Earlier this week, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, otherwise known as the French electronic duo Daft Punk, announced that they were disbanding after twenty-eight years of releasing music together. They did so in a fashion familiar to their fans: a stylized video of the two of them, wearing their leather jackets and customary robot helmets, parting ways in the desert. The robots stare at one another, raising their heads in a way that pantomimes human affection. One robot tenses its fist and explodes, and then a choral stretch from their 2013 song “Touch” plays: “If love is the answer / You’re home / Hold on.” The video was melodramatic and a bit silly. Yet Daft Punk remained so committed to this performance, to their meticulous aesthetic, that the whole thing was oddly moving, the final gesture in a career built on being possibly deep but definitely, childishly fun.
The thing I remember about hearing “Da Funk” and “Around the World” in the mid-nineties is how they both sounded like you were arriving somewhere—you were greeted by the sound of a chattering crowd and traffic, people were already there on the scene, bass lines and synths revealing themselves as you got closer. It was a time when one could still credibly wonder if any type of music would ever supplant rock as the lingua franca of mainstream youthful rebellion. Daft Punk’s head-nod take on club music, and their surreal, often funny videos, felt like an ambush, maybe a novelty. But success didn’t make them seem anxious or pandering. You were free to stay, but you didn’t have to.
The pair had started their career in the early nineties in a rock band called Darlin’, which also featured a future member of the band Phoenix. A reviewer called one of their songs a “daft, punky thrash,” which provided them a funny name once they got bored with doing that and decided to make dance music instead. Playing in bands and then evolving into something else was a familiar narrative for many of the dance acts that experienced mainstream success in the mid-nineties, like the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, or Underworld. In a rare interview, Bangalter once joked that Daft Punk’s début album, “Homework,” inspired as much by Chicago house as by Paris’s growing club scene, was meant to show rock kids that electronic music was cool. Daft Punk honed this approach with 2001’s “Discovery,” which combined the euphoria of dancing all night with the thrashy catharsis of rock. They glammed up samples of old disco and boogie records until they were drippy and majestic, ripping through synth arpeggios as though they were letting off some wicked, over-the-top guitar solos.
Daft Punk usually wore helmets when they appeared in public, to keep things focussed on the music. But it didn’t matter. I never felt too curious about their inner lives, given how open they were about their influences, whether it was their samples, their remixes, or collaborations that centered lesser-known DJs and idols like Romanthony or Todd Terry. Some of their best songs, like “One More Time,” or “Music Sounds Better With You,” which Bangalter made as part of his side project Stardust, are quite literally about how great music is. One of my favorite Daft Punk songs has always been “Teachers,” essentially a roll call of their influences over a luscious disco fragment and growling synths. It was filled with names I had never heard of, all these local legends from Chicago, Detroit, New York, and beyond, as well as names I never would have associated with electronic dance music, like Brian Wilson. It was like a door that opened onto more doors.
Daft Punk lay at the center of their own universe, popularizing dance music to audiences who may not have cared, while still maintaining their roots in underground dance scenes that scorned outside approval. In the two-thousands, their manager, Pedro Winter, branched off to found the Paris label Ed Banger Records, which expanded the Daft Punk diaspora, pushing dance music toward a kind of head-banging excess. I recall the excitement of Daft Punk’s involvement in the 2010 remake of “Tron,” near the beginning of this age of movie reboots we’re still living in. The film and the soundtrack were both underwhelming, and it suggested to me that Daft Punk were never as futuristic as they were deeply, earnestly nostalgic. Maybe the fact that they aspired to make albums at all, rather than transcendent singles, like most dance producers, spoke to their age. The robot-human thing rarely seemed like a commentary on present-day life, and even a track like “Television Rules the Nation,” from 2005’s often overlooked “Human After All,” trafficked in an anachronistic paranoia. These songs weren’t a commentary on automation or alienation so much as an exploration of childhood nostalgia, the thrill of hearing Giorgio Moroder or special-effects lasers for the first time, stuck on a seventies or early eighties sense of what the future would feel like. Their 2013 album “Random Access Memories” disappointed some, in part because the musical choices and collaborations finally seemed to be backward-looking. (I recall that the lead single, the effervescent and spangly “Get Lucky,” also set expectations impossibly high.) Their biggest hits came in the last few years, as guests on the Weeknd’s 2016 album “Starboy.”
Are they actually retired? It seems beside the point, given how intermittent their output has been over the past few years, as well as the fact that we never really knew them to begin with. There are few times when we are all listening to the same thing; usually it means someone has died. Two things often happen: record sellers jack up the prices on vintage copies of said artist’s old albums—a copy of Daft Punk’s “Alive 1997” which would have cost forty dollars two weeks ago now goes for four hundred—and everyone tries to embark on the same trip together. Retirement for Daft Punk seems a bit artificial, yet it’s one of the few times when our common listening is born of joy. Free from the paralyzing torrent of choices that define our daily listening habits, one needs nothing more than their mesmerizing live album, “Alive 2007,” a dive into the duo’s classic nineties set on BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix, or their spine-tingling remix of the Chemical Brothers’ “Life is Sweet.”
The draw of such moments is amplified by the pandemic. Even if Daft Punk remained unknowable, their music offered a vision of social life, whether it was the sounds of crowds, the samples chopped up and braided together, the tributes to their teachers. During the summer of 1997, my friend Sean came back from an internship at an irrigation company in France with a collection of brightly colored polo shirts, a new way to wear them, and a CD of “Homework.” He assured me that everyone was listening to it, the way people in America listened to Pearl Jam or 2Pac. The music was irresistibly obnoxious and sleazy, which fit the stories he brought back. It was confident, and it drew our curiosity toward new zones of the night.
A year into isolation, we miss the peaks of being out, the high of losing yourself in the madness of the crowd. For me, that yearning has grown more diffuse. Listening to “Alive 2007,” it was easy to recall the sheer ecstasy of seeing Daft Punk play live, marvelling at just how many great songs they had made, and how thoughtfully they wove them in and out of one another. But I now miss the entirety of the night, especially ones revolving around any big event. Taking the train, feeling in your pocket to make sure you have your ticket, looking around and wondering who’s going, too. The anticipation and eavesdropping. For their 2006-2007 tour, Daft Punk played inside an enormous, flashing pyramid, and no matter how hard someone who’d seen it tried to describe it, you were unprepared for the reality of it. An entire minor league baseball stadium in Coney Island full of people enjoying the same mass hallucination. Milling about afterward, and the magic of running into friends you didn’t know were there. Wondering, the following morning, if you had, indeed, seen a robot trash collector on the boardwalk outside the show. An MP3 of that night’s gig made the rounds, and sentiment often compels me to favor this bootleg over “Alive 2007,” which was recorded on a different night. It starts with a long stretch of nothing, then small ripples of cheers through the crowd when the pyramid is finally illuminated. The MP3 isn’t professionally recorded or properly mastered, like “Alive 2007,” but I believe I can hear my friend shrieking during “Music Sounds Better With You.”
