Daft Punk and the Evolution of Disco, Hip-Hop & Punk
Written by Nathan Evans
The 70s was an incredibly fertile era for music. Within the many revolutions capsuled in this decade, there lies the baby steps and popularisation of punk, hip-hop and disco. All three were born from aggravated minority cultures, creating something to put their struggles into, and channel into a vigourous energy. Punk derived from the working class in England and America, hip-hop from African-Americans in New York, and disco from ethnic minorities and LGBT communities along the East Coast of the US. All three birthed from the frustration towards higher powers and mainstream culture. All three would be the deep roots of a musical project that, through cultural osmosis and continuous reinvention of their genre, has become dance music’s greatest contributor - Daft Punk.
Hip-hop is a subtle influence on Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo. Not only do both parties champion boombap and 808-based beats, but DP also took on board the practise of shifting parts from an existing song, and repurposing it in their own - sampling. Producers and DJs from the Bronx were involved in developing this art form even in its inception, preserving and rejuvenating records that are potentially lost to history, while injecting their own creativity and self-identity in and around the sample. Not only does it provide an aural reference point for listeners, it can also demonstrate what music exactly inspires the artists they enjoy, such as when The Roots flipped Afrobeat originator and human rights activist Fela Kuti on the aptly-styled “I Will Not Apologise”. The use of vocal effects in Daft Punk’s music was also nabbed from elite hip-hop producers, particularly the ever-innovator Dr. Dre, and enhanced the stylistic poinience of the duo’s vocals as classic tracks like “California Love” did before them.
Punk had a short history, but through the process of evolution, has enjoyed a lifetime of ascendancy, and is a close species to electronic/dance music. One can look at the similarly independent, DIY mantra, an energy which coursed through both genres to influence culture through sheer force of will. The most poignant example of the convergence of punk and electronic music is Joy Division - a band that evolved punk by bringing its unfiltered emotion to outside inspirations, notably synthesized projects like Kraftwerk, as well as Bowie’s fabled Berlin trilogy, to create post-punk. After the suicide of frontman Ian Curtis, the remaining members would go on to regroup as New Order, the frontrunners of new wave, incorporating elements of dance and electronic music. Thomas and Guy-Man are certainly descendants of the punk timeline, even starting out in an indie-punk band called Darlin’.
Their ties to disco go even further. The four-to-the-floor beat, muscly syncopated bass-lines and electric instruments would be the backbone not just to disco itself, but its rich successor in house music, a discipline that the duo would make their mark in. French house, a now-outmoded style of house, is clearly associated with them, and it too originates from disco, even sampling these records in some of its greatest creations. Nonetheless, Daft Punk’s link to the genre goes deeper than most house artists, even French house artists, and that is down to the heartfelt, emotion-driven moments they offer, and their second album Discovery is indicative of that.
DISCOVERY
Even down to the design of its casing, the record exists in a world of its own. Wrapped around the CD was an unconventionally minimal design for its time, with no album title, and simply a metallic iteration of the band’s patch-worthy logo on an inky black background. In the present, minimal, bold cover designs are all the rage, but for its time, it was as if its contents were etched into the pitch-black ether of space. A fitting canvas, considering that this is the band’s disco-oriented record, leaning into the future-forward aesthetics of synth-pop. Perhaps the project’s title is truly deserved; the album is a vast exploration into new forms, only possible by moving into the past.
The album begins by greeting the crushed horns of “One More Time”, oft considered one of the greatest dance tracks on all time. Romanthony’s auto-tuned vocals dances betwixt a pulsating beat, but what makes the track so revered is also the reason why the robots are equally special. When disco was it its peak, its songs were structurally dynamic and each one displayed a ream of emotion in each track. Acts like Chic and ABBA elevated disco to a higher level by using complex song structures - the dancefloor had a narrative, these songs didn’t pummel the club all the time, the lower moments escalated the climaxes. Equally, during its midpoint, “One More Time” breaks down into its most minimal elements: Romanthony’s vocals punctuating soft, glistening chords. It’s a unique moment to engage in within the core of a bustling house track, to witness it killed off and unmasked as something of a ballad. However, when the celebratory horns creep back in, it is sent racing through space and time. It reaches its pinnacle, the same high reaches a higher level.
Nestled in the middle of the side C is “Something About Us”, a lenitive love song fit for the perfect slow dance. Gentle guitar licks caress the snappy drums and crooning vocals, trickling out with a soft conviction, echoing into the ether. The song eases in slowly like a nervous teenage boy confessing their love to his lifelong crush, and plays out the same way - concluding with a keyboard solo that has soul lovingly stitched into each note - much in the same vein, disco records of their time would slow down to a heartfelt pace.
