Switched on Pop - Listening 2 Daft Punk: Human After All / Alive 2007

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Throughout their legendary career, Daft Punk continued to prove that the more robotic their music became, the more human they sounded. This dichotomy came to a head on their third album, aptly titled��Human After All. Where their past two records wired their circuits and gave the robots a voice, on Human After All, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo gave Daft Punk sentience. On Human After All robots rock, but they also question their rigid programming. The record's ensuing tour and resulting live album, Alive 2007, furthered the narrative by ushering in a new age of live electronic performance. The impact of these two records range from the development of EDM to everlasting hits like “Technologic.” On episode three of our Listening 2 Daft Punk series, we take a look at these two records, and how both Alive and Human After All imbued the robots with super intelligence. Songs Discussed Daft Punk - Human After All Daft Punk - The Prime Time of Your Life Daft Punk - Robot Rock Breakwater - Release the Beast Daft Punk - Steam Machine Daft Punk - The Brainwasher Black Sabbath - Iron Man Daft Punk - Technologic Daft Punk - Emotion John Williams – Wild Signals Daft Punk – Touch It / Technologic Daft Punk – Oh Yeah Daft Punk – Technologic Busta Rhymes – Touch It Daft Punk – Around the World / Harder Better Faster Stronger Daft Punk – Face to Face / Short Circuit Daft Punk – Da Funk / Daftendirekt Kanye West – Stronger Kanye West – On Sight Daft Punk – Human After All / Together / One More Time / Music Sounds Better With You Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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get involved for your essence. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Today is the third installment in our listening to Daft Punk Daph Punk series where we listen closely to an artist's body of work to go past the public perception of the artist and uncover their deeper musical meaning.

Daphpunk are, of course, hugely influential. They're also highly conceptual. Through each album release, you hear the French duo take on an increasingly robotic persona. But there's this paradox that the more robotic they become, the more human they sound. Four years after putting on their humanoid robotic helmets, Daftbunk point directly to this dichotomy in the name of their third album, Human After All. If on homework they solder their circuitry and in discovery, they develop a voice. On Human After All, the robots acquire a mind and gain sentience. It's alive. We can hear it from the very first track, Human After All.

We are in a totally different. vibe. On homework, their first album, I feel like we heard a lot of house and techno beats. On Discovery, their second album, we heard a lot of funk and hip hop derived beats. And now it's like, this is just rock and roll. This is like the drum pattern from the Rolling Stones. I can't get no satisfaction. Yeah. And we're hearing, you know, electric guitar too. So this is, I don't know, this is like what your classic rock radio station would play. And as we progress, we get this hardly intelligible robotic voice through the vocoder that is making the most terrifying statement, the thing you never want a robot to sing. Wow.

Daff Punk are saying that they are sentient. We are human after all. Much in common after all. What do you think of that line much in common after all? Well, it seems like where Daph Punk has been leading through three albums, they've been trying to merge the human in the human. the machine, whether through synthesizers or vocoders, or now their lyrics, which address it head on. But doesn't the statement much in common, after all, kind of belie their opening statement or human after all? You don't have to say you have much in common with humans if you actually

are human. So in just one stanza, I think we're questioning whether or not they are robot or human, and yet they become more insistent about their humanity as the song progresses. Do we believe them if they have to repeat it so many times? I see what you mean. The more they insist on their humanity, the more you're like, but what are you? Are you trying to trick me? Isn't that just what a robot would say?

Yeah, right, exactly. You know, when this album came out, it was not well received. Rolling Stone said that daft punk may have become the victim of their own animatronic satire, and the village voice said they really are robots. The music is flat, barely inflected, sitting there like a vending machine, waiting patiently for your quarters. Damn. Oof. Savage.

