Daft Punk/Pépé Bradock
"Da funk back to the punk, come on"
When Daft Punk announced their split in February 2021, it was hard not to be disappointed even though they were barely active at that point anyway. In the eight-year break between their third and fourth albums, there was only a live album and then a movie soundtrack to tide people over. But the thing is, I would have happily waited another eight years if it meant an album as masterful as Random Access Memories which leads me to my one mild-spicy take: their last album was their best album.
I was there from the beginning, mind you. Daft Punk was actually playing at my house. Whenever I had to stay in sick from school, I’d turn on the TV and flip to MTV and “Da Funk” seemed to always be playing during those hours, my introduction to this thing called ‘house’ at a time that I barely knew what ‘rock’ was (there was not a lot of music in my household growing up). They brought all the kids in my primary school to the gym for a big dance and played “One More Time” and—get this—the “Pokémon Theme Song.” My friends and I huddled around to watch those videos of someone who had Sharpie-d the words of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” and “Technologic” onto their hands and showed them in sync with the beat of the song because we thought that was the pinnacle of cool. I was there, I was there.
Daft Punk are Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, but actually, they’re robots. I have never thought of Daft Punk as two separate individuals, but rather one robot entity (with two bodies, I guess), and key to my interpretation is that, with a few exceptions (especially the one-off Stardust song), both did their best work as Daft Punk over their many, many side projects. As human beings before they became robots, they failed spectacularly: prior to Daft Punk, Homem-Christo and Bangalter were first a rock group named Darlin’ (named after the Beach Boys song) with Laurent Brancowitz, which didn’t last long but did inspire their name when a review in Melody Maker dubbed them “a daft punky thrash.” (Brancowitz went on to form Phoenix, a indie band that scored two great songs in 2009 and still get good slots at the summer festivals because of those two songs; I like about half of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and one song from Bankrupt! and that’s about it with them.)
In Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Simon Reynolds highlights what separated Daft Punk’s Homework from their contemporaries: “a technique known as the ‘low-pass filter sweep’, an effect that makes riffs or vocal samples seem like they’re receding tantalizingly into the background before surging back in full ecstatic force. Sounding like a cross between panning and phasing, the low-pass filter sweep combines a spangly, spectral unearthliness with a teasing, suppressed-sounding quality” (491). Many of the beats on Homework (“Daftendirekt,” “Revolution 909,” “Around the World”) feel like you’re opening the bathroom door and re-entering the club to be hit by the groove and it’s like (oh jeez) discovering a new world in that sense over and over. It gives Homework a very neat ‘ebb-and-flow’ effect that’s sorely missing from some other French house albums. (Bangalter would use the effect again on Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You,” bright supernova chords that I like to listen to on my own even if they’re probably right that it would sound better with you.)
Further separating out Daft Punk is the Spartan mix of their drums, which seems to be chewing up the disco samples only spit them back in your face, assuming that’s your kink. Listen to “Disco Cubizm,” the lead single of fellow French house producer I:Cube, and you’ll be met with the requisite components of French house: disco samples and house beats. Then listen to Daft Punk’s remix of the same song and it immediately becomes apparent that something was missing in the original; the new drum mix that Daft Punk adds gives that song life. It was all disco, but Daft Punk commanded its listeners to move just a little bit harder.
“Da Funk” announces their pop sensibility with its highly infectious riff-loop, and “Around the World” announces their intent, which is global domination, which was more or less immediately achieved when Homework breached the top 10 UK albums chart. Unlike Motorbass’ Pansonic and other French house albums around this time, there’s a lot of thought put into making this play like an album by programming it to start with a very short song by house standards, then an interlude, a handful of essentially pop songs and then two of the album’s longest songs as Homework’s de facto centerpiece(s). The second half sort of falls apart: “Teachers” is a skip; both “Rock’n Roll” and “Burnin’” feel like failed beat experiments stretched to 7 minutes, although the latter’s bass-line is a joy to behold when it finally comes, and then you can go ahead and skip to “Alive,” bypassing “Indo Silver Club” altogether. “Rollin’ & Scratchin’” beeps, buzzes and then blares: a very weird one for them, and the one that I imagine Kanye West listened to most before asking them to help with Yeezus. Some of these songs were remixed and stretched into a single 45-minute track on Alive 1997.
