Switched on Pop - Listening 2 Daft Punk: Homework

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Ten years ago, Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories gave life back to music. The world-beating smash “Get Lucky” broke streaming records, forged a retro sound that still dominates the charts, and paved the way for artists like The Weeknd, Dua Lipa and Lizzo to craft their own throwback hits. How did Daft Punk do it? Switched On Pop’s four part-mini series Listening 2: Daft Punk unlocks the sounds, voices, and stories across all four of the group’s studio albums. On their first album, Homework, Daft Punk stretched the boundaries of electronic music and began wiring the circuits that would become their robot alter-egos, asking a fundamental question: where does the human end and the machine begin? Songs Discussed ​​Daft Punk - Give Life Back to Music Daft Punk - Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers) The Beach Boys - Darlin' Daft Punk - Around the World Daft Punk - Harder Better Faster Strong Daft Punk - Robot Rock Daft Punk - Game of Love Daft Punk - Da Funk Daft Punk - Teachers Black Box - Ride on Time Daft Punk - Daftendirekt Daft Punk - Fresh Daft Punk - High Fidelity Daft Punk - Oh Yeah Daft Punk - Phoenix Daft Punk - Rollin' & Scratchin' Daft Punk - Rock'n Roll Daft Punk - Burnin' Kraftwerk - The Robots Vangelis - Main Titles Brad Fiedel - Main Title - The Terminator Ben Salisbury, Geoff Barrow - The Turing Test Daft Punk - TRON Legacy (End Titles) Daft Punk - Indo Silver Club Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. I want to take you back for a second, Nate, to the early morning hours of May 17th, 2013, before there was a switched on pop. As I recall, at the stroke of midnight, we met to listen to Daph Punk's random access memories, which had just been released in its entirety. And we paired it with, a series of craft beers and we called it draft punk we did i feel like if we were smart we could have launched a beer company with that name but instead that evening i remember being inspired by our conversation to start a podcast because our minds were totally blown from note one of random access memories random access memories it's the fourth and final studio album by daf punk the robot helmet-wearing duo made up of Toma, Bengalter, and Guy Manuel de Omem Cristo. It is this disco revival album that gave them actually their first top 10 hit with Get Lucky.

Get Lucky was an instant classic when it came out. The song went to number two on the charts. It stuck around for 29 weeks. And the whole album was very critically praised, winning five grand. Emmys, including album of the year. Those two. Death Punk. Get lucky.

Random access memories. I don't know about you, but I feel like random access memories is one of the most important albums of the last decade. It's a bold claim, Chuck, but I feel like it's not unwarranted. I mean, when you turn on the radio dial today and hear anyone making a disco homage or reaching back to 80s synthesizers or giving us a four on the floor drumbeat, it's like Daft Punk probably had a hand. that with random access memories.

That's how I hear it. And we are now 10 years since you and I hung out on Draft Punk Night and random access memories was released. Daft Punk have formally disbanded. They had a video where they actually exploded the robots. But their music casts a long shadow on pop music. You could name a dozen different ways they've influenced pop music. They're extensive use of vocal manipulation.

their synthesizer sounds, their sample chopping, the way that they cross over electronic and hip-hop production, the fact that they created the model of the contemporary EDM festival performance. They even innovated on video albums, and I think you can say that they have changed the modern pop persona. DaVpunk go deep. Okay, all right. When you put it that way, it's like there's a lot to unpack here. I think the best way for us to unpack Daft Punk's musical meaning. is in our listening to miniseries.

The show that we launched last year where we listened closely to an artist's body of work to go past the public perception and known history of an artist to uncover their deeper musical reasons for their success. Last year, we did Britney Spears. Indeed. And I think this year is the time for daft punk.

Now, more than ever, I feel like our collective fascination and anxiety over robots, and automation and artificial intelligence. It's cresting in our culture. And given that it's also the 10th anniversary of Random Access Memories, I think it's time to listen to Daft Punk. Nate, here's what I want to do with this series.

We're going to look at one thing about Daft Punk. How did this French duo, with no face robotic elements, captivate us for over 20 years with one fundamental question. Are they robot or are they human? I believe that in each Daff Punk studio album, this question of robot or human is ever present. And kind of like each character that Dorothy encounters in The Wizard of Oz as she goes throughout her journey, each Daphunk album imbues these robots with a new quality. On their first album, 1997's homework, they saw it. the robot's circuitry.

