When Daft Punk called it quits after 28 years together, announcing their split via an 8-minute YouTube video titled “Epilogue,” the group’s song and album titles trended all day on Twitter as users (like me) took to the internet to reminisce about the music that had reached so many of us throughout the decades.
My first memory of the French electronic duo was using a variation of their album title as my LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) password in 2004. I was 13 and had recently discovered Discovery, their 2001 album, and I apparently liked it enough to entrust the robots with my middle school messaging app of choice.
It was a follow-up to their debut, Homework (1997), which spawned four singles, the first being “Da Funk,” a bass-driven house groove with an acidic synth line that cut through the center of the track like Martian venom, as well as “Around the World,” their first critical and commercial hit, an infamously repetitive earworm as robotic as their personas. The album is equal parts bouncy funky hip-hop — that old familiar steady drum and bass line — and staticky techno transmitted from a galaxy far, far away, like an alien response to the Voyager golden record or a radio program broadcast from beyond the Kuiper belt.
And we didn’t know it at the time, but the internet was so young. Myspace was less than a year old. I wrote my most private, intimate thoughts to my LiveJournal—published, of course, for anyone to find. I made friends on phpBB forums and played in-browser games built in Adobe Flash, support for which ended at the end of 2020. I stole music through LimeWire, made playlists in WinAmp, and in my AIM “Away Messages,” I’d list lyrics from bands like The Killers, Modest Mouse and Daft Punk.
I don’t know what to do / about this dream and you / I wish dream comes true.
The video for “Burnin’” and the track “Teachers” pay direct homage to other DJs, producers and musician who had influenced the duo — DJ Sneak, Paul Johnson, Brian Wilson, George Clinton, Derrick Carter, DJ Hyperactive, Dr. Dre, and many others across genres, from funk to hip-hop. The “Burnin’” video features cameo appearances from some of these musical greats, while the lyrics of “Teachers” is entirely composed of names of artists and producers, without whom we wouldn’t have Daft Punk, at least not the version of them we know.
During the Homework era, Daft Punk also worked with film legends Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry for iconic music videos. “Around the World” features actors representing each instrument on the track moving in sync, walking in circles around a stage, performing the song with their bodies, their cyclical motions. I wonder if they were aware that they were creating their own timeless legacy as well.
Discovery was an album that proved disco wasn’t dead. I’d never heard anything like it, growing up with mainly rock albums in my house — classics like the Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel, as well as contemporary artists like No Doubt and Alanis Morissette. Some folk influenced, some ska influenced, but always rock. I’d never heard a purely electronic album before, though of course the robots were not the first to do so.
Still, their sound was a revolution to me, a kid used to the cooing melodies and predictable, almost saccharine lyrics of “Good Vibrations” and “Surfin’ USA.” (My mother once told me: Beach Boys songs are about four things: California, cars, surfing and girls. It wasn’t an indictment as much as a code to read the genre). Listening to the KLOS Sessions episode on “Good Vibrations” reveals it is a much more lavish, layered production than I’d remembered: a sprawling, orchestral multitrack featuring organs, mouth harp and chopped up cello sounds, and although performed in analog, the connections to electronica become a lot clearer.
Ironically, the Daft Punk boys found their start together as an indie rock band called Darlin’, named after a song by the Beach Boys (when the reviews came in, a British music critic called Darlin’ “a daft punky thrash” and the Daft Punk name was born). But to me, Daft Punk represented the cardinal opposite of the 60s rock’n’roll surf rock sound —their four-on-the-floor beats, heavily electronic production and early embrace of auto-tune was a shake-up, compared to the traditional guitar-bass-drums-vocals conventions I was used to.
Moreover, they were participating in (and progressing) a genre largely considered passé by pop culture at that point: even the Rugrats were joking about how disco had died in 1992, just one year before Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter would begin to make music under the Daft Punk moniker.
In 1979, the MLB proposed a “Disco Demolition Night,” wherein fans would bring disco records to be destroyed between games of a doubleheader, which famously ended in a riot. In retrospect, it was a stunt driven by racism and homophobia, a symbolic and literal destruction of music created largely by and for queer people, people of color, fun-lovers, merrymakers and the sexually liberated.
When RuPaul referenced Disco Demolition Night on Drag Race during a season 13 musical challenge, he mentioned that disco had not “died,” but simply “changed its name and address.” “House” was one of those new names, as was “EDM,” and France was one of the new addresses. And Daft Punk was ready to let disco back out of the closet.