Although their studio playlist cannot be fully uncovered, clues to what the robots were seeking insight from at this time can be found in their choice of samples. Eddie Johns, Sister Sledge, Edwin Birdsong, Tavares, Surface and Rose Royce were all recontextualised onto the LP, in ways that retains the fabric of the originals, but fits snugly into the world of Discovery. A commendable feat achieved by using fragments from these old disco records that no other producer would touch, and similar sentiments would be expressed to star hip-hop producers like Madlib. Though their styles are unaligned, their attention to detail and craftsmanship both contributed to intricate beats that separate themselves from the original samples while retaining their spirit and energy.
“Face To Face” is the robots’ standout moment when it comes to recontextualising samples. Todd Edwards had a hand in vocals, as well as production, lending his schizophrenic electro-house fusing to the duo. The song is a timeless synthpop track combining the two production styles, reserving verses for Todd’s lyrics of reconnection, marching forth amongst the cutting, four-to-the-floor drums and punchy electro-bass. Meanwhile, the chorus is replete with a harlequin patchwork of instrumental and vocal snippets that is clearly the work of repossession, but the jagged-edged guitars and whirlwind jump-cuts breathe a little bit of life into every pocket. Taking bytes out of ELO, Kenny Loggins and Alan Parsons in the breakdown, it acts as a testament to the merits of sampling, a contested issue in both electronic music and hip-hop.
Discovery’s critical and commercial success was quite telling, because those who praised its refreshing sonic palette deemed the original neon-dripped 80s synth-pop and sparkly 70s disco that inspired the album as “cheesy” and “old-fashioned”. Discovery was about Daft Punk paying tribute to the music they loved growing up, and in being an integral member of the disco-tributing French Touch movement, they were able to kick down the door of a sound that has been trapped for too long, don it underneath a pair of chromatic helmets, and become pop culture icons. Yet disco is not all they have logged into their hard drive, that is apparent when examining their sound four years prior.
HOMEWORK
If Discovery is Daft Punk’s most disco-laden effort, their debut, Homework, is most rooted in hip-hop. The record glows with a youthful rebellion, the beats are fat and grimy, and, in an ideal world, should be played exclusively through a ghetto blaster. Hip-hop’s aesthetic pierces the record; there is just as many boombap beats as there are four-to-the-floor rhythms, putting them a foot above the rest of the French electronic music that was growing in popularity around the time of the album’s inception. The pair even spell out their influences on the track “Teachers”, listing Dr. Dre and George Clinton among the likes of Armand Van Helden and DJ Deeon. It seems, then, that on their adolescent studio work, Daft Punk wear their influences as if they were each sewn on, right next to the embossed patch seen on its front cover.
The introductory single to emerge from Homework was “Da Funk”, a blistering hybrid of acid house and g-funk. Its trenchant beat stomps like King Ghidorah, meanwhile the guttural synthesizer riff has the bark of Cujo. The bounce of the track rumbles the nervous system throughout, especially in the final sector, which introduces a textbook acid-house squeal that acts out fervently, splashing from the speakers. Something so bashful yet imaginative is the mark of a track only the youth would create. Parts of the anatomy of the track were lifted from sooty soul songs that could only be found from crate digging, a hip-hop tradition that dates back to its inception with the likes of the Sugarhill Gang flipping Chic records. Thomas and Guy-Man would also utilise Chic to reach new heights later in their career, bringing their journey full-circle.
The ties to hip-hop run deeper going back a track. “Revolution 909” does not begin until a crowd are disrupted by the police sirens and stoic orders to “stop the music and go home”, illustrating how French house music fans were held under the boot of the government, their raves being shut down under false pretences to delegitimise the culture in the 90s. Aside from an instructional cooking segment on making spaghetti, its music video, depicting a responsible party-goer on the cusp of arrest, further relates to hip-hop’s struggle to be devillainised by the establishment, and is also using peace-shattering beats to translate this message to the ear of people. Today, both dance music and hip-hop have become not just accepted, but have thrived in the mainstream with big-budget gigs and festivals, highlighting just how far they have come from conquering the powers that be that borderline criminalised them.