On 2001's discovery, they develop a voice. On 2005's, human after all, they become sentient. And on random access memories from 2013, they find their beating heart and soul. But to begin, today we're listening to homework to hear how the robots wire their circuits. Okay, since we're going back to the beginning, this might be a good opportunity for me to ask a fundamental question that I've always been curious about. Who are daft punk? You really don't know. Where did they come from?

Who are they? Another two French guys. That's about it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Toma, Bengaltair, and Guill Manuel de Imam Cristo grew up in Paris and met in the secondary school in the late 80s. They were lovers of rock and electronic music and hip-hop.

And in 1992, they formed a band called Darling, named after the Beach Boys song of the same name. Darling was kind of an indie rock band that made just a few songs and split after less than a year with their third member, Laurent Bronkowitz, joining the band Phoenix, and Amom Cristo and Bangalter creating an electronic duo named after a negative review in the magazine Melody Maker, which had called Darling Daft, Punky Trash. That's a good origin story. Yeah, so now as Daft Punk, they released their first track in 1994 called The New Wave,

but they really hit it big with their second single, Defunk, from 1995. That is quite a statement. It is really sparse. I mean, we've got a baseline that's just like unchanging. Don, don't, don't, just the same note over and over again, same rhythm. This repeating kind of bluesy melody, but it's play. by a really harsh and tense synthesizer, I think. Yeah.

This is not a pop song by any means. So it's kind of cool that it was such a success. It's like it must have really captivated people on the dance floor is what I'm guessing. Yeah, there was a huge underground electronic music scene that bought up all of these singles and helped land Daft Punk a label deal with Virgin Records where they very uniquely maintained full creative control over their music. music and identity. And this leads to them putting out their first album, Homework, that merges disco funk bass lines with side chain thumping four to the floor, house beats, gritty sounds of acid and techno, lots of

sample chopping, and even just the most diverse group of influences that they actually go to name check on their song, Teachers. That's cool, paying homage to the elders of these sounds. And I definitely noticed they shouted out the source of their former band name, Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys. Right, Beach Boys, yeah. Fitting. But that's cool. I like that.

It's like, you know, we're not creating this sound. These are all the people that came before us. But, you know, it was definitely seen as Daft Punk took these really broad influences and put them together in this compelling new way. that led to further hits, like the song around the world, which not a pop song in a conventional sense, travels to 61 on the Hot 100, staying on the charts for 20 weeks. I think you can hear a continuation from defunct to this song,

because it's so repetitive, it's so kind of sparse and simple in a lot of ways. But crucially, here, there's a vocal, which just helps send a track into, you know, another sphere of pop success. But they're not betraying any of their, like, dance music roots here, it seems. Yeah, precisely. There is no chorus in the song.

This is just a repeating vocal hook, more in the tradition of house music, where a often sampled piece of lyrical material would repeat incessantly and imbue meaning through repetition. Right. Like black boxes right on time. for example. And this idea of short vocal fragments appears all over homework. You can hear it on

Dapton Direct, fresh, high fidelity, and oh yeah. I love these fragments of vocals and it makes sense that they are enough to propel a song onto the Hot 100, but they don't turn into full songs until next week's album discussion about discovery. where Daft Punk will develop a full voice and full song structures. Good plug, Charlie. Thank you. For the most part, homework is an hour and 15 minutes of instrumental dance music. Homework gives us the sounds of smacking side-chained kick drums and microsamples,

like on the song, Phoenix. Screaming acid bass lines like on rolling and scratching. Wobbly, discordant lead sounds on. on rock and roll, laser zap funk, I don't know how else to describe it on Burning, and that growly bass line from defunc. It's cool to hear all of these back to back because you appreciate that there is this sort of sonic through line,

but each song sounds so different, I think in large part because the timbers are so different. Yeah. Like, you know, one has that laser funk that you were talking about. And then DeFunk has this growling, rough synthesizer texture. So I feel like every song has the same elements, and what identifies them is like this kaleidoscopic use of different synthetic timbers.

There's a real artistry to the way that they use the synthesizer. And this is where I want to spend the rest of our time today is on the sound of Daft Punk synthesizers, because I believe it's an essential building block to how they begin. became the robots that we know them as today. Attention Spotify. It has arrived the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera. A fragrance intense with character gourmet and addicive. Imagine a jasmine embollventy caramelized and tonka-tostata.