For a closeted Black teen like me, Discovery was an avenue back into a queer, Black art form claimed to be killed by society. And it returned in a spectacular way. The concept album is something I’ve always been drawn to, from Nine Inch Nails to Pink Floyd, clipping. to Saul Williams. As a writer, storytelling has been a passion of mine ever since I could talk, something I get from my mom. The stories told on Discovery and Human After All resonated with me; and not just the story of kidnapped alien pop stars, or robots discovering their feelings for the first time, but the story of disco music too, how it hadn’t died. Or if it had died, perhaps it was the story of how Daft Punk could help resurrect it.
The first post on my LiveJournal page—which somehow still exists—is from 2005. It’s the fallout from some event I can’t remember. In the entry, I’m apologizing for “what I said yesterday,” regarding rumors of someone else, and I write that I hope at least one person can forgive me. The actual subject—the person and the rumor—are lost to time now. It could have been someone from school, or an online friend. I went nuclear, deleting any entry before then.
At this point in my life, many of my friends were online. I participated in an online community of Dance Dance Revolution gamers. I watched a lot of anime. Some of my online friends still have comments on my LiveJournal; their usernames are now strikethroughed, indicating their journals were deleted or purged, probably years ago. We’re having conversations about the features of the upcoming Nintendo Wii console. I’m taking high school French, and learning Japanese on my own. I’m smart and very moody.
Discovery, Daft Punk’s sophomore attempt would also be one of their most successful, spawning six singles, including “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” which would give Kanye West one of his most famous samples, as well as “One More Time,” which will still get butts off of barstools — at least it did before the pandemic, back when we were able to go out dancing. Next time you’re (able to go) out, try it.
One of my New Year’s Eve traditions for years has been dancing at a house party at the home of a former coworker, and not just the current hits — the Dua Lipas and Ariana Grandes, although I love them too — but also older, funkier stuff like Queen and Michael Jackson and Parliament, and Daft Punk’s “One More Time” too. In fact, that’s what I was doing just after midnight, January 1, 2020.
Discovery was also released alongside an anime film, Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003) produced by Toei Animations, the studio responsible for plenty of iconic anime series from the 90s, such as Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Digimon and One Piece, precisely the kind of shows I’d grown up watching, laying on my belly after school staring at our CRT TV, waiting for the chance to be transported to another world for 22 minutes.
The film tells the story of a group of successful alien musicians who get kidnapped by an invading militant force and taken back to Earth. Their memories are wiped as they are literally reskinned, marketed and managed by a tyrant/tycoon for moneymaking purposes. On its surface, the plot’s pro-individualism, anti-commercialism message is perhaps a little “on the nose.” However, perhaps antithetical to most other stories, humanity isn’t the goal for the alien musicians; it’s an impedance, something unwelcome and foisted upon them. In the end, they find happiness returning to their home planet.
In my old LiveJournal entries, I’m often letting off steam. I’m an angsty perfectionist, angry about A- grades and quick to judge the “idiots” of the world. I’m frustrated with “young people,” vowing to never to work with “anyone under 24” again and specifically never to teach (a prophecy that wouldn’t come true: I’ve been teaching since 2014). But I’m empathic too, expressing a deep sadness for extinct plants and animals, “unfair” deaths and even demolished buildings. I remember feeling a pang of sadness in my belly when Sonic the Hedgehog would yelp after touching a sharp enemy, his rings scattering to the digital grass.
It’s my Holden Caulfield era: melodramatic and cynical. Catcher in the Rye wasn’t an assigned reading, but I read it in junior year voluntarily, without really knowing what it was about. I resonate when the character talks about having a favorite author you wish you could have a conversation with, like J.D. Salinger were writing to me. Like Holden, I start counting all the examples of profane graffiti around town. At sixteen, I write about suicide ideation and my time browsing 4chan, how I need to cut back.
In my early 4chan days, I spent my time browsing /b/, the most popular board where edgy teens gathered to “shitpost.” It was a meme hotspot, giving life to the Guy Fawkes mask wearing group Anonymous, launching Tay Zonday to fame when users goofed on his song “Chocolate Rain,” and birthing “rage comics,” which have found new life with the twitter account @OldMemeArchive and in the music video for Rebecca Black’s “Friday” remix released in 2021.