They did the Joshua Tree thing of stacking the opening salvo with the anthems, making it seem like the second half is a drop-off. Seem like. My opinion of Daft Punk’s songs and albums haven’t budged at all since I first heard any of them for the most part, except that I (oh God, not again) discover something new to like in this album’s second half every time. Songs develop more than the ones on Homework because there’s more interest in texture than just in the drum beats: the blippy keyboard in the left channel that takes “Superheroes” to an exciting new place (in the air, you might say); the digital harp coming in halfway through “Voyager,” while a disco guitar gently flickers in and out; “Short Circuit” turns from a somewhat annoying bouncing ball into an ambient house beat. Both “Voyager” and “Veridis Quo” (which sounds like it samples the instrumental section of Genesis’ “Firth of Fifth”) are genuine purty songs for Daft Punk.
And whereas Homework and Human After All are repetitive in nature, Discovery attempts pop songs via house through hooks (“One More Time”; “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”) and solos (“Aerodynamic”; “Digital Love”; “Something About Us”). “Digital Love” is my vote for their best song, aided by the fact that it’s an actual song, but not just that, they proved that these robots were capable of genuine emotion. By obscuring the voice with a robot effect, they managed to paradoxically extract more from the words and tone themselves, something that Kanye West and many others would soon exploit. The jumpy way the words “As we jam!…the rhythm gets stronger” are delivered makes the song for me. Those three little words, in the slightest of crescendos, makes this robot’s message for love feel as urgent as it actually is.
It’s here where I’ll break and talk about Pépé Bradock, a contemporary house DJ who released his own debut album around the same time as Daft Punk’s and similarly moved away from French house’s disco. Bradock’s legacy is ‘looser,’ because he doesn’t have a trajectory, because he stopped caring about the album as a format after his debut, because a lot of his best work was released on (limited) physical media through the label he started in 2000, Atavisme, and never properly compiled and certainly not available on streaming services in a lot of cases.
Having gotten his start by playing guitar in jazz-funk bands at the young age of 14, Bradock, né Julian Auger, is an interesting case of a funk musician turned house producer (starting off as a hip-hop DJ first), so he brings the funk with him whereas his contemporaries were looking backwards and digging crates to get the samples they needed. As such, it’s hard to isolate if the funk in Bradock’s records are sampled or organic because it feels so effortless!
Shorter than Daft Punk’s Homework, this could be even tighter by scotching “Un Pepe Qui Bugge,” the 7-minute meandering ambient centerpiece with a frankly awful drum sound, and any interludes you disagree with: I personally only keep “Dimarre Le Chauve” around because of the trick near the end where it’s glitching out and I’m left with an 8-track, 43-minute album; the two hip-hop beat interludes show where he came from but aren’t interesting beyond that. The songs from Bradock’s debut EP all appear here, but the two best songs are brand new: “Atom Funk,” placed at the start which announces Bradock’s predilection towards atom(ic) funk with a slamming bass-line and the most infectious, believable ‘WOO-HOO!’ you’ll ever hear, while “The Charter” is denser than any of these other songs, two different vocal samples cut up doing their own little dance over the synths. Meanwhile, “18 Carats” is a fun little romp with an absolute squeal of synth hook. The last two long cuts on the other side of the album test the waters beyond French house: “Lara” is easy-going deep house, a sign of things to come, albeit too easy going, while “Wonderbra” looks towards the Warp acts near the start of the decade for inspiration into some mutant house hybrid. It’s admirable even if it’s the track I listen to least, and not just ‘cause it’s the longest or near the end.
Buried underneath two more French house songs packaged together on a cover that looks like some incredible 80s’ thrash metal, “Deep Burnt” is Bradock’s best song: a very generous drum thump serves as the anchor for Bradock to layer a happy synth line, organ harmonies, and a very addicting orchestral swirl that turns out to be a sample of underrated Freddie Hubbard’s 1979 collaboration with Claus Ogerman, The Love Connection.