A combination that seduce from the first instant and he'll haweller. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discover it a hoy and let you evolve for its essence. Def Punk's album Homework was a huge success for them. And it brought a lot of notoriety. And very quickly, Daft Punk started hiding their faces from the public. They would turn away from the camera in photo shoots and cover their face. They don't appear as the robots until after homework,

but we can hear them developing that identity in the sound of the synthesizer. Because to me, the synthesizer isn't just a sound. It's at the center of our existential dilemma of the boundary between man and machine. What do you think of when you hear the sound of a synthesizer? I think of technology. I think of the future. I think of something that is generated purely by electricity rather than, you know, a human physical touch. So I think if I distill it down to one word, I would say the synthesizer represents the machine.

Okay, yeah, interesting. I feel like for many of us, the synthesizer can even just be a mysterious object. It is this keyboard or even just wall of knobs and sliders with all of this cultural baggage. I think that the synthesizer is the most important. important instrument of the 20th century, that its sound contains all of that allure and fear over technology. And I want to make the bold claim that synthesizers, robots, and the production of mass media in the last 100 or so years are completely intertwined. Okay, Charlie, I'm definitely here for your galaxy brain theories about synthesizers. But I also feel like I need to sort of

rain you in a little bit. Okay. Because some of us are not. the synthesizer head that you are. I know you have a sometimes troubling obsession with acquiring synthesizer gear. It could be a problem. I for instance love playing piano and keyboards, but when I see knobs and faders, I run for the hills. So maybe you could break down a little bit how a synthesizer works. Okay, so I guess the core, a synthesizer begins with a sound source. You call it a oscillator and it moves through a bunch of circuits including a filter. You can shape the sound. And then you can obviously control that sound with a keyboard. And I can understand why people might feel some trepidation about the synthesizer, not just because of it's confusing controls,

but also it's a name, you know, it implies synthetic, unreal. And there has from the beginning been a tense relationship between humans and synthesizers, which have really from the start been working to replace musicians. I'd always thought of the synthesizer as an instrument from like the 60s and 70s, but in reality, synthesizers are over 120 years old. In 1897, inventor Thaddeus C. Hill made a seven-ton instrument called the Teleharmonium. It was so massive that his second version weighed, over 200 tons.

Whoa. It's this tone wheel-based instrument that generates electronic sign waves to synthesize classical music. The idea is that it would play music for people over phone lines, except for it was quickly shut down because it would cause interference

between phone calls. You'd be going to call your mom, and you would be hearing the teleharmonium in the background unintentionally. So it was an absolute failure, this monstrosy of a system. And there were so many other electronic music attempts in this era. Things like the Andes Martin-No, you probably know the pheromine,

but the first programmable synthesizer came about in the 1950s. The company RCA, which is known for radios and microphones and electronics, wanted to make a device that would generate pop hits on its own and help save money from hiring orchestras to score TV and film. And so through the hands of Harry Olson and Herbert Bauer at RCA, we get the RCA sound synthesizer. It's completed in 1955. It takes up the size of a whole room, and it doesn't even have like a keyboard or controls like you think of a synthesizer today. The way you program this thing was via punch cards. Like you had a piece of paper and you had to like punch

whole program each individual note, timbre, pitch change. And It ended up taking weeks to program just a few minutes of music. It was also a failure. Like, if the idea was, we're going to try to replace orchestras for scoring TV, it was far too laborious to make this thing make music. And so it was donated to Columbia University, where a bunch of composers got to make some very avant-garde music on it. Like the composer Milton Babbitt used it to compose the piece Philomel

from 1964, a piece of music that I think is as difficult to listen to as it was to program. I mean, Babbitt is the composer who famously said about his music, I don't care if you listen. So perhaps this piece was illustrating that axiom. You know, it does show us, though, the futuristic possibilities for the synthesizer, I can give it credit for. And by the 60s, the synthesizer does really start to take off through the hands of inventors like Don Bucla and Robert Mogue,

synthesizers become more available and approachable, as does the music. And all these developments in the synthesizer are happening simultaneously as a public fascination with robots in popular media. Now, we could go way back to the beginning of time. Every culture has imagined some kind of automata. Like, back in the Greeks, they thought of gods

that had mechanical servants. But the idea of the modern robot doesn't come about until around 1900. We could think of even like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz as a kind of bionic man with no heart, just tin parts, who is first introduced in the Wizard of Oz, which was published in 1900 and of course was on screen in 1939. So the Tin Man eventually gets a heart. But in our story, it's about how the robots develop their circuitry.

and L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, created another character in the Osma of Oz, the continuation of the series. It's a copper mechanical man named TikTok of all things. No way. And TikTok isn't missing a heart. It's described as being able to think, speak, act, and do everything but live.