I, on the other hand, think that this is a clear continuation of their artistic project of bringing these robots to life. And part of that is even how the album was produced. It was made in just six weeks, and it feels like it was made very intuitively, like the two robots jamming in their garage. It's much less compositional than discovery. There are no real songs. It's more like a trance album of repeating loops built around these rock sounds introduced on the title track, Human After All. And they continue this trance rock sound on the second track, the prime time of your life. I love this because on one hand, it's one of the sort of quintessential rock rhythms that you might call it.

a shuffle. A rhythm that you can trace back to like literally the earliest days of rock and roll in the 1950s. So there's that very classic rock and roll rhythm. And then there's this chorus of robot voices on top of it. And it's such an odd juxtaposition. I can kind of see why people heard this record and were like, what? At the same time, I feel like it falls into a very contemporary song tradition.

The song type that I call, Tonight, We're Gonna Live Tonight, Forever Tonight, Tonight is the Night Tonight. It's one of those get ready, prep to go out, have the best time of your life kind of songs. Yet, again, this tension here, because we have the robotic voice singing about the desire to go out and party and be alive at the best time of your life. It's almost like they're commenting on their own plan. obsolescence, like the robots one day are going to cease to operate. And we can hear this anxiety as the song speeds up. Nate, the prime time of your life is fleeting and you need to seize it right now because it's going to speed up and get away from you before you know it. Well, I don't know why I'm sitting here recording a podcast. Gotta go. Got to live. It's been fun. What you got to do is as the

robots tell us next, you got to rock out. That works. Okay, I'll stay. I'll rock out with daft punk instead. And that's the thing. This really is about rocking out. We are moving away from the house and techno vibes of the first album and sort of the soft rock plus hip hop sampling of the second album. We are now in just like 80s stadium rock kind of vibe. It starts with that wild drum, Tom Phil. And then like kind of Jack White style, big guitar riff. It feels like the song is invoking the cult of authenticity around rock music. You know, there's always a lot of, you know, there's always. this debate about is electronic music as real as rock music. And they are living right in the in between of these two genres. So what do you think is the goal of the song? Like they, they were clearly making very, you know, dance floor oriented music on the last two albums. Like, who is the audience for this? Well, it seems like the music critic audience was not vibing on it originally. No. But I think that living in a genre that is not associated with electronics or robots, straight up rock, using that genre as the backbone to this album has a purpose. It's about

burnishing their human credentials. And yet, underneath it all, there's also maybe a hidden meaning, because this song is actually based very heavily around a sample of the song, Release the Beast by Breakwater. There it is. In a song, ostensibly, about robots having a good time going out, partying, living the prime time of their life, and rocking out, we are, in fact, referencing another track called Release the Beast, which suggests a much darker message that maybe these robots aren't the fun, party-loving DJs that we think them to be, but are, in fact, not here to serve humanity. Uh-oh.

And from here, the album takes a much darker turn on track four, Steam Machine, the road. the robot's voice turns into this screaming, horrific whisper. This is like daft punk does death metal. It's dark, ma'am. Seriously. Yeah, I think we are moving away from a utopian future of nice robots to the sinister, dystopian kind of robot that we are so familiar with in film and television. And we hear that sound continue on the sun.

song Brainwasher. These are evil robots. Yeah, nothing nice about that. Well, there's one nice thing. Not pleasant, but fun, which is that you mentioned metal. This is an homage to Black Sabbath and their song Iron Man. I am Iron Man. I am Brainwasher.

Okay. Iron Man, of course, being a man machine hybrid, so it's an appropriate reference. And the idea of brainwashing, it makes me think of, of like the robots in the matrix. These are robots that are here, not with good intentions for humanity, but instead we are the brainwashers. Or like the alien robot force

that are going to convert humanity to be subservient to us. Okay, so just so I've got this clear, your thesis here is that the album title, Human After All, is not a sort of utopian promise of humans and robots coming together in peace and harmony,

but in fact, a threat that we are more human than you realize and we are going to take over your brains and your society and your emotions. Yeah, more or less. I think there's no song that captures that sentiment more than the song Technologic, a portmanteau of technology and logic.