Homework tackles many subjects throughout its 1 hour 30 minute runtime, yet this does not equate to it being a night-before-the-exam cram job. DP’s notoriously time-consuming creation process originated here, where they spent no more than 8 hours in a week making music, over the course of a half-year. Those precious man-hours thankfully lead to a multi-faceted set of house tracks ranging from the gleeful gospel of “Phoenix” to unquestionably one of the most belligerent moments in Daft Punk’s discography, “Rollin’ ‘n’ Scratchin’”.
On the B-side of the original “Da Funk” 12” lies this 7-minute demon, who makes its return on the album, and drives at speeds rarely seen at NASA. Breathing with only a small selection of components, DP squeeze in a shifting four-to-the-floor drum pattern and glass hi-hats with a monstrous, rage-filled synth that stridently fires off like sustained rounds of ammunition to the chest. This ball of distortion is unquestionably alive, growling louder and ever-violent to an apex, then calming down almost to a stopping point, all before releasing a final convulsion of noise that heaves the track into the thermosphere. “Rollin’ ‘n’ Scratchin’” demonstrates how the duo take the aggressive, harsh sounds seen in hip-hop, implement them into house music, and then throw them into the lion’s den.
Until donning their iconic helmets, the pair visibly brought the meaty urban bounce of hip-hop into the pan of house, stirring in the flavourful relish of disco, and disruptive tang of punk to create a sweet puree to drizzle across the 17 tracks that concoct the record. Daft Punk have stated that the album’s name derives from its humble recording sessions in Thomas’ bedroom, and as a whole, Homework feels like their educational expedition before they would venture into wider, more ambitious LP archetypes. As well as, ironically, the ideal beginner’s guide to house music.
Warp-speeding to the years after Discovery’s release, the sound the two had made was in vogue. Artists like Madonna and David Bowie asked for their preternatural hands in production, which they boldly declined, instead searching for how to redefine themselves. Approaching the winter of 2004, Daft Punk saw fit to completely flip the ethos they had perfected over their first two projects, truly warranting the second half of their label - they were punking against themselves. Their slow and slaved-over construction process was even tossed out for a rigorous six-week space, and fabricating from that misty underbelly was Human After All.
HUMAN AFTER ALL
The ugly sister of the the original trilogy, many saw fit to weaponise the album’s title against them upon release, raising that the duo were indeed human after all, and not wondrous androids capable of delivering perfection every time. Today, it is still seen as the robots’ only malfunction in an otherwise pristine discography, but their intentions and goals were missed by most. Examining the mantra of punk, the works of bands like The Ramones and such were based on messy, amateurish recordings through sheer circumstance - a lack of top-grade studio equipment played into the hands of the aesthetic. At the time, many wrote punk off as being “too rough” or “overly garish” to reach any notable level of appeal, yet it became one of music’s most defining movements, not because it was made using sterilised equipment, quite the opposite. Punk was profoundly human, and for two robots to recreate this feeling is a task so impossible, it provoked them.
Utilising repetition and strands of improvisation, Daft Punk stood defiant in a world of electronic music that was not only based on rigid and measured track progressions, but ravenous for more of their unbreakable dance sound. As mentioned, this disobedience even went down to how the record was created, tearing up the usual whitegloved recording process, and instead taking only 2 weeks to bring something together, double that for the mixing time. Moments like the propaganda-smeared sloganeering on the hefty banger “Television Rules The Nation”, or the reworking of a Black Sabbath track on “The Brainwasher” show their intentions to use punk and counter-movement devices to venture askew and find the polar opposite of Discovery.
The title track aims to be the mission statement for the oncoming 45 minutes of material, as crisp reverberating drums thump across the militia of thunderous guitars that have been squeezed into the mix. Despite shrouding itself in a defiant character, DP has not lost its pop sensibilities. Their trademark vocoder vocals take on a similar, two-parts melodramatic, one-part sticky, cadence seen in hair metal. Small wonder why the two are drawn to this; in retrospect, the gaudy clothing and power choruses that defined 80s bands like Van Halen and Bon Jovi look a bit, well - daft. Still, Thomas and Guy-Man wear the spandex and denim well enough, but really go ham in the finale, occupying the entire space of the song with their ever-modulating vocals.
Further down the mineshaft lies the schaffeling beat of “The Prime Time Of Your Life”. The song assembles itself in an abnormal fashion, split into two distinct halves, a characteristic that formed the basis of post-punk, the invention of new structures. The first portion is quite tame, as if the song is being contained under a ceiling, beating slowly like a rested heart. Dental synths and mechanised vocals take minutes to congeal, forming what could have passed as a perfectly acceptable electroclash release just a few calendars earlier. The second half of the track, however, comes when the vocals blow the ceiling off. That beating heart begins to escape from the control of pace, as if infiltrated with a lethal dose of amphetamines. It booms and whirs like a factory in high gear, gathering more and more momentum, going double, triple, quadruple time until it devours itself like a sonic black hole. What is left is nothing, and whatever the robots’ perception as the “prime time of life” has evaporated. While it is a somewhat destructive track, that’s a trait somewhat key to punk.