By college, I’d moved onto 4chan’s music board, who loved the type of music they’d affectionately called “hipster garbage:” Neutral Milk Hotel, Antlers, Radiohead, Animal Collective, Captain Beefheart, My Bloody Valentine, J Dilla, Funkadelic, Miles Davis, and other Pitchfork favorites. From noisy shoegaze to psychedelic rock, experimental hip-hop to jazz, it was a surprisingly artistic, if not esoteric side of 4chan, one that matured my musical taste and expanded my palate—perhaps the first time “mature” and “4chan” have been used in the same sentence. I started listening to albums, not just singles.
At seventeen, I write about receiving hand sanitizer as one of my Christmas gifts from my parents, since my undiagnosed OCD means I can’t go more than a few minutes without washing my hands, but especially if I touch the spaces between keys on the family computer. Eventually I’d grow out of the feeling of uncleanness when my fingers weren’t precisely where I wanted them to be, the need to rub hand sanitizer on my my arms and hair before bed each night to keep my pillow clean, or the feeling of doom when I touched a light switch an odd number of times.
In 2021, my therapist and I discuss my fear and anxiety around starting and finishing projects. I almost didn’t write this essay, out of fear of inadequacy, until the words got too heavy in my brain and started spilling out onto the page. In many ways, I’m still that perfectionist I was in 2005. In many ways, both versions of me—2005 and 2021—need writing.
In many ways, Discovery was an album meant for people like me, fascinated with life outside my small rural town, willing to imagine fantasy worlds and ready to taste all that music had to offer, not just rock sounds but something dancier, sexier, more animal like disco, and at the same time, more robotic and artificial. And Interstella 5555 was a story for queer kids like me, who felt “good” and “natural” and when I was dancing around my living room alone on tiptoes to pop music, but upon whom a sticky façade of “normality” was either thrust, or had to be adopted, in order to fit in and “appear” more human, or more boy, or more straight, or more normal.
Daft Punk’s Human After All era was a continuation of their dance sound, though they traded funky grooves for a heavier rock sound, exemplified in “Robot Rock,” the first single, and the other big, almost-stadium rock inspired songs like “Television Rules the Nation” and “Human After All.”
And “stadium” seems an apt term, since this was also the era of massive live performances from the duo, who took to performing from inside a now-iconic giant glowing pyramid for the Alive 2006/2007 tour, a spiritual successor/callback to Alive 1997, a live album recorded during a show in Birmingham on their first and only other tour. The live album from the Alive 2007 tour would earn the duo their first of their six Grammys.
Alive 2007 also included a set headlining at Lollapalooza in Chicago, and if you’ve never seen footage from these shows, it’s absolutely worth checking out. Full sets can be found on YouTube, with comment sections already filling up with emotional fans. When I bought tickets for Lolla in 2017, Daft Punk fans speculated on a 10th/20th anniversary performance, but sadly, they wouldn’t end up touring that year.
In the most recent (now decade old) posts to my LiveJournal, there’s still a pattern of sadness. The client allows the listing of mood and song—in the last year on the website, I’m “lonely,” “depressed,” “cynical,” “melancholy,” “annoyed,” “aggravated.” I’m listening to some sad rock music like Brand New, Bright Eyes, Nine Inch Nails, but also some decidedly upbeat, poppier stuff: Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, Owl City, Girl Talk and Passion Pit, a throughline decidedly influenced by Daft Punk. I’m in my second year of college, living in the dorms, getting music recommendations from Pitchfork and 4chan’s music forum (a website I’d stop browsing later that year), and unlearning anger as my kneejerk response to any perceived slight.
It would be four more years until I come out relatively late at age 23, and in many ways my music choice at this time reflects closeted angst. Passion Pit’s lead singer would come out the year after I do. My brother was the Marylin Manson fan, while I was the Nine Inch Nails nerd, and while my his industrial musical tastes forked off in the direction of metal, mine would stay in the world of electronica, in dance and pop, in lush, synth-laden production.
Daft Punk’s influence transcends genres and mediums. Although not the first or only musicians to keep their identities concealed behind a mask (Buckethead and MF Doom come to mind as other early models), their choice to adopt robotic personas can be seen echoed in other electronic artists like Deadmau5 and Marshmallo.
They co-produced several tracks on Kanye’s Yeezus (2013), an ambitious and noisy experimental rap album, and were nominated for a Grammy for their soundtrack work on Tron: Legacy (2010), even appearing in a cameo (from behind their signature helmets, of course) in the film, as well as in the 2009 Activision video game DJ Hero where their music was also featured. Now, most pop artists have re-embraced disco; within the last year alone, we got albums like Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, Kylie Minogue’s DISCO, Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure, as well as disco-inspired tracks like Doja Cat’s “Say So.”