So you're saying El Frank Baum was the original content creator? He might have introduced us to TikTok. Is Wizard of Oz SpanCon? Right? TikTok, one of the original robots, it turns out. And our next step in our conception of a robot comes on the big screen in 1918 via Harry Houdini.

And his story, The Master Mystery, featuring a character Q the Automaton, who looks a lot like the Wizard of Oz's Tin Man, except Q the Automaton, is the antagonist. He's the embodiment of fear. The cue cards in the silent film read, Do you mean to tell me that a human brain can be transplanted to a giant machine similar to this model? Ridiculous! And even if possible, it would be of no use except as a terrible invention of destruction. I mean, you could hear that in 1918 or in 23, I feel like. Those fears of robotics are still

very much present today. It feels like a silent film cue card that could have been written by a chatbot prompted to say, tell me about all of our fears about contemporary artificial intelligence. So robot-related anxiety has been around for at least a century, is what you're telling me, Charles. Yeah, actually, we finally get the word robot from Carol Capic, who has a play from the 1920s called RUR, Rossum's Universal Robots. And Robot comes from Robots. Robot comes from Robots. which is, I guess, check for work. So that underlying concern about robots replacing us and doing work for us, but also the work that we do, yeah, it's about 100 years old.

Okay, Professor Harding, that was a verbose lecture on the history of the synthesizer and the robots. Where is this going? Okay, this will come back to Daft Punk, I swear. But I think that this association of robots and synthesizers really comes together in the world of film and television when robots needed to be represented in sound, not in Houdini's silent picture. Right? So you could go to an example like Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons. When we encounter Rosie the Robot, this is what she sounds like. Rosie!

Coming, sir. Here I am, sir. She makes beeps and boops that feel very synthesizer-asked to me, which reminds me of arguably the most famous robot of all time. R2D2. Yes, R2D2. When the sound designer, Ben Burt, was tasked with giving a voice to this little android, he went and borrowed Francis Ford Coppola's ARP-2600 synthesizer.

Here's Ben Burt in an archival interview about, making R2D2 from 1977 Star Wars. Here we had supposedly a machine that was going to talk, it was going to draw on our emotions, it didn't have a face with a smile or a mouth or eyes or ears, and it couldn't speak English, and it couldn't even mouth words. So the idea came up to really combine this sort of human sound with the electronic sound. So the iconic R2D2 voice is actually a synth?

Is that what you're telling me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went ahead and actually tried to design R2 myself. Could I get my synthesizer to talk and have emotion? So I started with just a pure tone, and then I added some really fast-paced modulation to the pitch, and then a lot more randomness, and I just started to spin all the knobs.

And if you practice that a lot, you can kind of make a synthesizer talk like R2D2. What? Okay, so what I'm taking away from this exegesis is that the technology of the synthesizer and the concept of the robot kind of develop simultaneously but parallel to one another. And then at some point, whether in the Jetsons or in Star Wars, the bleepy, bloopy sound of a synth starts to become associated with the sound. that robots make. That's exactly right. I think that the sound of robots and synthesizers are effectively married by the release of Star Wars in 1977, such that now when we hear synthesizers, we think robots. So it makes sense that just a year later in 1978, when

Croftwerk released their song, the robots, they use the synthesizer. Hmm. Cool. Kraftwerk, obviously a major inspiration for daft punk in so many ways. Yeah. They're, of course, not the only ones using the synthesizer to make the sound of robots, though. Really, like, any soundtrack that deals with questions of robotics has to, at some point, use the synthesizer. You take Vangelis' score for Blade Runner, for example. Uh-huh, okay. Enhanced 57-1945. Whether it's the robot sound effects or the main melody.

Blade Runner, a movie about characters called Replicants that walk the line between human and non-human is synthesizers through and through. Now, if you want to debate cyborg, robot, that's not the point. We're not doing that. Android. But this whole idea of using synthesizers for background music in film about robots goes on. Terminator soundtrack, for example. Or even more recently in the soundtrack, track for Ex Machina. All of this cultural baggage of the history of robotics and synthesizers and film and television

all collides in 2010 when Disney decides to reboot their Tron franchise, a film about a digital world with characters that are algorithms, and of course they ask Daft Punk to score the film.