Bradock formed the Atavisme label the following year which is where he released his material through moving forward. 6 Million Pintades contains another strong deep house offering in a-side “Life,” which doesn’t make use of a great sample as did “Deep Burnt” but has a 9-note bass-line that really emphasizes the deepness, especially when Bradock changes the bass-line ever so slightly at the halfway point for one single measure, perking your ears up, before returning to the original bass-line.
Lots of experiments released through Atavisme, some rewarding and others not. 6 Million Pintades b-side “Ghost” has the emphasizing drum beat lagging just a touch behind the on-beat and immediately feels different than anything he’s put his name on. Intrusion’s title track spins its wheels for 3 minutes with a throbbing drum beat and a rising drone that makes you feel like it’s building towards something only for Bradock to interrupt it with an alien synth and then to play a circus tune later on (alas, nothing in that song is developed). Rhapsody in Pain is an abstract one by these standards, all but removing the beat and featuring a ménage of voices grunting in a constipated orgy. Baby Bradock’s “Yazuke” is a tantalizing tribal beat and dubby effects while “Underground Monongahela” plays around with the French house filter that Daft Punk popularized for a massive release near the end. Stuff like this prompted Resident Advisor to consider Bradock “House music's original weirdo” in 2018.
Back to the robots… This is getting reclaimed now as a good album in many corners and I don’t see it. I thought it was a baddie when I first heard it, thought the same after I heard Alive 2007 and backtracked to it, and still think the same about fifteen years later. I know it’s so fucking stupid to levy ‘repetitive’ against a house album but I think if you do the math, strangely this album’s average song length is well over the average song lengths of their previous albums (even if you don’t adjust for outliers like “Too Long””): it certainly feels repetitive even more so than Homework even though this is their shortest album.
Not helping is the chief issue that the guitars, synths, bass and drums are all obnoxiously mixed, this highly unsexual slam predicting a lot of late-2000s pop that’s reminiscent of the sleaziest hard rock music of the 1980s. What I like about Daft Punk is that after failing as a rock band, they purged almost every trace of rock music from their being until this album, a highly compromised version of house music that sounds like rock music but isn’t actually even that. Okay, yes, “Human After All” and “Robot Rock” have good riffs. But “Technologic” feels like the overstuffed bigger-budget and less-rewarding sequel to “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”; “Television Rules the Nation” has strangely no momentum; the bass of “Steam Machine” gets tiring, and the same applies for the one on “Human After All,” bouncing in such a way that it sounds like it’s saying ‘YEAH’ over and over, more annoying than the Flaming Lips’ soon to come “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” in that regard. When the best parts of these songs were integrated into Alive 2007, it rendered this album obsolete.
I know a few people regard this as Daft Punk’s best album and I can see it: it manages to function as a ‘best of’ while simultaneously breathing new life into Human After All by shortening the songs and integrating them with the hits. My logic is simple: no “Digital Love,” no dice. The album’s logic is also simple to the point of genius. Using the empty space of “Television Rules the Nation” to sneak in “Around the World” (“Television rules the nation / around the world”) is just…yeah, duh, fucking hit me with that. Like Alive 2007, they build more hype for “Da Funk” using “Daftendirekt,” including using it to build more hype for “Da Funk”’s inevitable return. (Hearing “Da funk back to the punk, come on” over and over makes a lot more sense when it’s followed with “Da Funk” immediately afterwards.) The remixing and blending of songs into and out of other songs is seamless, presenting “The Prime Time of Your Life” as if it were the continuation of “Rollin’ & Scratchin’” and it’s a joy to hear “One More Time” sung over “Aerodynamic” and again over “Together” in the reprise. And there must have been no better way to end a concert than unearthing what was always Daft Punk’s mission statement even if it was a Bangalter one-off side project: “Music Sounds Better With You.”
Daft Punk and Olivia Wilde adoration aside, nothing could have convinced me to watch Tron: Legacy until writing this. But the soundtrack doesn’t work on its own, full of short little pieces that bounce between orchestral movie stuff (“Overture,” “Armory”) and Daft Punk’s synth and drums (“Arena,” “End of Line”), which work better in context, sure. That’s the bare minimum ask of a soundtrack. But the context is so fucking dopey (especially when the first act ends and the inevitable exposition dump happens), it’s hard to care regardless. Nothing that made Daft Punk special in the first place can be heard here.
