It Took Me 20 Years To Realize I Like Daft Punk
Earlier this week, Daft Punk announced that after 28 years, the electronic duo would be hanging up their robot suits and calling it quits. The announcement came via a video titled “Epilogue”, where one of the robots, exhausted after a seemingly endless voyage through the desert, makes a tacit agreement with his partner, letting him know it’s time to hit the self-destruct button. His friend respectfully agrees and, after watching his other half explode into nothingness, turns around and continues his journey into the sunset alone as a choir sings a section from the duo’s song, “Touch”: “Hold on. If love is the answer, you’re home.”
Despite their long and successful career, It’s only in recent years that I’ve actively engaged with the music of Daft Punk - who are actually French DJs Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter. Yet, hearing “Touch” accompany the end of their journey made me disproportionately sentimental.
The first time I heard “Touch” - a deep cut off the duo’s fourth (and presumably final) studio album, Random Access Memories - was around 2018, five years after that album became an undeniable success, topping the charts with hit songs like “Get Lucky” and eventually taking home the Grammy Awards’ top prize. I was with my friends Matt (Black Eyed Peas, Rebirth) and Sganga (U2, Coldplay) when I admitted that, despite the fact that the electronic duo had been playing a major role in mainstream music since the late ‘90’s, I’d never bothered to listen their albums. In fact, it had never occurred to me that they might be worth listening to.
I’m sure this isn’t how it happened, but I have a recollection of my two friends looking at each other knowingly, reaching a silent agreement - much like our robotic friends in the “Epilogue” video - and proceeding to put on the 8 minute and 17 second-long track.
But before I talk about what I heard, I think it’s worth talking about why it took me so long to arrive at that moment.
It’s difficult for me to expound my relationship with Daft Punk’s music. This is partly because of how long that relationship is, and partly because of how faint the existence of that relationship has been. If I had to trace it back, it would have to start with “One More Time”, the hit song off Daft Punk’s 2001 album, Discovery. This is a song I mainly associate with carpools, elementary school birthday parties, and the occasional karate tournament. (In fact, now that I think about it, perhaps the reason I’ve never had a positive relationship with uptempo techno music is because it was the soundtrack to my traumatic experience as a failed pre-pubescent martial artist.)
This is all to say that “One More Time” is not a song I ever remember engaging with in my own personal time. As a result, it’s hard to remember what my emotional relationship with the song was as a 6-year-old. Perhaps I’m projecting, but to the best of my recollection, the automated vocals, repetitive lyrics, and distorted samples made by two faceless men in robot costumes engendered a morbid fascination in me; it was world’s apart from the endless cycle of *NSYNC and adult contemporary radio my parents played in the car. In retrospect, this is exactly what the duo was going for. Unfortunately, like most 6-year-olds, I was not in the business of leaning in towards my morbid fascinations. So for most of my young life, when the name “Daft Punk” appeared, I instinctively categorized them as “not my kind of music”.
Junior high was when I first began exploring my morbid musical fascinations, namely: hip-hop. I’ve already discussed the perverse way I arrived at this fascination. However, after first discovering Pitbull, I spent my pre-teen and teenage years learning more about what hip-hop had to offer. In a roundabout way, this led to the next big step in my relationship with Daft Punk: moving in together.
Kidding… Sorry.
It was “Stronger” by Kanye West. This is one of those songs that became so successful and ubiquitous, it’s easy now to forget how unusual it was. All the elements that made “Stronger” such an unlikely hit rap song were the same things that made it an undeniable banger, an example of my love affair with hip-hop blooming in real time as I cut the rug to it at Bar Mitzvah party after Bar Mitzvah party. One of these elements is the song’s main sample: “Harder Better Fast Stronger”, Daft Punk’s other big Discovery hit. Obsessively dissecting what made “Stronger” so effective led to a slightly better understanding of what made Daft Punk interesting. (As did an OG viral YouTube video: “Daft Hands”.)
And yet, I still had the duo locked in my head as “not my kind of music”.
A couple years later, Daft Punk released what is, by all metrics, their most successful song: “Get Lucky”, a disco-tinged pop record featuring Pharrell Williams. This was the rare smash hit that every member of your family could agree on. It was the soundtrack to every party - both dance and dinner - that you had between the years 2013 and 2015. It was a completely different sound than the house music I had so strongly associated the duo with. It was soulful, optimistic, and funky, most things that I like in my pop music.
Still, I never bothered to wonder if Daft Punk’s discography was worth diving into.
Still: “not my kind of music”.
In between my first exposure to "One More Time” and my friends sitting me down to listen to “Touch”, Daft Punk had probably released around 60 songs. I had heard about three of them and decided they had nothing to offer me. Now, when I watch one half of the duo fade into the distance as “Touch” plays in the background, I get sentimental thinking about all the time I wasted being so short-sighted. I also get nostalgic for the recent yet somehow incredibly distant memory of gathering with close friends in a Manhattan apartment as they played me a song that is simply - and this is not a word I use in real life - breathtaking.
Many people have given their two cents on what “Touch” is about: a robot becoming human, a man experiencing the afterlife, a spiritual awakening. Whatever the details, it’s a song about how both grounding and disorienting it can be to simply feel something. It’s identified - both by fans and by the duo themselves - as the emotional core of Daft Punk’s catalog.
It opens with whirring synths that sound like they’re blowing distantly in the wind. Then, as the sounds get closer, a highly distorted voice sounds like it’s coming to, remembering it’s own existence. As we get closer and closer to the voice, it abruptly reveals itself to be the voice of Paul Williams, the song’s primary writer and vocalist - a man known for writing a number of hit songs from the ‘70’s like “We’ve Only Just Begun” by The Carpenters and “An Old-Fashioned Love Song” by Three Dog Night. He sings in a withered voice about faded memories of touch, how he feels confused by them, and yet also yearns for more. (Not to get too Thought Catalog-y, but the notion of yearning for physical connection seems extremely relevant in the middle of a quarantine.)
As the song progresses, it builds in texture and rhythm. The instruments become more vibrant, as if the protagonist’s memories of feeling something are becoming more and more vivid. As these memories crash into each other, a choir - at times robotic, at times cherubic - repeats that line: “Hold on. If love is the answer you’re home.” Perhaps the choir is telling the protagonist, “Don’t get lost worrying about the implications of love. To have been able to love at all is enough.” Throughout the song’s different sections, the distinction between the electronic and acoustic instrumentations are acutely felt, mirroring the sharp contrast between feeling everything and feeling nothing at all. Yet, even as these arrangements change hands, the dynamic energy is constantly building and building, becoming more and more visceral, more and more euphoric! Until…
A stunning moment of silence before Williams returns to reality, sounding almost defeated, as if he’s experiencing the world’s most painful withdrawal: “Sweet touch. You’ve almost convinced me I’m real!”
When the last unresolved chord in my first listen to “Touch” faded out, I stared wide-eyed at Matt and Sganga. They stared back like “yeah… we know.”
“Touch” is at times hilariously campy. A quarter of the way through, the beat kicks in, making it sound like a lost “Mamma Mia” number. But even this sort of over-the-top melodrama is in service to the idea of what it’s like to be overwhelmed by feeling. This kind of emotionality didn’t exist in lyrics like “One more time, we're gonna celebrate. Oh yeah, alright, don't stop the dancing.” Or maybe it did, and I just refused to hear it.
One thing The Skip Button has taught me is that our taste in music has as much to do with the music we don’t listen to as it has to do with the music we do listen to. We grow up defining ourselves in part by all the things we aren’t: “I’m not a math person”, “I’m not a people person”… “Daft Punk isn’t my kind of music”. As soon as we make that decision on behalf of ourselves, we put up barriers designed to block out anything that indicates it might not meet that self-definition. I used to hear automated vocals, repetitive lyrics, and distorted samples, and my brain would automatically shut down the possibility that I might like it. Somehow, “Touch” bypassed those barriers and, in doing so, opened up my mind to other songs in Daft Punk’s genre. When I first listened to “Touch”, I thought that, by being so much about the human experience, it was completely different from the Daft Punk songs that were overtly about being a robot. However, I now realized that by imagining what it’s like to be a robot, Daft Punk’s music had always inherently been about what it means to be human.
I think this is a common process for people discovering new music. Once you find that one country song, for example, that allows you to let your guard down, you might find that you no longer have that instinct to change the channel as soon as you hear a southern twang and steel guitars. It could be the start of a brand new relationship with that music. Almost two years after I first heard “Touch”, The Avalanches’ electronic album, We Will Always Love You became my #2 album of 2020. I don’t think one would have happened without the other.
On my long subway ride home from Sganga’s apartment, I listened to the rest of Random Access Memories. I was struck by the melodic lines in songs like “Within” and “Instant Crush” featuring Julian Casablancas. More importantly, I found myself open to the more techno-leaning tracks like “Giorgio by Moroder”. Although I had a clear favorite with “Touch”, the whole album was a delightful cornucopia of sounds I had previously shut myself off to.
Almost twenty years after I first heard Daft Punk, and less than two before they announced their breakup, I got off the A train with a shocking revelation:
Daft Punk had become my kind of music.