You did it, Chuck. You threaded the needle. And of course, You can go back to Daft Punk's album Homework, where the sounds of robotics and synthesizers can be heard on a track like Indo Silver Club. It's interesting, Joe, because now after hearing your breakdown, I hear this as, you know, like having those human elements that we were hearing the R2D2 sound designer talking about. It's like it's like got that got that like vocal quality to it, which is maybe a different way of hearing these synthetic tones. Yes, just as these guys are developing the prototype circuitry for the robots, I think they are already making us ask, are they human?

And you can hear it in all of their synthesizers. They make homework in their home studio surrounded by synthesizers. And to the average person, they might all seem the same. But like the many droids in Star Wars, they each have their own look and sound. You have the soft strings and pads of a Juno, the screaming resonant arpeggios of a TB303, and the ethereal qualities of the Prophet V.S. Even the names of these synthesizers sound like characters from Blade Runner.

They totally do. You could take, for example, their synthesizer called the MS20, which I feel like could just be the name of a robot from Star Wars. Totally. The MS-Twitty happens to be that famous lead sound from the song Defunk that we heard at the beginning of the episode. How would you describe that sound? Big, rough, growling, funky, but also with this vocal quality, the same way you could take your mouth and go, like that's what this synthesizer does.

Right, defunct was this first hit off of homework, and even though it doesn't have any vocals, there is a vocality to it. We love when instruments can mimic the human voice, like whether it's a guitar player using a wah pedal. Yeah. Or trumpeter using a mute. What's wild about the sound from defunct from the MS20 synthesizer

is that it's not just sounding like a voice, it's actually generating sound, kind of like the same way our voice. makes a vowel sound. Okay, break that down to me because I thought the synthesizer was a machine. How is it like a voice?

Okay, so if you want to make a vowel, you can go like, yeah, aw. So when we're making those vowel sounds, the way that we do it is by creating harmonic resonances in our voice. A resonance is basically like a little bump and a frequency, and each vowel sound has two,

big bumps that help define whether it sounds like an E or an A or an A or an O. We make those bumps by shaping our vocal cords, the back of our throat, the front of our mouth. They make these two little resonant bumps to make vowels. And what's wild is that synthesizers kind of do the same thing. Almost every synthesizer comes with a resonance filter on it. The MS20, the synthesizer that Daftpunk are using on defunc and on a lot of their tracks, doesn't just have one resonant filter. It has two resonant filters, a high one and a low one, that creates two resonant bumps

just like the way that our voice forms a vowel. So check it out. You can take the MS20 and begin with a raw sound, and then bring in the high resonance, and then the low resonance, then the lower resonance, and you can move them all around, and it sounds like screaming vowels. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Wow, that's pretty cool, Charlie. Yes, so now when you hear the lead sound from defunct, it makes sense to sing along,

even if there are no words because it has this vocal-like quality. The synthesizer contains the atomic units of the voice. With just the sound of synthesizers, daf punk put us in this uncanny valley of robot versus man. This is cool because now I'm hearing the synthesizers on defunc and homework in kind of a different light. Like when you were playing all those clips from soundtracks, whether it was Terminator or Blade Runner, I feel like synthesizers were scoring cinematic robots

in this really kind of scary way, this menacing sort of way. Right. And certainly one could hear that and have the takeaway, like, okay, synthesizers, robots, they're here to do sinister things. And I'm a little afraid when I hear that sound. Right, right.

But now when I listen to defunct and homework and daf punk's use of synthesizers with these vowel-like textures, maybe they're promising a different sort of relationship between synthesizer and robot, between man and machine, something a little more hopeful,

something that says, these synthesizers, these robots, they can speak to our humanity as well and literally emulate the kind of vocal techniques we use. I think that Daft Punk, as they release subsequent albums, develop a more enhanced version of this robot that takes on more and more human qualities so that

by the time we get to their second album, Discovery, Daft Punk will be donning robotic helmets, but they've also developed a fully fledged robotic voice. And we're going to hear how they do that next week on listening to Daft Punk. Switch on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, original music for listening to Daft Punk's series is by Marcus Thorne Bagala. Our engineer is Brandon McFarland. Our editor is Art Chung. Community Management by Abby Barr.

And Iris Gottlieb does our illustrations. Our executive producer is Nishat Kurwa. And we're a production of the Vox Media Podcast Network and Vulture. Our digital avatars are at Switched On Pop on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. You can find more episodes on our website, Switchedonpop.com. and we will be back again on Tuesday with more listening to Daft Punk. Next time, we'll be listening to Discovery.

Until then, thanks for listening.