Technologic. Technology sounds a lot like it's a cousin. Technologic sounds a lot like it's a cousin to their song, harder, better, faster, stronger, you know, a song about a robot, repeating its programming over and over. In contrast to the sort of 70s funk vocoder vibe of harder, better, faster, stronger,

the vocal manipulation on Technologic sounds much more malevolent. Yeah, there's something very bleak about this robotic voice, repeating these instructions over and over again. The form of it is similar to harder, better, faster, stronger from discovery, but it doesn't have that same sense of kind of like liberation that that song had. This is like not going anywhere. Yeah, a lot more desperation. And to me, it sounds even more robotic.

Yet there's a wrinkle because even though the voice sounds so robotic, it may be the most human daft punk track that we've heard yet because that creepy evil robotic doll-like voice is actually just the voice of Tomah pitched up and manipulated. Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail, upgraded, charge it, point it, zoom it, press it, snap it, work it, quick erase it. Check it out if we pitch it down. Buy it, use it, break it, fix it. Trash it, change it, melt, upgraded, charge it, pointed, zoom it, press it, snap, it, work it, quick erase it, write it, cut it, paste it, save it, load it, check it, quick.

There he is. Hearing that is like an unveiling of sorts. Right. It's like pulling the curtain back and seeing the wizard, you know, controlling all the levers. It's like, oh, there's just a regular person behind all of these robotic machinations. I feel like if they've spent the entire album building up our anxieties about technology and these robots, they also pull back the curtain on them in the final track, which is titled Emotion and has just one lyric. On one hand, that's very powerful to listen to. On the other hand, are we back in this place where it's like repeating a sentence over and over again doesn't make you feel more comforted. It makes you feel more comforted. feel more concerned that something sinister is going on.

Yeah, I was talking about this with the music journalist Ben Cardew who wrote the great book on Daft Punk called Discovery, and he was saying that frankly, humans don't communicate this way. We don't have to say, no, really, I have emotions, I'm not a robot, I'm just going to tell you over and over, emotion, emotion, emotion. I think that they give away their robotness, not just in the act of repetition, but also by musically connecting the song Emotion, where they are declaring their sentience, their self-awareness, their emotions, but they connect it back to Technologic, because check out the baseline from Emotion. We just heard the exact same thing in Technologic.

The same robot, which is faxing letters and unzipping files all day long is also the same one who at night goes home and talks about its emotions incessantly, and they are musically connected by that baseline. Dang. So in the larger paradox of are they robot or are they human, I come away from human after all feeling like this is a robot with primordial sentience, maybe some kind of self-awareness. The thing is, it's not until the tour of this album that I think that they go beyond their basic artificial intelligence and become much more human. Develop almost a super intelligence.

And we'll hear in the second half how on the tour for human after all, they start to generate new musical material out of the building blocks from their creators. Convierter your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of You know the form of Pago with a good conversion of the world. Has you heard

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So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds.

When Human After All was released, it wasn't received very well. But when the robots took the album on tour in 2006 and 2007, they completely recalibrated our ears to hear the genius in the machines. They did this by mashing up and remixing Human After All with their earlier songs. They released this work as a live album called Alive 2007. and to explain how this contributed to our ongoing understanding of the robots and a total shift in electronic music, I want to bring in our producer and resident DJ Rihanna Cruz. Howdy.

In addition to being our producer, you also spin a lot of records, and so I thought there was no one better to tell us about what's going on with a live 2007. Well, yeah, a live 2007 changed the game. So when you're after human after all, taking a step back to survey what's going on, we're still a year out from the first iPhone to put it into perspective.

And at this point, Charlie, like you said, daf punk had changed up their style from House and Techno to soft rock to this type of ACDC type metal that we got on Human After All. We know the critics didn't love Human After All. That was a big deal. Daft Punk actually put tour plans on hold because of that.