Human After All marks a pivotal period of time in the robots’ mythos, even if the project does suffer heavily at points from a lack of ideas. But what many looked over was the album’s influence to activate a sea change in the French dance music scene, with a more hard-nosed, glitch-laden style dubbed “Blog House”, a short-lived species in which Ed Banger was the kingpin. By showing that punk is not just a sound, but a set of philosophies that can be applied to any number of genres, the spirit that burns incandescently throughout Human After All has seeped into several corners of the music world.
To lay out the bigger picture, these three albums post-mark the principle era of Daft Punk’s musical genesis, and give light to how disco, hip-hop and punk’s ideals and pillars were being smuggled into a seemingly different genre altogether. However, the robots would continue to upgrade; soundtracking Tron: Legacy in 2010 allowed them to unlock their string-composing capabilities, a skill they would to put to great use on their 4th record, Random Access Memories.
RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES
Dropping from the realm of fantasy in 2013, RAM was an album where they fled from electronic dance music altogether, to the dismay of many, but they traced their roots to the source, and found the groove-driven funk and disco of the late 70s and early 80s. Where they previously refreshed and tucked foreign styles into their music, they saw fit to elevate this sound altogether, and deliver a project that does not just pay homage and incorporate its mannerisms, but completely re-contextualise it for the modern age and future ages.
The project’s absolute ambition is present even when looking at some of the collaborators on deck. Chic mastermind Nile Rodgers aid DP throughout the more guitar-led tracks, and Giorgio Moroder, the certifiable Henry Ford of Eurodisco who drove dancefloor-ready electronic music to the masses in the late 70s, appears as a rusty narrator. Having these two at the helm is especially tenacious for an album that grasps the era where these two cracked the whip. Blockbuster songwriter Paul Williams shares the robots’ yearning for feeling, meanwhile maven pianist Chilly Gonzales glides songs towards one another through his masterful piano transitions.
These legends sit alongside more contemporary and familiar faces, like eccentric producer/singers Pharrell and Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, who both distill their respective styles into the record. Finally, Daft Punk pull from their history to bring longtime friend DJ Falcon and prior collaborator Todd Edwards, whose old-guard house techniques and progressions are utilised on their respective tracks. This ensemble of collaborators details how far the two are willing to go in their quest to reinvigorate the soul of something that has been lost for decades.
Take the epic introductory jam “Give Life Back to Music”. The show bursts onto the stage with an emphatic entrance that feels like watching every aural section - the surging guitar, bashful drums, rocketing electronics - intersecting in a slow-motion collision. In other words, these opening four bars could soundtrack the Big Bang itself. Nile Rodgers steps in with a nimble guitar line spread along the glamorous piano chords, opening up the album’s proceedings on a quieter note that allows the listener to chalk up memories of the dusty music of the past, in preparation for DP to represent it in the most extravagant, high-priced way.
Another moment that testifies to the redefinition of disco is the Chase-man tribute, “Giorgio By Moroder”. Stretching across 9 transformative minutes, it begins with a monologue from the man himself, on the inception of his trademark sound. The background ambience immediately cuts to a potent use of the ever-prolific synthesizer, which gradually fades from being the central element to a motif for a wealth of sounds to dance over. Silky keyboard tones twirl alongside a bendy double bass; sunkissed piano ensemble darts around while a steady drum pattern keeps it in check; a plethora of strings unite to jerk the tear ducts until it expertly pairs with supple record scratches, all leading to a final attack of the senses with arena-sized drums and rock guitars. It speaks to the sheer majestry of the song’s core, that it can bound from one musical world to the next like a satellite transmission. The second Giorgio-voiced interlude inhabits this spirit, as he muses on breaking free from rules and boundaries to rediscover the childlike imagination that makes Daft Punk’s catalogue so impeccable. It’s the reason why this song was given so much wax - it was imperative to completing their mission of freeing their Random Access Memories.
For now, this is where the chronicles end, but with hip-hop being the zeitgeist at the moment, I hope that they are able to do the same with this as well as punk in the future, because ultimately, it’s what they were programmed to do.