and melodic song formats than Underworld or Chemical Brothers were known for. At least it’s that juxtaposition that kept me a fan over the years, more so than some of those other acts I listened to when Homework came out.
The town of Wee Waa has entered three days of mourning, I can report.
i was so enjoying this but ruined that this was done when the Fascist was visiting France, fuck that that asshole did not deserve that pageantry, obviously has no idea what was being played, and he is not Daft punk generation, on the other hand Obama would’ve greatly appreciated it.
As if pop music hasn’t been up to its neck in schtick and stupid costumes from the very beginning.
Will Gojira double their output now? Or will there be another second French band?!I, for one, cannot wait to find out.
That’s a bit of revisionist for Interstella 555.Leiji Matsumoto started work on Interstella in 2000, concurrent with the album. It uses the aesthetics it does because those are Matsumoto’s aesthetics: he did Space Battleship Yamato, Captain Harlock, Queen Esmeraldes.The six singles off Discovery all had videos done by Matsumoto – and these 6 form ~40% of the movie. One More Time single and video came out in November 2000. The first 4 singles, with the videos, came out by late 2001.The Japanese release, 10 March 2001, looked like this:
Thank you—I was just gonna name drop Leiji Matsumoto (sure, call me an obnoxious fan, but it seems almost like a dis to just brush it off as being a homage to random 1970s anime as this article implies). And man, is it brilliant (if only it’d get a proper BluRay upgrade rather than what we got—which is basically just the DVD on BluRay looking worse than ever *grumbles*) Of course the anime from his work were huge in France—Captain Harlock as Albator especially (I even grew up with the French dub here in Canada). random fact, the new song and score for Alabtor was done by former French/Egyptian eurodisco uber-producer Alec R Costandinos (unfortunately, while a nostalgic karaoke fave in France, it’s not really indicative of his disco greatness)
I also like people whose contact with electronic music is Daft Punk so they credit them for everything on existence, including reverse sampling
I mean other bands did it, for sure, plunderphonics bands took it to a whole new level, and for my money no one did it better than The Prodigy, but the way Daft Punk tuned and chopped their samples was masterful, they went to fairly new extremes when it came to making it sound like a new track played on instruments– most people don’t even realize a lot of their stuff is sampled.
It was, but when “Discovery” was released all the tricks were already very old.
i saw them at even further in rural wisconsin in 1996. that was a very cold and rainy weekend. i had no idea who they were at the time. what i remember most about that weekend isn’t daft punk, but the rain, mud, and it seemed like every small sound system tent i walked by during the day time had drum & bass dj playing the same jungle remix of busta rhymes’ woo hah.
So damn sad…the gaps between albums kept getting longer, so I should have figured that they might be wrapping things up soon, but I still expected at least ONE more album after Random Access Memories…sigh. I can’t decide whether Homework, Discovery, or Random Access Memories is my favorite studio album from them (cuz c’mon, NO ONE’s favorite Daft Punk album is Human After All). But I probably listen to their instant classic live album, Alive 2007, the most. Holy FUCK was that a great show.
“Daft Punk is Playing at my House” is a great Daft Punk as robots moment to me. Whenever they showed up in pop culture, there was always the funny tongue-in-cheek element of us having to accept two robots existing in our reality, and this song is a great example of it. They don’t even have to be directly involved to be the funnest, most essential part of a song.
i highly recommend the french film EDEN (2014), which chronicals a french DJ’s progression during the 90’s. the film makers were friends with Daft Punk and Daft Punk feature in the film, but played by actors.
Daft Punk is not playing at my house