But a year after that album came, out, they got this invite from Coachella to subheadline the festival. And this offer from Coachella was extremely attractive because they were offering Daft Punk a lot of money to play. At the time, they hadn't toured in 10 years, their last tour being a live 97. And this amount of money could bring their stage show to the next level. It's the event that opens up a new era for Daft Punk and also for pop music entirely. It's wild to think that daf punk were in a place we're like, we could use the money. I know.

Right. That was the opening of their Coachella set. And you could hear the palpable excitement from the crowd as the robots take the stage. And it's notable that we're hearing that mashup of the word human from human after all and the word robot from robot rock. They are addressing their core narrative from the very beginning, but they're also showing us they are going to be mashing things up in new. ways. Yes, and it was something that was incredibly profound. But the thing is, they didn't even perform on the main stage at Coachella. They performed in a side tent, you know, the Sahara tent that accommodated only 10,000 people. So, Rihanna, like, what does a robotic DJ duo do at a

music festival to stand out among all these exciting live acts? Well, let me set a scene. for you real quick. Please. Picture a giant pyramid on stage with Daft Punk standing in the middle of the pyramid, elevated, surrounded by screens all across the board, giant LEDs. In the middle are these two robots manning a DJ board, wearing their helmets, wearing their gear. And as they spin all of the LEDs around them, change and interact with the music, it's

pre-programmed to hit all of the beats. The introduction for the show featured the iconic five-note sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which the scientists in the movie used to communicate with the alien spaceship that has visited Earth. No way. That's hilarious. The robots are about to make contact. I remember when this set happened extremely well.

It became just the talk of the town. And I feel like there were endless videos of people trying to capture the energy of this pyramid landing with these robots in this completely mind-altering musical set. Absolutely. It was otherworldly. And people still talk about the pyramid with a deep reverence today. It was kind of the first time anything like that had been done before to that scale. You know, that stage setup. D.Js in a giant, pyramid type deal. And it was so over the top that 40,000 people tried to cram in to that 10,000 person 10. Wow. So they had to set up extra screens and speakers. And that performance ended up being such a smash that it led to a full live tour in 2006, which spilt over to 2007. And the sort of lasting legacy of that tour is their live album recorded in Paris, a live 2007. Oh, the robots come home. Back to France. So during this tour, like we said before,

they're mixing and mashing up and taking all of these different parts of their songs and blending them together. And these songs were notable, specifically because the arrangements were that of daft punk, much like a self-aware AI, making new forms. out of a pre-existing data set, and in this case, that data set being their previous catalog. Over time, the album has come to act as a standalone testament to their popularity and overall cultural impact. Take their mashup of Touch It and Technologic, for example.

The mashup with, oh yeah, kind of feels like the brainwashing robots have converted the people to chant along. to the robots instructions. It's really cool. You know, when we were listening to Human After All in the first half of this episode, I did have the sense, like,

this is music made for stadiums, made for arena rock. And now when I listen to these live recordings, I hear that promise fulfilled. Everything they've been doing is leading up to these massive live gigs, incorporating all the histories of their sounds into these, like, face-melting, pyramid performances. Right. So here we have, of course, the lyrics of Technologic.

Touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it turn it, leave it, stop formatted, while incorporating the oh yeah's from Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But later on, we work in not the beat from Technologic, but a stuttering inorganic version of Buster Rhyme's beat from his interpolation of Technologic, the touch it. Cool. And now here's the Buster Rhymes version. Oh my god. That's cool.

