Daft Punk is a French dance music duo, active from 1993 till 2022. I have chosen to use them for the cookbook for the influence they had on my artistic approach. Daft Punk were the first musicians I followed beyond their big hits, and were the most prominent artists on my very first (and every subsequent) iPod in the early 2000s, and the only artists I’ve found myself enjoying the discography of from the earliest part of my life.
The first thing I truly appreciated was their clear affinity for album experiences over a multitude of singles splattered around their career. Ironically, their second album “Discovery” allowed me to discover my enjoyment of the places music can take you when the proverbial road is well-paved. I like it to make one ad vs making a campaign. Intentionality is the cornerstone of a good album experience, as it lends itself well to finding a good balance of diverse “personalities” in the same “identity”. Having a song be recognized to its parent album, without “sounding like every other song” on the album is no easy feat.
They don’t go against the current of industry norms for the sake of it, either. They’ve always made it clear that their musical influences are the music their parents listened to (i.e 80s music) when album experiences were more in demand than present day. They even go as far as to record everything on tape, including their entire final album “Random Access Memories”.
This use of the older, more analogue means of recording and mastering gives the music they produce a much more human touch, especially with their use of live instrumentation (ex: Nile Rodgers, Omar Hakim, Nathan East, Paul Williams, etc). This is despite their use of vocoders (effectively auto tune). But again, while auto tune seems like an already dated cheesy gimmick for humans to sound robotic, Daft Punk flipped the formula on its head by becoming robots who are trying to be human, hence their robot personas.
The artists themselves (Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo) have dawned masks of some sort since the beginning of their career. They’ve maintained throughout that they are in it for their love of music, and don’t have any interest in fame. Given that most everyone in the western world has heard the name Daft Punk (or one of their songs), but have no idea who the two aforementioned now-pushing-fifty-years-old Frenchmen look like, I’d say they succeeded in doing so.
In terms of themes in their work, they make use of a lot of contrast. For example, while most of their music is dance music with a lot of futuristic sounds on the sheen, they are more often than not sampling or recreating the same works that inspired them, slicing up those samples and using synthesizers for their signature sound. With samples of the past, and the synthesizer being a “sound of the future”, they are able to achieve something that seems almost timeless. If you can extract the “magic” of the past down to it’s base and give it a fresh coat of paint, you eliminate elements that can make it a product of its time (like auto tune being a dead giveaway that a song was made around the turn of the millennium).
There’s plenty more to be said about their ideology, their perspective on the business end of the music industry and its predatory practices, their last album being released in 2014 only for them to disappear till their retirement announcement in 2022, etc… but what I’ve discussed already is enough to paint the picture.
Having a “big picture” idea to guide your decisions, knowing how to connect seemingly unrelated works together, being consistent, going against industry pressures, finding unique and contrasting perspectives, intentionality, having an artistic identity and (someday) knowing how to end it on a high note are all things I can say with confidence that I’ve drawn from and am likely to continue to do so. I suspect that, as with all arts, it often begins with your ability to recognize it long before your ability to perform it.
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