I remember the first CD I purchased. It was actually two CDs. One was Chumbawamba’s Tubthumper. The other one was Daft Punk’s Discovery.
There used to be a music store in Fredericksburg, The Blue Dog. They were known for being able to procure pretty much any CD or vinyl you could want, back when that skill had value. My dad had a lot of love for that store – you could ask them to crack open pretty much any CD you wanted, and they’d do it, and they had a listening area – a try before you buy – with some expensive cans and multi-disc CD changers, and leather couches. It was cool.
I was not cool. I was an awkward 14-year old with a blue Sony Walkman CD player stuffed haphazardly into the pocket of his cargo shorts. But I did buy some CDs, and I did have (plenty of) cargo shorts to fit them in, and I do remember buying Discovery, with its weird liquid metal album cover.
At that age, I didn’t know what electronic music even was. But this was great. A literal “discovery” of an entire genre of music I had never even heard of. Every track meant something. Every pulse, untz, and blasting synth. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’ve listened to Discovery, and (like many nerdy teenagers) fell into the allure of Interstellar 5555, the trippy concept anime based on the album. Most other people I knew listened to other stuff. I have never been into other stuff. But I was always into Discovery.
When I was 16, I went to a youth tech program in California. It was basically a week-long camp for computer-y people about how they might become a CEO, or something. This was when Silicon Valley was a thing, but not a thing that you could make a TV show about and have people think it was funny. It was just a place where you could go to work if you were a smart person, so I’m not sure why my parents decided to send me to this thing. As part of this event, you could take a tour of some companies in the Bay Area. One of the options was Apple, so I went on a tour of the Apple campus.
No visit like this would be complete without a trip to the Apple company store. I remember buying a t-shirt with a grey Apple logo on it. I also bought (to the disdain of my parents, who funded this trip with a debit card) a small, white box with four buttons on it called an iPod.
“You bought a what?”
In these times, of course, you couldn’t get anything wirelessly, so I got some weird electronic music from a friend (hi Matt) by plugging the iPod into his laptop and taking whatever he had.
(Incidentally, that music ended up being, mostly, that of Neil Cicierega, whom you’ve heard of if you’ve heard of Harry Potter Puppet Pals.)
As soon as I got home from California, it was my life’s mission to get Daft Punk on this thing. Blue Dog was old hat at this point, so I pulled all of the songs off of Discovery (remember “Rip, Mix, Burn?”) and turned to the nascent iTunes Music store. That next year, Pepsi had a promotion where there’d be a code for a free song in the cap of every nth bottle of Pepsi, and if you looked up from the bottle upside down just so, and you tilted the bottle just right, you could see if you had a code. I bought a lot of Pepsi, and redeemed most of the codes for other Daft Punk albums.
Daft Punk always persisted. In college I had some money, so I bought Human After All from the iTunes Store and downloaded it onto my iPod. Human After All wasn’t and isn’t as good as Discovery, but it still had some bangers. I figured out ways to sneak Daft Punk songs onto mix CDs, and give them to girls I liked. This was a thing you did. Or I did. But it worked in High Fidelity, so.
The iTunes Store had stopped being so nascent by this point, and had become the powerhouse for buying music and downloading it to your iPod. The Blue Dog had closed.
Around 2006, Daft Punk announced they were going on tour, and releasing an album of the tour, Alive 2007. I bonded with one of my best friends (hi Brad) a great deal about Daft Punk and this album. An incredible production, though my age has made it sort of a tiring listen – it’s just so damn loud. Brad loved Alive 2007. It became a hallmark of the late 2000s that Brad would drive around College Avenue in Fredericksburg in his orange Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible, blasting it as loud as it could possibly go. You could hear Brad and his rolling disco from half a mile away.
Things blur a bit here. Alive 2007 wasn’t much of anything new, more original mixes of their existing stuff, but turned up to 11. I had long since moved on from blue Walkmans and iPods and was in a blue Civic Si, a fun car that had a CD player – cars today don’t even have CD players anymore. I had moved on to using Spotify, and moved up to Boston where I met my now-wife.
Then, when I turned 24, I heard that there was a Daft Punk movie coming out. It was called Tron: Legacy. I think Tron: Legacy is actually a fine movie. The soundtrack was the first truly original stuff from Daft Punk in a while, and it was mostly great – though there are some tracks in there that they had to make for the movie, and they don’t really sound like Daft Punk. By and large, though, it was solid stuff.
And they are in the movie!
I was at work when the teaser for Random Access Memories dropped in the form of a clip from “Get Lucky.” This was classic Daft Punk sound. The most Daft Punk of Daft Punk-ness, without Disney’s meddling. Then the album launched, and people were…confused.
Random Access Memories has gotten better with age. When I first listened to it, I thought it was weird. It was Daft Punk, but a new direction. Unafraid of the consequences, they made something they knew wouldn’t be for everyone. A concept in the same vein as Dark Side of the Moon. Less iconic, but certainly a grand work of art, and it did win the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2014. In retrospect, I know better now – that its old, weird sound, evocative of the late 70s and into the 80s was the point. It was eight years ago, but it’s easier now to look back on Random Access Memories and see it as album created in Daft Punk’s twilight. Maybe they saw it, too.
They’ve done some work since then – I remember hearing The Weeknd’s “I Feel it Coming” for the first time and saying out loud to my wife, “hey, this sounds like Daft Punk,” and she says “it is Daft Punk.” Because really, only Daft Punk sounds like Daft Punk. And sure enough, they’re in that music video too, as alluring and mysterious as ever.
I heard about the news today from none other than Brad. His text read “love is over,” with a link to the Pitchfork article.
“Daft Punk Break Up”
I watched the Epilogue video they put up on YouTube, where one of the duo decides to have the other activate their self destruct sequence. (Is that one Daft, or is that one Punk? Or are they both just what they are? Are we all Dafts and Punks?) Funny and bizarre, and a little surreal.
Then, the chorus from “Touch” comes into the focus through my headphones, and as it rises and falls, I feel my chest tighten and ache, the emotion comes to my eyes. Grief. The song cuts away, and I am left in an existential ennui. A reflection of my own self through music that’s been with me well into my adult life. A reflection of changing times and changing technologies. No more.
When you get into your 30s, you get to be old enough to lose things you care about. (Chumbawamba is gone too.) As time continues its inexorable march, the more of that lost stuff you hold on to. I remember the long road trips in my dad’s pickup truck to my grandfather’s old house in Pittsburgh, listening to The Doors, and my mom’s “cleaning parties” where she’d listen to Blondie. I am one of those people now, another one of the olds, still listening to “Aerodynamic” and “Human After All” and even “Around the World.” The gen-z’ers are already old enough now to realize that their elders are wrong and bad, as is the way of the universe. What will my son say about Daft Punk when he’s old enough to have a real opinion? “Dad, this is crap.” Maybe he’s right. Maybe everything we hold on to is just nostalgia, the idea of the thing. Like an ex-girlfriend. I hope I’m wrong about that, and that there really is something timeless to Daft Punk’s sound. We’ll see.
“If love is the answer, you’re home. Hold on.”
My son retreats into his iPhone 17, listening to the latest from whatever genre the music industry decides to remix from the past. The phone knows what he wants to listen to before he does. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift, greying, plays an intimate but sold-out show at The Birchmere. I get into my family-hauling vehicle and press the start button to the hum of the electric motor, and I ask it queue up Discovery. One more time.