The robots are connecting to culture. The whole album is full of great mixes. Some other good ones include the face-to-face short circuit mashup, which honestly sounds more like harder, better, faster, stronger, but it works great. It's awesome to hear your favorite two daft punk songs mashed up together. Yeah, that one rocks. I personally really like the defunct daft and direct mashup as well. A robot mashing up their own songs feels like they're carrying on two ideas at the exact same

time in a way that a human never could. And yet when we experience it, it feels like almost like a holy moment because we don't expect these things to work together and they do. They go beyond our own human consciousness. So yeah, these remixes amplify daft punks deeper cuts and place them alongside their biggest hits, which in turn makes the deeper cuts, you know, danceier and more fleshed out, feel more alive. No pun intended. Yeah. The best example of these songs taking on a new life, I feel like, is in the most everlasting mash above the set list, the mix of homeworks around the world with discoveries, harder, better, faster, stronger. Their biggest hits.

So right off the bat, we're transitioning out of Steam Machine into one of Daft Punk's biggest hits today, the beat of around the world. So familiar. Great synth riff. I think something to note here too is that when you hear around the world perform live, not much is done to it other than mash it up with these other songs. The tempo is the same. It's just simply being played and it's eliciting such a grand reaction because the song is just that good. Around two minutes into the mashup, something then shifts.

The crowd goes wild. Loving that reaction. This version is harder, better, faster, and stronger than the original. That riff, the arpeggiated, diga, tick, tick, tick. It's like a heavy metal techno. Whoa. It's like the robots have taken over the world and we have accepted them as our masters, right?

We're going around the world and they're getting harder, better, faster, stronger. Wow, way to make everything dark over here, Charlie. Just bring in the doom and gloom. But we've accepted them as our overlords and we're all dancing together and it turns out that our benevolent robot dictators seem to be pretty great. Yeah, it's all good. It's all love. At least they're funky. At least they're funky. But you can hear just like how in Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, the verse is composed of two separate phrases.

The two dueling elements in this mashup collide to make the song come alive. And that's, you know, the around the world. And then the work it make it do it makes us harder, better, faster, stronger. It all blends together and it becomes one trading back and forth. But it slots into one another so effortlessly. This is the demonstration of superintelligence. It's like all along they were planning for this to happen over a decade, that all of it was a grand scheme just for this moment.

But it's not over yet. this all is only the buildup until three minutes in. The four to the floor drop hits and all hell breaks loose. I love that you can hear the crowd just losing their minds as this transpires. Yeah, they could have recorded this live album just directly from the board, but clearly made the choice to leave the audience mics in. Absolutely. I mean, it brings a lot. You know, you could hear them going crazy when the drop hits. It's towards the end they do something cool too, where they rework the words of harder, better, faster, stronger to have it model the mindset of both a DJ and the avid dance music listener. I can't believe I didn't make this connection earlier in Human After All that every time they're repeating instructions, it's just straight out of house music.

It's all about taking these little tiny vocal fragments like they did on homework and saying them over and over again so that they actually. do develop more human meaning, like work it, work it, work it, work it, dance it harder, basically, is what they're saying to us. This version of Harder, Better, Better, Faster, Stronger got the Grammy for Best Dance Recording at the 51st Grammy Awards and also helped a live 2007 win the Grammy Award for the Best Electronic Dance Album. Well deserved. Yeah. The tour serves as a monument to dance music at large, I think, paying tribute to the multiple

forms of music that Daft Punk has managed to bring together. in their career thus far. And it's worth noting that they had to take this gig because it was worth it for the money. Like, we think of daft punk today as being in the pantheon of pop music, but their last two albums were very middle and received, certainly by critics anyway,

and they were needing a boost. I think this is the moment that daft punk solidify themselves as this robotic duo that are quintessential, not just to electronic music, but also to the entirety of pop music. And it sounds like it creates this new paradigm for other electronic artists to follow. Like, I, too, can be a headliner.

I, too, can stand behind a DJ booth with crazy lights and projections and put a weird helmet on my head, Dead Mouse, marshmallow, and obscure my identity and make crowds of tens of that. Thousands of people go bananas. Right, yes, exactly to both of those points.

