Daft Punk diagnose the cause of death for EDM
As music has evolved and created a myriad of bizarre subgenres, the conventional of the lot has become almost dirty words. ‘Indie’ for example, has swiftly turned from a literal representation of independence to a satirical term splattered on anything marginally cliche. And then extends to electronic music – ‘EDM’ was a fairly literal representation of ‘electronic dance music’ before the culture turned it into a parody of cookie-cutter dance music. Perhaps at the forefront of dance music’s healthy innovation was the French duo Daft Punk.
Their seminal 2001 record Discovery set out an identifiable blueprint for future artists to follow and help mould the mainstream success of electronic music in the 2000s and 2010s.
Perhaps more notable than their exposure of dance music as a genre was their success in assimilating it into the sensibilities of indie music. Guitarist and keys player for Australian electropop band Parcels once said to NME: “We learnt about delicacy and having a really deep investigation into every note of every chord; but also about feeling and not thinking. They also helped us to realise that we’re a band, that we want to be playing real, live instruments together and recording it like that because that’s when we sometimes hit something special.”
In the late 1990s and early ‘00s, the production of a seemingly technological genre was still very much grounded in the same natural process as every other sector of music. It heavily relied on the creative alchemy of two people working together in the same room, bouncing ideas off one another with the live use of instrumentation.
While the advancement of digital recording technology innovated dance music, Daft Punk saw concerns about creative dangers. Speaking to The Guardian in 2013, they compared their own experience of live instrumentation to the apparent lack of that came from the emergence of ‘bedroom DJs’ and questioned whether it results in a lack of originality.
“Today, electronic music is made in airports and hotel rooms by DJs travelling,” Thomas Bangalter said. “It has a sense of movement, maybe, but it’s not the same vibe as going into these studios that contain specific things … You hear a song – whose track is it? There’s no signature.”
It was a viewpoint that perhaps inspired Daft Punk’s decision to collaborate with more traditional artists in the album they released in the same year they gave that quote. Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers and Julian Casablancas were just a handful of artists who appeared on their record Random Access Memories. In the same interview with The Guardian, the duo said: “The breakthrough came when they started experimenting with live musicians and “[recreating] what we used to do with machines and samplers, but with people”.
The combination of an electronic disposition with classic band sensibilities obviously spoke to the consciousness of music fans, with ‘Get Lucky’ becoming the earworm of 2013. In fact, the song landed Daft Punk the biggest hit of their career. It broke Spotify streaming records on the day of its release by achieving the highest number of streams on the streaming giant within 24 hours in both the UK and US.