2010 was also the date of my last LiveJournal entry. I’m nineteen, but still in the closet. At least, I am to myself; I’m pretty sure others had figured it out by then. My mood is listed as “lonely” and I’m listening to “Sunday Bloody Sunday” by U2. In the entry, I mention how it seems all my friends have left the community, and that future entries would be for myself, rather than an audience. There’d be no future entries. It’s also got a piece of my writing, an extended metaphor about rejection from the point of view of an off-brand product. It’s okay: dialogue driven, a little heavy handed. Probably something I wrote for a college class.
As I was writing this essay, I tried resetting my LiveJournal password, just to have control over a bit of my younger self that still exists online. I knew it was still online, but hadn’t looked at any content in years. The website simply tells me my password is out of date, no matter what I put in, whether old, known passwords from a decade ago, or nonsense keyboard mashes. When I try to reset password, it sends a password reset link to “current email,” which I’m guessing is the Yahoo address I abandoned years ago as well, in favor of a more professional-looking Gmail. If I had set up a Secret Question, I could still recover the password, but Secret Question wasn’t a feature in 2010, so that’s a dead end too.
I suppose the journal remaining online is fine. I’m sure no one looks at it. It’s a different version of me. It chronicles my mood and musical taste, my disappointment and anger, but also the things I get excited about. We both love Magic the Gathering and good music. I journal about my father’s then-lost side of the family getting in touch with me in 2009, at the urging of my high school therapist. I talk about being “overanalytical and existential.” Neither version of me wants our lives to be in vain. I was worried about mining my journal ten years later for this piece. It’s exactly as cringey as I thought it would be. But I recognize strength in both of us too: determination, passion, curiosity about the world. Maybe I could contact customer support and answer some questions to prove that I’m me, to regain control of the content. Or perhaps one day it will get wiped out in some digital purge.
Daft Punk continued creating smash hits into the 2010s, working with Pharrell Williams, Panda Bear, Nile Rodgers and Julian Casablancas. Their last release would be a collab with The Weeknd, the opening and closing tracks from his 2016 album Starboy — the title track, and “I Feel It Coming” respectively — both certified bops, both performed earlier this month during the 2021 Super Bowl halftime show. Daft Punk only toured twice, a decade apart, but their presence in (and impact on) live music continues.
And their latest (I suppose, last) album, Random Access Memories, nabbed two Grammys (Album of the Year & Best Dance/Electronic Album) in 2014, as did “Get Lucky” (Record of the Year & Best Pop Duo/Group Performance), a song which peaked at #2 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and remains their best-selling song in the US.
But more than the awards and album sales, Daft Punk represents something special and unique; like the characters from Interstella 5555, Daft Punk’s inhumanity is precisely what drew many fans to them. When you struggle to relate to others, you might start thinking you’re from another planet. In a way, creating music from a “dead” genre — from behind glowing masks — was an entry point for many fans. Those who thought of ourselves as somewhat alien or even robotic at times found refuge in Daft Punk’s music and image.
In retrospect, a LiveJournal and AIM password was such an apt place for my Daft Punk journey to begin: young and behind a screen, their music became a secret word that unlocked a world of communication, 0s and 1s, bits and bytes. It had to be something memorable and rhythmic that could fly from my fingers as I logged in each day after school. It had to be Daft Punk. And now, as a college teacher at 30, I still find myself behind screen — although for a different reason this year — still using music and technology to connect with others in an increasingly digital/digitized world. We’re in the future, albeit one I could never have imagined in 2004, but tried to regardless, as we all tend to do.
It’s hard to write about Daft Punk in the past tense, a thing that “was” and not “is.” The idea that the door has closed on another massively influential band is hard to swallow. But it’s easy to imagine their impact will continue to send tremors across genres, throughout our lifetime, likely beyond. And my desire for them to keep providing music is one driven by greed; as much as I’d love another album (or four), as much as I want to find my animal self at an Alive 2027 tour, their break is well deserved, and hopefully restful.
They are only human, after all.
John LaPine earned his MA in creative writing & pedagogy from Northern Michigan University (NMU), where he volunteered as an associate editor of creative nonfiction & poetry for the literary journal Passages North. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in: The Rising Phoenix Review, Hot Metal Bridge, The /Temz/ Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Under the Gum Tree, Rhythm & Bones, Midwestern Gothic, & elsewhere. His first chapbook of essays, An Unstable Container, is forthcoming from Bull City Press in 2021. He teaches English at Butte College.