Alive 2007 ushered in a sort of reappraisal of human after all. And when it comes to the human after all tracks like Technologic, the Live Tour worked to give new life to the robots in the public consciousness and kind of humanized these super robotic and metallic tracks. Guinewell said that a lot of the tracks from Human After All, which has not been received well by critics and maybe not by. the audience have gotten a stronger response when we play them in the show. It was really important for us to try and express that, this kind of triangle that exists between the three records. And of course, he's talking about homework, discovery, and human after all. This sort of mindset, right, talking about the kind of triangle expresses a sort of super intelligence on their behalf. It makes the music more than just the sum of its parts. It invokes the audience in the performance of

music reflecting the vibes off the audience to the DJs and back and forth. Gimuel refers to himself and Tomas as a mirror, which I think is a really interesting way to put being a DJ. You know, it's you're reflecting the vibes that are given to you. You're not curating. It's a very humanistic take on performing in front of people. The thing that makes them humans are their audience. Right. And speaking of audience, it even worked to create and develop one, the culture of electronic dance music at large. The Guardian put it aptly, if house music is a church, then a live 2006-2007 spawned a legion of televangelists.

They made the mega church, the gospel of daft punk. So as you talked about the marshmallows and the dead mouses of the world, they would be nowhere without a live 2007. An article from Vice called it the LED arms race that daft punk set into motion. And The Guardian said that the Tours Curtain Razor at Coachella was as significant for dance music in the U.S. as the Beatles' appearance on Ed Sullivan was for rock and roll.

Wow. It's something that's like so apparent in every aspect of electronic music today all the way to this year at Coachello when Scrillix Fortet and Fred again headlined the last night. And there's a quote from Scrillix that says that seeing Live 2007 was like walking into the portal of my destiny. Heavy. I wish I was at that show.

Alive 2007 also makes Daft Punk bona fide pop stars and cultural icons. Look at a song like, I hate to do this to you guys, stronger by Kanye West. It's okay. We've listened to Kid Rock in this series. We can handle it. Okay, let the record show that Buster DaphPunk before Kanye did. But this is clearly the moment where daf punk crossover into pop consciousness.

They're being played on a Hot 100 radio left and right for a whole new generation. And it also gives them the opportunity to start producing for other folks as well because I know that they produced on YIS. Yes, Yis was kind of. Kanye's sixth studio album, and it was kind of a turn into noise rock and industrial music. And daf punk produced four songs on it, including OnSight. Just daf punk with a lot more distortion. It sounds like they brought their human after all aesthetic into the studio for that.

And it's worth noting that Daft Punk's only number one hit came out of their producer collaborations, namely on 2016's Starboy with The Weekend. It's a good beat. It's an incredible beat. It's my favorite weekend song for a reason. This production work, as robots, mind you, would have not been possible without the legacy and the success of a live 2007.

And the whole tour and the resulting record finishes the sort of transition of peeling back the robot's metal shells and showing the humanity that lies beneath the daft punk personas. They set out to do this from the minute they step out with the robot rock, robot, human back and forth.

And they end the record and the tour with a mashup of their most human songs. Human after all, and one more time with together and music sounds better with you. Yeah. So we have like human and one more time, human one more time, human one more time. And in the back you have the refrain, together, together, together. That's a more optimistic note to end on.

And one that points to where we're going to go in our next episode, the fourth and final installment of our listening to Daft Punk series, their final album, Random Access Memories from 2013, where this robot narrative that they've been exploring finally reaches its ultimate destination. destination when the robots acquire a soul. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Jolie Myers, engineered by Bran McFarlane, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr, who just got married. Congratulations, Abby. Our executive producer is Neshaat, Karwa, and a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network

and a production of Vulture. The music for the listening to daft punk mini-series was composed by Marcus Thorne Gala. You can wax lyrical about daft punk with us on Instagram and Twitter at Switched on Pop. You can find more episodes of our show at our website, Switchedonpop.com, and we will be back next week with the final daft punk chapter. Until then, thanks for listening.