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Daft Punk - Random Access Memories


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On 2/23/2023 at 4:38 AM, xyrofen said:

I've noticed some more opinions about this album having turned into considering a classic, or at least generally well liked.

I loved Daft Punk, "Discovery" and "Homework" are two of my favorite albums of all time. "Alive 2007" is on regular rotation in my car's CD changer, I bought "Human After All" on release somewhat regrettably because most of that album is mix fodder pisstake material (still love the title track and "Steam Machine" though). I have tried to not dislike "Random Access Memories" and failed multiple times. This album makes me feel old, it made me feel old on release.

There are a few decent tracks and moments therein, but they usually do some hypocritical combination of overstaying their welcome, devolving into something less interesting or engaging, or not lasting long enough; to name the tracks I find worth my time: Instant Crush, Motherboard, Doin' It Right, and maybe Contact. My main problems with this album stem from a few key sources: I want most of the vocalists to shut up whenever I hear them singing (I will never want to hear Pharrell singing on anything ever and most of the vocoding is not good), the drums all sound like I went to go see my roommate's dad's cover band play some tunes and they paid one of their nephews to do the sound, and pretty much every track feels like an overproduced realization of an older track that I rather be listening to instead (I could tabulate this if anyone cares at all); I rather listen to tracks like "Fresh" or "High Fidelity" or "Voyager" or "Face to Face" or "Television Rules the Nation" or on any hour of any given day.

I consider my general enjoyment of most disco music and early formative taste to be pretty tied to Daft Punk. Use of a vocoder (or most vocal processing) is a fast way to my heart, so it's usually a bit of a feat when it makes me reel back, like on numerous tracks herein (specifically "Within" and "Lose Yourself to Dance"). I can, and often do, forgive vocal content if it's not the greatest if the rest of the track around it makes up for it, I grew up around my brother playing and listening to the garage-grunge music that took over in the mid-90s from Nirvana culling glam and hair metal.

It took me years to understand a lot of why I feel and felt the way I do about this album: my expectations, my misplaced metrics for assigning an identity as an electronic music dweeb and thus uncalled for attachments to artists (that I probably still have, I am still sad about Ametsub being a massive creep and still derive my visual representation and tastes in most artforms from mid-00s IDM), letting go of my younger self. When I heard Starcadian's album "Sunset Blood," I realized that was the kind of musical progression I expected from Daft Punk, not studio electronic heavy dad rock (though for levity I feel I should note I first heard "Get Lucky" in the same restaurant as where I watched a bunch of then early 40s parents completely groove to "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" while pre-gaming for a UFC fight and it fucked my head in). I needed to let go of always trying to define myself as a fringe "other" person to those around me intentionally and instead let who I am find its way organically and move past who I had tried to be for awhile.

 

Thanks for reading my existential braindump of a reflection on Daft Punk's "Random Access Memories" that has been brought to you by a sudden dumping of snow on the Portland metro area of Oregon. I was not planning on writing this, so it's all pretty cobbled together and only slightly edited (mostly to add the links for fun).

great post.

i see this album as an attempt to do a "real" studio album that harkens back to the late 70s/early 80s when this kind of album-making achieved a certain peak. i love records from that time and i think studio art really was achieving some incredible stuff. however, that time is gone. it's not enough to just try to recreate this, that's artistically empty. imo les freres simply did not cook their ideas enough to reach some new territory; instead they fell back on the conventions of a bygone era which is an artistic dead end. i think it's quite hard to attempt to revisit the past without just doing inane pastiche. when i listen to the record i just hear them making decisions that were made decades ago, about how records should sound and what makes them good - so in a way they just never really went to that place where artists have to grapple with their work, toil in the studio to solve problems and break out into new horizons for themselves. i just seems like they went to an established professional studio, hired appropriate professionals, and threw money into a project where they just did what other people used to do. it has a very steely dan kind of quality where it just sounds like musicians in a studio, nothing more. bloodless, easy, empty. to some extent i think artists usually can't really escape their limits and when they try too hard to get outside of themselves they end up making something that clearly could have and has been done way better by people who actually do that thing.  

 

i think a counter example to this is BOC. after listening to the societas x tape, i think so much of what they do became a little more clear to us. they're not just doing nostalgia, they are re-creating music of the past (like literally doing this, not sampling) and then destroying it, taking it on a psychedelic adventure, drawing things out of it that would never have been done when it was first made. i very much see a record like TCH as a kind of late 70s/early 80s record, but one that could never have existed in that time. cultural, aesthetic, and technological changes have taken place and the brothers understand that you can't just go back to the way things used to be. there's always something distorted when you journey into the past and they don't ignore this, they dig deep right into this conflict. this, obviously, is a touchstone in all of their work imo: from the lost childhood of MHTRTC to the post-apocalyptic TH.

just doing your album in the style of fleetwood mac rumors is saccharine and soulless. as an artist you have to confront the inherent conflicts of this situation, otherwise you really do just produce a kind of cover-band record.

 

like d-lo said, they became another LA band...

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5 hours ago, Stock said:

Feels like their major is just raking in the money after they disbanded in 2021

My thoughts exactly and this is exactly what I predicted when I heard the news of them disbanding. Disbanding is just another career/marketing move. Who the f does a ten year anniversary edition? Cringe all around

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2 hours ago, toaoaoad said:

My thoughts exactly and this is exactly what I predicted when I heard the news of them disbanding. Disbanding is just another career/marketing move. Who the f does a ten year anniversary edition? Cringe all around

Reminds me of Death Grips breaking up then to my surprise putting out a new album shortly after. I've seen other instances 'breaking up' just to remind people they exist. Then it gets a reunion tour a few years after which attracts more people than if they had just kept doing live shows. Then like that, they are working together again.

I think it's a good strategy. Maybe you know nothing will be coming out for a few years. So you 'disband' fully intending to come together again for an album.

Edited by Brisbot
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8 hours ago, Alcofribas said:

great post.

i see this album as an attempt to do a "real" studio album that harkens back to the late 70s/early 80s when this kind of album-making achieved a certain peak. i love records from that time and i think studio art really was achieving some incredible stuff. however, that time is gone. it's not enough to just try to recreate this, that's artistically empty. imo les freres simply did not cook their ideas enough to reach some new territory; instead they fell back on the conventions of a bygone era which is an artistic dead end. i think it's quite hard to attempt to revisit the past without just doing inane pastiche. when i listen to the record i just hear them making decisions that were made decades ago, about how records should sound and what makes them good - so in a way they just never really went to that place where artists have to grapple with their work, toil in the studio to solve problems and break out into new horizons for themselves. i just seems like they went to an established professional studio, hired appropriate professionals, and threw money into a project where they just did what other people used to do. it has a very steely dan kind of quality where it just sounds like musicians in a studio, nothing more. bloodless, easy, empty. to some extent i think artists usually can't really escape their limits and when they try too hard to get outside of themselves they end up making something that clearly could have and has been done way better by people who actually do that thing.  

 

i think a counter example to this is BOC. after listening to the societas x tape, i think so much of what they do became a little more clear to us. they're not just doing nostalgia, they are re-creating music of the past (like literally doing this, not sampling) and then destroying it, taking it on a psychedelic adventure, drawing things out of it that would never have been done when it was first made. i very much see a record like TCH as a kind of late 70s/early 80s record, but one that could never have existed in that time. cultural, aesthetic, and technological changes have taken place and the brothers understand that you can't just go back to the way things used to be. there's always something distorted when you journey into the past and they don't ignore this, they dig deep right into this conflict. this, obviously, is a touchstone in all of their work imo: from the lost childhood of MHTRTC to the post-apocalyptic TH.

just doing your album in the style of fleetwood mac rumors is saccharine and soulless. as an artist you have to confront the inherent conflicts of this situation, otherwise you really do just produce a kind of cover-band record.

 

like d-lo said, they became another LA band...

all of this except i think they legitimately thought they were "updating" the sound by adding those inane french vocoders on every track

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12 hours ago, dr lopez said:

all of this except i think they legitimately thought they were "updating" the sound by adding those inane french vocoders on every track

I don't think so, the vocoder everywhere sound just like the one Herbie Hancock used on the Sunlight album, I think just as the rest of the album, the vocoder tries to perfectly recreate/emulate the 70's/80's studio sound as mentioned by alco.

As for the potential reunion : Bangalter has a solo album of modern classical music coming out in a few weeks, I hope they will keep on making projects beside the Daft Punk brand. I'm fond of their respective output (especially the extremely repetitive french house of the Crydamoure label) :music:

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On 2/25/2023 at 2:53 PM, thumbass said:

Never liked datf punk

Same ?

Though lots of folks do, so it’s best to keep as quiet as you can about it. Probably one of my most disliked bands of all time tbh. But shhhh ? 

Edited by beerwolf
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On 2/26/2023 at 11:16 AM, beerwolf said:

Same ?

Though lots of folks do, so it’s best to keep as quiet as you can about it. Probably one of my most disliked bands of all time tbh. But shhhh ? 

homework is a dope album. the rest is pop trash tho

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6 minutes ago, NewSchoolScience said:

It’s hilarious how indescribably shit Daft Punk are/became

Indeed, and yet they are still celebrated as the epitome of electronic music by the french media, god I hate this country, it's unreal...

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Remember buying Homework the first few weeks it came out. It was about the time I had also landed my spaceship on Planet Aphex. So my vision was already becoming crystal clear to me. However I gotta say a lot of mates who were into Jungle/DnB, and Indie, and techno, and metal were lapping up Homework. It had huge crossover appeal. So I get the love for it. But I knew my map and compass was pointing in another direction. And it wasn't Planet Daft Punk. But it's undoubtedly a class album.
 

A similar thing happened when I got into metal. The first 2 albums I heard was Rust In Peace and Seasons In The Abyss, which completely blew my fucking mind. So a lot of other stuff which was circulating at the time was rightly judged as complete shit. It's like playing golf and shooting half a dozen holes in one on your first game. You may as well take up another hobby Mr Music Maker.

(Not sure if that makes sense but I know what I mean)

 

Edited by beerwolf
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On 9/29/2023 at 9:48 PM, logakght said:

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks RAM is absolute, complete garbage.

I kind of like it but in a completely  different context than the rest of their releases.

its more like "we are too old for a rave and drugs now and do not even pretend its different". 

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Seems kinda weird to talk about daft punk on this forum, I mean I know it's electronic music, but so is loads of pop music by that standard - the early stuff was ok, I don't know their influences, but probably more interesting than what they did - like the prodigy brought rave to mainstream by kinda making it compositionally accessible, they brought some kind of funky house music to the mainstream it seems like - I mean it's fine, if people are into it, good for them, but I don't see much interesting in them

Although, did they invent that kind of funky house? That can't be true, no?

Edited by hoggy
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Lose you youself to dance is a track i play often when i'm totally socked.

Makes me sing and start moving around as i clap along while friends look in horror

Alcohol is one hell ov a drug

 

 

Edited by Ivan Ooze
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3 hours ago, picklish2 said:

 

One of my favorites from the games of my childhood.

  

1 minute ago, Ivan Ooze said:

Lose you youself to dance is a track i play often when i'm totally socked.

Makes me sing and start moving around while i clap along while friends look in horror

Alcohol is one hell ov a drug

 

 

This track is as grating as anything off of Pulse Demon or Venerology. Borderline experimental.

Edited by xyrofen
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