![]() On Discovery, not only did they deploy samples but they wrote and performed additional parts around those samples to augment them, to make them a more organic part of an immersive sound. To that end, Daft Punk got even more creative with sampling than they had before. Discovery is a fantasia in which ‘70s bubblegum pop and AOR, as well as mid-‘80s MTV-based pop, were reimagined as the coolest pop music eras in history. “ Discovery was the opposite, of saying to the electronic kids, ‘Rock is cool, you know? You can like that.’” They wanted to reflect a reverted state of childlike innocence, of that time that you can never recapture when you listen to music without critical filters or prejudice. “ Homework was a way to say to the rock kids, like, ‘Electronic music is cool’,” Bangalter told GQ many years later. Instead of making dance music appeal to the indie kids, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo took aspects of the disco and pop music of their shared childhood experiences from the mid-Seventies to mid-Eighties and reformulated them into a contemporary aesthetic of electronic pop and house. What they did with their second album Discovery was to effectively invert their own formula. READ MORE: Daft Punk // ‘Homework’ at 20 years old Sophisticated yet primal, Homework was the pure, distilled essence of the club, and one that could appeal across tribes of fans. Originally intended to be a series of 12” singles, Daft Punk had accidentally amassed such a brilliant arsenal of dancefloor mammoths that they were too good not to release as an album. With their supremely confident debut album Homework, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo had held their nerve in the face of major label pressure (particularly after they’d had the brass neck to insist upon a structuring of royalty rights that hugely, uniquely favoured them) to deliver a seminal house album. ![]() Discovery, the group’s second studio album and released in early 2001, represents the foundation of their legacy and popularity. From their inception as Darlin’ in the early Nineties, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo never worked at a particularly prodigious rate – four studio albums and two tours in 28 years speaks for itself – yet they have consistently been one of the most critically praised and, belatedly, biggest-selling artists in the Western world. When Daft Punk recently announced their split, after nearly three decades together yet having maintained total radio silence for over seven years, it was a reminder not only about the French duo’s contributions to the wider field of popular music but also a lesson in the value we place upon art itself.
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