Wherein Daft Punk make a full-blown disco record instead of a disco-infused house record with a spattering of guest vocalists as if it were a Gorillaz album. You’ll remember the voices of the different features, but it’s the folding in of organic instruments that pushes this over the edge for me, which they use instead of samples: a drum solo near the end of “Giorgio by Moroder” courtesy of Omar Hakim; country sighing pedal steel guitar on “Beyond.” Only the closer uses samples, which makes it a fitting swan song: a return to their origins as these robots blast off into space. Likewise, Pharrell Williams might have his name on the title of “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky,” but those songs owe much more to the liquid silver disco guitar of Nile Rodgers.
It’s a whole album of “Digital Love”’s. Julian Casablancas, typically detached and boring on those Strokes records, warbles into a vocoder and sounds somehow soulful on “Instant Crush” (“One thousand lonely stars hiding in the cold / Take it, oh, I don't wanna sing anymore”). Panda Bear has a somewhat robotic quality in his voice when he’s in chant mode, and yet by pairing his voice with an actual robot chant on “Doin’ It Right” makes him sound human by comparison. The robot voice repeating ‘come on’ underneath Pharrell’s hook on “Lose Yourself to Dance” doing something similar for Pharrelll. The most obvious example is when the robots take the microphone from Pharrell for “Get Lucky”’s bridge, repeating the hook “We’re up all night to get lucky” over and over and sounding like their battery is running out as the words flicker in and out of coherency. Pharrell singing the hook is just ‘let’s have sex tonight.’ Daft Punk singing the hook is ‘we will die tonight if we don’t have sex’: there’s far more power to it because the vocals aren’t as clean. (Of the album’s 74 minutes, the only song that doesn’t work is “Touch,” placed right at the center, which annoyingly interrupts its own climax just to return to the corny intro.)
That’s it for Daft Punk, although I’d be remiss to not mention that that a month after Random Access Memories came Kanye West’s Yeezus, a hyper-realization of obnoxious and incredible rap music unlike anything I’ve ever heard made possible with the help of some electronic co-producers. Daft Punk contributed production to four songs there, “On Sight,” “Black Skinhead,” “I Am a God” and “Send It Up,” songs that sound heavier and grittier than anything Daft Punk ever put their name on otherwise. And a few years later, they landed their first #1 song on the US charts as a feature on the Weeknd’s “Starboy.” You make all this incredible music for two decades and don’t make a huge dent in the American market—Discovery only sold 500k copies upon landing, and still hasn’t sold a million copies two decades after the fact—and you link up with this a-ha/Michael Jackson wannabe and get a super-hit? I’d be annoyed too! (“Get Lucky” was stalled at #2 on the charts because, you remember, “Blurred Lines.”)
A note here that Pépé Bradock released two other albums after Random Access Memories, both playing as in-jokes and adding nothing to his legacy as an incredible French house-turned-deep house-turned-outsider house DJ. The first was the aptly-titled What a Mess!, two side-long suites without titles and without organization that was supposed to be “based on the deconstruction of the first LP I did and its reconstruction under the auspices of echoes of a joyful brouhaha from a dreamed speakeasy, including the true voices behind the charade,” whatever that means. In a similar vein, the next album, Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne released under new nom de guerre Brigitte Bardu, was supposed to be “an ethereal abstract hip-hop LP” but has no trace of hip-hop, abstract or not. Barely any beats at all, actually! Some electric guitar though, the return of Bradock to the instrument that he first learned.
Back to Daft Punk, I must have heard their tribute to Giorgio Moroder around a hundred times since it was released. “I knew that could be a sound of the future,” Moroder says, describing syncing up ‘a click’ with the Moog Modular. And soon after, he ends the first part of his monologue, “My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio” which cues the robots to starts up that special synth line. Every time I’ve heard that transition in the past almost-decade, it makes me think that someone has pressed a button and I’m suddenly hurdling through space-time. Comme ça:
